Diﬀerential geographies:place, indigenous rights and ......Diﬀerential geographies:place, indigenous rights and ‘local’ resources ... (cf. Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1999). 134 N.

Political Geography 23 (2004) 133–167

www.politicalgeography.com

Differential geographies: place, indigenousrights and ‘local’ resources

Noel Castree �

School of Geography, Manchester University, Manchester, M13 9PL, UK

Abstract

Over the last decade a number of human geographers have advocated relational perspectiveson place. These perspectives are currently influential within and beyond geography. In thisessay they are subjected to a constructive critique. Three shibboleths of place are identified andscrutinised. Taking the writings of Michael Watts, Doreen Massey and David Harvey as afocus, it is argued that these shibboleths possess important but nonetheless limited value asexplanatory and normative tools. Working within the broad parameters of a relational world-view, the essay proposes a more nuanced approach to place than that offered by Watts, Mas-sey and Harvey. The second half of the essay explores this approach in relation to debatesabout the global indigenous peoples movement. For some indigenous groups, the right to ‘dif-ferential geographies’ is synonymous with the right to erect new border controls around places.This is controversial, not least because non-indigenous groups—locally and translocally—canlay equal claim to occupancy of, or at least a stake in, those places. Rather than criticising sucharguments for the geographical apartheid that seemingly underpins them, I argue for a moresubtle reading of ‘strong’ indigenous claims to territory, cultural artefacts and informationalresources. The result is a plea for left-leaning critics to deploy more supple understandings ofplace that can accommodate the complexities of variegated real world place-projects.# 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Place; Relational thinking; Geographical imaginations; Indigenism; Michael Watts; Doreen

Massey; David Harvey

Introduction

‘‘Struggles over representation’’, David Harvey (1990: 422) has observed, ‘‘are as fun-

damental to the activities of place construction as bricks and mortar’’. In this essay I

wish to challenge a set of shibboleths about the representation of place dominant in

� Tel.: +44-161-275-3627.

E-mail address: [email protected] (N. Castree).

0962-6298/$ - see front matter # 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

doi:10.1016/j.polgeo.2003.09.010

contemporary human geography (and, for that matter, in several social science dis-

ciplines). The shibboleths I examine are the end-result of a decade long attempt to

actively reconfigure academic understandings of place—cognitively and normatively.

Shibboleths are beliefs that a set of like-minded people take to be axiomatic. In human

geography, the shibboleths of place I wish to question are associated with a cohort of

‘critical geographers’—including Harvey as well as John Agnew, Ash Amin, Cindi

Katz, Doreen Massey, Allan Pred, Neil Smith, Erik Swyngedouw and Michael Watts

(to name but a few)—who have struggled to make them disciplinary ‘common-sense’.1

Over the last ten years or more, this cohort has expended a lot of intellectual energy in

order to bring about a paradigmatic shift in human geographers’ conception of place.

This shift has seen the move away from what are variously described as Cartesian (Mer-

rifield, 1993), neo-Kantian (Harvey, 1990) or Newtonian (Massey, 1999a) conceptions

of place towards relational ones. These relational conceptions are not all of a piece, of

course. To take some examples, there are substantive differences between those rendered

in the languages of ‘dialectics’, ‘actor-networks’ and ‘commodity-chains’ respectively.

Nonetheless, at a more abstract level, relational imaginaries together contest a view of

places as ‘‘locations of distinct coherence’’ (Massey, 1999a: 14). Instead, they depict pla-

ces as ‘‘nodes in relational settings’’ (Amin, 2002: 391), as ‘‘specific yet globalized sites’’

(Watts, 1991: 10) and as ‘‘articulated moments in networks’’ (Massey, 1994: 5).2

1 The use of labels like ‘critical geography’ is always hazardous since their meanings are not at all

clear. I use the term in a loose sense to encompass a range of left-leaning ‘isms’ in geography (Marxism,

feminism, anti-racism etc.). I do not include the work of humanistic geographers here, though I do wish

to acknowledge the overlap between their work on place and that of the authors whose writings I dis-

cuss in this essay (see, for example, Adams, Hoelscher & Till, 2001).2 Cynics and pessimists might query both the causes and the consequences of this shift in place imaginaries.

On the one side, the florescence of relational concepts of place in human geography could be considered

symptomatic of the mundane struggle for academic recognition in an increasingly professionalised academy

(Castree, 2000). New ideas are the currency that buys success in the academic marketplace; intellectual inno-

vation, some would say, is primarily a means for career advancement. On the other side, it might be argued

that, whatever the reasons for their recent rise to disciplinary ascendancy, relational notions of place are

unlikely to make much of a difference to thought and action in the wider world. Written in arcane language

and entombed within books and journals, these ideas, it could be claimed, lack the means to ‘leak out’ from

the sites of their production: the universities. Despite some validity, both arguments are surely overstated.

The rationale for, and impacts of, intellectual work are underdetermined by the imperatives of the academic

labour process. In critical human geography, recent debates about ‘activism and the academy’ (Blomley,

1994) and ‘social relevance’ (Martin, 2001; Massey, 2001; Dorling & Shaw, 2002) indicate as much. Whatever

the impediments to ‘making a difference’ out there, much is being done by those on the geographical Left to

inform ‘real world’ struggles. In any case, there is a lot that can be achieved ‘in here’ (Castree, 2002). Uni-

versities are not just talking shops where academics discourse polysyllabilically with one another. It is easy to

forget that they are major institutions of social reproduction, not least because they educate the next gener-

ation of leaders in business, politics and civil society. Accordingly, the kinds of geographical knowledges stu-

dents are presented with—be they knowledges of place, landscape, nature or any other major disciplinary

concept—will have a material bearing on their worldly conduct. In light of this, scrutinising the new critical

geographic orthodoxy about place is more than simply an academic exercise. If, as Stephen Greenblatt (1991:

6) argues, representations ‘‘are not only products but producers, capable of decisively altering the very forces

that brought them into being’’ then challenging critical geographers’ place shibboleths might, in some small

way, help to change the world rather than merely help understand it (cf. Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1999).

N. Castree / Political Geography 23 (2004) 133–167134

I should say immediately that my critique is a sympathetic one. In both anexplanatory and normative sense, I find the relational view of place compelling.My concern is less with its overall logic and more to do with unproblematisedbeliefs several of its advocates appear to operate with. To use an architecturalmetaphor, the shibboleths I wish to challenge do not constitute the foundations ofthis relational view but, rather, elements of its superstructure. Specifically, I ques-tion three ideas about place that seem to have become axiomatic for a cohort ofcritical human geographers. The first is that attempts to put ‘strong’ boundariesaround places—that is to enclose peoples, resources or knowledges within a ‘local’domain—are invariably misguided because such boundary acts are always falseattempts to shut-out (or at least ameliorate the impacts of) translocal ties that inpart constitute those places. They are, in other words, a denial of a fundamentalontological fact of our time: namely, that the global is in the local. Secondly, suchdenial, it is further argued, typically engenders actions that are politically regress-ive. Mapping definitions of place onto putatively discrete territories, peoples orcultures can—as the actions of militant Irish republicans, the Khmer Rouge, Bas-que militants and Tamil rebels have shown—lead to real or potential geographicalapartheid. Here ‘purified’ place representations have a performative and exclu-sionary force by identifying those who supposedly have the right to ‘belong’ tothe geographical area those representations depict. The argument, in short, is thatthese representations support what Amin (2002: 397) calls a ‘politics of place’rather than a ‘politics in place’. The third shibboleth I wish to question is almostthe mirror opposite of the previous two. It is the idea that there is somethingmorally ‘progressive’ about insisting that people on the ground work with, ratherthan disavow or deflect, the inter-place connections that irrevocably bind them todistant others. Put differently, it is the idea that a geographical politics that proac-tively weds agendas in one place to those in myriad others—what Katz (2001:724) calls a ‘‘rooted translocalism’’—is to be preferred to one that is place-bound.3

It goes without saying that the three shibboleths listed are as constructed asthey are political. They are intended to change the world they purport to describeby claiming to possess a certain truth-value. As Rabinow (1996: 56) notes in a

3 These beliefs are not exclusive to human geographers. To the extent that place serves as a metaphor

for culture, identity, community and society (and vice versa), several anthropologists, cultural critics,

political theorists and sociologists have also advocated the need for a ‘global sense of place’ (Hannerz,

1996; Lash and Featherstone, 2002; O’Neill, 2000; Urry, 2000). It is, it seems, currently de rigeur in criti-

cal social science to code translocal solidarities positively while seeing localisms that define themselves

against a putative ‘outside’ as either parochial, ill-conceived or downright reactionary. ‘Extroverted’

place-making projects meet with approval because they are regarded as genuinely ‘glocal’: that is, they

evidently grapple with the tensions between the needs and rights of locals and non-locals. The connec-

tive imperative being established here between conceptualisation and evaluation is all too apparent:

because places in the modern world are undeniably ‘open’—Arturo Escobar (2001: 162) simply calls

them ‘‘meshworks’’—it follows for relational thinkers that a proper (sic) place politics cannot be inward

looking or exclusionary.

135N. Castree / Political Geography 23 (2004) 133–167

different context, they combine ‘‘an ethos of macro-interdependencies with an

acute consciousness of the inescapabilities and particularities of places, historicaltrajectories and fate’’. So far so good. The three shibboleths I wish to challenge

have a good deal of validity—and I will spell-out the reasons why in due course.But it is equally the case that they remain tendentious without careful qualifi-

cation or further refinement.4 This brings me to this essay’s title. In recent years,many indigenous peoples worldwide have begun to argue for the right to ‘repatri-

ate’ land, resources, knowledge and cultural artefacts. From First Nations inCanada to Maori in New Zealand to the pre-Conquest peoples of Latin America,

these ‘communities of descent’—comprising tens, if not hundreds of millions ofindividuals—are today agitating to reverse long histories and geographies of dis-

possession. They are struggling for differential geographies: that is, the right tomake their own places, rather than have them made for them. By exploring some

of the specificities and complexities of ‘indigenism’, I hope to show why the threeshibboleths of place I identified above are insufficiently refined to be of continued

usefulness among Left critics. One of the reasons I focus on indigenism is that itis a ‘global social movement’ (Cohen & Rai, 2000). Though comprised of numer-

ous specific indigenous groups with territorially particular histories and aspira-tions, it is also a ‘community without propinquity’ or what Radcliffe (1999) calls

a ‘‘non-diasporic transnational collective’’. People laying claim to the title‘indigenous’ have, as Castells (1997) argues, created a ‘resistance identity’ that is

avowedly international in compass. It is at once territorially rooted—‘‘attach-ments’’, as sociologist Bryan Turner (2001: 49) observes ‘‘need a location’’—and

yet a prime instance of translocal solidarity. It is thus about ‘roots’ and ‘wings’.What is more, indigenous peoples are using ‘universals’ crafted to benefit all man-

ner of people (like the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights) to advancetheir geographically differentiated cause. But this is not to say that indigenism is

therefore ‘progressive’ in the sense someone like Doreen Massey uses the term, orthat it is incompatible with the pursuit of exclusionary localism. Specifically,

4 To anticipate my argument somewhat, we might ask: is reaching out across space to serve resolutely

particular interests to be deemed ‘progressive’ when these interests are satisfied at the expense of invis-

ible strangers? If this question seems blunt it is partly because Massey’s (1994) use of the deliberately

overdrawn distinction between a ‘progressive’ and ‘regressive’ sense of place has, perhaps, rendered criti-

cal geographers’ normative vocabulary insufficiently subtle. It is too simplistic to assume that the world’s

myriad place-based struggles line-up such that their relative openness or closedness can be evaluated

according to a progressive/regressive polarity. As Castells (1997: 8) helpfully observes, ‘‘no [place] ident-

ity has, per se, progressive or regressive value outside its [specific] . . . context’’ This said, there is much

to commend about critical geographers’ advocacy of a relational imaginary. As I will show, these geo-

graphers are guilty of neither romanticism nor pessimism in their representations of place. They neither

celebrate supposedly ‘authentic’ place projects nor do they depict what Sheppard (2002: 319) calls a

‘‘post-geographical world’’ where place no longer matters. Instead, they prefer to highlight the difficult-

ies and dilemmas that emerge from the insertion of myriad places within translocal flows, processes and

relations. If this can be called a realist perspective—a deliberate conceit given my comment above about

the constructedness of all representations of place—then my aim is add even greater realism to it (cf.

Wolfe, 1996).


because many of the areas, environments and cultural artefacts indigenism seeksexclusive control of are considered to be of national and even global importance,the movement must confront a tension between local needs and extra-local wants.Left-leaning researchers across the disciplines have, in the main, been sympatheticto the indigenous cause (a cause that is, though, far from homogenous in eitherits strategy or goals). But what happens to relational conceptions of place—inboth their cognitive and normative dimensions—when confronted with a move-ment where the local and the translocal are negotiated in ways that challenge theshibboleths highlighted above?

The argument proceeds as follows. In the next section I discuss the rise to promi-nence of relational place conceptions in critical human geography. Following this Isummarise the work of Michael Watts, Doreen Massey and David Harvey in orderto illustrate and explain the shibboleths of place that, in my view, need to be chal-lenged. I focus on this trio not just because they are especially influential theoristsof ‘glocal’ relationships, but also because their conceptions of place have beendeveloped against rather different academic and real world backdrops. Exploringthese backdrops reminds us why, the shibboleths I discuss nothwithstanding, rela-tional concepts of place are so analytically and politically valuable at the presenttime. In the fourth section, I discuss the indigenous peoples’ movement, emphasis-ing its translocal nature while recalling its rootedness in what Raymond Williams(1989) famously called ‘militant particularisms’. Critical human geographers haveonly recently begun to focus on indigenous peoples’ struggles in earnest (see, forexample, Anderson & Jacobs, 1997; Berg & Kaerns, 1997; Braun, 1997; Howitt,Connell & Hirsch, 1996).5 What distinguishes my contribution here is that I focuson the conjoint local and translocal nature of these struggles, rather than any oneexample/set of examples of indigenous place-making (see also Howitt, 2003: 146–51 and Perreault, 2003).6 This leads me, towards the end of the fourth section, torehearse an argument that many supporters of the indigenous cause endorse:namely, that indigenous groups be entitled to full control of land, water, artefactsand knowledges that, historically and today, they consider to be theirs. It is a con-tentious argument because many of the territories and things in question are con-sidered to be of translocal importance such that they should not, in the estimationof many, be sequestered by indigenes. Yet this argument, I show, is compatibleboth with ‘closed’ place-projects and a form of ‘openness’ to outside relations andconstituencies. Though I do not necessarily support this argument in its entirety, itis a compelling one in a number of ways. Within academia, it has largely beenmade in the discipline of anthropology. Accordingly, I draw heavily upon anthro-pologists’ arguments in the latter part of the essay. In conclusion, I reflect upon theneed for critical geographers to acknowledge the messiness of real or intended

5 This contrasts with a long-standing interest in indigenous peoples among historical geographers and

‘old’ cultural geographers—especially in North America (think, for example, of Canadian Cole Harris’s

germinal work on first nations in British Columbia).6 To my knowledge few, if any, critical geographers have focussed in-depth on the broader, inter-

national context for specific indigenous struggles.


place projects. This messiness often cannot be fitted into the diagnostic and evalua-tive boxes otherwise well-intentioned critics are wont to use in examining it.7

Geographical imaginations and imaginative geographies: theorising

‘the local’

When, in Social justice and the city, Harvey (1973: 24) famously defined ‘the geo-graphical imagination’, he could scarcely have anticipated the cacophony of voicesthat, three decades later, would share his preoccupation with local-translocal rela-tionships. A geographical imagination, Harvey (1973) argued, ‘‘allows the individ-ual to recognise the role of place and space in [their] . . . own biography’’. Thirtyyears on, the nature, content and implications of place-space/local-global relation-ships is the subject of enormous critical attention in both geography and the widersocial sciences. There are at least three reasons why. First, in an era of ‘globalisa-tion’, ‘time-space compression’, ‘time-space distanciation’, ‘vagabond capitalism’and ‘liquid modernity’, the issue of whether place particularity is being eroded isvery much on the agenda. One is compelled to ask: can areal differentiation survivein ‘‘a seriously scrambled world that does not divide itself cleanly at the joints’’(Geertz, in Winkler, 1994: 18)? Secondly, heightened geographical interdependencyhas also posed an important, related question: namely, to what extent are changes‘internal’ to places the result of ‘external’ ties? Finally, intensified place-space con-nections have also been coincident with a proliferation of local particularisms.These particularisms—which include everything from the Basque separatist move-ment to myriad urban ‘growth coalitions’ to the efforts of the Tamil militias andKurdish rebels—are often pursued by emphasising distinctions from rather thanrelations with the wider world. As such, they have attracted a good deal of analyti-cal attention with a view to understanding and, sometimes, challenging their goals.

In human geography the current preoccupation with what Massey (1994) called‘a global sense of the local’ is to be found both in formal considerations of place—as in Massey’s own writing—but also in numerous other debates. These includethose on transnational communities (e.g. Mitchell, 1997), the restructuring of locallabour markets (e.g. Peck, 1995), the territorial organisation of corporations (e.g.

7 Before I begin, a brief word on terminology. The precise meanings of ‘place’, like the related term

‘region’, are nowadays numerous. To borrow Cresswell’s (1999: 226) understatement, we can say that

the term place ‘‘eludes easy definition’’. Since the purpose of this essay is to question some of the core

ideas supporting one broad conception of place—rather than any of the term’s precise referents—I do

not intend to unpack its myriad meanings here (on this see Staehli, 2003). Accordingly, in this essay the

term place refers to no particular geographical scale. Rather, it refers to any area that derives its charac-

ter, in part, from its willing or unwilling engagement with something ‘bigger’ or ‘wider’ than itself: vari-

ously, the ‘national’, the ‘transnational’ or the ‘global’. After all, as relational theorists of place insist,

there are few places today that have, as it were, bootstrapped themselves into existence. In the main,

contemporary localities must reckon with the consequences of wider interdependencies—consequences

that ‘‘are no longer a matter of choice’’ (Bauman, 2001: 147) and bind them into a shared collective

future.


Dicken, Kelly, Olds & Yeung, 2001), the geography of justice (e.g. Smith, 2000),development ethics (e.g. Corbridge, 1998), and the spatial lives of commodities(e.g. Jackson, 2002). In theoretical terms, these debates have been phrased in thediverse idioms of Marxism, post-colonialism, feminism and post-structuralism (toname but a few). In virtually every case, a key theme in all of these considerationsof place is how to understand and evaluate ‘otherness’, ‘alterity’ and ‘difference’ ina world where none of these exist sui generis. Outside geography, the recentengagement with place has been similarly vigorous and relational, but phrasedvariously in terms of the end of autochthonous cultures (in anthropology), thehybridity of identities (in cultural studies), the unboundedness of moral claims (inpolitical theory), and the disembedding of social relations (in sociology).

Among the many differences between Harvey’s initial plea for the developmentof a geographical imaginary and the numerous current attempts to specify place-space relationships two loom large. First, it is now evident that no Archimedeanpromontory exists from whence local-global ties can be ‘properly’ sited. Criticalgeographers and their fellow-travellers are now apt to talk about geographical ima-ginations in the plural. The reasons for this are not hard to fathom: because ofrecent debates over situated knowledges, reflexivity and positionality, few Left-leaning academics would now want to claim the tainted mantle of ‘objectivity’when describing their knowledge-productions. Secondly, it follows that geographi-cal imaginations are not simply ‘reflections’ of the worldly phenomena they pur-port to capture. Since Said’s (1979) landmark book, there has been an awarenessamong Leftists in geography and related fields that imaginations of local-globalties are fictions: they are actively manufactured and have a constitutive role to playin how we see ourselves and others (and thus how we act in the world).8 To phrasethese two points in another way, it is evidently the case that geographical imagina-tions are also imaginative geographies. They involve a cognitive mapping withpolitical intent and material effectivity. This arguably heightens, rather than redu-ces, the stakes in their construction, circulation and consumption. ‘‘It is necessary’’,as legal theorist Rosemary Coombe (2001: 318) observes, ‘‘to see our scholarly lan-guages of representation not merely as reflecting a state of things ‘out there’, but aspotentially productive. . .’’. Thus, rather than asking whose geographical imagina-tions are ‘correct’, we need instead to ask: who has the power to construct whatgeographical imaginations and with what effects? This does not—or should not—lead us into a flabby relativism where each and every geographical imagination hasequal validity. Instead, it encourages those whose geographical imaginations aredominant, emergent or subordinate—in academia and beyond—to actively justifythe kind of world those imaginations are designed to create.

In human geography, as I will illustrate in the next section, a cohort of criticalgeographers have developed a highly articulated relational perspective on place

8 Indeed, some of the best recent work by historians of geography (e.g. Driver, 2000), post-colonial

geographers (e.g. Gregory, 2004) and political geographers (e.g. Tuathail, 1996) have been precisely

about these constructed and consequential imaginaries.


that is designed to challenge previous disciplinary conceptions and shape ‘realworld’ geographical imaginations. Since numerous individuals have helped to fash-ion this perspective, I focus on just three contributions: namely, those of Watts,Harvey and Massey. Massey’s theorisation of place is perhaps the best-known ofthe trio, but Harvey and Watts have also made concerted efforts to develop rela-tional local-global imaginaries. To simplify rather, Watts focuses primarily onplace identity, Massey on the nature of place difference and interconnection, andHarvey on the geographical scope of agency, loyalties and justice. Together, theirworks theorise the ‘subjective’ dimensions of place, the ‘objective’ dimensions ofplace, and the wider geographical scales at which active efforts to defend/enhance/alter places should be organised. I focus on their works for two reasons. First, theyhave been uncommonly influential, setting agendas for how others in geographyand beyond think about place. Secondly, together their work encompasses therange of fundamental issues that fall under the polysemic term ‘place’. As I hope toshow, this trio’s writings together encapsulate something of the power—but alsothe limitations—of critical geographers’ attempts to develop a view of place fit forour times.9 Inevitably, in any summary of other authors’ work, there is the risk ofover-simplification and caricature. In what follows I hope I have not unfairlyrepresented Watts’, Massey’s and Harvey’s ideas.

Relational places: three theorisations

Watts: place identity and the spectre of geographical fetishism

In a string of publications (alone and with Allan Pred), Michael Watts hasoffered a critical analysis of resurgent place identities in the contemporary world(Watts, 1991, 1998, 1999, 2001; Pred & Watts, 1992). Though perhaps betterknown for his work on ‘natural hazards’ (Watts, 1983), agro-food systems (Good-man & Watts, 1997) and Third world political ecology (Peet & Watts, 1996), Wattshas, in fact, developed a consistent and powerful theorisation of the ‘subjective’consequences of places being wired-in ‘objectively’ to wider spheres of cultural,economic and political influence. The context of this theorisation is two-fold. First,it has been undertaken in critical dialogue with two important 1990s debates ingeography, the social sciences and the humanities: namely, those on post-colonial-ism and those on post-development. In both cases, several commentators havevalorised ‘local knowledges’, ‘subaltern identities’ and ‘place-making projects’ as acounter to the (Western) abstractions imposed historically by the powerful on the

9 My argument, in this paper, is true to the spirit but not the letter of Escobar’s (2001) recent inter-

vention on place. Escobar, drawing on the example of indigenous struggles is South America, endorses

subaltern struggles to reclaim places but he avoids discussing the ‘extreme’ end of indigenous peoples

movement. By contrast, I argue that left-wing analysts can neither label extreme place-projects as ten-

dentially reactionary and unrealistic, nor glibly describe them as ‘progressive’ because they draw upon

wider networks and scales.


powerless—such as ‘development’, ‘reason’, and ‘progress’. As Kamat (2001: 39)puts it, here ‘‘The local is seen to contain the solutions to its own problems . . .’’.Against this, Watts is very wary of celebrating ‘local difference’ in a quasi-romanticmode, observing that what is really at stake here ‘‘is the struggle between intellec-tuals’’ (Watts, 1999: 92). What he means by the latter statement is that some aca-demics become cheer-leaders for place-projects, while others take a moreinternationalist, cosmopolitan view. One of the former, in Watts’ (2000: 29–30)estimation, is Arturo Escobar, who is a key advocate of local, grass-roots alter-natives to the blanket application of development practices in the South. Secondly,the academic advocates of geographical difference (like Escobar) have made theirarguments in the context of a recent proliferation of localist movements world-wide—as mentioned earlier. This proliferation should come as no surprise.Increased place-connectivity creates new opportunities and new threats for local-ities. In Cocks’ (2000: 46) words, now that places ‘‘cannot be counted on [t]o . . .remain in tact’’ they take on a heightened importance for those living in them.What is more, if Jessop (1999) is right, the ‘down-scaling’ of political-economicregulation in many countries has given numerous places greater power to control—and thus take direct responsibility for—their own destinies. However, as Dirlik(1999: 53) notes, the recent ‘resurrection of locality’ has ‘‘had politically mixed con-sequences’’. The various geographical imaginations that local actors and institu-tions have deployed to command their home ‘turf’ have often been chauvinistic,essentialist, and exclusive, as opposed to ecumenical, open and inclusive.

Watts focuses on just two efforts to imagine and reappropriate place, both ofthem occurring in modern Nigeria, West Africa. The first is a set of Muslim millen-narian insurrections among the Hausa during the early 1980s, inspired by a self-proclaimed prophet, Alhaji Maitatsine. The second is the more recent struggle ofthe Ogoni people, led by the late Ken Saro-Wiwa, ‘‘to create a space of autonomyand self-determination enshrined in an Ogoni Bill of Rights and in a mass politicalmovement’’ (Watts, 1999: 86)—MOSOP (the Movement for the Survival of theOgoni People). The Ogoni movement, as Watts notes, has often been held up asparagon case of subaltern struggle and post-development practice. The context forboth struggles is a history of British colonial control, followed by nation state inde-pendence which has been reliant economically on oil exports and remains subjectto an oligarchy of Western petroleum companies. In each case, Watts aims to showhow two charismatic leaders helped to forge new social identities for their followersthat were profoundly geographical in their character. Specifically, he argues thatboth identities rested upon a ‘‘fetishisation of geography’’ (Watts, 1999: 92) that isdeeply paradoxical. Fetishisation occurred because both subordinated identitieslaid claim to specific territories within Nigeria with a view to appropriating themso that the identities in question could have a space for free expression. The para-dox though, as Watts (1999: 87) notes of the Ogoni movement, is that such iden-tities ‘‘were in practice [the effect] of a conversation with national discourses . . .over federalism, sovereignty [and] citizenship . . ., [with] multinational Occidentaldiscourses of indigeneity, . . . and [with] transnational oppositional discourses of


environmental and human rights’’. Far from being sui generis, these identities were

an outcome of an engagement with supralocal discourses and relations.In theoretical terms, Watts’ reading of these two localist resistance identities is

informed by the works of Stuart Hall, Walter Benjamin and Nicos Poulantzas.

From Hall (1996), Watts borrows the notion of ‘articulation’. If identities are

seen as constructed, not given, as concatenations of subject-positions rather than

the outward expression of inner essences, then it becomes necessary to interrogate

(i) how people build notionally coherent identities in any give situation and (ii)

who promotes what identifications. As Castells (1997: 7) puts it, ‘‘It is easy to

agree on the fact that . . . all identities are constructed. The real issue is how,

from what, by whom and for what.’’ The idea of articulation draws analytical

attention to how coherence is rendered (however temporarily) and to how the

people assuming a given identity are interpellated into political projects. ‘‘A col-

lective subject of politics’’, in Westwood’s (2001: 250) apt words, must be pro-

duced ‘‘out of diversity in order to step onto the political stage . . .’’. In order to

ground this, Watts adapts Benjamin’s notion of ‘collective wish images’ and Pou-

lantzas’s (1978) argument that communal identities typically rest on a constructed

history and a representational geography. Wish images are visions of the past and

future that give normative force to a political movement. In the case of marginal

groups, they are often conjured up as mythic and utopian reactions against those

other groups who are seen to threaten the collective’s integrity and even existence.

Relatedly, wish images and the identities they express need a location to call their

own. Just as wish images may involve fantastical visions of a group’s past and

possible future, so the territorialisation of identities is equally fictive: claims to

parcels of space can be legitimated with reference to spurious histories of ‘home-

lands’, ‘birthrights’, ‘origins’ and the like. As Bauman (2001: 129) sagely notes,

‘‘It is only after the border-posts have been dug-in that the myths of their

antiquity are spun . . .’’.Thus, however ‘heterotopic’ the Maitatsine and Ogoni movements might have

been, Watts (1999: 92) believes that ‘‘their subversive potential is compromised

by geography’’. Despite the constructedness of the identities these movements

expressed—and a relational constructedness at that, defined in part against what

those identities are not—in both cases, Watts argues, socio-geographic essential-

ism and boundary-marking are in play. Important ‘internal’ differences among

the Ogoni and Maitatsine were, Watts argues, consequently glossed over (cf.

Rangan (1996) on the Chipko movement), while the place imaginaries deployed

erased complex histories of inter-ethnic movement within and beyond West

Africa. As Watts (2000: 32) concludes, ‘‘calls to localism can produce Hindu fas-

cism as easily as Andean Indian cooperatives’’. Uncritical celebrations of local-

ism, in academia or the wider world, thus risk forgetting that ‘‘the ‘local’ is never

purely local but . . . created in part by extralocal linkages and practices over

time’’ (Watts, 2000).


Massey: place and relational difference

Doreen Massey’s writings have always had place as their central concern—goingback to her classic contributions on ‘the regional problem’ and spatial divisions oflabour (Massey, 1979, 1984). However, it was only in the early 1990s that shebegan to thematise place explicitly in many of her publications (Massey, 1993,1994, 1995, 1996, 1999a, 1999b, 1999c, 2002). Where Watts focusses mostly on thecrucial issue of place identity, Massey is equally interested in the ‘objective’ dimen-sions of place: that is, those relations, processes and structures that form the con-text and condition for the ‘subjective’ issues that concern Watts. It is a measure ofjust how influential Massey’s publications have been that her conception of place isnow routinely appropriated in all manner of publications on the local-globalnexus.10 Rather than review her place writings in detail, I want instead to examinethe arguments presented in Power geometries and the politics of space-time (Massey,1999a). This is Massey’s most recent, substantive statement on place and local-translocal relations. It thus incorporates, refines and modifies much of her earlierthinking on these matters. I organise my discussion according to what place-con-ceptions Massey dissents from, what her own conception looks like, and what itspolitical intent is.

Massey’s starting point is that all geographical imaginations—all depictions ofplace-space relationships—are non-innocent. The analyst’s task is to ask: whatare the consequences of these imaginations and who manufactures them?Her response is that, in academia and beyond, two geographical imaginations arecurrently dominant. The first is a ‘‘classically Newtonian, billiard-ball view’’(Massey, 1999a: 36) that sees places as (actually or potentially) discrete untilexogenous forces ‘intrude’ into them or are, alternatively, vanquished. Histori-cally, this view has been central to the project of Western colonialism, which,Massey argues, pejoratively essentialised non-Western places in order to justifythe domination of those places. Geography, of course, (like anthropology) wascomplicit in this process. Today, though, this depiction of place is, as Watts’Nigerian inquiries show, as likely to be deployed by peoples who perceive ‘their’places to be in need of reclamation from ‘outsiders’. Though these peoples haveoften suffered histories of domination, Massey (1999a: 40) nonetheless refuses toendorse the ‘‘local parochialisms’’ and ‘‘mutual antipathies’’ they expound.Indeed, she intimates that were academics to affirm these particularisms theywould risk reinstating ‘‘the essentializing tendencies of which the social sciences

10 Two recent examples of this will suffice. Eric Sheppard (2002), in an essay on what he calls ‘worm-

hole geographies’, borrows Massey’s (1994: 5) conception of places as ‘‘articulated moments in net-

works’’ in order to theorise the rugged terrain of ‘positionality’. Positionality, for Sheppard, describes

the profoundly variable relations that individuals and institutions have to wider webs of connection—

and how these relations condition their actions. Similarly, in a critique of ‘scalar’ conceptions of globali-

sation, Ash Amin (2002) draws on the idea of ‘‘place as meeting-place’’ (Massey, 1999a: 22) to argue the

case for a more fibrous, complex notion of how localities are wired-in to the wider world.


have been trying to rid themselves’’ (Wastell, 2001: 193). By contrast, a secondgeographical imagination that Massey opposes is relational, one promoted by theIMF, the World Bank, the WTO and other supporters of free-market globalisa-tion. Despite its relational credentials it is, Massey argues, distinctly ageo-graphical. It imagines a world of ‘‘immense, unstructured, free, unboundedspace’’ (Massey, 1999a: 15) in which places are (or should be) open to flows ofcommodities, money and people. It is a vision of a world without barriers wherethose localities not yet fully integrated into the global economy soon will (orshould) be. ‘‘This vision’’, Massey (1999a: 17) argues, ‘‘is not so much a descrip-tion of how the world is, as an image in which the world is being made’’. It is avision constructed by the world’s power-brokers in Washington, Davos, G8 meet-ings and elsewhere—one designed to further consolidate their power over thelives of billions of people from Belem to Bombay. Ironically, Massey argues,these power-brokers resort to a Newtonian imaginary when it suits them: ‘‘In onebreath the[y] . . . assume that ‘free trade’ is . . . some moral virtue, . . . in the nextthey pour venom [on] . . . asylum seekers’’ in the name of ‘‘defensible places’’(Massey, 1999a: 19).

Against both of the geographical imaginations described above, Massey’s agendais to create one that is ‘both/and’ rather than ‘either/or’. As she (Massey, 1999a:40) puts it: ‘‘I absolutely reject . . . the claims to local exclusivity and the terms inwhich they . . . [a]re being made. On the other hand, I absolutely d[o] . . . not wantto give up on the ability to appreciate local difference (it is one of the reasons Ibecame, and remain, a geographer).’’ Massey’s ‘‘third approach’’ imagines place‘‘as the sphere of juxtaposition, or co-existence, of distinct narratives, as the pro-duct of power-filled social relations . . . This is place as open, porous, hybrid . . .where specificity (local uniqueness, a sense of place) derives not from some mythi-cal internal roots nor from a history of relative isolation—now to be disrupted byglobalisation—but by the absolute particularity of the mixture of influences foundtogether there’’ (Massey, 1999a: 21–22).11

Intellectually, this ‘third way’ has the following advantages over non-relationalplace imaginaries and relational but ageographical place imaginaries. First, it per-mits an understanding of areal differentiation as a relational outcome (and cause)of inter-place connections. Local specificity and place uniqueness are not simply‘out there’ waiting to be discovered but the product of interaction. Secondly, sincenot all geographical differences are benign, Massey’s conception focuses our atten-tion to the ‘power-geometries’ that actively produce inequality within and amonginter-connected places. Thirdly, this conception does not reduce place difference tothose geometries and connections. These differences are as often emergent andunexpected as they are planned and anticipated: as Massey avers, ‘‘there are always

11 In theoretical terms, this view of place owes much to Massey’s engagement with Marxism (in the

1970s and 80s) strained (in the 90s) through the insights of non-essentialist feminism, post-colonial

theory and the post-Marxism of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (see Massey, 1999c).


loose ends [in place],. . . [always] an element of chaos’’ (Massey, 1999c: 37). Oncecreated, geographical differences of an ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ kind have a‘‘relative autonomy’’ (Massey, 1999c: 35) which, for Massey, allows us to see that‘otherness’ and ‘alterity’ might still existence even in our hyper-integrated world.Finally, all this indicates the futility—for both analysts and place-based actors—ofever supposing that places could or should exist as metaphorical islands. It is sim-ply too late to turn back the hands of time in the name of autarchy.

What, to conclude this discussion of Massey’s work, is the political point ofseeing places in the way she does? Recalling her (Massey, 1999c: 17) insistencethat all ‘‘imaginative geographies legitimise’’, Massey’s vision is arguablydesigned to inculcate the following four ideas. The first is that it is morallywrong and practically misguided to indulge in geographical apartheid. Erectingboundaries, in thought or practice, can simply serve to repress ineluctable con-nections. The second idea is that place-based projects to defend and preservespecific local ways of living are acceptable so long as they are not place-bound—that is, projects to protect or resurrect ‘‘internally generated authenticities’’ (Mas-sey, 1999c: 11). Thirdly, it follows from this that for Massey a ‘progressive placepolitics’ both confronts wider power-geometries while working positively with themyriad non-local constituencies who are also seeking to confront them. Thispolitics is anti-essentialist both in the sense that it recognises that its object—place—is relationally constituted and in the sense that it recognises that placewill change. This is what Michel Feher (1994: 276) calls a supra-local politics of‘‘mutual transformation . . . not a static respect for each other’s integrity’’. Thereis, then, no ontological ‘essence’ to place that can be held stable—either objec-tively (in terms of the built environment) or subjectively (in terms of local iden-tities). Finally, Massey’s conception of place mandates what she calls ‘‘arelational politics’’ (Feher, 1994: 41) whose ultimate target is the cartographies ofpower through which localities are partly made. As she puts it, ‘‘the point ofpolitics [is] . . . to attack the relations . . . rather than to keep focussing on therights of particular identities’’ (Feher, 1994; 75, emphasis added). Such an attackwill not do away with all inter-place relations, but it will target those (like capi-talist ones) that are adversely affecting all manner of towns, cities and settle-ments worldwide. It will do so not on the basis of pre-constituted identities, butby strategically deploying identity claims—geographical and social—that areknowingly constructed.

Harvey: militant particularism, translocal solidarities and the geography of justice

We turn, finally, to the geographical imagination of David Harvey. Harvey, likeWatts and Massey, takes it as axiomatic that ‘‘places are more than what they con-tain’’ (Amin, 2002: 395). Where he differs, in his more recent writings, is theemphasis he gives to theorising the right to geographical difference, the ‘proper’geographical scale of actors’ loyalities, and the geographical scope of justice.Rather than focus on all of the dimensions of Harvey’s thinking about place—a


job requiring an essay in itself12—I wish to dwell on these questions of ‘difference’,solidarity and justice.

The context here is what Harvey sees as a hypostatisation of place among cer-tain social scientists and ‘real world’ actors. In his view, this has arisen because ofheightened place competition during a post-1974 era of global capitalist restructur-ing. The ‘beggar-thy-neighbour’ logic of post-Fordist, globalised capitalism has, inHarvey’s view, led to aggressive efforts to market places and to anxieties about thevulnerability of localities to uncontrollable ‘external’ forces (Harvey, 1988, 1990,1993). Though it may seem far-fetched to argue that academic understandings ofplace are but reflections of this economically-induced turn to localism, Harvey haslong maintained that disciplines like geography are part and parcel of the appar-atus that helps reproduce capitalism and its inequities (Harvey, 1984).13 This con-text helps to explain Harvey’s recent arguments for an internationalist place

12 As the earlier reference to Social justice and the city indicates, Harvey’s conceptual and political

interests in place are long-standing. Though not always the core thematic of his work, place constantly

appears in his writings throughout the 1970s and 80s—be it in relation to geographical competition (as

in the final part of The limits to capital), to the formation of place-coalitions (in parts of The urbanisa-

tion of capital), to ‘internal’ struggles over place (as in the Paris essays of Consciousness and the urban

experience) or to the fight to defend a particular locality (Cowley) from disinvestment (as in the co-edi-

ted book The factory and the city). Taking Marx and Bertell Ollman as his inspiration, Harvey’s pre-

1990s writings theorised places as physical instanciations of circulating capital. Places, and the commu-

nications networks linking them, were thus conceptualised as the arteries through which capital flows. In

this dialectical view, places are depicted both as the necessary material form that ‘global capitalism’

takes and as active moments in the reproduction of that capitalist ‘totality’ (see Merrifield, 1993). As

Brenner (1998) explains so lucidly, the dialectic of fixity and motion that Harvey describes reveals a geo-

graphical universe in which translocal processes serve to restlessly unify and differentiate places world-

wide (see also Smith, 1984). In this sense, Harvey’s pre-90s thinking about place was informed by a

closed, holistic logic that both Watts and Massey eschew. Since the late 1980s, though, Harvey’s writings

on place have arguably changed in four respects. First, Harvey has become increasingly concerned with

the ‘subjective’ dimensions of place existence—as opposed to his earlier ‘structural’ readings of place (his

Paris essays notwithstanding) within the dynamics of capitalist accumulation (see Harvey, 1993, 1995,

1997). Secondly, this has been linked to an increasing interest in the politics of place: that is, in efforts to

actively defend, enhance or alter the physical form and the ‘structure of feeling’ of towns, cities and set-

tlements. One of Harvey’s major preoccupations here, as will be seen momentarily, is the ‘proper’ geo-

graphical scale at which place politics should be pursued and who wins or loses in the process. Thirdly,

all this has been woven into a concern for socio-geographic difference. As is well known, The condition

of postmodernity (Harvey, 1989) was criticised for reducing ‘otherness’ and ‘alterity’ to either the cul-

tural clothing of late capitalism or else ciphers for class (see, for example, Morris, 1992). Accordingly,

Harvey’s recent writings have offered a more refined take on the problematic of difference, including

arguments—presented most fully in Justice, nature and the geography of difference (Harvey, 1996)—for

the ‘right to geographical difference’. Finally, all of Harvey’s recent writings about place are shot

through with a concern for social and spatial justice—marking his return to a theme first broached three

decades ago in Social justice.13 Thus, in a late 1980s essay on the geographical imagination (Harvey, 1990), he argued that human-

istic geographers’ preoccupation with everyday place experience risked implicitly endorsing the geo-

graphical divide-and-rule that is part of the logic of capitalism. Likewise, though in a more qualified

vein, Harvey’s (1992) response to the 1990s rise of post-modernism and post-structuralism in the Anglo-

phone social sciences was to worry that they risked (ironically) essentialising social identities and losing

sight of their relational constitution across space and through time.


politics that favours neither ‘side’ of the local-global dialectic.14 This is well cap-tured in his well-known essay on Raymond Williams (reprinted twice: Harvey,1996, 2001)—an essay worth pausing to consider, not least because it uses Wil-liam’s thesis about militant particularism to reflect upon Harvey’s personal involve-ment in a localist campaign to save jobs in a Rover automobile plant near Oxford,England. ‘‘A new theory of socialism’’, Williams (1989: 242) once remarked, ‘‘mustnow centrally involve place’’. Harvey agrees, but like Williams argues that it willonly thrive on a set of place-based, rather than place-bound, political projects.Detailing his disagreement with Teresa Hayter, co-editor of The factory and thecity, Harvey analyses Williams’ novels to show that any project to challenge thesocio-geographic ills of a capitalist world cannot afford to draw Maginot linesaround places. Though the satisfaction of local needs and wants is manifestlyimportant—hence his qualified support for the campaign to save jobs at Rover—Harvey argues that only translocal solidarity can really satisfy myriad local agen-das. As Williams (1989, 249; 115) put it, ‘‘The unique and extraordinary characterof working class self-organization has been . . . to make real what is at first sightthe extraordinary claim that the defence and advancement of certain particularinterests, properly brought together, are in fact the general interest’’.

Despite Williams’ seemingly problematic reference to the ‘working class’—implying that an anti-capitalist place politics is a purely labourist politics—Har-vey’s point is not that an exclusively class identity should be constructed withinand among places. By defining class relationally as ‘‘positionality in relation toprocesses of capital accumulation’’, Harvey’s (Harvey, 1996: 359) point is thatwhatever identities place-based actors choose to emphasise—gender, ethnic orreligious identities, say—these must necessarily engage in some form of classstruggle that transcend the localities in question. To suppose otherwise is to fixateon social and geographical differences as if they were absolute. It is also to playinto the hands of a capitalist system that uses socio-geographical differencesamong workers as a strategy for controlling them. For Harvey, by contrast, dif-ference must be seen as a relational product. For him a focus on class relationswithin the dynamics of capitalism, allows us to identify ‘‘the similarities that canprovide the basis for differing groups to understand each other and form alli-ances’’ (Harvey, 1996: 360). As David Held (2001: 400) observes in a similar vein,‘‘what we have in common is as important as some of the things that mark usapart’’.

Clearly, Harvey is not recommending any simple-minded internationalism,where myriad place-based groups unite readily to confront the universality ofcapitalism. But he is arguing that there is nothing more ‘authentic’ or meaningfulabout face-to-face loyalties than those among distant strangers whose fates are

14 These arguments begin, in earnest, in The factory and the city (Harvey & Hayter, 1993), building

through Justice, nature and the geography of difference to the recent Spaces of hope (Harvey, 2000a).

They have also found expression in several essays—for instance on cosmopolitanism (Harvey, 2000b),

on the relationships between class and non-class axes of difference (Harvey, 1999), on the body (Harvey,

1998), and on the work of Raymond Williams (Harvey, 1995).


directly, if invisibly, entangled. The circle of the ‘we’ is, in Harvey’s estimation,large indeed today. Nonetheless, problems remain in constructing an extroverted,place-based, oppositional politics. First, as Harvey acknowledges, recognising thetransnational qualities of capitalism does not, in itself, diminish the importance ofsocio-geographical differences among people connected over long distances. Whatseems to make political sense at the local scale may not make any sense at allwhen seen from the perspective of a wider, translocal, anti-capitalist constituency(and vice versa). In the otherwise optimistic book Spaces of hope, Harvey is thuscareful to recognise the ‘‘contradictory politics’’ (Harvey, 2000a: 93) that all mili-tant particularisms—even those aiming to be internationalist not just reactivelylocalist—must negotiate. Secondly, this means that we have to recognise howsocial life is structured at, and by, numerous geographical scales (cf. Smith, 1993;Swyngedouw, 1997). These scales actively constrain and enable both identity andaction and pose a formidable barrier to the formation of inter-place solidarity.Given these two facts, the ‘banality of geographical evils’ is, in Harvey’s (2000b)view, ever present.

Nonetheless, myriad contemporary examples exist of (i) actors in one placeagitating on behalf of distant others (witness the consumer boycotts of sweat-shop commodities led by UNITE in the USA) and (ii) local political movementsthat are outward looking in their grammar of expression. In the case of the lat-ter, Harvey, 2000a) particularly commends the efforts of the Zapatistas in Mex-ico. This remarkable attempt to preserve a particular way of life among peasantand indigenous peoples in the Chiapas has, Harvey observes, phrased its critiqueof the Mexican state, NAFTA and the wider forces of capitalist neo-liberalism inthe universal language of human rights and human dignity. That is, a localagenda was pursued dialectically by way of critical reference to the destructiveinfluence of certain translocal forces and with positive reference to an inclusive,universal discourse (see Kamat, 2001). This leads Harvey to reflect upon the con-temporary usefulness of the United Nation’s Declaration of Human Rights foran anti-capitalist, internationalist politics. Though Marxists have tended to avoidtoo much discussion of rights (and other normative concepts), Harvey sees theDeclaration as a pragmatic way to address the common injustices all manner ofdifferent people worldwide suffer at the hands of capitalism. To adapt NancyFraser’s (1997) arguments, its broad principles can, in Harvey’s view, support anon-sectarian politics but one that still recognises people’s desire for meaningfulsocio-geographical distinctiveness. One the one side, universal rights discoursecan help deliver ‘cultural-geographic justice’: that is, the right to have one’sparticular identity and territory recognised by others. As Harvey (2000a: 93)notes, ‘‘The right to difference [here] confronts the universality of rights’’. On theother side, it can help deliver ‘economic-geographic justice’ because it impliesthat if cultural and territorial difference is to flourish, a reworking of inter-national economic, trade, and other relations is necessary in favour of thesocially and spatially marginalized. This reworking would necessitate many bet-ter-off places being willing to redistribute wealth to other parts of the world, not


disavowing their implication in others’ well-being (see Bauman, 2001; Smith,2000).15

And yet (the enormous practical problems of achieving justice aside) one finalissue remains: the discourse of human rights, which can bolster both inter-placesolidarity and place specificity, can also licence an ‘anything goes’ attitude to socio-geographic difference. Harvey (1996: 350–52) has tackled this issue in the contextof a critique of communitarian thinking. Examining Walzer’s (1983) argument thateach community is entitled to its own conception of justice, Harvey argues that thiswould permit fascism or slavery to be considered ‘just’ in certain instances. Like-wise, universal rights discourse can, in principle, be appropriated as much by racistSouth Africans as by the Zapatistas. Harvey’s tack is to argue that the right tosocio-geographic difference can only be asserted if the group/s involved recognisetheir intractable interconnectedness with others. To act locally in ways that harmlocal or distant ‘outsiders’—that is, those not invited to take-on the identity of‘insiders’—is to ignore the fact that those others help constitute the places the insi-ders wish to make their own. It is also, therefore, potentially a threat to the rightsof these others. Thus, however substantively ‘thin’ it may be, the discourse ofhuman rights is, Harvey implies, potentially ‘thick’ enough to prevent sectarianlocalisms being given succour by it (for a contrasting view see Bauman, 2001: 141).

The shibboleths of place

Let me summarise. A survey of Watts’, Massey’s and Harvey’s writings on placeshows what a rich and powerful battery of arguments they offer. In Watt’s workwe confront the ‘subjective’ dimensions of place in the form of a critique of essen-tialised local identities. In Massey’s work questions of identity are linked to the‘objective’ dimensions of place that form their context and condition. Finally, inHarvey’s work we are invited to appreciate the ‘proper’ scales of loyalty and actionthat can produce translocal justice and yet allow geographical difference (subjectiveand objective) to flourish. Though the details of these authors’ arguments vary—often in important ways—what is equally striking are the similarities. First, allthree authors argue that place still matters immensely. Far from being subsumedinto a ‘space flows’, they agree that ‘‘the local level of everyday life [remains] . . . acrucial relational field . . .’’(Anderson 2001: 387). Secondly, all three are deeply sus-picious of inward-looking localist movements that are defined against ‘outsides’and ‘outsiders’. Though they appreciate why such localisms arise in a world with-out clear boundaries, they nonetheless detect real dangers in their political agendas.Finally, all three authors affirm a place-based politics where local needs are

15 All this said, Harvey is aware that a ‘universal’ like the Declaration is merely a globalised local: that

is, a Western discourse that claims to have a general applicability but which inevitably reflects the values

of the culture from which it originates. Nonetheless, its signal virtue is, to quote Rorty (1989: 192), that

it allows us ‘‘to think of people wildly different from ourselves as included in the range of ‘us’’. Also, it

remains the case that ‘‘just because certain ideas have particular origins in certain locales . . . (could it be

otherwise?) doesn’t invalidate them’’ (Held, 2001: 437; cf. Pollis & Schwab, 1979).


pursued by constructive engagement with translocal forces and non-local

constituencies.Confronted with both the realities of global interdependence and the recrud-

escence of place-cleansing politics worldwide (see Krishna, 2003), it would be diffi-

cult for any self-respecting person on the Left to demur. As I argued in the

introduction, the arguments that Watts, Massey, Harvey and others make about

place are now disciplinary ‘common-sense’ among critical researchers—and not

just in geography. However, it is useful to reflect on what is lost when we are

encouraged to see place-bound movements as tendentially ‘regressive’, translocal

organising as largely ‘progressive’ (not to mention pragmatically necessary), and an

openness to other peoples and places as the mark of a proper (sic) place politics?

First, while we might abhor the recent genocides in Rwanda, the Russian invasion

of Chechnya, or the tactics of Colombia’s drug cartels, not all attempts to wrest

territory from others—to make place in a particular image—attract such clear-cut

opprobrium (Krishna, 2003). A case in point are the increasingly well-organised

attempts by First Nations Canadians to (re)claim their historic territories. Com-

mentators on the Left have often found it difficult to position themselves morally

in relation to such cases because they often pursue a geographical politics of

exclusion (potentially ‘regressive’) but for ‘good reason’ (a sorry history of colonial

and neo-colonial control by whites). Secondly, it is important to note that a place-

based movement might be ‘open’ to the extra-local in some respects but use it for

its own, exclusive purposes in other instances. Local movements are not either

‘introverted’ or ‘extroverted’ but can be both simultaneously and with a variety of

local and extra-local consequences. In these instances, a dichotomous endorsement

or criticism of such movements is, clearly, not viable. Thirdly, it is equally the case

that inter-place cooperation among marginalized constituencies can, paradoxically,

have exclusionary and non-inclusive goals and outcomes. Herod (2001: ch. 6)

demonstrates as much in his analysis of rival international, post-war trade unions.

Finally, once we have determined which particular non-local relations or peoples a

place-based movement is engaging with, it becomes a contingent question whether

or not the term ‘progressive’ is applicable. There is nothing, ipso facto, progressive

about making translocal connections, just as there is nothing necessarily regressive

about all forms of localism that are defined against a putative exterior. With these

comments in mind I want, in the second half of this essay, to challenge the shibbo-

leths of place discussed above with reference to the combined, contemporary efforts

of many indigenous peoples worldwide to make their own geography and history.

Since these shibboleths cross-cut the key issues that Watts, Massey and Harvey

focus upon, I want to structure the second half of this paper as a three-stage

engagement with these authors’ work. That is, by looking at the issues of identity,

of what counts as (and constitutes) the ‘local’, and of loyalties, I want to show how

indigenous struggles over place call into question critical geographers’ shibboleths

of place.


Indigenism and the struggle for differential geographies

‘Indigenism’ (the term is Niezen’s, 2000) is a global social movement of increas-ing prominence and importance. It was presaged in the International Labor Offi-ce’s Indigenous and Tribal Populations Convention of 1957, but has only reallybegun to take shape in the last decade or so. Like most social movements it is anoppositional one. It is a translocal attempt to redress the grievances that foundsuch dramatic expression in the 1973 siege at the Wounded Knee reservation insouth Dakota, the Maya uprising of 1980 in Guatemala, and the Mohawk insur-rection at Oka in Canada. Indigenism is comprised of numerous communities ofdissent and descent. ‘Indigenous peoples’ (I shall explain the need for scare-quotesbelow) are today combining at a number of geographical scales in order to findpeaceful means of ensuring ‘‘a particular historical [and geographical] trajectory oftheir own’’ (Dirlik, 1996: 18). Note that indigenism is not synonymous withindigenous peoples as such. Rather, it describes those indigenous groups who areconsciously building translocal solidarities as a means of achieving local aims andambitions.

We can add three things to this minimalist description of indigenism in order toget a better handle on its character. First, unlike most other global social move-ments (such as the environmental or peace movements), it is defined with referenceto a particular constituency of individuals and communities. In other words, it ispursued by and on behalf of people who claim a certain identity (‘indigenous’) forwhich they seek recognition and which, in turn, can be used as a resource in spe-cific struggles. This identity is not, of course, given in nature. It is, depending onthe circumstances, either ascribed or adopted (and I will come to how ‘indigenous’is defined and to whom the term applies presently). Secondly, unlike most otherglobal social movements, indigenism is, in a fundament sense, about the control ofplace.16 To simplify, many indigenous peoples are currently seeking to reappropri-ate three things that, historically, have been taken away from them: namely, par-cels of land and water, material artefacts (e.g. ceremonial goods like masks), andknowledges (e.g. designs and medicinal remedies).17 Together, we can call thesethings physical, cultural and informational resources, ones that are highly valuedby indigenous communities in a number of ways (instrumental, symbolic, moraland aesthetic). Though only the first of these three types of resources might, strictlyspeaking, appear to be place-related, it is arguable that, in many cases, all of themin fact are. For instance, in the eyes of many indigenous groups, certain artefacts—such as Mayan masks or Pueblo ceremonial urns—take-on significance preciselybecause of where and when they are placed. Likewise, certain indigenous knowl-edges of plant, insect or animal species—currently the focus of bioprospecting

16 When I use the term ‘control’ I do so to indicate a spectrum of possible scenarios, from exclusive

proprietorial control to non-propertied indigenous rights to place.17 More recently, a fourth thing has been the focus of reappropriation efforts: the biological material of

indigenous peoples themselves, which has been collected by researchers on the Human Genome Diver-

sity Project, among others.


efforts by Western life-science companies—are considered meaningless once dis-embedded from their territorial and spiritual ‘homeland’ (Nigh, 2002). In short,many artefacts and knowledges are, like land and water, considered by indigenouspeoples to be inalienable (in both a proprietorial and geographical sense) or onlyalienable under certain strict conditions. All this said, what is interesting aboutindigenism from a geographical perspective is that the project to (re)appropriatecertain places is being pursued through a set of translocal initiatives that involveboth indigenous and non-indigenous peoples and institutions. To return to com-ments made in the introduction, local agendas are, in this case, being pursued byglobal means (I will mention how on pages 25–26 below). Finally, it is possible tounderstand the nature of indigenism by comparing it with so-called ‘ethno-nationalist’ movements (like the Quebec separatist movement). According to Nie-zen (2000), the latter often rest on volkisch myths of cultural purity, are usually notinternationalist in their outlook, and often seek secession from their host nationstate. By contrast, indigenism is not composed of myriad different indigenousstruggles that bear no relation. Rather, these struggles are being pursued globallyin acts of solidarity designed to further the particular place-projects of specificindigenous groupings. It is a contingent question whether these projects aspire tosecession or are based on notions of cultural purity (relative to the majority popu-lations of their nation states). Examples exist of where they do and are and,equally, where they do not and are not.

With these preliminary comments in mind, this section proceeds in three stages.In each stage I make critical reference to the arguments of Watts, Massey and Har-vey respectively as a critical (and ‘symmetrical’) counterpoint to the first three sub-sections of the last one. First, I discuss how ‘indigeneity’ is defined. This is morethan just a semantic issue of signifiers and signifieds. It is also an issue of howidentities are claimed or made, of how ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ are created throughthe identification process, and of how real place-projects are pursued in the nameof these identities. In this sub-section I question some of Watts claims about thesocio-geographical ‘suturing’ of identity and show why such local suturing can bedefensible and, paradoxically, part of an internationalist agenda. Secondly, themajor translocal institutions, agreements and initiatives that currently underpinand inspire indigenism are described. In this sub-section I question some of Mas-sey’s arguments about the difference between ‘introverted’ and ‘extroverted’ place-projects. Specifically, I suggest that many indigenous groups’ place projects cross-cut and therefore defy Massey’s distinction. Finally, I present the argument thatindigenous peoples are sometimes justified in pursuing exclusionary place projects,even though these may have deleterious consequences for non-indigenous peoplesworldwide. In this sub-section I question some of Harvey’s arguments about theneed to extend local loyalties to distant strangers.

Defining indigenous peoples

The term ‘indigenous’, Niezen (2000: 120) observes, ‘‘is not a category ofantiquity’’. Though the various peoples who lay claim to the label can often trace


their lineage back a very long way indeed, the term itself is a distinctly post-warcreation, emerging out of bodies like the United Nations (UN) and the Inter-national Labour Office (ILO) during the 1950s and 60s. Indeed, the term wouldarguably not exist but for the fact that the peoples who now fall under its descrip-tion have had to reckon with the influence of ‘non-indigenous’ peoples past andpresent. As anthropologists Cleveland and Murray (1997: 479) argue, ‘‘indigenouspeoples must be understood in terms of their interaction with the modern world’’.Categories, of course, do not simply re-present. The term indigenous, in effect, itinterpellates hundreds of millions of individuals and groups worldwide, fromTorres Strait Islanders to native Aleuts—or, rather, invites them to be interpellatedunder the term’s description. ‘Indigenous’ is a portmanteau category that gatherstogether all manner of different peoples with distinct geographies and histories: itestablishes commonality among manifest differences. The term has thereby cre-ated—or has attempted to create—a new world-historical subject of sorts. Peoplewho have hitherto described themselves as, say, Maasai or Guarani, might nowalso consider themselves part of a more generic, global constituency of ‘indigenouspeoples’. This is why Niezen (2000: 120) bluntly states that ‘‘‘being indigenous’ is aproduct of the last several decades only . . .’’. The term’s post-war emergence andincreasing efficacy thus confirms what Watts, Hall and others have long argued:that identities are made not given, that naming is a key component of identity-con-struction, and that such naming can be a resource in socio-geographic struggles.

Of course, this still begs the question of quite what the term ‘indigenous’ means(and therefore to/by whom it can reasonably be applied/claimed). Since referenceis conventional not natural—as one commentator wryly observes, there is no suchthing as a ‘bona fide native’ or Certified Indigenous Person (Brown, 1998: 202)—we can only address this question by looking at the definitions that have gained acertain legitimacy within the indigenous peoples’ movement. Though a numberhave been proposed (see Axt, Corn, Lee & Ackerman, 1993; Churchill, 1996;Ramos, 1998), perhaps the most influential—and certainly the most well-known—are those of the UN’s Subcommission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protec-tion of Minorities (est. 1985), and the ILO 169 Convention (revised 1991). The for-mer, in the words of its Special Rapporteur, defines indigenous peoples as ‘‘thosewhich, having a historical continuity with pre-invasion and pre-colonial societiesthat developed on their territories, consider themselves distinct from other sectorsof the societies now prevailing in those territories, or parts of them. They form atpresent non-dominant sectors of society and are determined to preserve, developand transmit to future generations their ancestral territories, cultural patterns [and]. . . institutions . . .’’ (Cobo, 1986: 48). The ILO definition resonates with this. InArticle 1.1, it describes indigenes as ‘‘descent . . . populations which inhabited thecountry at the time of conquest [and] . . . who regardless of their legal status, retainsome or all of their own . . . institutions’’. In both cases, indigenous peoples aredefined as ‘original’ populations who have had their needs and rights ignored orcompromised by immigrant populations who have appropriated ‘their’ resources.In each case too, indigenous peoples are defined as those who are seeking, at longlast, to become the subjects of history and geography not its objects. Finally,


though they do not indicate the fact in their wording, in both cases the UN haspreferred to let individuals and groups use these definitions in order to identifythemselves as ‘indigenous’, rather than try to apply the designation by fiat. Indeed,in its Draft Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, the UN’s WorkingGroup on Indigenous Populations (est. 1982) refrains from defining indigenouspeoples altogether. For practical reasons alone, this makes a lot of sense. Yet inmany instances ‘self-identification’ is not, of course, straightforwardly voluntarysince indigenous peoples have been marked out (often pejoratively) as a separategroup by the state and the populace of their ‘host’ countries. Australian abori-ginals are a prime example. In these instances, affiliating with a global ‘indigenouspeoples’ movement is, in part, a means for minority populations to revalorise astigmatised identity. Whatever the circumstance, it is estimated that some 300 mil-lion people worldwide can be classed as indigenous using the UN designations.18

While these and other concerns about the category ‘indigenous’ are under-standable, the fact remains that any definition of the term will be guilty of whatHavemann (2000: 29) calls ‘‘essentialising tendencies’’. As Kearney (1996: 63) putsit, all social descriptors ‘‘contain . . . multiple identities within [a] . . . unitary cate-gory’’, thereby ‘‘effectively constitut[ing] that which [they] essentialise’’ (Kamat,2001: 34). Indeed, some pro-indigenous activists are at pains to ‘fix’ the core mean-ing of indigeneity in sharp distinction to its ‘constitutive outside’: that is, non-indigenous peoples (e.g. Fourmile, 1999). An interesting process unfolds herewhereby the generic category ‘indigenous’ both includes, and encourages theexpression of, more specific indigenous identities on the ground (Wichi, Udege,Ogiek, Nuba etc.). Essentialisation thus works, iteratively, at two levels: the genericand the particular. Here, then, ‘local’ identities are partly crafted out of an emerg-ent translocal one. Anthropologist Shannon Speed (2002) offers a graphic example.She explains how recent international initiatives around indigenism (initiatives tobe discussed in the next sub-section) have led some Mexican communities to rap-idly move away from describing themselves as campesinos towards identifyingthemselves as specific types of pre-Columbian natives. As she says of the populace

18 Notwithstanding the clarity of the definitions presented above, the meaning of ‘indigenous’ remains

contentious. On the one side, these definitions (and others not mentioned here) are flexible enough to

include all manner of peoples in all manner of places in a new ecumene. As Cleveland and Murray

(1997: 480) observe, the term ‘indigenous’ has become a ‘‘useful heuristic’’ that allows ‘‘the people who

appropriate it to do so on an ad hoc basis that contrasts themselves with others’’. On the other hand,

even very loose definitions risk excluding peoples who might stand to benefit from a global social move-

ment like indigenism (see Kamat, 2001). For instance, are Europe’s Romani to be considered indigen-

ous? Cannot indigenous peoples also be described as ‘peasants’ or ‘cultural minorities’ and do not these

alternative designations create a wider basis for territorial and other claims (as has, apparently, hap-

pened in the Zapatista case)? Finally, critics in Asia and the Middle East have complained that too

many definitions of indigeneity reflect the experience of settler societies with their historical-geographies

of ethnocide, forced assimilation, and socio-spatial exclusion (as in ‘reservation systems’ in North Amer-

ica) Maybury-Lewis (1997) tries to tackle these definitional problems be proposing a continuum, ranging

from tribal/indigenous peoples to indigenous (but not tribal) peoples to peoples stigmatised as tribal to

ethnic minorities and so on.


of Nicolas Ruiz in Chiapas, ‘‘The shift in self-identification from non-indigenous in1997 to ex-indigenous in 1999, and then to potentially future Tzeltales (or even‘truly Tzeltales’) in 2000 [was] . . . dramatic’’.

A rather rigid suturing of global and local indigenous identities plays-well withthose in academia and wider public spheres who prefer, in romantic mode, to seenative peoples as ‘noble’/‘organic’ minorities reacting to generations of outsideoppression. As they would have it, the subaltern, at long last, gets the opportunityto speak. Equally, the celebration of ‘authentic’ socio-geographical identities tendsto alarm Watts (and other critics), for reasons explained earlier in this essay. Yetwhile sympathetic to Watts’ arguments, it seems to me that the recent emergence of‘indigenous peoples’ on the national and global political stage confounds them in anumber of ways. First, as argued above, insistently ‘local’ indigenous identities aretoday fashioned in dialogic interaction with broader representations of indigenouspersons emerging out of global institutions like the UN. These identities are eitherrevalorisations of existing local attachments (as in the case of, say, Cree Indians inCanada) or reclamations of ‘lost’ senses of self and community (as in NicolasRuiz). Watts might retort that these relationally constituted local identities none-theless risk forgetting that they are constructions not essences—hence his critiqueof the Maitatsine and Ogoni movements in Nigeria.19 At best, he might argue, theyshould be seen as acts of ‘strategic essentialism’. But this leads to a second pointabout place-identities, one made by Speed. As she astutely observes (Speed, 2002:222), ‘‘If we understand identity . . . as a constant process of construction andreconstruction, strategic versus authentic is simply not a relevant distinction. Bothare part of the same process, one in which no identity is more or less legitimatethan others’’.

Thirdly, the real issue then becomes exactly who is included/excluded in identityclaims and what specific resources (physical and immaterial) are sought after bythose adopting the valorised identity. The stakes in defining identities are, clearly,very high indeed in cases like indigenism. This is why definitions ‘matter’ in bothsenses of that word. Only identity claims phrased in the most abstract, universalterms—like the identity ‘human’ (as used in human rights discourse)—can avoidthe risk of excluding somebody somewhere. By contrast, local identity projects—even when framed by transnational signifiers like ‘indigenous peoples’—necessarilyrest on an ‘insider’/’outsider’ distinction if they are to have any meaningful pur-chase in everyday life. There is, arguably, no way to avoid this situation. Howeverrelationally constituted and hybrid identities may be, at some point they must‘deny’ this relationality and hybridity. Fourthly, this said, the essentialisation thatis endemic to all identity claims can be a force for inclusion and empowerment asmuch as for boundary-marking. For example, now that certain rights and privi-leges (however limited) attach to the possession of an indigenous identity in manyformer settler colonies, more individuals and communities are identifying them-

19 It’s an open question whether these movements should be described as indigenous, religious or

ethno-nationalist.


selves this way in these countries. Finally, even critics like Watts must surelyacknowledge that ‘strong’ versions of the us/them, insider/outsider distinctionsometimes deserve to be endorsed by even the most cosmopolitan of commenta-tors. Indigenous peoples are a case in point here. Given the sometimes appallinghistories they have suffered at the hands of majoritarian populations, it is under-standable (and pragmatically useful) that they might, in certain cases, wish tounderpin claims to territory, artefacts and knowledges with plenary statementsabout ‘their’ identity and difference. Such statements can provide a platform forindigenes to interact with named ‘outsiders’ on their own terms. It is thereforeinteresting that Left-wing academics in geography and the social sciences havecalled into question traditional concepts of place, culture and identity at the verymoment when marginal populations worldwide need them more than ever. AsCoombe (1998: 93) notes, these concepts and the practices they license might ‘‘bethe last legitimate ground for political autonomy and self-determination’’ forindigenous peoples.

None of these five arguments are intended to romance the indigenous stone. Thismuch should be clear. I am not affirming indigenous identities as if they are a over-due ‘return of the repressed’. Obviously, I do not regard them as primordial essen-ces that are rightfully seeking to reclaim their socio-geographic ‘purity’ fromhistories of violence and miscegenation. Rather, I agree with Watts that all iden-tities are provisional and mutable (within limits). But it seems to me that strongclaims to ‘indigenousness’ are, in principle at least, defensible on intellectual andmoral grounds. As I will now go on to explain with further reference to indigen-ism, exclusionary place-projects founded on full-blooded identity claims are not tobe dismissed as necessarily ‘regressive’. Indeed, I will suggest that the kind of‘both/and’ approach to place that Massey advocates is not, in fact, inconsistentwith highly localist place projects.

Indigenism as a local/global project

It is virtually impossible to make generalisations about the precise politicalaspirations of those who are active members of the global indigenous movement.The above mentioned quest for autonomy, founded on exclusivist identity-claims,lies at one end of a spectrum of political possibilities. As Michael Brown (1998:205) rightly argues, specific cases of indigenism must be approached with a ‘‘situa-tional pragmatism’’. Nonetheless, the various indigenous struggles for differentialgeographies do have some striking things in common. On the one hand, theimpetus for indigenism is precisely the kind of local-translocal relationships thathave, pace Watts, Massey, Harvey and others, rendered older notions of place, cul-ture and identity obsolete. These are the already mentioned relationships of colon-isation, domination and control imposed by non-indigenous majorities. On theother hand, as also emphasised in the preceding pages, indigenism is distinctivelyinternationalist: local agendas are pursued through formal translocal networks andinstitutions. Put differently, indigenism is both a reaction to and an embrace oftranslocal connectivity (or ‘globalisation’ as it is now commonly termed).


As such, the movement seems, at first glance, to be very much in tune with Mas-sey’s arguments about place, geographical difference and geographical inter-dependency. Massey, recall, criticises the kind of ‘forced’ openness to ‘outside’forces that is currently being promulgated by global power-brokers in the WTO,the IMF and elsewhere. Likewise, indigenous peoples are critical of (i) the appro-priation of their historical territories by others and (ii) the removal of artefacts andknowledges from these territories, both yesterday and today. But given Massey’sother argument that not all inter-place relationships are equal—they are not alwaysdomineering and intrusive—we can, it seems, equally interpret indigenism as ‘pro-gressive’ because of its supra-local commitments. These commitments have, in themain, taken the form of a plethora of new resolutions and organisations created byindigenous peoples themselves, as well as indigenous support for the ongoingefforts of sympathetic non-indigenous institutions (like the UN). Let us brieflyexamine each arm of indigenism in turn.

Since the late 1980s, indigenous peoples have come together at the national, con-tinental and global scales to issue sets of declarations about their needs, wants andrights. These declarations have been intended as normative provocations tonational governments and supra-national state bodies. These various statementshave been issued either at key-note events (like the UN Earth Summit in Rio) orby permanent indigenous organisations (like Survival International and theIndigenous Peoples Survival Foundation). They range from the Charter for theIndigenous Peoples of the Tropical Forest (1992) to the Phoenix Declaration ofIndigenous Peoples of the Western Hemisphere Regarding the Human GenomeDiversity Project (1995).20 As their titles suggest, the declarations refer to a widerange of indigenous concerns. However, indigenism does not simply consist of theactions of indigenous peoples alone. As already noted, organisations like the UNhave had an important role to play, as have non-governmental organisations suchas the Rural Advancement Foundation International (RAFI) and Genetic Resour-ces Action International (GRAIN). These organisations have spear-headed initia-tives that are either about indigenous peoples per se—such as the UN’saforementioned Working Group on Indigenous Populations, which continues toagitate for a formal UN declaration of indigenous peoples’ rights—or whichdirectly impinge on the interests of these peoples.21 Whatver resolutions and orga-nisations are (or are not) involved in any given indigenous initiative, it is important

20 Other notable ones are the Indigenous Peoples Earth Charter (1992), the Charter of the Indigenous

Tribal Peoples of Malaysia (1992), the Kari-Oca Declaration (1992), the Mataatua Declaration on Cul-

tural and Intellectual Property (1993), the Treaty for a Lifeforms Patent-Free Pacific (1995), and The

‘Heart of the Peoples’ Declaration (1997).21 Examples of the latter are numerous. For instance, much of UNESCO’s support for the cultural

integrity of minority groups is of obvious relevance to the indigenous cause. Likewise, the Food and

Agriculture Organisation’s Code of Conduct for Plant Germplasm Collecting and Transfer insists that

communities donating or selling bio-resources do so under conditions of prior informed consent. In

principle, the Code can thus serve to counter what Shiva (1997) calls the ‘bio-piracy’ that indigenous

peoples have suffered at the hands of Northern agro-chemical firms.


to acknowledge the extended geographical infrastructure now in place at a numberof geographical scales to support indigenism. This infrastructure ranges from infor-mal networks of cooperation to more long term representation on governmentaland other bodies.22

Despite the now impressive number of pro-indigenous declarations and organisa-tions existing worldwide, as well as the above mentioned infrastructure, indigenismhas, as yet, achieved very few of its members’ aims. This is because the declarationsgenerally have no legal standing, while the organisations in question lack thepower to enforce their wishes that, say, national governments possess. Even so,indigenism’s apparently cosmopolitan character seems to align it with just the kindof place-politics that Massey commends: one that embraces place interdependencywhile defending local specificities. Here, though, is the rub. Not all indigenousplace-projects are (or should be) ‘open’ in quite the way Massey advocates. Thisdoes not, though, imply that they are simply ‘closed’ and parochial. Rather, it isperfectly possible—and, arguably, perfectly legitimate—for some indigenousgroups to use the translocal infrastructure of institutions and declarations listedabove to claim exclusive control over territories, artefacts and knowledges. Here,then, a ‘global sense of the local’ is used to underpin a ‘non-global defence of thelocal’. In other words, an appreciation of the relational constitution of place ismade to dovetail with efforts to erect new border controls on what ‘enters’ or‘leaves’ the places in question.

This peculiar conjugation of ‘extroverted’ and ‘introverted’ senses of place is,given the context for the rise of indigenism, an understandable one. Manyindigenous peoples today face an invidious choice (Havemann, 2000). Given thepower-geometries that have rendered them marginal within various nation statesworldwide, passivity is simply not an option. If indigenous peoples were not nowfighting to assert their agency, they would simply perpetuate what Held (1995:163) calls their historical ‘nautonomy’—that is, their long-standing political mar-ginality. However, if indigenous peoples become too willing to accommodate thewants of non-indigenous peoples (near and far) they risk further assimilation intonational and global publics. Thus indigenous place-projects that are overly ecu-menical might, in fact, inhibit the kind of control of territorial, cultural and intel-lectual resources that is the raison d’etre for these projects in the first place. Forthese reasons, it is understandable that some indigenous peoples ‘‘are nowencouraged to reconstitute themselves as closed societies’’ (Hiatt, 1998: 209). Theyoften favour what at first sight seems utopian and counter-productive: that is, anew reservation system that ring-fences them and their resources from unwantedoutside interference. For its advocates, this would not be the socio-geographicseparation of old, wherein indigenous peoples were robbed of an ability to pursuetheir definition of the good life. Rather, it would be a qualified form of placeautarchy where indigenous peoples have meaningful control over both the kind

22 Richard Howitt’s various writings on indigenous peoples offer a set of insightful metaphors for

thinking about how ‘local’ and ‘translocal’ links can be made to further these peoples’ agendas.


and the degree of interaction with non-indigenous peoples. Lest all this seemover-stated, it is worth remembering that even today many indigenous groups areexperiencing a mixture of neo-colonialism, bio-piracy and cultural dispossession.For instance, in recent months the Gani and Gwi bushmen have been seekingglobal support for their efforts to prevent the Botswana government (and the DeBeers mining conglomerate) removing them from their ancestral lands (TheObserver, 2002). Meanwhile, indigenous groups from the south Pacific to the Arc-tic circle are being ‘mined’ by transnational companies for potentially marketabletangible and intangible resources with little or no compensation offered in return(Parry, 2002).

In this context, one can argue that Massey’s reservations about exclusionaryplace-projects need very careful qualification depending on the cases in question.Just as I argued earlier that Watts’ critique of place identities is too one-sided, Ilikewise want to suggest that Massey’s argument proceeds via heuristically usefullybut ultimately unsustainable dichotomies. An analysis of indigenism demonstratesthat the binaries ‘progressive’/‘regressive’ and ‘extroverted’/‘introverted’ are notmutually exclusive. The arguments and actions of some indigenous peoples con-found these dichotomies. They can express inter-place solidarity and cooperationas well as aspirations for geographical separation and segregation. How, then,should Left-wing social scientists judge them? The answer, surely, lies in a reeva-luation of the usefulness of the analytical and normative polarities Massey andothers are wont to use. Critical geographers and other researchers can find goodreasons to support a politics of (as against in) place, without reverting to Cartesian,neo-Kantian or Newtonian imaginaries.

A question of loyalties: indigenism and the conflict over ‘local’ resources

In the last two sub-sections I have questioned the three place shibboleths currentamong geographical Leftists by presenting two dimensions of indigenism that callinto question Watts’ assessment of local identity politics and Massey’s of ‘closed’and ‘open’ place projects. We are now in a position to turn, finally, to the severalsubstantive arguments for indigenous rights to differential geographies. These argu-ments, like them or not, suggest that local and translocal needs may be fundamen-tally irreconcilable such that loyalties and justice at once scale may have to beserved at the expense of those at another. Though Harvey’s call for multi-scalarsolidarities is appealing, circumstances may dictate that it is not, in fact, an appro-priate one to heed. Let me elaborate.

In recent years, a number of indigenous populations in various parts of theworld have used the transnational apparatuses of indigenism to make the case for‘strong’ localisms. That is, they have argued for non-trivial rights to their terri-torial, cultural and informational resources. I use the normative concept of rightsdeliberately (as opposed to, say, the concepts of duties or responsibilities), becauseindigenous claims to place have typically been phrased in this idiom. Thus the variousdeclarations and charters mentioned earlier often invoke the notion of indigenous


rights,23 while the kind of universal rights discourses that Harvey discusses withqualified approval have also been of service to the indigenous cause. At the sametime, one specific set of rights claims—namely, those surrounding propertyrights—have frequently supplanted all others in indigenous struggles for differen-tial geographies. The reason, of course, is that local efforts to ‘reclaim’ resourceshave often involved indigenous peoples challenging the proprietary claims of statebodies, firms and other non-indigenous actors. The right to command place is, inmany cases, a struggle over who has the legal right to dispose of resources thatin some sense ‘belong’ to indigenous peoples. To simplify, these are variouslystruggles over landed property (territory), cultural property (artefacts) and intel-lectual property (ideas/knowledge). In each case, though individual propertyclaims can be made, it is common for indigenous groups to make ‘cultural pro-perty’ claims about collective, inter-generational resources that are seen to havean organic link with any given group’s past and future identity and livelihood.24

Though property rights are by no means the only vehicle indigenous groups canuse to reappropriate places, they have two signal virtues. First, to borrow RichardHandler’s (1991) image, they speak a language that power understands. That is,they confront those non-indigenous actors with claims to indigenous land, artefactsand knowledges with a powerful counter-claim: a claim of proprietary control. Sec-ondly, property rights are among the most legally secure and materially effectiverights that individuals and groups can possess. These rights promise to be animportant tool for those indigenous groups seeking to exert strong forms of placecontrol. They can help these groups redress both economic and cultural injustices.

For these reasons, property rights claims are among the most threatening tothose non-indigenous groups who have an economic stake in the resources beingclaimed. As Hale (2002) notes of Latin America, national governments have beenbroadly accepting of indigenous groups’ right to recognition as distinct peoples.What they have been resistant to, however, is those groups’ rights to redistributionof economically valuable resources and assets. Proprietary demands are at theextreme end of the spectrum of claims that indigenous peoples can and do makeabout themselves and their aspirations. In the remainder of this last section of theessay I rehearse some of the arguments that have been made in favour of indigen-ous proprietary reappropriation of ‘their’ resources. These arguments have alreadyfound legal expression in certain parts of the world, as with the USA’s NativeAmerican Graves Protection and Repatriation ct of 1990. As I proceed, the keything to bear in mind is that the indigenous resources in question are actually orpotentially of national and transnational importance. Here we confront the scalardilemma that so preoccupies Harvey. But want I want to argue is that there mightbe prima facie case for some indigenous groups to ignore wider claims on their

23 For instance, the UN’s Draft Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples asserted in 1993 that

‘‘indigenous peoples are entitled to . . . full ownership . . . of their cultural and intellectual property’’.24 Cultural property claims van be made about the three categories of resources identified earlier

(physical, cultural and informational) rather than the second alone.


resources (however ‘progressive’) in the interests of a resilient localism. Yet, apro-pos my discussion of Massey above, this is a localism borne out of a partialembrace of translocal connectivity not atavistic autarchy.

Let us turn, then, to some of the arguments for the rights of indigenous peoplesto make their own places rather than have them made for them. Because thesearguments have been made in the various contexts of landed, cultural and informa-tional resources I am inevitably going to simplify rather complex, nuanced posi-tions.25 First, many indigenous groups have been dispossessed—either by force orby duplicity—of their territorial, cultural and intellectual resources. This disposses-sion has usually occurred with little compensation or redress from the wider socie-ties in which indigenous peoples now find themselves. Secondly, one of the severalreasons why indigenous peoples are often economically marginal minorities withinvarious nation states is precisely because they lack proprietary control of their owntangible and intangible resources. If they had such control then, potentially atleast, they could profit financially. In other words, the argument here is thatindigenous peoples should have the right to benefit financially from their ownlands, their own material cultures and their own knowledge productions. Thirdly,this relates to a critique of the idea that many indigenous resources (like nativelandraces) are ‘public domain’ resources. This idea—namely, that nobody has pro-prietary rights to certain of the natural and manufactured resources that histori-cally and today are bound into native ways of life—has, clearly, been used to theeconomic advantage of non-indigenous groups. The classic example here is onementioned earlier: namely, biodiversity prospectors gathering genetic resourcesfrom native lands in the tropics and sub-tropics and turning these putative ‘com-mon resources’ into lucrative products. Fourth, economic issues aside, it is clearthat many indigenous groups regard certain resources as inalienable. For instance,as Brown (1998: 198) notes of Pueblo religious knowledge, ‘‘the primary motiv-ation for closing [it] . . . to outsiders and objecting to . . . the permanent storage ofthis information by non-Pueblos is to prevent it from cycling back to Pueblo indi-viduals who are not authorized to possess it’’. Fifthly, what this means is thatmany indigenous groups regard the appropriation of their resources as an act ofcultural violence: that is, a spiritual assault as much as a brute act of physicalexpropriation. Arguments for the full restitution of lands, artefacts etc. to indigen-ous peoples are thus as much about respecting cultural integrity as they are about

25 Specifically, even among advocates of ‘property rights for indigenous peoples’ there are important

disagreements on the exact nature and implications of the rights in question—not least because ‘pro-

perty’ is a complex, multi-faceted concept (see Honore, 1961). What is more, there are many and varied

ways that property rights can be recognised and enforced—in the case of intellectual property, for

example, there are patents, copyrights, trademarks, and trade secrets (among others). These complexities

aside, the arguments I now rehearse relate to the following scenario: one where indigenous peoples have

exclusive proprietorial control over certain resources and may be unwilling in future to permit a wider

national, international or global constituency access to those resources (whether gratis, for money or for

some non-monetary compensation). These arguments are, in my view, compelling (though hardly uncon-

troversial). Within the academy, they have made with especial force by a set of anthropologists, notably

Stephen Brush, Tom Greaves and the recently deceased Darrell Posey.


economic welfare (Puri, 1995). In the sixth place, it follows that granting indigen-ous peoples exclusive rights over myriad natural and cultural resources is animportant means for them to keep certain of those resources out of the hands ofnon-indigenous peoples (Strathern, 1998: 112). Finally, there is the argument thatproprietary restitution for native peoples is especially urgent because in manycountries their way of life is now close to extinction. The economic and culturaldamage caused by histories and geographies of dispossession can only be stemmed,so the argument goes, by rapid actions among national states and global organisa-tions (like the UN) to grant native peoples exclusive control over a wide range ofresources.

These arguments are only a selection of those that have been used by academicsand activists sympathetic to the indigenous cause. On grounds of principle and ofpractical viability they have come in for heavy criticism (see, for example, Brown,1998). Though I do not want to underestimate the power of these criticisms, in thepresent context I wish to focus on the implications of the ‘strong indigenous local-ism’ stance for Harvey’s arguments about the extended geographical scope ofloyalties. It seems to me that Harvey’s response to the case for proprietary resourcecontrol among myriad local indigenous constituencies would go something as fol-lows. First, he might argue that many of the resources that indigenous groups arenow laying claim to are of serious actual or potential benefit for non-indigenouspeoples. For instance, medicines of global importance might not be developed ifcontinued and relatively unfettered access to indigenous lands were not granted bynative peoples. Given this, Harvey might object to absolute indigenous control ofcertain resources on the grounds that while this might be just at one spatial scale(the local) it is certainly not at other scales. Secondly, he might argue that whilelaying claim to the identity ‘indigenous’ is politically important for the people soidentified, there are other important identities that need to be recalled here. Forinstance, to the extent that many indigenous peoples sell their labour power theyare members of a wider class community organised at multiple geographical scales.At the same time, the fact that indigenous localisms are being pursued, in part,through universal human rights discourses indicates that non-indigenous peoplesalso have rights that might be infringed if proprietorial resource control by nativegroups is ever seriously achieved. Finally, like Watts and Massey, Harvey mightargue that it is, in any case, too late for strong indigenous localisms. Because ofgenerations of ‘outside’ influence, indigenous places can never be made ‘properly’indigenous again. For Harvey, then, the sheer fact that indigenous resources are nolonger (for better or worse) theirs anymore might be one argument for resistingattempts to turn back the hands of time.

These three arguments are powerful ones. Though I have, as it were, put wordsin Harvey’s mouth, I have done so in a way consistent with Harvey’s broader argu-ments about the need to avoid fixating on local rights at the expense of translocalones. Yet it seems to me that in the case of indigenism Harvey’s arguments mightnot withstand scrutiny. As already explained, indigenism is a global movementmany of whose members understand the practical and strategic necessity of locallyring-fencing territorial, cultural and informatic resources. Though Harvey is right


to point to the need to weigh local agendas against the wider good/harm these

agendas do, for many indigenous peoples there is a prima facie case for place-pro-

jects that are pursued at the expense of wider non-indigenous groupings within and

beyond national borders. As argued above, this is not necessarily the politics of

geographical hate. Rather, it is, plausibly, a politics wherein geographical difference

cannot flourish unless bold attempts are made to control the traffic to and from

those places indigenous groups seek control over. Contra Harvey (and Raymond

Williams), indigenism indicates that certain militant particularisms should, quite

rightly, pay relatively little heed to the ‘general interest’.

Conclusion

Taking the case of indigenism I have sought to question some shibboleths of

place that, in my view, are today shared by several analysts on the geographical

Left. The arguments of Watts, Massey and Harvey have been examined in order to

expose both the strengths and the weaknesses of these shibboleths. As I hope I

have showed, critical analysts of place need more supple explanatory and evalua-

tive vocabularies if they are to reckon with the diversity of place projects current in

the world. Firstly, I have argued real world projects to erect ‘strong’ boundaries

around places—in both the imagination and practice—should not necessarily be

deemed acts of geographical folly by those on the geographical left. They need not

be seen as a futile or misguided attempt to erect borders in a borderless world. Sec-

ondly, projects of what Escobar (2001: 149) calls ‘‘defensive localisation’’ should

not, I have further suggested, necessarily be seen as ‘regressive’. Many contempor-

ary efforts to defend territories, resources, knowledges, communities and cultural

artefacts are not assimilable to the xenophobic particularisms found in, say, the

former Yugoslavia. But neither are they open, ecumenical and inclusive. How,

then, I have asked, should the academic left judge them? Finally, I have argued

that it is perfectly possible for inward looking localisms to be founded on an

explicit and conscious engagement with extra-local forces. That is, the translocal

can be strategically harnessed for purely local needs (as captured in the following

reversal of a hackneyed phrase ‘think locally, act globally’) and this is not at all

paradoxical. In sum, in certain situations it may be necessary for critical analysts

to commend ‘open’ localisms, while at the same time refusing to see more ‘closed’

place projects as tendentially ‘regressive’. This kind of situational pragmatism, it

seems to me, is a preferable alternative to viewing place through the sophisticated

but nonetheless prescriptive schemas offered by Watts, Massey, Harvey and others.

Geographical imaginations matter. This is precisely why we need constantly to

interrogate their presuppositions, as well as the kind of world they aim to engender.


Acknowledgements

I wish to thank three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on an

earlier version. David Slater’s editorial interventions were also much appreciated.

The usual disclaimers apply.

References

Adams, P., Hoelscher, S., & Till, K. (Eds.) (2001), Textures of place. Minneapolis: Minnesota University

Press.

Amin, A. (2002). Spatialities of globalisation. Environment and Planning A, 34(3), 385–399.

Anderson, K. (2001). Thinking post-nationally. Annals of the Association of American Geographers,

90(2), 381–391.

Anderson, K., & Jacobs, J. (1997). From urban Aborigines to Aboriginality and the city. Australian

Geographical Studies, 35(1), 12–22.

Axt, J., Corn, M. L., Lee, M., & Ackerman, D. (1993). Biotechnology, indigenous peoples and intellectual

property rights. Washingston DC: Congressional Research Division.

Bauman, Z. (2001). The great war of recognition. Theory, Culture and Society, 18(2/3), 137–150.

Berg, L., & Kaerns, R. (1997). Constructing cultural geographies of Aotearoa. New Zealand Geographer,

53(1), 1–2.

Blomley, N. (1994). Activism and the academy. Environment and Planning D, 12(3), 383–385.

Bourdieu, P., & Waquant, L. (1999). On the cunning of imperialist reason. Theory, Culture and Society,

16(1), 41–56.

Braun, B. (1997). Buried epistemologies. Annals of the Association of American Geographers.

Brenner, N. (1998). Between fixity and motion: accumulation, territorial organization and the historical

geography of spatial scales. Environment and Planning D, 16(5), 459–481.

Brown, M. (1998). Can culture be copyrighted?. Current Anthropology, 39(2), 193–206.

Castells, M. (1997). The power of identity. Oxford: Blackwell.

Castree, N. (2000). Professionalisation, activism, and the university: whither ‘‘critical geography’’?

Environment and Planning A, 32(6), 955–970.

Castree, N. (2002). Border geography. Area, 34(1), 103–112.

Churchill, W. (1996). From a native son. Boston: South End Press.

Cleveland, & Murray (1997). The world’s crop genetic resources and the rights of indigenous farmers.

Current Anthropology, 38(4), 477–515.

Cobo, J. (1986). Study of the problem of discrimination against indigenous peoples, Vol. V. U.N. doc

E/CN.4/Sub.2/1986/7/Add.4.

Cocks, J. (2000). A new cosmopolitanism? Constellations, 7(1), 46–61.

Cohen, R., & Rai, S. (Eds.) (2000), Global social movements. London: Athlone Press.

Coombe, R. (2001). Anthropological approaches to law and society in conditions of globalization. In N.

Blomley et al. (Eds.), The legal geographies reader (pp. 298–318). Blackwell: Oxford.

Coombe, R. (1998). Reply to Brown. Curent Anthropology, 39(2), 207–208.

Corbridge, S. (1998). Development ethics, Ethics. Place and Environment, 1(1), 35–53.

Cresswell, T. (1999). Place. In P. Cloke et al. (Eds.), Introducing human geographies (pp. 226–234).

Arnold: London.

Dicken, P., Kelly, P., Olds, P., & Yeung, H. (2001). Chains and networks, territories and scales. Global

Networks, 1(2), 89–112.

Dirlik, A. (1999). Globalism and the politics of place. In K. Olds et al. (Eds.), Globalisation and the Asia

Pacific (pp. 39–56). Routledge: London.

Dirlik, A. (1996). The past as legacy and project. American Indian Culture and Research Journal, 20(2),

1031.


Dorling, D., & Shaw, M. (2002). Geography of the agenda. Progress in Human Geography, 26(5), 629–

641.

Driver, F. (2001). Geography Militant: cultures of exploration and empire. Blackwell Publishers.

Escobar, A. (2001). Culture sits in places. Political Geography, 20(2), 139–174.

Feher, M. (1994). The schisms of 67. In P. Berman (Ed.), Blacks and Jews. New York: Delacorte Press.

Fourmile, H. (1999). Indigenous peoples, the conservation of traditional ecological knowledge, and

global governance. In N. Low (Ed.), Global ethics and environment (pp. 215–246). New York:

Routledge.

Fraser, N. (1997). Justice interruptus. New York: Routledge.

Goodman, D., & Watts, M. (Eds.) (1997), Globalising food. New York: Routledge.

Greenblatt, S. (1991). Marvellous possessions. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Gregory, D. (2004). The colonial present. Oxford: Blackwell.

Hale, C. (2002). Does multiculturalism menace? Journal of Latin American Studies, 34(3), 485–524.

Hall, S. (1996). On postmodernism and articulation. In D. Morley, & K. -H. Chen (Eds.), Stuart Hall:

dialogues in cultural studies (pp. 131–150). London: Routledge.

Handler, R. (1991). Who owns the past? In B. Williams (Ed.), The politics of culture. Washington, DC:

Smithsonian Institute.

Hannerz, U. (1996). Transnational connections. London: Routledge.

Harvey, D. (1973). Social justice and the city. London: Arnold.

Harvey, D. (1982/1999). The limits to capital. London: Oxford: Blackwell: Verso.

Harvey, D. (1984). On the history and present condition of geography. Professional Geographer, 36(1),

1–11.

Harvey, D. (1985a). The urbanisation of capital. Oxford: Blackwell.

Harvey, D. (1985b). Consciousness and the urban experience. Oxford: Blackwell.

Harvey, D. (1987). Three myths in search of a reality in urban studies. Society and space, 5(3), 367–386.

Harvey, D. (1988). The geographical and geopolitical consequences of the transition from Fordism to

flexible accumulation. In G. Sternleib, & J. Hughes (Eds.), America’s new market geography (pp. 101–

135). New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

Harvey, D. (1989). The condition of postmodernity. Oxford: Blackwell.

Harvey, D. (1990). Between space and time: reflections on the geographical imagination. Annals of the

Association of American Geographers, 80, 418–434.

Harvey, D. (1992). Postmodern morality plays. Antipode, 24(3), 300–326.

Harvey, D. (1993). From space to place and back again. In J. Bird et al. (Eds.), Mapping the futures

(pp. 3–29). London: Routledge.

Harvey, D. (1995). Militant particularism and global ambition. Social Text, 42, 69–98.

Harvey, D. (1996). Justice, nature and the geography of difference. Oxford: Blackwell.

Harvey, D. (1997). Contested cities: social process and spatial form. In N. Jewson, & S. MacGregor

(Eds.), Transforming cities (pp. 19–27). London: Routledge.

Harvey, D. (1998). The body as an accumulation strategy. Environment and Planning D, 16(4), 401–421.

Harvey, D. (1999). On fatal flaws and fatal distractions. Progress in Human Geography, 23(4), 557–566.

Harvey, D. (2000). Spaces of hope. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Harvey, D. (2000). Cosmopolitanism and the banality of geographical evils. Public Culture, 12(4), 529–

564.

Harvey, D. (2001). Spaces of capital. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Harvey, D., & Hayter, T. (Eds.) (1993), The factory and the city. London: Mansell.

Havemann, R. (2000). Enmeshed in the web? In R. Cohen, & S. Rai (Eds.), Global social movements

(pp. 18–33). London: Athlone.

Held, D. (1995). Democracy and the global order. Cambridge: Polity.

Held, D. (2001). Globalisation, cosmopolitanism and democracy: an interview. Constellations, 8(4), 427–

441.

Herod, A. (2001). Labor geographies. New York: Guilford.

Hiatt, J. (1998). Reply to Brown. Current Anthropology, 39(2), 209–210.

Honore, A. (1961). Ownership. In A. Guest (Ed.), Property rights. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.


Howitt, R., Connell, J., & Hirsch, P. (1996). Resources, nations and indigenous peoples. Melbourne:

Oxford University Press.

Jackson, P. (2002). Commercial cultures: transcending the cultural and the economic. Progress in Human

Geography, 26(1), 3–18.

Jessop, B. (1999). Reflections of globalization and its (il)logics. In K. Olds et al. (Eds.), Globalisation and

the Asia Pacific (pp. 19–38). London: Routledge.

Kamat, S. (2001). Anthropology and global capital. Cultural Dynamics, 13(1), 29–51.

Katz, C. (2001). Vagabond capitalism and the necessity of social reproduction. Antipode, 33(4), 709–729.

Kearney, M. (1996). Reconceptualizing the peasantry. Boulder: Westview.

Krishna, S. (2003). Boundaries in question. In J. Agnew, K. Mitchell, & G. Toal (Eds.), A companion to

political geography (pp. 302–314). Oxford: Blackwell.

Lash, S., & Featherstone, M. (Eds.) (2002), Recognition and difference. London: Sage.

Martin, R. (2001). Geography and public policy. Progress in Human Geography, 25(2), 189–210.

Massey, D. (2002). Don’t let’s counterpose place and space. Development, 45(1), 24–25.

Massey, D. (1979). In what sense a regional problem? Regional Studies, 13.

Massey, D. (1984). Spatial divisions of labour. Basingstoke: Macmillan.

Massey, D. (1993). Questions of locality. Geography, 78(2), 142–149.

Massey, D. (1994). Space, place and gender. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Massey, D. (1995). Thinking radical democracy spatially. Society and Space, 13(3), 283–288.

Massey, D. (1996). Politicising space and place. Scottish Geographical Magazine, 112(2), 117–123.

Massey, D. (1999a). Power-geometries and the politics of space-time. Heidelberg: University of Heidelberg.

Massey, D. (1999b). Imagining globalisation. In A. Brah et al. (Eds.), Global futures (pp. 27–44). New

York: St. Martin’s Press.

Massey, D. (1999c). Spaces of politics. In D. Massey et al. (Eds.), Human geography today (pp. 279–

294). Cambridge: Polity Press.

Massey, D. (2001). Geography on the agenda. Progress in Human Geography, 25(1), 5–17.

Maybury-Lewis, D. (1997). Indigenous peoples, ethnic groups and the state. Needham Height: Allyn and

Beacon.

Merrifield, A. (1993). Space and place. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 18(4), 516–

531.

Mitchell, K. (1997). Transnational discourse: bringing geography back in. Antipode, 29(2), 101–114.

Morris, M. (1992). The man in the mirror. Theory, Culture and Society, 9(2), 253–279.

Niezen, R. (2000). Recognizing indigenism. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 42(1), 119–148.

Nigh, R. (2002). Maya medicine in the biological gaze. Current Anthropology, 43(3), 451–464.

O’Neill, O. (2001). Bounds of justice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Parry, B. (2002). Cultures of knowledge. Antipode, 34(4), 679–707.

Peck, J. (1995). Workplace. New York: Guilford.

Peet, R., & Watts, M. (Eds.) (1996), Liberation ecologies. New York: Routledge.

Perreault, T. (2003). Changing places. Political Geography, 22(1), 61–88.

Pollis, A., & Schwab, P. (1979). Human rights: a Western construct with limited applicability. In A. Pol-

lis, & P. Schwab (Eds.), Human rights. New York: Praeger.

Poulantzas, N. (1978). State, power, socialism. London: New Left Books.

Pred, A., & Watts, M. (1992). Reworking modernity. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

Puri, K. (1995). Cultural ownership and intellectual property rights. Intellectual Property Journal, 9,

293–347.

Rabinow, P. (1996). The anthropology of reason. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Radcliffe, S. (1999). Entangling resistance, ethnicity, gender and nation in Ecuador. In J. Sharp, P. Rou-

tledge, C. Philo, & R. Paddison (Eds.), Entanglements of power (pp. 164–181). London: Routledge.

Ramos, A. R. (1998). Indigenism. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Rangan, H. (1996). From Chipko to Uttarchandal. In R. Peet, & M. Watts (Eds.), Liberation ecologies

(pp. 205–226). New York: Routledge.

Rorty, R. (1989). Contingency, irony and solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Said, E. (1979). Orientalism. New York: Vintage.


Sheppard, E. (2002). The spaces and times of globlization. Economic Geography, 78(2), 307–330.

Shiva, V. (1997). Biopiracy, Totnes: Green Books.

Smith, N. (1984). Uneven development. Oxford: Blackwell.

Smith, N. (1993). Homeless/global. In J. Bird et al. (Eds.), Mapping the futures (pp. 87–119). London:

Routledge.

Smith, D. M. (2000). Moral Geographies: ethics in a world of difference. Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univer-

sity Press.

Speed, S. (2002). Global discourses on the local terrain. Cultural Dynamics, 14(2), 205–228.

Staehli, L. (2003). Place. In J. Agnew, K. Mitchell, & G. Toal (Eds.), A companion to political geography

(pp. 158–170). Oxford: Blackwell.

Strathern, M. (1998). Introduction. Social Anthropology, 6(1), 109–111.

Swyngedouw, E. (1997). Excluding the other. In R. Lee, & J. Wills (Eds.), Geographies of economies

(pp. 167–177). London: Arnold.

The Observer (2002) The diamonds and the bushmen, 17th November.

Tuathail, G. (1996). Critical geopolitics. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press.

Turner, B. (2001). Cosmopolitan virtue, globalization and patriotism. Theory, Culture and Society, 19(1/

2), 45–63.

Urry, J. (2000). Sociology beyond societies. London: Routledge.

Walzer, M. (1983). Spheres of justice. New York: Basic Books.

Wastell, S. (2001). Presuming scale, making diversity. Critique of Anthropology, 21(2), 185–210.

Watts, M. (1983). Silent violence. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Watts, M. (1991). Mapping meaning, denoting difference, imagining identity. Geografiska Annaler,

73B(1), 7–17.

Watts, M. (1998). Nature as artifice and atrefact. In B. Braun, & N. Castree (Eds.), Remaking reality

(pp. 243–268). London: Routledge.

Watts, M. (1999). Collective wish images: geographical imaginaries and the crisis of development. In J.

Allen, & D. Massey (Eds.), Human Geography Today (pp. 85–107). Cambridge: Polity Press.

Watts, M. (2000). Contested communities, malignant markets. In C. Zerner (Ed.), People, plants and jus-

tice (pp. 21–51). New York: Columbia University Press.

Watts, M. (2001). Petro-violence: nation, identity and extraction in Nigeria and Ecuador. In N. Peluso,

& M. Watts (Eds.), Violent Environments (pp. 189–212). Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Westwood, S. (2001). Complex choreography. Theory, Culture and Society, 18(2/3), 247–264.

Williams, R. (1989). Resources of hope. London: Verso.

Winkler, K. (1994) Anthropologists urged to rethink their definitions of culture, Chronicle of Higher

Education, December 14th.

Wolfe, A. (1996). Marginalised in the middle. Chicago University Press: Chicago.


Diﬀerential geographies:place, indigenous rights and ......Diﬀerential geographies:place, indigenous rights and ‘local’ resources ... (cf. Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1999). 134 N.

Documents