Encounters and Engagements Between Economic and Cultural Geography the Geojournal Library

Encounters and Engagements between Economic and Cultural Geography The GeoJournal Library Volume 104 Managing Editor: Daniel Z. Sui, College Station, USA Founding Series Editor: Wolf Tietze, Helmstedt, Germany Editorial Board: Paul Claval, France Yehuda Gradus, Israel Sam Ock Park, South Korea Herman van der Wusten, The Netherlands For further volumes: http://www.springer.com/series/6007 Barney Warf Editor Encounters and Engagements between Economic and Cultural Geography Editor Barney Warf Department of Geography University of Kansas Lawrence, KS USA ISSN 0924-5499 ISBN 978-94-007-2974-2 ISBN 978-94-007-2975-9 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-2975-9 Springer Dordrecht Heidelberg New York London Library of Congress Control Number: 2012935893 © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2012 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifi cally the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfi lms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. Exempted from this legal reservation are brief excerpts in connection with reviews or scholarly analysis or material supplied specifi cally for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work. Duplication of this publication or parts thereof is permitted only under the provisions of the Copyright Law of the Publisher’s location, in its current version, and permission for use must always be obtained from Springer. Permissions for use may be obtained through RightsLink at the Copyright Clearance Center. Violations are liable to prosecution under the respective Copyright Law. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specifi c statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. While the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication, neither the authors nor the editors nor the publisher can accept any legal responsibility for any errors or omissions that may be made. The publisher makes no warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein. Printed on acid-free paper Springer is part of Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com) Contents 1 Introduction: Fusing Economic and Cultural Geography ........................................................................ 1 Barney Warf 2 A Short Cultural History of Anglo-American Economic Geography: Bodies, Books, Machines, and Places ............................... 19 Trevor J. Barnes 3 The Cultural Turn in Geography: A New Link in the Commodity Chain ........................................................................ 39 Elaine Hartwick 4 Consumption Geographies: Turns or Intersections? ........................... 47 Juliana Mansvelt 5 Gender, Commodity Chains and Everyday Life .................................. 65 Deborah Leslie 6 Economic Rationality, Ethnic Identity, and the Geographies of Consumption ....................................................................................... 79 Lucia Lo and Lu Wang 7 Trust and Distrust: Culture Finding Its Way into Economics or the Other Way Round? ...................................................................... 103 Geir Inge Orderud 8 Building the Beloved Community Through Techno Music Production in Detroit .............................................................................. 123 Deborah Che 9 Exploring the Role of Networks in the Creative Economy of North East England: Economic and Cultural Dynamics .................................................................................................. 143 Roberta Comunian v vi Contents 10 The Relevance of Scale Economies in Economic and Social Relationships in the New Economic Geography .................................. 159 Luca Spinesi 11 Consuming the Spectacle: Tourism and Communication Technologies in Santiago de Compostela .............................................. 167 Carlos Ferrás Sexto and Yolanda García Vázquez Index ................................................................................................................. 179 List of Figures Fig. 2.1 Quantgeog airlines fl ight plan ....................................................... 34 Fig. 6.1 Study areas .................................................................................... 86 Fig. 8.1 Visual land mines in Detroit .......................................................... 132 Fig. 8.2 For those in the know .................................................................... 133 Fig. 8.3 Counteracting negative images: UR’s alternative tour of Detroit (Clockwise – The Heidelberg Project, The Motown Museum, Indian Village house)..................................................... 136 Fig. 11.1 Location of Santiago de Compostela, Galicia, Spain .................... 172 Fig. 11.2 Idyllic image of Santiago de Compostela...................................... 175 vii List of Tables Table 6.1 Results of the grocery model ......................................................... 93 Table 6.2 Results of the electronics model .................................................... 93 Table 6.3 Results of the travel model ............................................................ 94 Table 8.1 Detroit’s population, 1940–2010 ................................................... 125 ix Chapter 1 Introduction: Fusing Economic and Cultural Geography Barney Warf In retrospect, the long-standing separation of economic and cultural geography seems ludicrous, even analytically disastrous. Two major parts of a discipline renowned for the diversity of its theoretical views and the heterogeneity of topics that it studies have suffered for decades in relative isolation, as if the economy and culture had little to do with one another. Fortunately, what have long been distinct sub-disciplines, each with its own body of theory, vocabulary, methodology, and topics of inquiry, recently have increasingly merged, an intersection fostered by their mutual interest in issues of social relations, power, and location. Economic geography has typically taken the domain of production for its point of departure, focusing on the dynamics of capitalist development and underdevelop- ment over space and time, subsuming issues such as labor markets, technological change, transportation and communications, geographies of the fi rm, international trade, and regional restructuring. In part, economic geography’s long-standing detachment from culture refl ected its earlier infatuation with neoclassical economics, which views the economy as a black box utterly detached from the rest of society, as if it were devoid of social, political, economic (and spatial) origins and consequences. Thus Barnes (2005 :68) notes that “Neoclassical economics is extreme in its aversion to culture.” In this sterile reading, the only actor who matters is that desolate being, homo economicus , a purely self-interested creature lacking any consciousness but utility lines. Fortunately, most neoclassical nonsense has been purged from geography as it embraced various species of political economy and social theory, and more recently, come to acknowledge that the economy is deeply shaped by cultural norms and practices, that economy and culture are mutually constitutive. For the last decade or more, economic geography has thus undergone a pronounced “cultural turn,” a transformation that has met with a variety of reactions. For some, the cultural turn is mere passing intellectual fashion (Crang 1997 ; Barnett 1998 ) . Many B. Warf (*) Department of Geography , University of Kansas , Lawrence , KS , USA e-mail: [email protected] B. Warf (ed.), Encounters and Engagements between Economic and Cultural 1 Geography, GeoJournal Library 104, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-2975-9_1, © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2012 2 B. Warf view it as a chance to expand the defi nition of the economic (Martin and Sunley 2001 ) . Thrift ( 2000a,b ) welcomes it as a long overdue necessity. Others accept it but note the on-going tension between the two kingdoms that it is supposed to unite (McDowell 2000 ) . Andrew Sayer ( 2001 ) cautions against invoking cultural analysis as a panacea for the oversights of Marxism by overstating its role in the “often brutal economically dominated world” (Sayer 1997 :25). For yet others, it amounts to an attack on political economy, even a lethal assault on economic geography (Rodrigues-Pose 2001 ) . Cultural geography, in contrast, has traditionally centered on the domain of social reproduction, a suite of topics that includes cultural landscapes, ethnicity, represen- tation, discourse, gender and sexuality, everyday life, and identity formation. As cultural geographers have grappled with the situated nature of culture and consciousness, its embodiment in living beings engaged in interaction with nonhuman actors, and the pervasive role of power in shaping ideology and everyday life, they have been drawn into issues such as the uneven topologies of capitalist landscapes and globalization, and regional restructuring. Unfortunately, unlike the cultural turn that has engulfed economic geography,

Load more