Section III: Borders
33 The Genuine and the Counterfeit: Qualitative Methods in Economic Geography and Anthropology
Elizabeth Dunn and Erica Schoenberger
34 The Cultural Turn and the Conjunctural Economy: Economic Geography, Anthropology, and Cultural Studies
John Pickles
35 Worlds Apart? Economic Geography and Questions of “Development”
Susan M. Roberts
36 Putting Politics into Economic Geography
John Agnew
37 Inheritance or Exchange? Pluralism and the Relationships between Economic Geography and Economics
Peter Sunley
38 Sociological Institutionalism and the Socially Constructed Economy
Matt Vidal and Jamie Peck
39 Political Ecology/Economy
James McCarthy
Editors’ Introduction: Borders
It might seem odd for a disciplinary text in economic geography to devote so much of its limited space to other disciplines as does ours in this last section of the volume. But as editors we keenly wanted to include this section, sketching out its potential content and contributors before other sections, relishing the prospect of reading the solicited chapters. Collectively, those chapters have exceeded even our own heightened expectation. They confirm that the borderlands of economic geography are a rich, if not teeming, intellectual landscape essential to visit if not a site to set up permanent camp. This is not to say that they are Nirvana. One of Britain’s most famous twentieth-century public intellectuals, Raymond Williams, literally grew up on the borderlands, in his case between Wales and England. He was also positioned betwixt and between other borders too: raised in a working class family, he came to hold a Chair in one of England’s most socially elite universities, Cambridge, “teaching the enemy” as he once put it; as a child his first language was Welsh, but he taught English literary classics to undergraduates; and while he believed that Wales was an English colony ever since Edward the Conqueror’s thirteenth-century conquest, his adult life was not spent in the oppressed Celtic margins but at the heart of the imperial Anglo-Saxon center. Raymond Williams’ stretched and displaced existence between the various borders in which he lived, shot through with tensions, frustrations, anxieties, sometimes even anger, was for him also a source of vitality, purpose, and creativity. Our contributors make the same claims about life on the borderlands of economic geography.
There are several reasons why we are so keen to include this section. The first is to reflect the history and present intellectual temperament of the discipline as a site of recurrent border crossings. It is a disposition that is in our disciplinary bones, coming out in the marrow of economic geographical practices that continually refer if not rely on ideas, schemes, concepts, theories, and models from elsewhere. Unsurprisingly, elsewhere has often meant orthodox economics and spatialized versions of economics like regional science. But economic geography, especially over the last three decades, has increasingly shunned monogamy. The discipline has been intentionally (some may say embarrassingly) promiscuous, serially adulterous, “reading around” as Gibson-Graham (1996) put it, with economic geographers taking home any book from the library shelf that appeals. Common to many of the books that have appealed is that they furnish larger explanatory frameworks with a promise of portability or adaptability, frameworks that can be reworked on the ground, in specific places, or regions, or as geographical flows and interactions. Even David Harvey’s (1982) brilliant geographical theorizing is as an example of this ethic, relying as it does on his devoted reading of several large books of a single non-geographer, Karl Marx (Harvey says he has read Marx’s Capital, volume 1 from cover to cover every year since the early 1970s, see Harvey 2010). Further, the relationship is not just one way, crossing borders only to ransack and pillage the juiciest bits of another discipline. The very best of economic-geographical border crossings involves creative engagement; that is, making something new from the encounter, and which appeals not only to the home discipline but to other disciplines as well. Harvey’s work again is exemplary.
A second reason is Foucauldian: disciplines discipline (a point raised already by Barkan, this volume). By joining a discipline, we become subjects of it, regimented, shaped, and produced. We take on its values, methods, politics, institutional affiliations, and history. They come to inhabit our practices whether we like it or not. For example, the early history of economic geography in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was closely linked to colonialism, military conquest, and through environmental determinism to racism (Hudson 1977; Barnes 2001). Contemporary economic geographers consciously spurn these things, and not even all economic geographers during that early period believed in them either. But colonialism, military conquest, and racism were constituents that first defined the form of economic geography as an academic discipline, determining its questions, setting its trajectory as an institutional project, delimiting its boundaries with other disciplines. We are heirs to that history and are stuck with it. (Remember: postcolonial critiques of economic geography’s Eurocentric biases are of a relatively recent vintage; for all the expansiveness of Harvey’s project, his zones of engagement have been mostly confined to the advanced industrial nations.) Consequently, a ghostly residue remains, haunting everyone who enters and practices in the discipline. Work on the boundary with other disciplines, however, possesses at least the potential to begin to exorcise that specter. Confronting other disciplines on the boundaries may allow us: to see some of the ghostly presences remaining in our own subject and to vanquish them; to weaken ties that bind us to some of the less flattering features of our own discipline; and to incite us to move beyond disciplines altogether, engaging in post-disciplinarity of the kind Foucault himself practiced.
Finally, there are several pragmatic reasons for engaging in work on the borderlands, and exemplified by the chapters in this section. (1) We expand our scholarly horizons, exposing ourselves to novel thinking, potentially escaping entrenched intellectual ruts. (2) We widen the extent of our intellectual community, drawing on the talent, expertise, and creativity of a larger group. (3) Through the very act of setting another discipline’s ideas against our own discipline’s we create a spark, or frisson, that potentially produces a novel set of ideas different from either original set. (4) The very process of external interdisciplinary exchange fosters increased internal disciplinary dialogue and interaction, breaking down solitudes, heightening reflexivity and self-awareness, enhancing the scope for engaged pluralism and critical engagement (Barnes and Sheppard 2010). The larger philosophical warrant here is given by American pragmatism. Pragmatist philosophers believe that in order to cope with an uncertain world requires gathering together as many original ideas as can be mustered, which, in turn, means including and being open to the people who have those ideas, giving everyone a chance to speak and to be heard. The same affirmation justifies boundary work: to find and to be open to as many original ideas as possible in whatever discipline they are found, to try them out, to refashion them for our own purposes, but then to put them back into circulation for potential (re)use by everyone else.
Of course, borders can also be scary. They can take the form of an Iron Curtain, constructed to keep people inside, and to prevent those from outside coming in. These types of borders are heavily policed with only a few officially sanctioned points of crossing. Further, there are often unpleasant consequences for those who try to bring in things from outside. In contrast, our connotation of the term border, as well as that of the contributors below, is quite different. While everyone recognizes there are marked differences between one side of a border and another, those differences are viewed as an exciting opportunity to explore, offering the prospect of creativity, novelty, and advance. And just as borders can help us understand the character of the cultures on either side, so transgression of disciplinary borders can sharpen our appreciation of intellectual cultures, methodological practices, habits of mind, norms of behavior, and so on, both at “home” and “abroad.”
Venturing into cognate fields can therefore be seen as a tour of economic geography’s constitutive others and outsides. It can also draw attention to those borders that are “hard” and those that are “soft.” Some we can easily cross sans papiers, others require a methodological visa. Some disciplinary languages are easy to pick up, others can take a lifetime to master. Economic geographers habitually participate in many such cross-border conversations, in some cases with a marked geographical accent, in others almost blending in with the locals. They say that one can only really appreciate a culture through its own language. If so, the fact that many economic geographers have eschewed the language of mathematics may be one reason for the climate of suspicion and serial miscommunication that exists at the border with mainstream economics (Sunley this volume). On the other hand, many of the languages of heterodox economics, such as those found in sociology and anthropology, seem to be more closely related to economic geography’s lingua franca (Peck forthcoming). Even here, though, the same word can mean different things. “Economy” is a case in point.
All this border crossing hardly seems like a prelude to a flat-earth of post-disciplinary sameness, a cultureless universe in which the only remaining language is some social-scientific Esperanto. If border crossing is analogous, on the other hand, to a process of cultural encounter, then cross-border disciplinary regions can also be seen as spaces of creativity and conflict, places where new hybrids can be formed. It is in this spirit that Elizabeth Dunn and Erica Schoenberger (this volume) take us to the border between economic geography and anthropology. Using illustrations that vary from the Peloponnesian War to the East European bloc command economy, they argue for an interdisciplinary conversation between economic geography and anthropology focused on the creation of economic value and its circulation. Anthropologists, as a result of their disciplinary imperative to sit and watch, “to dwell,” bring to the table socially granulated understandings of local knowledge and practices, in the spirit of Clifford Geertz’s (1973) “thick description.” Economic geographers do not seem to be that patient. In part, this is because of their own disciplinary imperative to keep on moving, to speak to people in different places, and to figure out wider geographical connections. Consequently, each discipline, as Dunn and Schoenberger say, has its own way of “seeing.” But like a Rorschach inkblot test in psychology, by seeing the world one way, one necessarily blocks out seeing the world in another way. Can we have double vision? Dunn and Schoenberger propose as partial solution a new “alloy” forged from both disciplines, combining local anthropological detail and non-local geographical connections. The practices of anthropology and economic geography fuse, combining as do all alloys the strengths of its constituents.
John Pickles (this volume) is concerned with anthropology too, though even more so with cultural studies. He doesn’t use the metaphor of forging an “alloy,” but recognizes the significant intellectual overlap between economic geography and these other two disciplines. Rather than proposing collaboration, however, he puts a pox on all disciplines, recommending not inter- or even post- but instead anti-disciplinarity. He thinks that, in spite of their best intentions, disciplines cannot help themselves but to essentialize, that is, to reduce their subject matter to a limited number of inviolable explanatory variables and in some cases articles of faith. That’s what disciplines do. But by doing so, Pickles suggests, they miss what is most important about their object of inquiry, the socioeconomic world, which is its “conjunctural” character. “Conjunctural” is a difficult term to define. For our purposes it means an economy produced by a larger contingent context (the economy is relational), but where that larger context is itself contextually defined. You can already see the problem. The economy is defined by what becomes an infinite regress of contexts, with no final foundation. It is precisely this problem that mitigates the usefulness of disciplines. Disciplines work when there is something firm and solid to which they can attach. (Indeed, the work of disciplines is often to stabilize such privileged objects, along with preferred ways of seeing.) But for Pickles “the” economy must not be reduced to such a singular, essential object. Less-than-card-carrying economic geographers, like Pickles, still have a vital contribution to make, though. But the contribution should not be framed in disciplinary terms, but rather as part of a larger non- or anti-disciplinary collective intellectual and political project to articulate context and even more importantly to find sites and moments to intervene, shape, and torque it. Economy, in this sense, becomes a malleable object and a site of possibility – not simply a source of constraints or imperatives.
Although not as radically ambitious as Pickles, Susan Roberts (this volume) begins her chapter also with a desire to undo traditional disciplinary divisions. In her case, it is the one between economic and development geography. Development geography was about the global South, economic geography the global North. But in a globalized, highly interlinked spatial economy, Roberts suggests that divide makes no sense, if it ever did. Further, Roberts contends, there is another divide that needs also to go: between economy and politics. Using the recent history of the United States from 2000, Roberts carefully documents how the issue of economic development, and thus economic geography, was joined and colored by international politics, especially US concerns about global militarization and securitization. For example, in 2005 the US Department of Defense contributed 21% of the country’s “development aid,” up from 6% only three years earlier. Of course, the United States has long been centrally involved in framing the discourse of economic development. President Truman’s inaugural speech in January 1949 famously envisaged a “program of development” (Escobar 1996; Pickles, this volume). What is so striking about the last decade, however, is the blatant instrumentalism and self-interest demonstrated in the case of US “development” efforts. Without any concealment, the United States now links economic development in the global South directly to its geopolitical and “security” interests. This may be an extreme case, but it underlines a much more general point: that (economic) development should never be mistaken for a politically neutral process.
Perhaps it is one of the soft norms of economic geography that the economic is always political, but that does not mean that political dimensions are always given their due, or even brought to the surface. This is a theme that John Agnew (this volume) takes up in his exploration of the wider relation between economic geography and politics, defined by “interest groups, political ideologies, geopolitical hierarchy, and private and public regulatory bureaucracies” (Agnew this volume). He examines three areas in which economic geographers have undertaken considerable work over the last 10 years – globalization, money and finance, and industrial clusters – arguing that in each case political acts played a critical role. But such acts were all but ignored by economic geographers. This is despite economic geography’s affirmation of disciplinary openness, and indeed, the inseparability of the political and the economic. Agnew believes the reason for the neglect of the political can be traced to the nineteenth century, with the emergence of neoclassical economics. Neoclassicism naturalized the economy, separated it from the political and the moral with which it was originally tethered. The economy was given autonomy, endowed with its own momentum, made resistant to the effects of outside social forces like politics. The economy trumped all else. While most contemporary economic geographers reject neoclassicism, and its later neoliberal incarnation, Agnew argues that the idea of the economy as natural has nevertheless lingered. It is this belief that diverts economic geographers away from the political, unwittingly making a lie of the discipline’s claim to inclusivenesss. Crossing the boundary separating political science and economic geography is urgent, and if Agnew is right it may be more disruptive of practices on our side of the border than many of us would care to think.
If John Agnew’s chapter derogates orthodox economics, Peter Sunley’s (this volume), if not quite celebrating it, wants to remind economic geographers there should still be contact. Sunley’s argument, partly in response to the recent plea for engaged pluralism (see Barnes and Sheppard 2010), is that engaged pluralism is frequently unrealizable, a pipedream. Much more common in the social sciences are disciplinary toe-to-toe critiques, tending to partisan advocacy in the face of antithetical others or outright dismissal, with little or no engagement. For Sunley, however, a form of pluralism can still be salvaged: critical or antagonistic pluralism. The important point is the existence of critique, not whether people engage one another, let alone whether they change their position as a result of the engagement. The existence of critique demonstrates that a necessary critical sensibility for social scientific inquiry remains alive and well. Over the last 10 years or so Sunley recognizes two main points of contact between economics and economic geography. The first occurred in the wake of Paul Krugman’s New Economic Geography. Communication has been only one way, however, with economic geographers highly critical of the economists but with the economists not replying. At the other contact point, around evolutionary economics, critique has been less severe, with even some glimmering of engagement. In either case, for Sunley the crucial point is that economic geographers have remained alert, keeping up with the literature, willing to take it on (in both senses of the phrase, through combat or through adoption) and if only in a negative direction changing their position. That’s what is most important in critical pluralism, and we shouldn’t expect anything more.
The question of which battles are fought, with whom, and to what ends, is very much the story of economic sociology. According to Vidal and Peck (this volume), mainstream economic sociology, and embodied in the Mark Granovetter inspired New Economic Sociology (NES), has learned to coexist with, rather than to contest, the neoclassical model of the economy. Because of neoclassicism’s attendant naturalism, as discussed by Agnew, the new economic sociologists do not claim that adding sociology changes the fundamentals of the economy. Society merely supplements the story, filling it out, not changing it, definitely not contradicting it. Vidal and Peck argue though that this is insufficient, in particular, belying the social-constructionist line of argument that runs through sociology from Marx to Durkheim and more recently to Berger and Luckmann. This line, suggest Vidal and Peck, is not content with NES’s quietism, letting sleeping dogs lie. A social-constructionist economic sociology suggests that at every turn the economy is socially infused; that the social goes all the way down. It begins with and builds from social, institutional, and relational categories, rather than with thought experiments or methodological individualism. The one thing you can’t say about the economy is that it is natural. At its core, it is thoroughly unnatural, which is what makes it so interesting as an object of study. Once you open the Pandora Box of the economy to the social, so much else falls out including politics and geography. From a social constructionist perspective, the economy becomes variegated, including geographically variegated, porous, at times and places contestable and vulnerable, and most important, subject to reshaping, subject to social re-construction. Vidal and Peck’s conclusion echoes that of Dunn and Schoenberger, that it is this project that needs to be pursued by economic sociology and geography joining forces.
The (always contestable) “natural limits” of economic geography are very much at stake in the final chapter of this section, James McCarthy’s exploration of economic geography and political ecology. In contrast with some of the other disciplines in which border-crossings have been difficult and hard won, McCarthy sees less a border between economic geography and political ecology than a broad, open highway, with traffic moving ceaselessly in both directions. With its origins in the early 1970s, political ecology brought together the theoretical interests of Marxism, especially theories of uneven international development, and material concerns about the environment. Such interests scarcely described economic geography at that time, though, concerned as it was with smoke-stack industrial manufacturing and loosely formulated (and definitely not Marxist) theories of the firm. That changed from the late 1970s with the discipline increasingly practicing political economy and even giving sporadic attention to “nature.” It was Neil Smith’s (1982) Uneven Development that finally brought these together. The history of the relationship since then as McCarthy nimbly describes is a model for the kind of open conversation that we would hope could exist among all disciplines on economic geography’s boundaries. The barriers at the border have come down; the police and customs officials’ posts abandoned. Schengen is here, mutually benefitting both economic geography and political ecology. Maybe free trade really can benefit both parties, after all?
References
Barnes, T. (2001) ‘In the beginning was economic geography’: A science studies approach to disciplinary history. Progress in Human Geography, 25, 4, 455–478.
Barnes, T. and Sheppard, E. (2010) ‘Nothing includes everything’: Towards engaged pluralism in anglophone economic geography. Progress in Human Geography, 34, 2, 193–214.
Escobar, A. (1996) Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World. Princeton University Press, Princeton.
Geertz, C. (1973) The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. Basic Books, New York.
Gibson-Graham, J.K. (1996) The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy. Blackwell, Oxford.
Harvey, D. (1982) The Limits to Capital. Blackwell, Oxford.
Harvey, D. (2010) A Companion to Marx’s Capital. Verso, London.
Hudson, B. (1977) The new geography and the new imperialism: 1870–1918. Antipode, 9, 2, 12–19.
Peck J. (forthcoming) Economic geography: Island life. Dialogues in Human Geography.
Smith, N. (1982) Uneven Development. Blackwell, Oxford.