Trans-Locals, Critical Area Studies and Geography's Others, or Why 'Development' Should NotBe Geography's Organizing Framework: A Response to PotterAuthor(s): Adrian SmithSource: Area, Vol. 34, No. 2 (Jun., 2002), pp. 210-213Published by: Wiley on behalf of The Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of BritishGeographers)Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20004225 .

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210 Comment

Trans-locals, critical area studies and

geography's Others, or why 'development'

should not be geography's organizing

framework: a response to Potter

Adrian Smith Department of Geography, University of Southampton, Highfield, Southampton SO1 7 1 BJ

Email: adrian.smith@soton.ac.uk

Revised manuscript received 22 January 2002

Rob Potter (2001) has recently taken to task 'main stream' geographers - those in our discipline with research interests in the 'core' - for marginalizing development research undertaken on/in the 'periph ery'. In his attack on 'core' geography, he argues that

we should search for areas of mutual interest which inter-link our research pursuits, we should not mar ginalize research on parts of the globe which com prise the majority of the world's population, and that through an expanded sense of 'development' as an organizing concept, we should be able to provide a better understanding between 'all manner of "Geographies"' (Potter 2001, 424). In particular, Potter makes four main suggestions. First he suggests that development geographers should expand their global reach and develop an interest in 'issues and policies of development wherever they occur' (Potter 2001, 425). A reverse disciplinary imperialism is suggested; letting 'core' geography's 'other' speak.

Second, 'core' geography must study places and peoples outside of Anglo-America. Third, although not entirely clear in the original statement, Potter argues that we need to enlist geography in the pursuit of social justice. Finally, we need 'an enhanced responsibility to distant geographies' (Potter 2001, 426) through a focus on place, environment and development as key organizing principles.

In this short paper, I would like to address some of the concerns raised by Potter. I do not want to deal

with all of the issues and suggestions raised by his

Observation, in part because I do think that at times he is wide of the mark in suggesting that 'core' geographers are not interested in the 'periphery'.

Conversations over the years with 'core' economic geographers reveal a keen interest in geography's Others. What might be key to the relative tendency of 'core' geographers to work in 'core' areas (which is at the heart of Potter's concerns) are a number of

very practical issues connected to, amongst others, funding regimes and availability of research money, linguistic expertise1 and very practical issues of work ing 'away' from 'home' in distant locales. I write then as a geographer interested in the economic and social transformations of what used to be called the 'semi-periphery' or the 'Second World' - the diverse

worlds of 'post-soviet' East-Central Europe. How ever, while this is my situatedness, I want to address a number of issues that transcend the narrow geog raphies of the areas in which we work, whether they be 'peripheral', 'semi-peripheral' or 'core' - although I do not like such categorical discourses because they close rather than open our ability to think across places (a point I shall return to below).

While I am sympathetic to some of the concerns that Potter raises, especially that mainstream geogra phy tends towards an Anglo-American centricity which at times marginalizes all kinds of Others (development geography, post-socialist geographies, etc.), I do want to suggest that Potter's alternative -

the centrality of development, the universalizing of 'development' as an organizing concept - is equally

problematic. In particular, I want to highlight two issues, which I think take us in some different and

more fruitful directions to those suggested by Potter. First, I want to address the claim that 'development' (as some neutral concept of progress and social justice that can organize our work as geographers) is

ISSN 0004-0894 ? Royal Geographical Society (with The Institute of British Geographers) 2002

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Comment 21 1

unproblematic. Second, I want to suggest that the project of linking Potter's 'distant geographies' might be better served by some recent trends in critical areas studies than by the universalizing of the concept of 'development'.

First, let me take the issue of 'development'. Potter is attentive to the shifting sands of development theory and is concerned to show how development2 is not only about the Third World. In many ways, I

would agree. However, I do not believe that it is as useful or particularly productive to take 'develop

ment' as our organizing framework as he suggests. In part, this is because Potter's argument leads him

down the path of essentialism in which he argues that processes of marginalization around the world (including those in 'peripheral' parts of the 'core') are driven by processes that, he claims, are 'essentially identical' (Potter 2001, 425). By positioning (uneven) development alongside an essential cause, which presumably is 'global capitalism', Potter reflects a long tradition of theorizing development centred on the hegemony of 'capitalism'. Potter is careful to stress that he views 'development' as a non-linear process and one that should not mimic the experi ence of 'developed' countries. However, at no place does he challenge the assumption, prevalent in most development thinking, that at the heart of the pro cess is the development of capitalism and economic growth, albeit a capitalism that may have a social democratic flavour.3 As Gibson-Graham and Ruccio (2001) have recently argued, modernization, depen dency and post-development theories all share in common the centrality of global capitalism to creat ing the possibilities and uneven contradictions of 'development'. While we may be critical of global capitalism in the inequalities that it produces, as I believe Potter is, nevertheless development theory, even in its more radical guises, essentializes our focus on a hegemonic global capitalism. Rather,

Gibson-Graham and Ruccio (2001, 170) have argued for a project, following Gibson-Graham's earlier work (1995 1996), that repositions the capi talocentrism of development theory and practice as a 'discursively hegemonic entity' - one that requires critical reformulation. Their project then - and I am not suggesting that this is unproblematic, but it is a useful starting point - is to provide space

to recognize class diversity [not just capitalist class processes] and the specificity of economic practices that coexist in the Third World and to show how

modernization interventions have themselves created

a variety of noncapitalist (as well as capitalist) class processes, thereby adding to the diversity of the econ omic landscape rather than reducing it to homogeneity. (Gibson-Graham and Ruccio 2001 170)

In this way the focus shifts from a rather woolly and teleological concern with 'development' to a more precise and analytical understanding of the consti tution and articulations of diverse economies and class processes, and the possibilities that they hold.

Second, let me reflect on Potter's suggestion that we need to build a responsibility to distant geogra phies. I do not disagree with this proposition. What is problematic, however, is that it raises all kinds of knotty problems (which remain untreated in Potter's albeit brief polemic) about how we should approach the task. As I argued above, I do not think that the argument for essentializing 'development' takes us very far. One alternative possibility is that we should look to recent work in critical area studies for inspiration. I suggest this because such work is attempting to re-focus on the trans-local rather than global development. It centres on a call for thinking across various locals - transcending a simple notion of hierarchical scales from global to local to body and enabling us to think of the intertwining of locals by stretching relations over space (Latham 2002). For example, Escobar (2001, 141) argues for 'the contin ued vitality of place and place-making for culture, nature, and economy' and sees that 'people are not only "local"; we are all indissolubly linked to both local and extralocal places through what might be called networks' (Escobar 2001, 143). Develop ing this trans-local network metaphor, Law and

Hetherington have argued that thinking about trans-locality enables us to argue that

knowing, knowing at a distance, acting, acting at a distance, and the making of space, are all relational

effects. And they are materially heterogeneous effects. Materials of all kinds are being disciplined, constituted, organised, and/or organising themselves to produce knowledges, subjects, objects, distances and locations. (Law and Hetherington 2000)

Such challenges to think trans-locally - to consider 'the porosity of boundaries' as Escobar (2001, 144)

would have us do - have been echoed in recent innovations in critical area studies, a realm that traditionally has been centred on understandings of discrete areas of the world somewhat in isolation from each other.4 For example, the recent pro gramme of doctoral training run by the Institute

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212 Comment

of International Studies (IIS) at the University of

California, Berkeley is one model. Here the 'New

Geographies, New Pedagogies' and the 'Crossing Borders' programmes have been aimed at revitaliz ing area studies to highlight that doctoral training is required to provide skills to manage 'the fact that

much area studies research is being conducted in "globalized sites"' (IIS undated a). Coping with transnationalism and translocal relations then becomes the heart of a rejuvenated area studies in which the local is situated, not as unique and uncon nected, but within the context of the connectivities with distinct and distant Others. A summary report from the first stage of the Berkeley initiative, 'Crossing Borders', highlights several key issues emerging, such as 'the need to rethink the received

wisdom ... in light of the experience of non-western societies' and 'the need to re-address presumptions about American society - both its particularity, and its universality - on the basis of comparisons with

other societies' (IIS undated b). Together these suggest 'a recognition of the necessity and complex two-way flow of theory which decenters the role of the West' (IIS no date b), which echoes the con cern in a post-socialist context for 'travelling theory' in two directions (Burawoy and Verdery 1999).

Rather than seeing places, locales as a result of

general global capitalist conditions unfolding around the world, the new area studies suggests that critical ethnographies of comparative local transformations are crucial ways in which to

develop understanding of trans-local and trans national phenomena. As Appadurai (1996, 1 78) argues, locality is seen 'as primarily relational and contextual rather than as scalar or spatial'. Locals become 'a property of social life' (Appadurai 1996, 199), sites of social and political action (Escobar 2001; Gibson-Graham 2002).5 Such a rendering of

trans-locality, rather than the hegemony of 'devel opment', might then provide the basis for more

open, more fluid understandings of the kinds of connectivities across different locals ('core', 'periph eral' and 'semi-peripheral') at the heart of Potter's (2001) concern for symbiosis and overlap between 'core' and 'periphery'.6

Acknowledgement I am very grateful to former colleagues at the University of

Kentucky for providing a context in which to consider some

of these issues. In particular, John Pickles (now of the

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) has influenced

my thinking on critical area studies. I would also like to

thank James Sidaway for his insightful comments on an earlier version.

Notes

1 Over the years, I for one have struggled (in the main,

unsuccessfully!) with Central European languages in order to enhance my research on post-soviet societies.

2 Potter (2001, 423) argues that development is not only about 'economic growth', but also concerns expanding social democracy.

3 A related claim is that 'development' (still) tends to foreground the West as the key reference point, although Potter is careful not to make such an argument

himself (see Power 1998). I am grateful to James Sidaway for this insight (see also Sidaway 2001).

4 See Bradshaw (1990) for an earlier treatment of the need

to transcend the divide between systematic geography and area studies, read through the lens of post-soviet space. In addition, Appadurai (1996, 16) historicizes the 1990s crisis in area studies in relation to its role in the

'strategizing world picture driven by U.S. foreign-policy needs between 1945 and 1989'.

5 I do not have space here to trace the links between these

arguments and earlier work in 'locality' studies, but see

Massey (1994). 6 Such claims regarding trans-local perspectives are

echoed in anthropological 'multi-sited ethnography' (see Marcus 1995).

References

Appadurai A 1996 Modernity at large: cultural dimensions of globalization University of Minnesota Press,

Minneapolis Bradshaw M 1990 New regional geography, foreign-area

studies and Perestroika Area 22 31 5-22

Burawoy M and Verdery K eds 1999 Uncertain transition: ethnographies of change in the postsocialist world Rowman and Littlefield, Lanham

Escobar A 2001 Culture sits in places: reflections on globalism and subaltern strategies of localization Political Geography 20 139-74

Gibson-Graham J K 1995 Identity and economic plurality: rethinking capitalism and 'capitalist hegemony' Environ

ment and Planning D: Society and Space 13 275-82

1996 The end of capitalism (as we know it): a feminist

critique of political economy Blackwell, Oxford 2002 An ethics of the local Rethinking Marxism

forthcoming Gibson-Graham J K and Ruccio D 2001 'After' develop

ment: reimagining economy and class in Gibson-Graham I K, Resnick S and Wolff R eds Re/presenting class: essays

in postmodern Marxism Duke University Press, Durham, NC 158-81

Institute of International Studies undated a New geogra phies, new pedagogies: revitalizing area studies at

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Comment 213

Berkeley (http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/NewGeog/) Accessed 18 January 2002

-undated b What was learned from crossing borders phase one? (http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/NewGeog/ learned.html) Accessed 18 January 2002

Latham A 2002 Re-theorizing the scale of globalization: topologies, actor-networks, and cosmopolitanism in

Herod A and Wright M eds Geographies of power: making scale Blackwell, Oxford forthcoming

Law J and Hetherington K 2000 Materialities, spatialities, globalities (http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/sociology/ socO29jl.html) Accessed 5 September 2001

Marcus G E 1995 Ethnography in/of the world-system: the emergence of multi-sited ethnography Annual Review of

Anthropology 24 95-117 Massey D 1994 Space, place and gender Polity, Cambridge Potter R 2001 Geography and development: 'core and

periphery'? Area 33 422-39 Power M 1998 The dissemination of development

Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 16

577-98 Sidaway 1 2001 Post-development in Potter R and Desai V

eds The Arnold companion to development studies Arnold, London 16-20

Geography and development: 'core and

periphery'? A reply

Rob Potter Department of Geography and Centre for Developing Areas Research, Royal Holloway,

University of London, Egham TW20 OEX

Email: r.potter@rhul.ac.uk

Revised manuscript received 6 February 2002

It in now over 18 months since I penned the draft of 'Geography and development: core and periphery?'. Inevitably, much has happened since then, both globally and locally. Adrian Smith's comments on my polemical observation occasioned my going back to the original, and I was surprised just how much I agreed with what I had written. Indeed, in certain respects recent world events have served to strengthen my resolve that, in collective terms, it

would be in the interests of us all if Anglo-American geography were far less parochial.

Looking back, I am glad that I took an explicitly historical shot at establishing the 'poor relation' status of development geography, which seemed to be so clearly exemplified in Wooldridge's beliefs and Prothero's post-war experiences. The observation presented two key issues; firstly, what Adrian Smith describes as my central concern, the relative ten dency of 'core' geographers to work in 'core' areas. But it was also intended to focus on what I see as the strong tendency of 'core' geographers to act in an imperious manner, in appearing not to notice

geography done other than in, and on, the core. How else can one start to explain the fact that

research outside the Anglo-American orbit received such minuscule attention in the last two major reviews of British geography collated by Richards and Wrigley (1996) and Thrift and Walling (2000) (Stoddart 1 996; Potter 2001)? Whilst there may be practical, financial, ethical and personal reasons for not working overseas, together with the second bias of not even noticing that work is done elsewhere, the net outcome is a form of parochialism which not only seems very old-fashioned, but highly misplaced in the new world order.

The observation did not seek to debate the hegemony of capitalist development, with all its manifest inequalities, but rather sought to draw attention to the degree to which Anglo-American geography seems to be reproducing such inequali ties in what it studies. Looking back, perhaps I could even have referred to 'capitalist-' or 'neo-liberal' geography. In this regard, the observation could have stressed that, since 1960, the world has become

more than twice as unequal (UNDP 2001). Yet, my note suggests that since 1 950 the output and con cerns of British geographers have remained largely unresponsive to this major global change. It was for

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