Cultural Geography

cultures who only judge on their own values and

priorities: ‘Use your commonsense, but usually

there’s different commonsense’ (in Suchet,

1999: 238).

Concepts and practices of management play

an integral role in colonizing processes. The

development and conservation of resources have

been asserted and imposed through management

mechanisms such as sovereignty, ownership,

laws, institutions, scientific research, etc. The

tension between indigenous groups’ nominal

ownership of their territories, and its appropria-

tion through colonization processes embedded

deep in management regimes, is a hotly contested

political process in many places.

In the same way that exercising rights and

responsibilities to care for (and to be cared

for by) country are reconstituted in Eurocentric

discourses as ‘environmental’ or ‘wildlife

management’, and the ontological primacy of the

human domain at the top of the hierarchical

chain of being is surreptitiously embedded in

‘management systems’, discourses of human

management have also harnessed efforts to liber-

ate the objects of injustice and oppression to

regressive structures of discipline and power.

This can see indigenous self-determination

reconstituted as ‘community management’.

Rendered invisible are processes of disposses-

sion, theft and genocide (see Tatz, 1998; 1999)

that produced what the Aboriginal affairs indus-

try reconstitutes as ‘communities’, as well as

assertions of sovereignty and identity and aspira-

tions of being-in-place on one’s own terms.

Within this nature- and management-centred

view of change, the persistence of indigenous

rights is seen as simply another element to be

managed, another tool in the manager’s toolkit.

The notion that it is not only residual rights that

persist, but epistemological systems, value

systems, cultural institutions, systems of custom-

ary law, and deeply entrenched ways of being-in-

place is only dimly glimpsed in the nature and

management speak of so-called postcolonial dis-

course. In many places, diverse elements of

indigenous society, economy and ecology

continue to shape everyday life for large groups

of people. However, ideology disciplines social

change to conform to existing patterns, forms

and explanations.

IDENTITY AND SUBJECTIVITY

This leads us more or less directly to Levinas and

his consideration of otherness, lived experience

and ethics. For Levinas (for example, 1989), the

ambiguity of such spaces reflects the self–other

relationship, which he sees as foundational in

human existence. Levinas represents relations

between the self and the other in terms of an

ethical imperative in which the face-to-face

encounter between the self and the other

develops terms for understanding one’s place in

society. ‘Intersubjective space,’ he writes – that

space in which one relates to the other(s) – ‘is not

symmetrical’ (1989: 48). For him, this inter-

subjective space is a moral space. We occupy

moral landscapes in which ethics (responsibility,

reciprocity, proximity, collectivity and coexis-

tence) frame and temper interpersonal, structural

and political relationships. Cultural landscapes

are, therefore, to be understood as simultaneously

material and metaphorical.

Levinas’ writing disrupts common binaries

that underpin western philosophy’s hall of

mirrors. Even the self–other binary is disrupted

to establish relationships between the self, the

‘other that is like me’ and the ‘entirely other’.

Levinas grapples to establish terms for engaging

with relationships between entities whose coex-

istence is not reducible to a larger unity. In ‘Time

and the other’, he asserts that ‘existence is

pluralist’. A plurality, he writes, ‘insinuates itself

into the very existing of the existent’ (1989: 43).

In grappling with the self–other relation, which is

always contextualized ‘because we are always

immersed in the empirical world’ (1989: 43), he

targets that which is, by convention, unscaleable

and immeasurable – the infinite.

In cultural geography, the shift between one-

to-one, one-to-many and many-to-many is

always troubling. Once this shift is spatialized, it

clearly implicates the notion of scales and scale

shifting. The link between psychoanalysis,

psychology and sociology, however, is not

reducible to a measurement or a formula. While

individuals, social formations and cultural

groupings may be mutually influential, there is

no predetermined causal link between them. One

simply cannot predict individual behaviour from

the knowledge of social behaviour or cultural

values, or vice versa. Neither can one read off

from large structures the details of small events

and processes, whether past, present or future

(see Storper, 1988). This conundrum leads to

many studies that deal with different scales as

autonomous spheres of social action – as

bounded domains. Yet such domains do interact.

We do shift between geographical scales and

sociological levels. Cultural geographers have

begun to engage with issues of scale, but

have generally avoided the metaphysical scale

(the infinite), limiting their scope to a

local–global binary.^1

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