Governing minorities and development in Xishuangbanna, China: Akha and Dai rubber farmers as entrepreneurs

In Xishuangbanna, southern Yunnan, Akha and Dai farmers, regarded in China as “backward”, passive recipients of state-led development, have been “getting rich” on rubber and expanding rubber cultivation into neighbouring Laos. State cash crop campaigns to raise minority farmers’ incomes inadvertently turned minority farmers into dynamic entrepreneurs. This paper builds on Vinay Gidwani’s use of development as a “regime of value” to raise social and economic value to analyze these unexpected results. Local state agents believe they are the agents of development, bringing modest social and economic improvements to minority farmers of obdurate backwardness. Minority farmers see themselves as improving their own incomes and “quality”, a term in China for social value, in an era when they are responsible for their own development. National development discourse encourages citizens to raise population quality by becoming entrepreneurial, a message heard by minority rubber farmers as well as urban elites. Through creative, post-Fordist production models and agile deployment of land, labour, and capital, minority farmers have achieved incomes that exceed those of workers on state rubber farms, large plantations whose Fordist production models are losing out in the uneven transition from a planned economy to a more capitalist market assemblage. Akha and Dai rubber farmers, the “backward” minorities on China’s periphery, have unexpectedly become the forerunners of flexible production arrangements that are prevailing in the arena opened up by China’s 2001 entry into the World Trade Organization.     

An Apollonian appreciation of Google Earth

This short article reviews and critically appraises Kingsbury and Jones’ (2009)Geoforum article entitled “Walter Benjamin’s Dionysian Adventures on Google Earth”, and finds it lacking in several regards. First, the use of Nietzsche’s Dionysus/Apollo dichotomy is in fact a double binary, in which Apollonian logic is constructed as a binary within the dichotomy, while the Dionysian logic is ‘bacchanalian’. Second, Walter Benjamin as exemplar of Dionysian logic is shown to be problematic and more a distraction from the flawed Nietzschean logic than a useful construct in itself. Lastly, the educational potential of Google Earth is overlooked by Kingsbury and Jones, in their haste to see Google Earth through ‘Google goggles’, in which everything Google appears through Dionysian-tinted lenses.     

Energizing historical materialism: Fossil fuels, space and the capitalist mode of production

In this paper, I present a theoretical argument that fossil fuel represents a historically specific and internally necessary aspect of the capitalist mode of production. Despite sustained attention to distributional conflicts between international capital and energy rich nation-states, few historical-materialists have paid attention to the relations between fossil fuel and capital accumulation in industrial capitalist societies. In opposition to ecological economic notions of fixed thermodynamic “laws”, I first propose a dialectical conception of energy as embedded in dynamic social processes and power relations. Second, I review the historical importance of the energy shift from solar or biological sources of energy (muscles, wind, and water) to fossilized sources of energy (coal, oil, and gas). I then demonstrate how attention to fossil fuel energy forces a reexamination of the core insights of ecological Marxism and the political economy of nature. In the core argument of the paper, I reconsider the shift from biological to fossil energy as internal to the generalization and extension of capitalist social relations from two basic vantage points - (1) capitalist production based on wage labor; (2) the spatial conditions of capitalist circulation. I conclude by asking whether it is accurate to conceptualize capitalism as a “fossil fuel mode of production” and highlight the political urgency of a historical materialist perspective that takes seriously the importance of energy to the reproduction of capitalist social relations.     

Reading representations of women’s war experiences in the Changi Chapel and Museum, Singapore

In this paper, we highlight the way Singapore commemorates its involvement during the Second World War. After briefly tracing the genesis of war commemoration within the nation, we turn to one specific problematic--the gendered portrayals of the war within a particular war memorial in Singapore, the Changi Chapel and Museum. Through a reading of landscape texts, interviews with key figures, visitors and other ethnographic data, we explore the specific ways in which women have either been omitted or stereotypically represented within the site. We proceed to provide possible reasons for this, arguing how the male-centric focus of the site may be due to the perpetuation of hegemonic ideals of war as being a traditionally “male” terrain, and the fact that “silence” is often part of women’s approach to their war experiences. We also argue that gendered portrayals of the war within the site is also an unconscious product of the patriarchal nature of the Singapore state and nation-building endeavours that have placed limits on a more substantial inclusion of women’s stories vis-à-vis the men’s.     

Recombinant workfare, across the Americas: Transnationalizing “fast” social policy

The paper presents a genealogy of the Bloomberg administration’s Opportunity NYC program, launched in 2007 as part of New York City’s explicitly experimental anti-poverty strategy. Opportunity NYC was modeled on “conditional cash transfer” programs, currently operating in more than thirty countries across the Global South, drawing direct inspiration from Mexico’s widely touted Oportunidades program. This striking case of South-North policy emulation calls attention to some distinctive features of what is characterized here as a transnationalizing “fast-policy” regime, based on technocratic forms of program evaluation and development, dense expert networks, and orchestrated communities of practice, within which a range of policy intermediaries—particularly those connected with multilateral agencies—are assuming significant new roles. What appears to be a pragmatic form of policy learning in fact operates in the context of narrow ideological parameters, within which there is a concerted technocratic “push” toward favored solutions.     

Feeling Slow Food: Visceral fieldwork and empathetic research relations in the alternative food movement

This paper details the author’s experiments with accessing the visceral realm in research on the food-based social movement, Slow Food (SF). “Visceral” is defined as the bodily realm where feelings, sensations, moods and so on are experienced. Fieldwork methods aimed at participatory co-creation of data through verbal communications in the form of in-depth conversations and group discussions, as well as non-verbal communications in the form of “intentionally designed experiences” and other forms of sensory involvement. Communications centered on understanding how foods and food-based settings elicit feelings and sensations that move and power bodies differently, and specifically how SF guides bodies to be affected by specific foods and environments. The paper details how data were created and recorded, specifically exploring how sensory-based research events were translated to data through the creation of imagined bodily empathies. The paper also discusses the emergence of change-oriented communications that pushed for transformation in SF’s (in)attention to visceral differences, thus demonstrating how visceral research can challenge researchers and participants to critically reflect upon, and perhaps transform, how their own bodies feel (and respond to) the world.     

State visions, landscape, and disease: Discovering malaria in Argentina, 1890-1920

Recently, geographers and other scholars have reappraised the state’s spatial properties, roles, and strategies. According to these interpretations, modern states seek to control their subjects and coordinate economic development through various “rational” and “scientific” strategies that involve the standardization, transformation, and bureaucratization of space, territory, and landscape. Through this process social relations are increasingly configured through state discourses and institutions. The role of public health institutions in the development of state spatialities has been relatively underappreciated. This paper explores the establishment and early action of a malaria control campaign in Northwest Argentina, in the early twentieth century. I make three arguments: first, in creating a malaria control program, the Argentine state did not merely respond to a given “social fact” but rather was the key participant in constructing the “malaria problem”. Second, in response to this problem the Argentine state created a new technical-administrative territory, “the malarious zone”, which encompassed several provinces and defined the federal government’s jurisdiction for public health action. Finally, state actors came to understand the malaria problem, and potential solutions to it, through specific “rational” practices of the modern state: surveying, mapping, measurement, and statistical compilation. In its early years, the malaria campaign did not so much control the disease itself, as much as establish control over the “malaria question”, making it indisputably a state project.     

Tanzanite as conflict gem: Certifying a secure commodity chain in Tanzania

Shortly after the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States, the Wall Street Journal published an article claiming that al Qaeda sympathizers were using an obscure gemstone commodity known as tanzanite to raise funds for terrorist activities. Despite subsequent disclaimers by the US State Department, this allegation effectively marked tanzanite as a “conflict gem,” and set in motion a complex set of political maneuvers designed to rehabilitate the tanzanite industry’s reputation. This paper analyzes the immediate fallout from the Wall Street Journal article and the subsequent effects of anti-terrorist rhetoric on the tanzanite industry. I explore the origins of the “conflict gem” discourse and the political movement that has taken shape over the past decade to reform gemstone mining. Drawing on theories developed by critics of the fair trade movement, I examine a series of steps taken by the main corporate miner active in the tanzanite industry to re-brand and certify tanzanite as “conflict-free.” I underscore the degree to which these efforts have been inflected by new security provisions embodied in the USA Patriot Act.     

How to speak for aquifers and people at the same time: Environmental justice and counter-network formation at a hazardous waste site

A common source of conflict at hazardous waste sites in the US Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund program is the accuracy of scientific investigations and representations produced to inform cleanup decisions. Liable firms often produce these technical representations themselves, and communities surrounding sites frequently argue that such “voluntary” investigations are compromised by conflicts of interest. In order to challenge the representations of powerful firms, locally situated actors often develop trans-local connections with expertise and equipment concentrated at distant centers of calculation. Although some interpret the spatial politics of such connecting in terms of “jumping scales,” another important spatial dimension of this network construction is differential positioning. In a conflict over groundwater models at the St. Regis Superfund Site in Minnesota, the counter-network that emerged to challenge the owner’s representations of the site positioned some actors as “outsiders” and others as “insiders.” This differential positioning enabled the counter-network to balance the need to demonstrate the reliability and impartiality of its claims with the requirement to maintain its accountability to local public interests. I argue that these requirements result from the prevalent view of the science-policy interface, which assumes a rigid separation between science and politics. Nonetheless, the conflict over groundwater at St. Regis reveals how at the science-policy interface, speaking for things and speaking for people are thoroughly entangled.     

Localising privatisation, disconnecting locales - Mechanisms of disintegration in post-socialist rural Russia

Soviet collectives in general and especially the kolkhozes in rural areas were much more than merely production units. They regulated a significant part of everyday life in the villages and thus have to be seen as all-embracing social institutions, constituting the bedrock for rural communities. Relying on the homogenising effect of the kolkhoz-mechanism most authors who analyse the process of transformation in the Post-Soviet Russian countryside highlight the failures of privatisation and consequently presume continuity and not change. This paper argues, first, that in view of the weakness of the central state in the 90s a considerable leeway existed at the local level for different ways and degrees to implement the reform legislation and, second, that the concrete outcomes of the restructuring can only be adequately understood focusing on interests and power relations on the micro level rather than dealing with farms as such as the ‘acting units’.The common vantage point for most of the kolkhozes was an “alliance for the locale” between management and workers. It had its roots in the fear to become “slaves on one’s own land” if non-local investors would be allowed to buy agricultural land, to remain without infrastructure like streets, water supply and kindergartens if the kolkhoz would be divided up and to lack the machinery to work the private plots without the support of the farms. But beyond this consensus the chairmen of the collective farms could rely on a bulk of different allocative and authoritative resources to stage-manage privatisation. This introduced a highly ‘individual’ moment in the process and led to rising disparities and an increasing disintegration of rural Russia in the 1990s. Using a farm in southern Russia as an example the closer look at these resources and the “failed privatisation” unveils, that not continuity, but hybrid amalgamations of old and new characterise the Post-Soviet Russian countryside.     

Grounding the virtual: The material effects of electronic grocery shopping

This paper addresses the materiality of computer-mediated retailing. The paper uncovers the “hidden geography” of e-commerce, considering how the seemingly simple act of doorstep food delivery is explicated in urban form, and in transportation and communication infrastructures. The paper categorises electronic grocery shopping (EGS) enterprises into three types: “bricks and clicks”, “pure-play” and the “infomediary”, and examines how each type of operation has been materialised in the urban landscape, and the infrastructure upon which each draws. The paper then considers the strategies EGS operations have used to offset the “killer costs” of logistics for electronic commerce. The paper concludes by considering how electronic grocery shopping is embedded within broader trends in consumer behaviour, and how these trends are manifested in the materiality of urban life. The paper argues that online grocers are in the vanguard of ventures habituating customers to the remote ordering and delayed delivery of products to the home. Through controlling this “last mile”, online retailers hope to extend the product offer to higher-margin and more problematic products, which are in themselves unprofitable to distribute direct to the customer, but which can be profitably combined with a grocery shop.     

Mobile pastoralism on the brink of land privatization in Northern Côte d’Ivoire

Côte d’Ivoire’s adoption of land privatization policies promoted by the World Bank and European Union is producing new land use patterns in the countryside. A centerpiece of these policies is the 1998 Rural Land Law that aims to restructure rural economic life along agrarian capitalist lines. The purported “development” objective of land privatization is to stimulate agricultural productivity based on the assumption that land titling will lead farmers and herders to make greater investments in their production systems. This paper argues that the mobile livestock raising system of immigrant FulBe pastoralists in Côte d’Ivoire is threatened by the new land law. Since mobility is crucial to animal health and fertility rates, I argue that reduced mobility will lead to lower livestock productivity. Although the land law has yet to be implemented, its very existence is leading prospective claimants to test their land rights by planting orchards and lending land to immigrant farmers. The monetization of land lending and grazing rights is increasingly common. Land disputes over who has the power to allocate land are also on the rise. I argue that this heightened interest in “tenure building” is constraining herd mobility, especially for herders with limited resources to negotiate access to rangelands. On the other hand, land privatization is strengthening the hand of local cattle-owning farmers who increasingly practice mobile livestock raising and compete with FulBe herders for grazing lands. Under these new conditions of land access, control, and competition, FulBe herd mobility and productivity are at risk of declining.     

Singaporeans in China: transnational women elites and the negotiation of gendered identities

The burgeoning literature on transnationalism involving skilled migrants--based largely on the view from the developed world--have generally paid little heed to “elite” women and the reproductive sphere. We argue that women play many roles in elite transnational migration streams and must be given full consideration as part of the “transnational elite.” Attention is given to the way women--both “tied” and “lead” migrants--negotiate gendered identities as they participate in Singapore's regionalisation process, a state-driven initiative to extend the national economy by leveraging on growth in the region. Empirical material for the paper is mainly based on in-depth interviews with married women who were part of a larger project involving interviews with 150 Singaporeans who had lived, or were living, in China. In examining the movements through transnational space between Singapore and China, it is clear that patriarchal norms continue to shape women's understandings of their own identities vis--vis men's. Singapore women who move as accompanying spouses (the majority) find themselves giving up careers to focus on their domestic role in China (in the absence of access to “suitable” paid domestic service), and are not so much “deskilled” but “re-domesticated”. The exceptional few women who ventured into China as entrepreneurs experienced considerable strain holding together geographically separate spheres of productive and reproductive work across the transnational terrain. Both sets of “stories” alert us to the need to include “elite” women--whether accompanying spouses or independent entrepreneurs--in our understanding of “transnational elites.” This will contribute to the urgent task of ensuring that both productive and reproductive work are valorized in equal measure in conceptualizing transnationalism.     

The grain-size characterisation of coastal sand from the Somme estuary to Belgium: Sediment sorting processes and mixing in a tide- and storm-dominated setting

Sand-rich Holocene to modern clastic deposits in the eastern English Channel and the southern North Sea coasts of France and Belgium occur extensively as nearshore-sand bank, estuarine-tidal flat, aeolian dune and beach sub-environments. Sand samples (n = 665) collected from these deposits suggest the presence of three different populations: a largely dominant (83%) medium to fine quartz sand population (“b”), and finer- (14%) and coarser-grained (4%) populations (respectively “c” and “a”). The distribution of these populations among the four sub-environments reflects tide- and storm-dominated sorting and transport processes and a variable degree of mixing. These populations are derived from a mixture of very fine- to very coarse-grained fluvial, outwash and paraglacial sediments deposited on the beds of the eastern English Channel and southern North Sea during the late Pleistocene lowstand. The nearshore-sand bank environment, which also corresponds to the main offshore source area of the coastal deposits, exhibits population heterogeneity reflecting the variability of hydrodynamic conditions and sediment sorting in this zone. The nearshore topography of tidal ridges, banks and troughs in these tidal seas leads to variable bed and tide- and storm-induced shear stress conditions. These conditions only allow for the mobilisation and onshore transport of some of the finer fractions (populations “b” and “c”), leaving an offshore mixture of these finer populations with coarser, less mobilisable sediments (population “a”). Once in the coastal zone, these two finer populations undergo further hydrodynamic sorting and segregation. Variably sorted very fine sands to silts (population “c”) are trapped in the low-energy estuarine-tidal flat sub-environment, while the highly homogeneous population “b” is further sorted in aeolian dune and beach sub-environments. This sorting occurs via a coastal sand transport pathway linking the Somme estuary mouth to the southern North Sea bight where tidal range and wave energy decrease relative to the English Channel. Since this sand transport pathway enables longshore transport of hydrodynamically sorted medium to fine sand derived directly from the immediate nearshore zone, it has further contributed to a net flux of this sand population from the eastern English Channel sea bed to the southern North Sea.     

Genetic geographies. A historical comparison of agrarian modernization and eugenic thought in Germany, the Soviet Union, and the United States

The article deals with the role of genetics in the state-led agricultural modernization efforts that took place in different industrialized countries during the course of the 1920s and 1930s. A comparison between Germany, the Soviet Union and the United States shows substantial similarities in their attempts to increase the productivity of agriculture on different geographical scales. Following advances in scientific knowledge about the geography of cultivated plants, these countries sent out numerous expeditions to collect plant breeding material from all over the world. At the same time, states tightened their grip on farmers’ and breeders’ activities inside the country by establishing legal rules for the use of plant varieties and seed. But this was only one side of a larger “genetic modernization” project. In all three countries, concepts of agricultural modernization were substantially linked to social-darwinist thought which embraced programs of eugenics and “racial hygiene”. These links are outlined for each of the cases, highlighting the widely differing intermingling of scientific concepts and terminologies with political ideologies. It is then discussed what role geography and in particular geopolitical thinking of the time were to play in the development of “genetic modernization”, and more specifically, with regard to the nexus between agriculture and eugenics. While the discipline’s involvement in both fields remained comparably marginal in practical terms, clearly there were conceptual contributions toward the development of the broader field. Going back to Ratzel’s and Kjellén’s work, it is argued that geography had an important role in the establishment of a political field in which ideas of managing human reproduction were fused with concepts of economic development and environmental determinism.     

Behind the scenes: How transnational firms are constructing a new international division of labor in media work

Predictions that work in fields such as computer programming, architecture, and graphic design will be globally sourced have raised the specter of job losses among skilled workers in high wage economies. One of the most interesting cases tied to this controversy is that of so-called “runaway” motion picture and television production from the traditional center of entertainment media production in Los Angeles to non-US satellite production centers. Although runaway production is an old complaint in the entertainment media industries, the production location decisions of media entertainment firms since the mid-1990s look considerably different than those in the 1980s when a similar alarm was raised. Among the critical differences are: (1) the location of an expanded range of production activities in regions outside the “headquarters” location of Los Angeles; (2) the ability of transnational firms to access multiple, self-organized and networked pools of skilled labor in production locations outside Los Angeles; and (3) the expanded role of the sub-national state in reducing the overall production costs of transnational firms, including those attendant to their use of skilled labor pools. The current controversy provides an opportunity to consider how transnational firms use international out-sourcing to address their need for high-skilled and specialized labor in the production process. It also contributes to the on-going theoretical debate over how transnational firms are combining the advantages to be derived from territorial agglomeration with those of substitutability of labor skills in multiple locations.     

Interviewing landed elites in post-war Guatemala

This essay explores the methodological challenges of conducting ethnographic research among economic and managerial elites in Guatemala’s landed sector during the country’s post-war transition. Guatemala’s 34-year civil war ended with peace accords in 1996. From the mid 1990s through 2001, I conducted interviews with leading representatives of the private sector in Guatemala, including the owners and top managers of the country’s sugar plantations. The Guatemalan sugar elite describes itself as the new face of the private sector in Central America, implementing “corporate social responsibility” programs linked to the World Bank and other international agencies. Questions of access and interview dynamics are often discussed in relation to qualitative research on “elites.” Yet, I found the interview process to be less complicated than I anticipated. Of greater concern were the problems of research dissemination and praxis. The experience discussed here raises questions about whether research on particular elite groups can be sustained over long periods of time.     

Identifying “free” and “bound” lipid fractions in stalagmite samples: An example from Heshang Cave,Southern China

Stalagmites are good archives for paleoecological change, as they are easy to date, and contain multiple environmental proxy records, including climatic records from oxygen isotopes. Lipid biomarkers preserved within stalagmites have recently been used to investigate changes in the overlying soil and vegetation. However, the understanding of lipid records from stalagmites is still at an early stage, and is hindered by the low abundances of lipids preserved and the complexity of the organic matter signal. Here the first results of a sequential extraction procedure are presented, that enables examination of the distribution patterns of “free” (solvent extraction) and “bound” (including physically bound within the calcite matrix and chemically bound to macromolecules) lipids in a stalagmite from southern China. In both groups the dominant compounds are saturated fatty acids, which are an order of magnitude more abundant in the “bound” phase. n-alkanes and n-alcohols chiefly appear in the “free” lipids. In contrast, 3-hydroxy acids are predominantly released under strong acid reflux conditions, suggesting a principal input from bacterial membrane compounds. A direct comparison between the present results and the published data from an Ethiopian stalagmite shows significant differences in the lipid signals from separate sites, with a stronger microbial signal in the Chinese sample. This preliminary investigation of lipid distributions in different modes highlights the importance of microbial geochemical processes in karst systems and supports the use of stalagmites in paleoecological reconstruction.     

Jamaican tourism and the politics of enjoyment

Critical approaches to tourism, united by a refusal to conceptualize tourism as mere enjoyment, illustrate how Third World tourism typically involves labor exploitation, unequal gender relations, cultural destruction, and environmental degradation. Researchers presuppose, however, that enjoyment is an innocent and self-evident psychological phenomenon underpinned by and opposed to worthier objects of inquiry such as exploitation, domination, and discrimination by virtue of their politically serious, conceptually profound, and empirically complex properties. These critical approaches, however, are not critical insofar as they tacitly assume that the phenomenon of enjoyment is just enjoyment: easily enjoyed and unrelated to the problems of tourism. The main thesis of this paper is that a thorough theoretical conceptualization of enjoyment is necessary for any analysis of tourism to be sufficiently rigorous. The psychoanalytic concepts of Jacques Lacan and the work of Slavoj ?i?ek offer an unparalleled theoretical vocabulary with which to investigate the subjective, material, embodied, discursive, and enacted dimensions of enjoyment in tourism. The paper elaborates what I call a politics of enjoyment using key psychoanalytic ideas that include jouissance, the pleasure principle, the Other, and fantasy to critically explicate the contradictions, antagonisms, and impasses that (de)structure Jamaica's “One Love” and “No Problem” tourism product located on a Caribbean island renowned for beach bliss and civil unrest.     

Sustainability schizophrenia or “actually existing sustainabilities?” toward a broader understanding of the politics and promise of local sustainability in the US

As an approach to development, many see capitalism as reaching across an enormous range of scholarly domains and political interests. For some time geographers and others have begun to conceptualize capitalism as less of a system of intrinsic economic logic and more a collection of social and discursive relationships. By bringing capitalism into the “discursive world” these commentators and others have provided the theoretical ground for an exploration of alternative economic forms, especially those that are more socially and ecologically just. This paper makes an argument for putting sustainable development through the same theoretical scrutiny. Drawing on examples from the US we recruit the concept of “actually existing sustainabilities” from Altvater’s concept “actually existing socialisms” as an entry point to this conversation. Our purpose is to show that the potential for sustainability in the US exists in current local policies and practices if we rethink how we frame it.