Dialogues in Human Geography
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Dialogues in Human Geography http://dhg.sagepub.com/ Up from the depths: Reply to three critics of Geopiracy Joel Wainwright Dialogues in Human Geography 2014 4: 96 DOI: 10.1177/2043820614527888 The online version of this article can be found at: http://dhg.sagepub.com/content/4/1/96 Published by: http://www.sagepublications.com Additional services and information for Dialogues in Human Geography can be found at: Email Alerts: http://dhg.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts Subscriptions: http://dhg.sagepub.com/subscriptions Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav Permissions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav Citations: http://dhg.sagepub.com/content/4/1/96.refs.html >> Version of Record - Mar 25, 2014 What is This? Downloaded from dhg.sagepub.com at OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY on March 26, 2014 96 Dialogues in Human Geography 4(1) one to become fluent in a language other than the institution, the American Geographical Society, to one learned at home. These incursions into unfami- weather a rough patch in its cash flow. liar countryside can also transform the lives of sub- In the broad view of scholarly concerns, this jects, especially when they read what has been book is a tempest in an ideological teapot of the written about their communities, see the maps made author’s own design. Lack of a do ut des arrange- of them, or engage a researcher for the first time. ment suggests that Wainwright’s pamphlet should The Bowman Expeditions have been and will not have been published until he at least had a continue to be about learning about the world. That strong case. It is a bottom-feeding exercise, unsub- disarmingly simple objective was the clinching stantiated in most respects, of a salon intellectual in argument of Jerry Dobson’s selling point to the a Gramscian swoon. Suppositions, innuendos, and FSMO in the wake of the Iraqi fiasco brought on, insinuations are reckless and feckless substitutes in part, by the ignorance of American elites in the for the compelling activity of figuring out, first- government and media about the complexities of hand, places and processes in a diverse world. Geo- that Middle Eastern country. The Bowman Expedi- graphical knowledge is a banquet, the staples of tions have also trained graduate students in firsthand which are derived from empirically derived stud- research. In addition, the funding from FMSO is ies. Without such studies geography will die as a also helping the venerable 163-year-old sponsoring formal discipline. Response there is almost nothing novel in Gade’s essay. Gade dutifully summarizes Dobson’s views, but this is Up from the depths: Reply to three no great feat: say what you like about Dobson, his critics of Geopiracy writings are voluminous and transparent1. Gade would like us to see the Bowman expeditions as Response by: Joel Wainwright, Ohio State University, self-evidently virtuous and wonders why I have not USA ‘laud[ed] Dobson for his prescience, diligence, and entrepreneurial spirit’ (p. 94). For Gade, ‘the Bow- Three reviews, two different perspectives. Craib and man Expeditions have been and will continue to Mutersbaugh extend Geopiracy’s analysis in impor- be about learning the world. That disarmingly tant directions and raise provocative questions; from simple objective was the clinching argument of Gade, bitter invective and sullen defensiveness. Jerry Dobson’s selling point to the FMSO’ (p. 96). I begin with the latter to provide a view from the Dobson could not ask for a more faithful defense. bottom—since that is where Gade is fishing for In the end, however, we are simply asked to take me—then rise to meet the sunlight with Craib and Gade’s word, which rests upon that of those he Mutersbaugh. defends. For added assurance Gade says he has Before descending, let me say this. The debate ‘no ideological axe to grind’, unlike me—or, I surrounding the Bowman controversy has been over- would imagine, Craib and Mutersbaugh. personalized. This only reduces our ability to For those of us who do not simply take Dobson at appreciate its deep historical roots and wider political his word—for those scholars with a modicum of implications. I do not wish to add to this tendency, so skepticism or with a willingness to consider the I will not reply to Gade’s ad hominum remarks. potential validity of Dobson’s indigenous critics in Oaxaca—Gade’s attack on Geopiracy only raises Swimming with the Sauerian school new questions. If he is certain about the innocent For those among us who have slogged through Jerry reasons the US military had for funding his field- Dobson’s writings on the Bowman expeditions, work in the 1960s, why not elaborate upon them and Downloaded from dhg.sagepub.com at OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY on March 26, 2014 Book review forum 97 provide evidence? How does Gade know what the The second concerns his defense of Carl Sauer’s FMSO saw as Dobson’s ‘clinching argument’ in use of military funding. Sauer’s ghost appears in their decision to fund him? How, ultimately, does every defense of the Bowman expeditions, but until he understand his own motivations, given his refusal now the militant empiricists have not so explicitly to even acknowledge the influence of ideology? appealed to his legacy. Somehow according to Gade does not answer these questions. This is not Gade, the fact that Sauer took funds from the US to suggest that I can empirically disprove his inter- military to conduct research in Latin America2 pretation of the US military’s interests in geographi- means that geographers who do the same today cal research (including his own work). Yet surely should not be challenged or questioned. Yet no one, we can say more than Gade with his casual assertion not even Sauer, is beyond criticism. that the US military ‘had its reasons’ for funding his We should take this opportunity to inquire into work, which apparently deserve no further attention the multigenerational ties between Sauer’s ‘chil- in his view since these reasons ‘did not extend to dren’ and the US military. Most of those who controlling decisions about the projects themselves’ have participated in or publicly defended the (p. 95). That perspective—which has a history I will Bowman expeditions (Gade included) are human discuss briefly—does not get us any nearer an geographers who trace their intellectual ancestry understanding of the situation today, where the US to Sauer and abide by his conception of the field.3 military is actively funding, accumulating, analyz- Sauer had practically nothing to say about the poli- ing, and employing geographical research to domi- tics and power dynamics of knowledge—not to nate what it calls ‘battlespace’. No, the military mention his military funding—and I think it a fair does not explain its ‘reasons’. Nor does the military generalization to say that his intellectual grandchil- need to directly control a scholaroraresearchproj- dren reiterate his silence, faithfully if not proudly. ect for the data to be useful. Much of what geogra- Elsewhere Gade writes, ‘the Sauerian circle of affi- phers routinely produce has potential military nity has refused the notion that geographic research applications; if the military can assist geographers is most justified when it is applied to solving social in conducting research, it may well reap the problems. Sauer was resolute in insisting that curi- rewards—whether the ostensibly independent osity is the driving force behind doing good geo- scholar is aware or not. graphy. He would have been the first to warn of Isaiah Bowman understood this well. It forms the danger of the “relevancy orientation”. ...The the basis of his arguments for geography’s place Sauerians have rarely dealt with the burning issues in the social sciences and utility to American of the day’ (2009: 32–33). Such unwillingness to empire (Smith, 2003). As he writes, ‘the attainment reflect upon social problems and politics has proven of every objective ... isaidedbyhavingthefacts useful for the US military. As the latest Bowman of the earth gathered in flexible form’ (Bowman, expeditions reveal (Wainwright, 2013a), getting the 1934: 215). This argument—a truism for the US US military to pay for fieldwork in Latin America military today—grounded Bowman’s militant remains common Sauerian practice. empiricism. It inspires the expeditions carried out For those us of outside the ‘Sauerian circle of in his name. affinity’,4 important questions remain: Has cultural Gade’s essay provides two clues for further ecology’s state/military funding shaped the field? research. First is his statement that ‘the funding from If so, how? How has the field’s relative silence [US Army] FMSO is ...helping the ...American about politics been facilitated by its theoretical com- Geographical Society ...weather a rough patch in its mitments? To answer these questions, we need a cash flow’ (p. 96). This claim, which I suspect is true, research program analogous to Trevor Barnes’ meti- implies that the US military is propping up an culous studies of the US Cold War’s contributions to ostensibly scholarly organization that might other- geography’s quantitative revolution and its implica- wise fail financially. Quite a revelation, meriting tions for postwar economic geography (e.g. Barnes, further reflection. 2008). As I have argued elsewhere (Wainwright, Downloaded from dhg.sagepub.com at OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY on March 26, 2014 98 Dialogues in Human Geography 4(1) 2008, chapter 6), we need to finish the critique of We should be glad that Said, a literary critic, so often cultural ecology. plunged his pen to write about US foreign policy, ignoring the ‘experts’ who told him to go back to Con- rad.