Masons, Tricksters and Knowledge Spaces

Posted on May 11, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Turnbull, David. 2000. Masons, Tricksters, and Cartographers: Comparative Studies in the Sociology of Scientific and Indigenous Knowledge. New York: Routledge

Turnbull aims to show that all knowledge production, including the technoscientific, is “motley”—i.e. a messy meshwork of places, practices, contingencies, and creativity. “The process of knowledge assemblage is a dialectical one in which forms of social space are coproduced. The interactive, contingent assemblage of space and knowledge, sustained and created by social labour, results in what I call a ‘knowledge space’” (4). The knowledge spaces discussed in the book include the construction practices of gothic cathedrals by masons, the production of maps by colonial and European state-makers, indigenous Pacific navigators, scientists and governments seeking a malaria vaccines, and turbulence research. Continue reading →

Posted in Assemblages, Maps, Networks, Place, Power, Science & Tech., Spatiality | 1 Comment

Sassen: Territory Authority Rights

Posted on May 7, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Sassen, Saskia. 2006. Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

I could not get into this book. Saskia Sassen’s broader goal in this book is to show the emergence of national and global scales and how these entities have always existed, in complex and changing ways, “inside” of each other. She uses the dictionary definition of assemblage to describe these ever-changing configurations by tracing the tension-filled combinations of territory, authority, and rights within particular historical conjunctures. In her narrative, “capabilities” come together at particular “tipping points” (conjunctures) in ways that suddenly allows them to “jump tracks and get lodged in novel logics, projects, or path dependencies” (28). Continue reading →

Posted in Law, Nation/Nationalism, Scale, Spatiality, Territory, The State | Comments Off on Sassen: Territory Authority Rights

Human Territoriality

Posted on May 6, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Sack, Robert D. 1986. Human Territoriality: Its Theory and History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Intro and Ch. 1]

Sack describes human territoriality as a specifically strategic process, departing instantly from the notion of territoriality as a biological human drive. He sees power as an inherent part of territoriality, even says “territoriality is the basis of power.” Proposing a definition, Sack writes, “In this book territoriality will be defined as the attempt by an individual or group to affect, influence, or control people, phenomena, and relationships, by delimiting and asserting control over a geographic area. This area will be called the territory” (19). Continue reading →

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Paasi on Boundaries as Processes

Posted on May 5, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Paasi, Ansi. 1999. “Boundaries as Social Processes: Territoriality in the World of Flows.” Geopolitics 3(1): 669-680.

Paasi attempts to think the changing strategies, meanings, and identities produced by boundaries (by which he mainly means national borders) in the context of a world of flows. Seeing boundaries as a process helps him show the indeterminancy of boundaries: both as they are produced via practices of all kinds and socio-cultural discursive formation as well as their changing and politically contingent historical configuration and meaning. Continue reading →

Posted in Boundaries, Nation/Nationalism, Power, Spatiality, Territory, The State | 1 Comment

Territorial Trap

Posted on May 5, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Agnew, John. 1994. “The Territorial Trap: The Geographical Assumptions of International Relations Theory.” Review of International Political Economy 1(1): 53-80.

In a more recent piece, here’s how John Agnew described his influential 1994 article on the Territorial Trap: “The purpose was to show how much the conventional wisdom in the field of International Relations misses examining what I took to be one of its most crucial assumptions: that the quintessential state of International Relations is simply and straightforwardly a territorial entity” (2010, 779). Agnew says he wanted to upset the notion of inter-national relations from its privileged place of emphasis in the politics of global affairs, while suggesting more attention to different spatial configurations and scales as important “sites” of analysis. The territorial trap had actually frozen geography. Continue reading →

Posted in Historical-Geographies, Nation/Nationalism, Political Economy, Scale, Territory, The State | 1 Comment

Territorialization of State Power

Posted on May 5, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Vandergeest, Peter, and Nancy Lee Peluso. 1995. “Territorialization and State Power in Thailand.” Theory and Society 24: 385-426.

Vandergeest and Peluso’s landmark article concerns the way in which state power is territorialized within the borders of a politically defined space and the relationship of this process “to the allocation and realization of resource access rights” in addition to control over the people who use such resources (387).

We argue … that a territorialized local administration and market system are only one aspect of a much broader process of territorialization. Thus in this article we systematize and generalize the analysis of territorialization. We then illustrate the process through a discussion of the establishment of territorial civil administrative units, and the state’s attempts to take over the administration of rights to land and “forest” in Thailand. (386)

Continue reading →

Posted in Forests, Historical-Geographies, Law, Power, Spatiality, Territory, The State, Violence | 1 Comment

Production of Territory

Posted on May 4, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Brenner, Neil, and Stuart Elden. 2009. “Henri Lefebvre on State, Space and Territory.” International Political Sociology 3(4): 353-377.

I have read this incredibly important article enough times that I hardly need to be writing notes on it. It’s pretty engrained in my mind. Maintaining Lefebvre’s funny obsession with triads, Neil Brenner and Stuart Elden explain they will explore Lefebvre’s writing on space and the state—that is, Lefebvre as a theorist of territory—by tracing “three key dimensions of his approach to state space as territory—first, the production of territory; second, state territorial strategies; and third, the ‘territory effect,’ namely, the state’s tendency, through its territorial form, to naturalize its own transformative effects on sociospatial relations” (353). Their analysis explicitly hangs on the notion of “state space as territory” (354). Continue reading →

Posted in Boundaries, Henri Lefebvre, Nation/Nationalism, Political Economy, Power, Scale, Spatiality, Territory, The State | 1 Comment

Antonio Gramsci: On Hegemony

Posted on May 4, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

In Antonio Gramsci’s first Prison Notebook—he wrote 29 of them—he’s still using hegemony in the sense of a crude political leadership, much in the same way as he used it in his seminal essay “Some Aspects of the Southern Question.” In fact, entry Q1§44 is kind of a continuation of the Southern Question.

Continue reading →

Posted in Antonio Gramsci, Hegemony, Marxism, Power, The State | 2 Comments

Guha: Dominance Without Hegemony?

Posted on May 4, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Guha, Ranajit. 1997. Dominance Without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Intro & Ch. 1]

Intuitively, it’s odd that the Subaltern Studies crowd has drawn so heavily on Gramsci, since he had surprisingly little to say about violence—odd, since his work tried so hard to grapple with the rise of fascism. Indeed, how do the subalternists reconcile Gramsci’s silences with the utter brutality and force that colonialism entailed? While flying the banner of Subaltern Studies by centering “the politics of the people,” Guha’s book provides one answer. Continue reading →

Posted in Antonio Gramsci, Critique, Hegemony, Historical-Geographies, Law, Nation/Nationalism, Post-Colonial, Power, The State, Violence | 5 Comments

Suffering for Territory

Posted on May 3, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Moore, Donald. 2005. Suffering for Territory: Race, Place, and Power in Zimbabwe. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

This is a hard book to summarize because of the intricacy of the argument, its theoretical architectures, and its deep ethnographic empirics—they are all intricately woven together. Donald S. Moore’s keyword in this book is “entanglements” and there’s no better word that sums up many of this book’s key insights. The intricacies of these entanglements is largely dependent on the various scales—broadly construed—that are ensnarled and knotted in this place of eastern Zimbabwe known as the Kaerezi (which until further notice, I like pronouncing it as CAH-RAY-ZEE, as in “damn, you crazy”). Continue reading →

Posted in Antonio Gramsci, Governmentality, Historical-Geographies, Michel Foucault, Nation/Nationalism, Place, Post-Colonial, Power, Race & Ethnicity, Scale, Spatiality, Territory, Violence | 1 Comment