Eli’s PhD project comprises an anthropological analysis of university culture, and he’s also looking at the socialisation of graduate students. I remember being told as a Master’s student that it was not entirely acceptable to study “our own,” and since I always thought that was bullshit I was really excited by Eli’s commitment to study academia. Anyone interested in institutional space and culture can check out an overview of the project, or read the full proposal (pdf).

I’m especially taken by his observations on fieldwork in French philosophy departments, and this fascinating post on reading as an ethnographic tactic.

Hidden Landscapes by Chris Thompson

Geographical Methodology as Spatialization and Topology (Part of “Theorizing Place: Interdisciplinary Trajectories” A Panel Discussion at the Canadian Association of Geographers Meeting, Carleton University, May 27, 2009):

This presentation focuses on the virtuality of place, an object of study which resists specification in material or topographic terms. In effect, place exceeds the boundaries of topography. It cannot be adequately mapped. This raises a methodological conundrum for geography which has only be solved via interdisciplinary innovation, leading geographers into the study of social and cultural categorization, and statistical analysis of spatial data. What is a geographer to do? A relational approach to ‘place’ foregrounds the tissue of geographical space and the multiple flows and passages through it. Multiple passages suggests that geography explore a multiple, n-dimensional topology as a paradigmatic shift out of Cartesian space.

Maybe geographical information systems already work in n-space, but my sense is no, and geographers think of cartography as a 3d and 2d endeavour.   Any thoughts?  This is a step toward a paper on topology as method for social science in the 21st century, part of my belief that at university level we should teach methodology as something evolving, to think past mastering a particular program and ask ourselves what is it for?  And, how do our chosen methods guide how and what we see in our studies?

How could one avoid being just a technical end-user and late-adopter of Geographical Information Systems – that’s geodata or spatial data in other lingo : Does anyone have truly theoretical and methodological innovations in areas such as GIS for visualization of local and of community issues, locative and mobile media applications, GIS-amateur sketch map interfaces and cognitive mapping methods, or use of maps in a range of disciplines.

One example is Proboscis artist group’s  mapping – or is that unmapping? – of community issues.  The way they transform radio-controlled cars and other toys into ‘feral  robots’ equipped with eg. air quality sensors to allow schoolchildren to playfully gather data which is then posted up on interactive maps of their community.

Are we at at the beginning of a paradigm-shift in the use of GIS because these technologies have come off of the desktop onto portable devices.  Consider GPS devices, smart phones – almost ubiquitous in some industries.  What is the research agenda?

This is uniquely urban but the spill-over into touristic areas is already evident (take a drive through the Loire Valley with  a GPS enabled smart phone).

Are there examples of revitalizing old geodata (geodata for Edmonton goes back to 1963 but is in inaccessible formats) by making it available in museums, in exhibits or to the public for use in the form of downloadable and /or interactive maps?  Are their other projects such as Andre Lemos, Marilei Fiorelli and my locative art of drawing on Google Maps with a GPS logger?

How do we get from desktop/supercomputer style GIS to the scampering world of geotagging, geocaching and interactivedata accessed on the go (Google Earth on my mobile)?

-Rob

Photo: Munim Wasif ‘Water Tragedy’ Series, Shortlisted Prix Pictet 2008.

The idea of “island” deserves to be rethought today. Long a topos where bygone colonial powers articulate various fantasies underlying their world historical projects, the island has in recent past added to itself an element of dystopian exigency by becoming a place of choice, a target, so to speak, at which the more bellicose of the foes of the new imperial cents launch their military attacks. Just as Pearl Harbor on the island of Oahu was chosen as the site of a surprise air raid sixty years ago by Japan, itself a relatively small island nation dreaming big of hemispheric domination, the island of Manhattan was selected lately by al Quaeda as a target of opportunity where the phallic symbols of American capitalist global hegemony were toppled by missiles of a hitherto unthinkable kind. Either in literary-geographic imaginations or through real encounters between cultures, island has historically been a site where the self meets the Other and, through this meeting, fashions and refashions itself in a process of asymmetrical mimicry characteristic of what we call colonialism.

From Plato through Descartes to today’s cruise ship commercials, island is often described as a place of escape, a place to escape to, as well as a place to escape from. Suspended in space and time, the distant island easily and understandably offers itself as a pole of projection for the less traveled in the metropoles, receiving investments that are at once psychical, symbolic, material, and, by extension, geo-political. An elsewhere both known and unknown to the empire, the island challenges any easy cutting of open space constitutive of colonizing centers’ territorial practices, marking from afar the ambiguity of empires’ very own boundary by locating itself as a liminal opening of and to the Other, an Other-opening, where, in spite of or because of its being distant and isolated, all the tensions and anxieties, conflicting desires and fears, associated with identity formation, exploration and conquest, are staged in full colors.

In Empire Islands: Castaways, Cannibals, and Fantasies of Conquest, Rebecca Weaver-Hightower examines the checkered romance between empires and islands as it is reflected in the Western literary and popular cultural imaginations during the past five hundred years. Drawing on ideas vigorously mobilized by postcolonial studies, the book seeks to provide, says the author, “a detailed unpacking of the psychological draw of the castaway genre and analysis of how it worked as a tool of European imperial culture (p. ix). The book comprises six chapters. It begins by invoking the scene of “Monarch-of-All-I-survey,” a moment when a seafaring White European man (e.g., Robinson Crusoe, John Daniel, and many others) first gazes from a mountain top at the vista of an island on which he, as if by fate, is stranded. To the likely readers of the book, it is not hard to see how this scene effectively sets in motion the analyses to come. Veni, vidi, vici: inasmuch as the castaway’s searching gaze takes in what it surveys from an elevated position, the colonial project cannot but be one of possession, control, and imposing law and authority upon the Other–human, animals, plants, and minerals alike. Having established an illustrative starting point, the different chapters discuss in turn the various strategies adopted by the castaways-colonialists not only to maintain their mental health when facing an unknown land and its menacing inhabitants but also to justify colonialism by neutralizing the violence it exercises as either flowing from divine rights or demanded by its civilizing mission.

Central to Weaver-Hightower’s investigations is a set of psychoanalytically inspired concepts familiar to readers of contemporary critical discourses. In Chapter One, for example, the Kleinian notion of identification and Didier Anzieu’s work on the “skin ego” are adopted quickly to explain castaway-colonist’s frantic attempt to discipline his own body and, in so doing, to control what lies outside of him through projective incorporation. In this chapter and in others as well, as the reader will soon find out, the same quick application of theory to texts takes place. The result is a series of textual analyses that reiterate the messages heard time and again in recent literature in critical cultural studies at large and in postcolonial studies in particular. The reader may be less than satisfied if he/she is looking for a sustained engagement between texts and theory; his/her reward in reading this book is likely to come from the author’s choice of an interesting topic and her concerned discussions of the texts many of us read years ago.

Much has been written about things colonial or postcolonial, and most of these writings are products of chiefly Western or Westernized scholarship. While this book makes a fine addition to the current literature of postcolonial studies, it also makes clear the need for an equally critical examination of the many counter-stories told by the islands about the empires. If the island, as the book demonstrates, has always been “exclusively included” in the empire’s imaginary of the Other, empires are also “inclusively excluded” by the islanders when they tell stories about the Whitemen, stories in which the beginning of what one calls the Age of Discovery means only the start of catastrophes for the other. Like the empires that descend on them with their own narratives of conquest and exploration, islands themselves never stop telling stories about the visitors who come and go. They speak back and they should be heard. Indeed, postcolonial criticism would mean nothing if it did not facilitate the other post of postcolonialism to be sent back to the center and, in keeping with its avowed principle, to postcolonial critics themselves as well.

Review by: Briankle G. Chang, University of Massachusetts, USA

-Ondine

The government of Iceland promised to repay Icelandic depositors in the island country’s failed banks. They did not extend the guarantee to non-Icelandic depositors. Partly they simply didn’t have the cash, but partly the view has been that taking care of one’s own takes priority. Countries do not want to bail out foreigners, and different governments do not want to assume the liabilities of other nations. The nature of political solutions is always that politicians respond to their own constituencies, not to people who can’t vote for them (www.stratfor.com)

The result was that other, nationalized, Icelandic banks such as Kaupthing’s funds were frozen in the UK under emergency measures contained in recent Anti-Terrorism legislation and assets immediately sold off to the Danish bank ING. While individuals were protected, up to 20 UK councils and numerous charities could lose millions.

This is where the blood flows: Disappointed that European and western allies failed to provide support, and that it had been made a scapegoat by UK politicians Iceland accepted a loan from Russia of about 4 Billion Euros. In effect, the lack of clarity and guarantees were used as a excuse to push the Icelandic financial sector and the economy into ruin.

However the spectacle of an overleaveraged Icelandic krona against a small island economy and population of only about 313000 suggests to some that other nations might be similarly overleaveraged. In an online discussion, a user ‘Truth Conquers’ speculated,

Actually, we might be just as broke as Iceland is. No one knows how big the CDS “House of Cards” really is. But I have seen estimates of at least 5 trillion. And estimates usually under guess these sort of things. And that does not include foreign banks, credit card debt, car loan debt, companies needing short term loans and FDIC coverage of banks. You get the idea.

Via such rumours, no country is immune from appearing virtually bankrupt, regardless of the actual state of its economy.  Here I mean the virtual in a bookish, philosopher’s sense of not an imagined abstraction but a real thing that nevertheless can’t be seen or touched, for example a brand, nation or community.  Trust may be a real ‘thing’ but it is intangible and can be manipulated. Historically one important way of controlling such real-but-intangibles or ‘virtualities’ is through ritual – think witch hunts, sacrifice and scapegoating. These are the ultimate terror.  Indeed, John Raulston Saul commented that this is a worry for Canada as an supplier of ‘dirty oil’ facing the United States and Europe who may want to rebuild their financial relationship and power. Iceland was sacrificed.  It was made a virtual scapegoat regardless of the actual nature of Iceland and of actual cost to British local taxpayers and its implication for UK urban infrastructure, volunteer services and agencies.

This is a geopolitical coup for Russia and (despite chaos in its markets) a reversal of its position: 20 years ago it was in economic collapse. Wall Street Journal’s online ‘Marketwatch’ said ‘The world has gone upside down’. In a sense, we need to turn our globes upside down too.  What does it mean to say that iceland is at the centre of the financial crisis this week?  This is a metaphor for the way that a new geopolitics – and a whole re-spatialisation of where we assume the centre of our maps – is an outcome of the current financial crisis, which as of today is widely being called a ‘crash’.

In the 20^th century, the significance of Iceland was in relation to fish and Atlantic sea lanes – and this continues, perhaps in relation to the ability to monitor submarine tracks? In the 21^st century the significance is its relation to oil, gas and Arctic sea lanes which will emerge as polar ice melts. In effect, Russia moves towards enhancing its position amongst nations involved in the Arctic.  Iceland may offer a point from which power can be projectied into what is becoming open ocean north of Iceland and Greenland.

-Rob

This is not the end of capitalism, as some wildly claim; there is no intellectual, social or political challenge to a market system based on respect for private property rights, even by the Chinese Communist party. Rather, it is a crisis of a particular capitalism that has set aside respect for trust, integrity and fairness as fuddy-duddy obstacles to ‘wealth generation’. What we are relearning is that without trust and fairness, capitalism risks its own sustainability, even while it unleashes forces that undermine those self-same values. London’s money markets froze because of a trust collapse; banks simply don’t believe each other when they say their businesses are sound and will not default on their obligations. Trust matters.

‘Trust’ is not an abstraction, nor a metaphysical object, nor something that can be used to hold up a table.  It is a virtuality – a real but intangible thing – and the economy has long been understood to be founded on exactly such virtualities.  Another example is ‘virtue’, a word which shares the same root.  Like virtue or character, virtualities generally relate to latent outcomes or potential.  They are entirely different from risk, which is related to calculations of what is probable, or to danger, when a risk is actualized as a material presence.

Hutton notes that opponents have ‘no alternative proposal about how to restore trust once it has gone. Trust is a reciprocal relationship, dependent upon a desire to be considered decent and honourable.’  Rather than focusing on the dollars of the bailout, the virtual question of reputation is much more difficult to restore.  It relates to the future – to the anticipation of continuity.  This requires repair in the virtual.  In simple terms, this means not rhetoric (which might repair representations) but rituals of closure of the crisis.  These rituals are likely to take the form of establishing watershed moments which set the period of leveraged capitalism behind us globally.  Expect shamans who lead us through the process and sacrificial figures (individuals, animals, corporations), liminal stages and zones with changes in location, and figures of rebirth.

-Rob

From the abstract:

Following urban computing and locative media and their accompanying visions from labs, conferences and classrooms to journal publications and popular media accounts, this dissertation presents four case histories in corporate, academic and artistic design practice. An analysis of the Mobile Bristol, Passing Glances, Sonic City and Urban Tapestries research and design projects draws out the idea that everyday life in the future city is expected to become more expressive, engaging and meaningful. The increased extensibility and transmissibility of the city itself, along with an increased ability to be socially embedded within it, is seen to be a fundamental promise inherent in these projects. The dissertation argues that such spatial and cultural potentialities can be productively understood as involving temporary, selective and mobile publics, where creative and playful interactions emerge as primary means of social innovation…

I’ve posted both the full dissertation (1.33 mb pdf) and individual chapters, and feedback is always welcome.

- Anne

The points become fewer, the lines fade out as fewer and fewer people travel along them. Empty spaces increase… the territory has become increasingly limited to those few points from which they can carry out…activities only to provide extra food….The lines from those points all lead back to the settlement. These lines have begun to resumble modern highways where the modern weekend hunter travels, unaware of the areas on either side – areas that used to be important to his father, grandfather and forefathers.” (p.195)

Can one of the most different appreciations of the landscape and sense of geography can be found amongst the Inuit? In an environment where ice-covered land blurs into sea, there is not only a detailed vocabulary and profound sense of snow and ice, for example landfast and sea ice, but also of location and the landscape as an ecosystem of animals and their territories. Survival over centuries has depended on close attention to the details and possibilities of hunting and fishing grounds, but this is changing with life in settlements, more rapid travel by snowmobile rather than by dogsled, a shift to English, European bans on seal-hunting and more recently a US ban which ended the livelihood of guides for polar bear hunters. A small ecotourism industry exists on Victoria Island.

Collignon offers a very readable and important account of place-naming amongst the Inuinnait, the Inuit who live in the western areas of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. Her work is centred specifically in and around Ulukhaqtuuq ([Ulukhaktok] formerly Holman) on Victoria Island. She marvellously describes the cultural and economic schanges which are resulting in a loss of geographical knowledge and declining familiarity with the region. While,

the Baffin Islanders made use of the increase range of the machines…Inuinnait have primarily taken advantage of the speed. They do not travel farther, but do not stop at the traditional staging areas anymore and they go ‘back and forth’ more often….from the 1980s onward, snowmobiles…have been a means toward a life increasingly centred in and around the settlement.” (p.188)

The result of several sojourns and over more than a decade by the French anthropologist, the book is an excellent translation of her Ph.D. research for the benefit of northern residents. On the one hand she gives us diary-like descriptions of going hunting, showing how people interact with and comment on sites and the landscape, on the other hand by analyzing place names she shows the importance of place to memory and the relational deep-structure of Inuinnait geography.

In this sense of space, nuna (the land in general including earth, ice and water) is differentiated in practice from seasonal hiku (ice sheet) 5where no game live and tariuq (salt sea). These surfaces are linked by lines of travel which cross otherwise ignored spaces where game is not abundant. This geography is enlivened by memory and significance which is only hinted at in place names which often refer to activities possible at a place, or a significant event that took place at a site. Uumajuit (animals, and all living beings including people and mythical creatures) also contribute to a spiritual sense of nuna as a network of sites as a living environment. ‘Great myths and small tales from the oral tradition are one of the many signs on the land, that thransform the landscape into a ‘memoryscape’, as Mark Nuttall describes it (1992:51-58). With changes in travel, language and the Inuinnait economy, many are now less familiar with this geography and less engaged in the activities that it refers to and which in turn refresh it.

While it was once more detailed and intensely engaged, Inuinnait toponymy still reveals a zone of assembly embracing settlements and nearby ancient fall and winter camps where the community once reunited annually. These places are often named for regular activities or events. Second, spaces of trails which are traversed rather than inhabited on seasonal migrations which may now only be quick hunting trips out from town on snowmobiles, and a third border zone which were historically assocated with summer camps and with trapping during the fur trade period from about 1920-1970. Beyond these areas of activity, lie less frequented southern spaces such as southern cities visited by plane (sometimes for health care) and the globalized mediascape of places represented on television shows.

Collignon incisively notes the contrast with Western categories such as physical versus human geography, for Nuna and Uumajuit work together, with the latter nested in the former like a folderol doll. She gives two examples: a place called Hiuqqitak is ‘the shallow and sandy place’ but the proper translation would be not this Nuna dictionary sense, but ‘caribou crossing place’, a contextual, Uumajuit, sense of the place. Nilak (mouth of a river where the ice forms a high pile) is not merely topology but ‘to anyone who has travelled in the Arctic is “an obstacle”’, which would be the correct translation. The importance of contextual experience for understanding place names illustrates the problems that can come with a shift from Inuinnaqtun to speaking English in everyday life, especially amongst young people, which creates a divide between generations.

She realizes that this unsettles the analytic structure of her research, but this is the point: she is presenting something which we can only grasp via its lack of fit with Western principles of place-naming and geography. Inuinnait knowledge of places is rich in subjectivity. A Qablunaat’s (White, Southerner) map is held to conceal the personality of the map-maker:

In the Inuinnait world, since it is the observer’s point of view that is the focus, when an island is called ‘the last one’ we get a clear picture of the viewpoint of a certain traveller moving in a certain direction. Moreover, a number of places have two names instead ofjust one, allowing speakers to refer to a place with a different name, a different meaning, depending on where they are at the moment of the description. A place name of a western map, however, is always the same…. An Inuinnaq toponym will often reflect the speakers direction of observation…. ‘The last one’ becomes ‘the first one’, ‘the distant one’ become ‘the closer one’…. on the return trip, each landmark will look different in the reverse direction. The relationship will have changed and so the character and sense of the place will have changed as well.” (p.167)

There are lots of duplicate place names – for example, Qikiqtalik (the place that has an island). Their importance is in relation to surrounding places. Innuinnait geography is not autonomous, not isolated from practical knowledge: ‘the tendency is to use either common everyday words, or words that belong to…hunting or physiology’ (p.138) that related to activities. Few toponyms relate to travel – this is no signpost system for nomads but an engaged and emotional spatialization of the land which casts it as places for this and places for that, sites where so and so did such and such or where a certain event happened.

Given the way enacted knowledge works….The Inuinnait framework of geographic knowledge is a structure that resides in the mind, ready for use when called upon. When needed, it springs to life and becomes a working paradigm. An empty structure when out of context, this paradigm can only exist in the context of a particular situation.” (p.155)

In sum, this toponymy does not simply a matter of geosophy, as some readers may conclude. It suggests not an abstract but a real, qualitative geography which truly is ‘landscape’ and not merely terrain. What is useful is the twin ideas of a, first, a ‘framework’ even if this sounds too much like an abstraction rather than also something imagined. And second, a ‘paradigm’ which again doesn’t communicate the sense of lived and embodied understanding. In clarifying what I would call a ’social spatialization’ (R. Shields, Places on the Margin , 1999), the anthropologists’ analytic toolkit fails. Although she says, “The abstract, virtual map of the Inuinnait is closer to the experience of the land it depicts that the Western system,” (p.167) this smuggles in a Western tendency to collapse together the abstract and virtual: the conceptual is seen as more or less the same as the qualitative leading to artificial difficulties in distinguishing the ‘abstract’ from the ‘virtual’, that is, in being able to differentiate the concept or idea of a place from its intangible but qualitative significance. For example, it is not merely a ’shallow place’ but one ‘where caribou are found’ – potentially a life and death difference in meaning. This is at the root of the paradox of Inuinnait toponymy: it is not a system of abstract locational signs but an annotated geography which casts places as the spatialized sites of activities, affordances and events.

Thus, even this inspired book never seems to come to grips with the mythic and geosophical elements it describes, even though it introduces the reader to them so well by narrating trips to hunting camps or a day-in-life of a teen in an Arctic settlement. Mythical beings which roam in certain places are fears, but in everyday life, they evoke a sense of palpable dread and a quickened step, which a scientist’s terms such as ‘paradigm’ poorly communicates, but the book speaks volumes about the changing nature of this intangible geography:

The modern young hunter does not stop to look at or use the surroundings. He does not think of the land as a collection of elements related to each other and to the people. Expressions such as ‘travelled territory’ and ‘inhabited territory’ no longer describe a reality. As an image… the land is losing its cohesion. It is becoming a puzzle of places poorly bound together, with too many missing pieces. The surfaces are becoming every smaller, seldom connected to the rest of the territory. …As everyone goes faster they neglect the old stopover places; they forget the names and qualities of the places along the trail. The territory becomes simplified: worn down, a skeleton with no flesh or muscle or connecting tissue; it disintegrates.” (p.195)

This is an essential and accessible book on the Canadian Eastern Arctic and its indigenous inhabitants, the Inuinnait, written for both specialists and the general public.

Reviewed by: Rob Shields

- Rob

The debate has recently been extended in the Toronto Star to the time-space of academe. Stephen Marche observes that this whole kerfuffle is grappling with a moot point given that the market forces of academia “will do away with it long before its intellectual silliness has a chance to become apparent.”

He notes that although philology “is vital to scholarship [...] almost nobody does it now.” Instead, theorists in the humanities and social sciences study “Deleuze or Irigary” since they can “get the gist in six months.” It follows, suggests Marche, that “the old academic books that took a lifetime of lecturing to produce, and which often were readable, and even beautiful, have no place.”

Marche’s suggestion is that the spaces of academe, whether or not neorobiology is able to inform them, do not have the patience for so complex a “problem.” Instead, he implies, with a focus on churning out publications and looking productive, graduate students and faculty develop vague aesthetically-inclined discourses, thereby condemning aesthetics (thankfully?) to an ongoing life of mystery. He explains:

Typically, young academics are given four years to write a Ph.D., during which time they are probably teaching a heavy load, paying their dues as cheap replacements for the professors the university can’t afford to hire. They must also publish articles if they want to be hireable once they graduate. If the student takes too long writing the dissertation, the university stops its financial “support,” which in the humanities is a term that must always be chaperoned by quotation marks. For junior professors, the institutional hunger for publications cannot ever be satisfied. They simply must always produce more — quality is unmeasurable so it is not measured. The spew of publications must be continual and prodigious. In such a system, who on earth is going to go to the trouble of learning neurology? If anyone were foolish enough to attempt it, by the time he or she had written anything, neuroscience would most likely have changed and the work would be worthless. Better and easier to rummage around the archives or the old enthusiasms, and find something manageable, like a dress Queen Victoria wore which you can relate to Great Expectations, or a few untapped sadomasochistic longings of John Donne. Neuroaesthetics is too lousy a gamble. There’s no need to bomb this airfield, the planes were never going to fly anyway.

- Matthew

Cities at Night, an Orbital Tour Around the World was made when astronauts added stabilizers to the cameras on the orbital space station, allowing them to get sharp, crisp nighttime images.

And here is the accompanying YouTube clip:

– Matthew