‘Development’, resistance and the geographies of affect in Oecussi: Timor‐Leste's Special Economic Zone (ZEESM)

In 2013, it was announced that Timor‐Leste's Oecussi enclave would become the site of a special economic zone. Arid, and inhabited mostly by semi‐subsistence farmers from West Timor's Meto ethno‐linguistic group, the plan entails remaking the enclave as an industrial, transport and tourism hub. To facilitate this, in mid‐2015 the authorities began the process of clearing hundreds of indigenous gardens and homes from land slated for mega‐projects intended to make the region attractive to foreign investors. In this paper, I describe how, for many Meto, land tends to be experienced as a spiritually mediated ‘geography of affect’ (Lea & Woodward, 2010) in which questions of place, belonging, spirituality and personal fortune cannot easily be divided, a reality that raises questions about the suitability of the plan's vision of globalized and investment driven ‘development’. Drawing on Scott, I argue that in Oecussi, spirits associated with the land are not apolitical, but are sometimes perceived as acting to protect locals against powerful outsiders – a characteristically Meto ‘weapon of the weak’ that is in keeping with their previous encounters with colonial regimes.     

THE GEOGRAPHICAL DIMENSIONS OF AL‐QA'IDA RHETORIC

ABSTRACT. This article examines the geographical ideology of al‐Qa'ida. The central questions are to what extent al‐Qa'ida terrorism is motivated by a desire to control geographical space, and how the organization defines that space as place in its communiqués. The study also asks whether al‐Qa'ida's geographical rhetoric reveals the nature or locations of future attacks. Principal sources are statements and interviews by and with al‐Qa'ida leaders. al‐Qa'ida classifies distinctive geographical realms of legitimization, preparation, and action. Its geographical concerns and ambitions are hierarchical and based principally on perceptions of sacred space. The holy places of Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem are the cornerstones of a greater Islamic holy land that al‐Qa'ida seeks to rid of non‐Islamic‐especially U.S. and “Zionist”‐elements and replace with a new caliphate. Terrorism directed principally against American civilians in the United States is one of the main tactics by which al‐Qa'ida says it hopes to achieve its goals in geographical space.     

THE NON‐PENNSYLVANIA TOWN: DIFFUSION OF URBAN PLAN FORMS IN THE AMERICAN WEST*

ABSTRACT. Wilbur Zelinsky's classic 1977 account of the Pennsylvania town as a cultural place type–the urban component of the nationally influential Pennsylvanian culture region–acknowledged that it was not exported intact across the successive western frontiers of the United States. But, aside from Edward Price's specialized study of courthouse squares, we know little that is systematic about how town‐planning ideas diffused across the continent. This investigation offers evidence from the Willamette Valley in Oregon of the eventual variety and geographical distribution of town‐platting conventions that developed in this Pacific Coast “destination’ setting and the possible provenance in the Ohio Valley of certain early Oregonian town‐plan features. The evidence raises questions about the resilience of town‐planning conventions in light of the distance carried, cultural time lags, and changing ideas about best practice and local suitability.     

Contemporary Refugee‐Border Dynamics and the Legacies of the 1919 Paris Peace Conference

While the geopolitical legacies of the World War I peace negotiations are widely recognized, this article examines the often overlooked connection between the WWI Paris Peace Conference's spatial and geopolitical logics and contemporary refugee‐border dynamics. We argue that the spatial and geopolitical logics that framed the WWI Paris Peace Conference—the creation of new states, the propagation of the Western ideal of bounded sovereign states, the nationalist goals of self‐determination and homogeneous ethnic nations, and the establishment of a system of international governance—continue to impact refugee‐border dynamics and “crises” today. The categories, ideals, and practices of the international refugee regime that emerged over the last one‐hundred years stem in great part from these logics. In this paper, we urge critical contemplation about how these foundations—including the establishment of the post of High Commissioner for Refugees in 1921, the resultant Nansen Passports, the post‐WWI minority treaties, and lastly the 1933 Convention Relating to the International Status of Refugees—connect to contemporary human (im)mobility and border violence. We also introduce the articles in this special issue and highlight key themes and future directions for research in critical migration studies.     

HYPHENATED GEOGRAPHIES: THE DEINDUSTRIALIZATION OF NATURE‐SOCIETY GEOGRAPHY*

As visions of ecological crisis mark the daily headlines, industrial spaces of intensive energy and material consumption become a more intense object of political and social concern. In this article, I attempt to situate geography's relative neglect of the ecological underpinnings of industrial capitalism within the context of the history of geographical thought. I argue that the ways in which geographers read the hyphen in the phrase “nature‐society” reveals epistemological limits to their object of study. I then offer three dramatically different readings of the hyphen and discuss how they have affected the lineages and trajectories of geographical research—Barrows's human ecology, Sauer's cultural landscape, and critical theories of social nature. I conclude by suggesting that geography needs to let go of its empirical and conceptual fixation on “nature”.     

HUMAN GEOGRAPHY OF THE AMERICAN TROPICS: A FORTY-YEAR REVIEW

For a decade or so after World War II, human geographers working in the American tropics found socio-political conditions and resultant research topics little changed from those before the war. This was in contrast to the Old World tropics where decolonization processes and the demands of economic development and new nation building produced divergent research currents, For the first half of the period under review, the American tropics continued to be the province largely of geographers with culturalhistorical questions grounded in natural historical bases. The legacy is Humboldt's; the practitioners most notably students of Carl Sauer or German counterparts such as Carl Troll. French and British regionalist approaches, strong in the region before World War II, survived less successfully. By the 1980s, however, broad pan-tropical currents of geographic discourse and debate had become established. New practices and theories were formulated and tested as North Atlantic geographers borrowed from antipodean innovators and others working in the Asian and African tropics. Since the 1980s, there have been greater efforts at dialogue and collaboration with host country colleagues. As might be expected in this era of ‘globalization’, national research styles and agendas have become less evident. This paper offers a highly selective map of research nodes within tropical Americanist geography since the early 1950s. The selection of examples includes qualitative criteria, but more importantly, research that signify stasis or intensification as well as turning points and departures in the overall development of this literature. The contours of this history suggest some highly evolved, even idiosyncratic enterprises, but in the main, it is an unfolding that suggests broad congruencies with human geographic work elsewhere in the tropics.     

URBAN‐SYSTEM EVOLUTION ON THE FRONTIER OF THE ECUADORIAN AMAZON

ABSTRACT. Like the North American frontier, Ecuador's Amazonian margin has advanced in periodic waves. But the impetus has been extremely varied, interlacing periods of socioeconomic crisis with times of prosperity. Recent events in eastern Ecuador confirm that urbanization is a fundamental component of frontier development in South America. The urbanization process is not a sign, however, of regional economic strength. Capital gains at the periphery are transferred to the nation's core region. Even the larger boom towns display little functional specialization; they are, instead, precariously dependent on employment in the public‐service sector. Nonetheless, urban centers in the Ecuadorian Amazon continue to grow and to drain surrounding rural areas of younger and more educated individuals.     

BUILDING A COLONIAL RESOURCE MONOPOLY: THE EXPANSION OF SULPHUR MINING IN NEW SPAIN, 1600–1820*

The discovery, extraction, and monopolistic control of key natural resources was a priority of New Spain's colonial administration. Managing the region's abundant resources, however, often proved difficult for the Spanish Crown. Human and environmental challenges impeded protoindustrial growth and development, and monopolistic control of resources often met resistance. In this article I examine these processes in the context of New Spain's little‐known monopoly on sulphur—a yellow, powdery mineral the Crown jealously guarded as its own. Sulphur was critical for gunpowder and explosives production, yet the Crown often failed to produce enough of it to meet the growing demand by its military and the silver blast‐mining industry. Colonial documents reveal administrators’ attempts to improve sulphur production through reform measures, which included advising sulphur miners on how to discover sulphur deposits and, eventually, how to develop their mines. Efforts to improve sulphur production were moderately successful, although the process was messy and inefficient.     

THE SOVIET WAR MEMORIAL IN TREPTOW,BERLIN*

ABSTRACT. The Soviet War Memorial in Treptow, Berlin, was an important emblem of political power and ideology during and after the cold war. Designed as the Soviet Union's premiere extraterritorial battlefield shrine, the site combines a veterans' cemetery with a large‐scale memorial complex celebrating the Soviet victory in World War II. The monument was intended for use in Soviet military commemorative activity and became a key sacred space in the Cult of the Soviet War Dead, but its location in Berlin meant that it served other political purposes. By avoiding definitive statements on key issues the memorial attained a semantic flexibility that enabled it to remain a focal point of commemorative activity for decades. The memorial continues to play a part in contemporary Berlin, though the political overtones are now overshadowed by its role as a shrine to the war dead.     

A Geography of Children's Vulnerability: Gender,Household Resources,and Water‐Related Disease Hazard in Northern Pakistan*

Water‐related diseases continue to pose major threats to children's survival and well‐being in many places in the developing world. This article develops a theoretical perspective on the ways in which children's vulnerability to water‐related disease hazard is produced within the everyday circumstances of livelihood and child care. Central to this analysis is the role that household resources play in mediating or shaping particular microenvironments of health risk. Further, the effects of local geographies of gender on how household resources are accessed and on how child care is structured are examined. Children's vulnerability is evaluated in a community in the District of Gilgit in northern Pakistan, a region presently undergoing tremendous social and economic transformation. The case study highlights household‐level response and adaptation to child health risks associated with diarrheal disease transmission and infection in this mountain environment. The case study draws from ethnographic fieldwork involving qualitative household microstudies and interviewing to elicit mothers' resource and risk‐response strategies in the context of changes in livelihood systems and household dynamics.     

MYTHOLOGIES OF THE GRID IN THE EMPIRE CITY, 1811–2011*

In this article, I examine the performative dimensions of historical narration as a form of modern mythmaking by reconsidering conventional narratives on the “origins” of Manhattan's grid street plan of 1811. The historical mythology of the grid espoused in canonical readings of the Plan of 1811 relies extensively on a rearticulation of the official explanation that the grid's designers provided in a foundational text known as the “Commissioners’ Remarks”. I argue that such accounts result in an extraordinarily narrow and formulaic interpretation of the utilitarian motives and intentions behind the city's grid plan, one that reinforces a form of “morphological essentialism”. To support this argument, I shift the focus of attention beyond the “Commissioners’ Remarks” in order to complicate readings of the intentionality that gave rise to the 1811 street plan. I conclude by suggesting that the mythic search for the “origins” of the grid in the realm of founding intentions can most effectively be challenged by drawing attention to the proliferation of countermyths of gridded space.     

THE HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY OF HONG KONG INVESTMENTS IN THE ASEAN REGION

Conventional studies of “Third World multinationals” tend to focus on their recent origins. This paper argues that the transnational operations of Hong Kong firms have had a long tradition originating in its Overseas Chinese networks and in the colonial experience of many Southeast Asian countries. Based on secondary and primary data, this paper takes a historical view to describe how the ASEAN operations of Hong Kong transnational corporations (HKTNCs) and their foreign direct investment (HKFDI) have evolved over more than a century to become one of the most important economic players in the ASEAN region. Four phases of their historical development are benchmarked in this paper. Before World War II, HKTNCs in the commercial and banking sectors had a notable presence in the region. It was, however, in the post-war period that HKTNCs and their FDI flows flourished. During the period 1945–69, industrialisation took off in Hong Kong and this led to the expansion of manufacturing HKTNCs into the ASEAN region. The real zenith of outward investment from Hong Kong was the 1970s and 1980s so that in the 1990s Hong Kong has become one of the largest investors in Indonesia, Singapore and Thailand.     

THE MONUMENT AND THE BUNGALOW

ABSTRACT. Students of human landscapes often view those landscapes as documents and seek to “read” them for cultural and historical meaning. But how does one learn to read landscape? And how can students be taught to do it? After many years of teaching courses about commonplace American landscapes, I have discovered that students must learn two things before they can expect to read human landscapes. First, they must learn to pay attention to commonplace things which most Americans normally ignore. Second, they must master vocabularies that permit them to classify elements in the landscape and to connect small things with larger ideas. Two examples in the landscape of Bellefonte, Pennsylvania—the town's war memorial and a scattering of California bungalows-demonstrate how these ideas work.     

G. Stanley Hall,Child Study,and the Teaching of Geography

Abstract

G. Stanley Hall (1844-1924), founding president of Clark University, was a leader in the child study movement and a significant figure in psychology and education in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Hall had pronounced opinions on many educational subjects, including the teaching of geography. His criticisms and program for the reform of school geography were based on a mix of European ideas of heimatkunde or “home geography,” developmental or “genetic” psychology, and his work in the child study and nature study movements. This article traces Hall's involvement with geographic pedagogy from the 1880s through World War I, including his sponsorship of the first American Ph.D. dissertation in the teaching of geography, completed at Clark in 1906.     

THE AMERICAN CHALLENGE TO BRITISH HEGEMONY, 1861–1947*

ABSTRACT. In The Shaping of America Donald Meinig describes a United States averse to challenging Britain geostrategically but emerging as a powerhouse economy by the late 1890s. But America embarked on a sustained economic struggle with Britain in 1861 by embracing protectionism; America's Civil War ironclads were as much to resist Britain as fight the Confederacy; and in 1866 uss Miantonomoh helped persuade Britain to reconsider, then pay, the Alabama Claims. Britain never retaliated in the economic struggle by moving to protectionism and in the late 1800s began to appease America in geostrategic terms. This struggle intensified in the 1920s and 1930s as America and Britain competed for control of international transportation, international communication, and the global oil supply, but by the mid‐1940s American hegemony was clear. This article traces the course of the complex economic and political struggle for hegemony in the light of recent models of transitions in the world economy.     

The Geography and Area Studies Interface from the Second World War to the Cold War

Disciplinary geography's history represents an important source for contemporary debates over the status of geographical knowledge across the social sciences. This article argues for a reorientation of geography's history by examining its interface with the development of area studies in the United States. It investigates the epistemological and institutional transformations that occurred in the decades before and after the Second World War as the regional concept transmuted into area studies. The article finds that although geography's regional concept shaped the spatial constructions of area studies, the latter's imaginative geographies fixed the regional concept along geopolitical visions of the nation‐state and Cold War regional blocs that continue to occlude social scientific attempts to redraw the borders of the world.     

WHERE THE PAVEMENT ENDS

ABSTRACT. Black Rock is one of the nation's newest national conservation areas. This significant desert‐and‐mountain region 107 miles north of Reno, Nevada, is the focus of increased global attention, in part due to the annual Burning Man festival, which has become a cause celebre of the dot‐com set and many others. This photographic essay offers a visual sampling of the lyrical sensibility of this unique environment. Geography, I argue, can be an overtly photographic textual form.     

THE NINETEENTH‐CENTURY EVOLUTION OF LOCAL‐SCALE ROADS IN KENTUCKY'S BLUEGRASS

ABSTRACT. In the nineteenth century, local‐scale roads in central Kentucky were built subject to local knowledge and cultural tradition but within the context of legal authority and folk‐ or science‐based engineering precepts. This study demonstrates how legal and engineering standards‐though conceived as transcendent and objective‐were in fact contingent on the region's physical attributes as well as its cultural traditions and character. Thus local road alignment and construction have been influenced by and contingent on local knowledge, dialogue, and debate since frontier times.     

Who Is “Forest‐Dependent”? Capturing Local Variation in Forest‐Product Sale,Eastern Honduras

How researchers describe groups living within or near the world's tropical rain forests has important implications for how and why these groups are targeted for assistance by conservation and development organizations. This article explores how data about market behavior can be used to assess one aspect of forest peoples’ livelihoods: their “dependence” on forest resources as a source of market income. With the intent of revealing the importance of methodology to how we describe forest peoples’ livelihoods, I draw from a multiyear survey of market activity among the Tawahka Sumu of Honduras and distinguish nested measures of the Tawahkas’ engagement in forest‐product sale. Results indicate that whether or not the Tawahka —or any forest group — can be considered financially “dependent” on forest resources depends on the spatial and temporal scales at which data are aggregated. As a group, the Tawahka earned 18 percent of total market income from forest‐product sale, but their group profile masked a high degree of heterogeneity at the village and household level. Similarly, multiyear data indicated that while group‐level generalizations adhere from year to year, they belie considerable change in households’ market behavior across years. I discuss three ways in which the findings are relevant to the theory and practice of conservation and development in the humid tropics. I emphasize the importance of spatial scale in interventions, how market‐oriented conservation schemes can benefit from a broader conceptualization of the economic context in which forest‐product sale occurs, and how longitudinal analysis can reveal the dynamism of forest peoples’ livelihoods.     

“THE FARTHER REACHES OF HUMAN TIME”: RETROSPECT ON CARL SAUER AS PREHISTORIAN*

ABSTRACT. Carl Ortwin Sauer (1889–1975) is widely regarded as one of the most influential geographers of the twentieth century, admired particularly for his studies in cultural and historical geography. His contribution to the study of prehistory is less widely acknowledged, but, between 1944 and 1962, he published a series of speculative yet scholarly papers that contain many prescient insights into humanity's remote past and the relationships of our ancestors to the environments they occupied—and modified. In this essay, based on the Carl O. Sauer Memorial Lecture given at the University of California, Berkeley, in October 2001, I reflect on Sauer's contribution to the science of prehistory by examining, in the light of recent advances in knowledge, two major themes of Sauer's work: the early dispersal of Homo sapiens in the Old World, and the origins and prehistoric spread of agriculture.