Why the History of Economic Geography Matters: the Case of Central Place Theory
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RELATED TITLES Documents Science & Tech Science 0 0 98 views Reopke Lecture in Economic Geography Uploaded by pkrish12345 The Subtle Art of Not Sapiens: A Brief The Alchemist Giving a F*ck: A History of Full description Save Embed Share Print Reopke Lecture in Economic Geography: Notes from the Underground: Why the History of Economic Geography Matters: The Case of Central Place Theory t Trevor J. Barnes cThe discipline of Anglo-American economic geo Department of Geography a phy seems to care little about its history. Its practitio- University of British ners tend toward the “just do it” school of scho Columbia r tin which a concern with the present moment in eco- 1984 West Mall snomic geography subordinates all else. In contrast, I Vancouver b BC V6T 1Z2 aargue that it is vital to know economic geography’s CANADA history. Historical knowledge of our di [email protected] enables us to realize that we are frequently “slaves of some defunct” economic geographer; that we cannot escape our geography and history, which seep very pores of the ideas that we profess; and that the full connotations of economic geographic ideas are sometimes purposively hidden, secret even, revealed Key words: only later by investigative historical scholarship. My history of economic geography antidote: “notes from the underground,” which central place theory a history of economic geography that delves below Edward Ullman the reported surface. This history is often subv Walter Christaller contradicting conventionaldepictions; it is antir alist, querying universal (timeless) foundation seeks out deliberately hidden and buried economic geographic practices, relying on sources found underground—personal papers and correspon- dence stored in one subterranean archive or another. To exemplify the importance of notes fro underground, I present an extended case the 20th-century development of central place associated with two economic geographer German, Walter Christaller (1893–1969), American, Edward L. Ullman (1912–76). ecge_1140 1..26 RELATED TITLES Documents Science & Tech Science 0 0 98 views Reopke Lecture in Economic Geography Uploaded by pkrish12345 The Subtle Art of Not Sapiens: A Brief The Alchemist Giving a F*ck: A History of Full description Save Embed Share Print ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY Acknowledgments The archives [a]re anarsenal ofsort (Stoler 20 I thankYuko Aoyama for I am inclined to believe that the “Central Place” th full of dynamite. (Ullman Papers, Eugene Van Cleef to honoring me with the Edward Ullman, 1941) invitation to give the 2011 Roepke lecture.Allen Scott I am dynamite. (Nietzsche 1979 [1888], 1) was always my first choice to be a discussant for the Economic geography has often been reluctant to take article, and I am both on its past. Its attitude toward history has been li flattered and grateful that he of one of the people it has studied, Henry Ford: “We accepted the invitation.The want to live in the present, and the only history that is main research for the article worth a tinker’s damn is the history we make today,” was undertaken when I held he said to the Chicago Tribune in 1916. In contrast, a fellowship from the Peter my guiding text for this article is from a contempo- Wall Institute of Advanced rary of Henry Ford, George Santayana (1905, 284), Studies (2009–2010), 2 among other things a Harvard pragmatist philos University of British “Those who cannot remember the past are cond Columbia, to which I am to repeat it.” indebted.The support and For almost 15 years I have been trying to remember encouragement of Joan Seidl the past of economic geography. It began with record- made it all possible. ing 36 separate oral histories by econom graphers over a five-year period beginning in 1997 (Barnes 2004).1 All the interviewees were in one way or another involved in economic geography’s quanti- tative revolution that began in the late 1950s (Barnes 2011a). They included a few original pioneers like Chauncy Harris and William Garrison, as many second-generation followers, such as Scott. I first met Allen at the November 1978 annual meeting of the Regional Science Associat Chicago when I was a first-year graduate student. At that point, he still half believed in the quantitative revolution. Most of the other conference participants were full-on believers, especially the founder of the Regional Science Association, Walter Isard (1979), who gave the opening plenary address that explained the world in a single flow diagram and three equa 1 I recorded oral histories from the following 36 economic geog- RELATED TITLES Documents Science & Tech Science 0 0 98 views Reopke Lecture in Economic Geography Uploaded by pkrish12345 The Subtle Art of Not Sapiens: A Brief The Alchemist Giving a F*ck: A History of Full description Save Embed Share Print Vol. 88 No. 1 2012 By the time I interviewed Allen in 1998, he was not even a half believer, but his funny and astute stories, told with perfect recall and vocal mimicry, and, most impressive of all, spoken in grammatically impeccable complete paragraphs, were a highlight of the entire project. My reasons for collecting the oral histories were partly personal. I wanted to unde my own academic biography that began in the mid-1970s as an undergraduate and was irrevocably shaped by mathematical equations, multivariate inferential statistical tech- niques, dog-eared SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences) computer manuals, and compulsory reading lists for courses that included works by Walter Isard and Allen Scott. But there was an intellectual motivation as well: to write the history of econo geography from the perspective of science studies. In line with Henry Ford’s positi histories of economic geography had ever been written. And those that existed tended toward rationalism. They depicted an earlier descriptive regional economic geograph prescientific, which changed only in the late 1950s when pioneers adopted rationalist theories and methods.At that point, economic geography became a proper science, science (Barnes 2011b). In contrast, science studies was avowedly antirationalist. Origi- nating in the 1970s, it was an approach that insisted that the origins of knowledge were social, and that applied even to abstract, formal knowledge written as mathematical equations and in SPSS code. The social went all the way down. There was no herm sealed, privileged realm where knowledge was pure and simple. The complicated social character of knowledge could be best appreciated, suggested science studies, by carrying out empirical, often historical, case studies, focusing on the detailed practices of produc- ing knowledge. That was precisely the end to which my 36 oral histories were directed. I quickly realized, though, that oral histories alone were insufficient. First, the informa- tion they providedwas partial, sometimesthin,subject togaps,andoccasionally unr The oral histories needed supplementation, triangulation with other so with published texts, certainly, but also with unpublished material that could be found only in archives. Second, in listening to the interviewees, I often felt that into their stories halfway through.Although theinterviewees werescrupulousin tel their stories from the beginning, no one reflected on the historical conditions that enabled their narratives to begin as theydid. I am not blaming anyone, but those beginnings to be told partly by secondary sources and again partly by going into the archives. The institutional archives included Walter Isard’s immaculately groomed science collection at Cornell University, as well as the slipshod and scattered pape Office of Strategic Service housed at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) in Washington, D.C. And the personal archives included Edward Ullman’s, located at the University of Washington, Seattle; Edward Ackerman’s, lodged in the spectacular space of the American Centennial Center, Laramie, Wyoming; Joh Stewart’s, found in the strangely cramped Dickensian Rare Books and Special Collec- tions Division at Princeton University; and Richard Hartshorne’s, stored at the globe- filled America Geographical Society’s libra Mil ukee Wisconsin. The RELATED TITLES Documents Science & Tech Science 0 0 98 views Reopke Lecture in Economic Geography Uploaded by pkrish12345 The Subtle Art of Not Sapiens: A Brief The Alchemist Giving a F*ck: A History of Full description Save Embed Share Print ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY The purpose of this article is to continue in the track of understanding the history of economic geography from the perspective of science studies. But I intend to go back before the immediate quantitative revolution, disclosing some of the historical conditions that enabled my interviewees to begin their oral histories as they did.The article is into three unequally sized parts. First, I unpack my Dostoevsky-inspired mai elaborating my framework and general argument: that the history of the dis matters. We are all, to paraphrase Keynes (1936, 383), “slaves of some defunct” ec geographer. We cannot avoid history. The past is passed on. It enters into the very pores of the ideas that we profess. Furthermore, following science studies, historical inquiry of those ideas must be critical, if not subversive, scraping away surface obfuscations to expose the conjuncture of social forces lying beneath. These ideas include even supposed universals that are found in logic and rationalist epistemologies. I claim that ideas be true only in history and are not born true outside history. “Time will tell but epistemology won’t,” as Richard Rorty (1979, 4) tersely put it. Second, I suggest that particularly periods for the transformation of ideas in economic geography is during war produces not only enormous material effects but immaterial ones as well. During 4 ideas are melted down, recast, drawing in a multitude, and mobilized for ends both noble and heinous. Here I make use of concepts elaborated in science studies (although not all originated there): first, the notions of hailing and interpellation, discussed by Donna Harraway (1997) (albeit by way of Louis Althusser 1971), and second, the idea of the mangle, suggested by Andrew Pickering (1995).