REVIEW SYMPOSIUM D Mitchell (2000) Cultural Geography: A Critical Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell Organizer: Scott Kirsch Department of Geography, University of North Carolina, North Carolina, USA; e-mail:
[email protected]
War: What Is It Good For? Sallie A Marston Department of Geography and Regional Development, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, US; e-mail:
[email protected]
Don Mitchell’s Cultural Geography is a welcome addition to the advanced undergraduate/graduate textbooks on the topic currently in circulation. It provides a comprehensive, critical, and much-needed engagement—broad, deep, and rich—with a rapidly changing subfield of the discipline. Part 1 of the book elaborates a discussion and argument about the history and nature of the debates in cultural geography as well as the relevance of cultural geography to understanding cultural production and cultural change. Effectively the heart of the book, parts 2 and 3, attempts to shed light on contemporary cultural processes and struggles—the term Mitchell adopts is “culture wars”— that are being waged over the meanings, institutions, and spaces that structure our lives. The seven chapters in these two parts address a range of culture wars using different conceptual frameworks and theoretical positions, from both within and outside geography, to reveal the interventions that can be made to progressively transform the structures of power deployed through them. The approach of introducing cultural geography by navigating students through the power geometries that underlie various highprofile culture wars is an effective one. At a pedagogical level, this approach enables students to grapple with issues with which they are already likely to be familiar. However, it also operates on a political level that forces students early on to recognize and come to grips with their own position on these culture wars and ultimately to defend that position against, or revise it with respect to, the critical assessment that Mitchell deploys. Most importantly, Cultural Geography is particularly © 2002 Editorial Board of Antipode. Published by Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA
War: What is it Good For?
317
unusual—and therefore highly commendable—because it takes a position by committing itself to being critical. And, as Mitchell (2000:xiv–xv) states, “I expect the reader to be every bit as critical of me, and the arguments I make, as I am of the material I analyze.” Given such an irresistible invitation, it would be churlish, somehow, not to respond as expected. Thus, in the remainder of the review, I am critical of Mitchell’s main theoretical position and of the problematic way in which he has represents culture processes in terms of the metaphor of “culture wars.” My critique, however, should be seen unquestionably as a sympathetic one. Mitchell’s theoretical argument about the political economy of culture approach was first elaborated in his 1995 Transactions piece, “There Is No Such Thing as Culture: Towards a Reconceptualization of the Idea of Culture in Geography.” Cultural Geography is also predicated on this theoretical position, which is, briefly put, that “‘culture’ is a handy term, but in the end it represents no identifiable process. To put the argument at its most stark: there is no culture in the world, only differing arrays of power that organize society in this way, and not that” (Mitchell 1995:75). For me, this position is highly problematic, particularly as Mitchell deploys it in Cultural Geography. I am also troubled by the culture-war metaphor as a way of approaching cultural processes because I feel it leaves out too much of interest to cultural geographers and others with respect to cultural processes. Is there nothing about cultural production that operates outside of overt struggle? Importantly for my own work, the culture-war metaphor seems ill suited to the more subtle machinations of hegemony. Is it effective or helpful to conceptualize the relations of support, cooperation, caring, and socialization that, in many circumstances, underpin the social reproduction of the everyday life of the home as a culture war? I am, of course, aware that the home can also be a site of struggle and violence, and I certainly do not want to be taken for offering an uncritical, idealized, and romantic notion of it. The home is undeniably a complex space and place of myriad social, political, economic, and cultural processes, sometimes quite war-like—but oftentimes not (see Pratt 1999, especially pp 156–160, for a concise and subtle elaboration of this complexity). Furthermore, the home must certainly be seen as well, if not primarily, as a different sort of space and place than the shop floor, the shopping mall, or a square or park. In addition to the home often being given over largely to processes of social reproduction, in it there is arguably also an unusual internalization or naturalization of power relations—which means, perhaps, that hegemony operates more completely there than elsewhere. Whatever the particularities of the home as a space and place, my point is that the home and the social relations of family (in the broadest and most inclusive sense of
318
Antipode
family) surely must be relevant to the political economy of culture. How can a metaphor that incorporates the position that all cultural production is “a means of attempting to order, control, and define ‘others’ in the name of power and profit” (Mitchell 2000:75) effectively account for these very different sorts of relations? I am aware, too, that the relations of family can easily be conceptualized as ones of order and control. I contend, however, that they are not just about order and control. I am also aware that I have called these relations social ones and that another argument could be made that they are therefore not really cultural at all. If that is the case, however, how do we explain, for example, the differences that exist in child-rearing across the modern world? Yes, the rearing of children is vital to the social reproduction of the political economy, but it is also true that social groups in different places interpret and enact in very different ways the social relations that support social reproduction. In short, I am not intellectually comfortable conceptualizing these sorts of processes as war-like or even as necessarily about struggle in a less militaristic sense, though they are certainly hegemonic efforts. This leads me to my second concern with Cultural Geography: Mitchell’s theoretical position that there is no such thing as culture. In an interesting piece in the edited volume entitled Culture Theory (1984), Ochs and Schieffelin argue that the process of language acquisition among children in various parts of the modern world must be understood as culturally constructed. In other words, there is more than one way for children to become social through the acquisition of language, and those various ways are shaped by the value and meaning systems within which they are practiced. In an attempt to demonstrate that white, middle-class models of language acquisition are not generalizable to other parts of the contemporary world, Ochs and Schieffelin examine language acquisition practices in Papua New Guinea and Western Samoa. By comparing them to white (English, Scottish, American, Australian, and Dutch) middle-class practices, they show that different societies have different norms and expectations about how children can and should participate in social situations, and that these differences are fundamental to how children learn language. To compress a very detailed article unjustly, I summarize only two of Ochs and Shieffelin’s developmental stories of language acquisition. In the case of white middle-class society, an intense face-to-face dyadic relationship exists between the caregiver and the child in which the caregiver assumes that infants/young children possesses intentionality and the ability to express it, at least in sounds if not in actual words. White middle-class caregivers treat their children as partners, more or less, and speak to them as if they were competent language users. In contrast, in Kaluli society in Papua, New Guinea, the caregivers
War: What is it Good For?
319
believe that infants/young children have no capacity for understanding and never treat them as partners in dyadic communicative interactions. Rather than gaze at their babies/young children, as white middle-class caregivers do, Kaluli mothers tend to face them outward so they can be seen by other members of the household. Moreover, unlike the white middle-class one, the Kaluli communicative interaction is more often than not triadic. Another member of the household —an older child or another adult—addresses the infant, and Kaluli mothers respond by speaking for their young children in a high-pitched voice, deliberately different from their own normal speaking voice. Importantly, in both the white middle-class and the Kaluli cases, and in the absence of pathology, white and Kaluli children learn to become competent speaking members of their societies. I realize I have not been able to provide much ethnographic detail here. I hope, however, to have made the simple point that culture gives meaning to the social interactions between caregiver and child and, as a result, shapes how caregivers speak to their children and how their children learn to speak and operate in their local social world. I fail to see how the metaphor of culture wars can elucidate this important sociocultural practice, nor do I see that this case does anything but support the existence of a process or set of practices that intervene and shape power geometries. I would argue that this case shows that culture is the mediating moment, the worldview, the meaning system that motivates the relationship between society and the construction of subjectivities in a particular place at a particular time. If power is about the ability to institute meaning, then what do we call the production of meaning with which power must grapple? I firmly believe that power is a fundamental organizing social force. But if all there is in the world is power, then how can we effect change? I believe we effect change by comprehending how our taken-for-granted material and discursive practices support power geometries and how, new comprehensions of this material and these practices might demolish or alter them. And I want to call this mediation between power and situated agents, culture. Because of—and I do mean because of and not despite—these criticisms of Cultural Geography, I truly appreciate this book. I appreciate it because it does exactly what a good textbook should do. Besides being deep and rich in its treatment of the subdisciplinary concerns of cultural geography, it fiercely delivers on its promise to be provocative. It forces the reader—whether student or instructor—to process the debates in the subfield and to understand who said what and how, so that informed discussions can take place in the seminar room. Most importantly and rewardingly, it demands that readers become engaged with what is happening in the discipline and the world and find their own position with respect to these happenings. Mitchell’s position
320
Antipode
provoked in me a very strong response. I spent a good deal of time thinking about my unease and trying to come to terms with why I could not quite fully accept his argument about the political economy of culture, at the same time that I certainly could not really reject it. While this intellectual discomfort is often generated by scholarly monographs, it is rarely produced by textbooks. A good textbook is a genuine gift to the discipline, and I am truly pleased to have this one available to my students and me. I have no doubt that Cultural Geography will do the sorts of things really good textbooks do: help to change the future of the world we live in by provoking students to engage passionately with that world.
References Mitchell D (1995) There is no such thing as culture: Towards a reconceptualization of the idea of culture in geography. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 20:102–116 Mitchell D (2000) Cultural Geography: A Critical Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell Ochs E and Schieffelin B (1984) Language acquisition and socialization: Three developmental stories and their implications. In R Shweder and R Levine (eds) Culture Theory: Essays on Mind, Self, and Emotion (pp 276–320). New York: Cambridge University Press Pratt G (1999) Geographies of identity and difference: Marking boundaries. In D Massey, J Allen and P Sarre (eds) Human Geography Today (pp 151–167). Cambridge, UK: Polity Press
