lecture 2 human geography - themes and perspectives of geography about place
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Human Geography , FootHill College ,Lecture 2 - Outline for Week 2 of Human Geography Course ( Summer 2010 ) Bret Wallach ,TRANSCRIPT
Themes and Perspectives of Geography About Place
Geographical Perspectives The big question for many geographers is “what is out there?” In your reading so far you have come across Wallach’s comment that geographers are “terminally childish.” What does he mean by this? Methods used by geographers:
• Narrative-‐descriptive • Comparison-‐contrast • Idiographic (ideas)
Concept of Place So, what is “place” and why does it have meaning for us? Geographer Yi-‐Fu Tuan said in 1975 that place is the “center of meaning constructed by experience” for humans. It is the way we make the world meaningful and the way we experience the world. Another way of thinking about place comes from Tim Creswell: “When humans invest meaning in a portion of space and then become attached to it in some way (naming is one such way) it becomes a place.” Toponyms (place names derived from topographic features) reflect the past and shape the future. As an example, let’s look at a place in India – Darjeeling. Darjeeling is a place nearly on the opposite side of the world from us. Darjeeling is located in the Indian state: West Bengal.
Darjeeling is on the other side of the world so why should we care? Why does it provide such a good example of “place”?
• If you drink tea you have probably been connected to Darjeeling in some way.
• It teaches us about “globalization” and its history • It teaches us about “place” and all its complexities • Finally, since we are all geographers for at least this quarter – human curiosity. This is partly what Wallach means about geography being terminally childish. Geographers still believe that curiosity is central to research, understanding the world around us, and coming to terms with our relationship to one another, “nature”, and non-‐human life forms.
Darjeeling is the “Champagne of Teas”
The region has ideal soil and a temperate tropical climate, which is perfect for tea production. Traditional hand-‐crafted methods are used in producing Darjeeling teas. Darjeeling produces nearly 20,000,000 lbs of tea each year about 7% of India’s total output. The carefully cultivated image keeps Darjeeling tea in the center of the market. Darjeeling is both place name and brand name.
Darjeeling is most known for its tea, but also its designation as a UNESCO World Heritage site. It is actually the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway that is the World Heritage Site. The train is one of the only remaining steam locomotives still in use in India. But it is Darjeeling as a colonial outpost and internationally famous tea region that concerns us here.
Today there are 85-‐90 tea “gardens” that produce the bulk of the region’s tea. More than 60% of the workers are women and tea plantations are increasingly operated by worker cooperatives.
Tea plantation in Darjeeling (Wikipedia image)
Global Darjeeling
“Globalization” is really not new – it is, in fact, a very old idea. We think of it now as an emerging “new world order” but it has foundations that reach back to the European colonization of the world. The East India Company and British Empire dominated most of the world beginning in 1600 when the Company received a Royal Charter to establish outposts throughout South Asia.
The East India Company dominated South Asia through trade, diplomacy, military conquest, and looting (theft). This lasted until the Sepoy Revolt of 1857-‐58 in which the company’s Bengalese soldiers revolted. Rather than freedom from domination, though, the revolt led to the establishment of the British Raj, which remained in power from 1858 to 1947. Darjeeling became a colonial outpost in about 1835. It was one of the first “hill stations” established by the British. A hill station is just what it sounds like – outposts established at higher altitudes by the military and civilian arms of the British government. Before this, though, Darjeeling was a tiny mountain crossroads dominated by Muslim Mongols around 1200. Dominated by Hindu-‐Nepalese Gorkhas in the late 1700s. The East India Company took possession formally in the 1830s. In 1839 tea seedlings were smuggled into Darjeeling by the British Superintendant of the outpost. By 1865, cheap land and abundant labor provided by colonialism made possible 40 tea gardens that totaled 10,000 acres. Some of the important legacies of colonialism still visible in Darjeeling include a Hindu, Napalese majority, territorial inclusion in India’s West Bengal State, and modern development. We will discuss development in more detail later in the quarter, but there are conflicting arguments about the impact of colonialism in places like India. Did colonialism lay a strong foundation for modern development in the form of:
• Infrastructure (e.g. Darjeeling Himalayan Railroad) • Industry – tea and tourism • Connections to the English-‐speaking world • Education
OR is the legacy of colonialism in India permanent underdevelopment?
• Plundered local economies • Ruined traditional societies • Geopolitical instability • Ravaged environments
There are, of course, other good examples of why place matters, but in the text Wallach focuses on India and China quite extensively so this seemed a good
example to use. Darjeeling also has a kind of romantic appeal, which also makes it interesting.
Human Geography Place forms part of our identity, ranging from the local to the global. There are about 190 modern states, but there are also many stateless nations as well as other minorities/dependencies. Some examples include Kurdistan, Quebec, Puerto Rico, and Northern Ireland. So, how do we group ourselves in order to make sense or some kind of order in our perception of the world in which we live?
• A simple order of about half-‐dozen pieces, defined by nature? • 3 or more biological “races”? • 5 or more geophysical “continents”?
A Better Choice? Perhaps ten or so world regions
• “continents” but different than how they are currently defined. Perhaps defined historically-‐culturally rather than naturally.
• An example would be South Asia as a continent.
South Asia as a Continent This makes sense on many levels. First, South Asia is one of the world’s major population clusters.
Hinduism helps distinguish South Asia, but look at the map below and notice the presence of other global religions also.
South Asia is also home to a major branch of the Indo-European language family.
BUT, like all other regions of the world, especially the large “world regions” – South Asia is not a monolith. There is no real lingua franca (common language) despite the history of Sanskrit. There are dozens of different living languages, many of which are official languages, with countless dialects. There are divisions along the lines of: rich vs. poor, urban vs. rural, modern vs. traditional, Hindu vs. others.
Wallach’s South Asia (Ch. 8)
Although we’ll read chapter 8 later in the quarter, it’s important to take a look at the way Wallach describes South Asia. Could it be considered a continent? Basic Geography
• India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh ( can include other countries also) • Himalayas (“house of snow”) and the Indus, Ganges, and Brahmaputra Rivers • Indo-‐Gangetic plain (Punjab to Bengal) • The margins: Thar Desert and Sind, Chattisgarh Jungle, Deccan Plateau
Historic Foundations • 4000 BP: Indus Valley Civilization (Harappa and Mohenjo-‐Daro) • 3000-‐4000 BP: Indo-Aryan invation/migration (“nobles” from the northwest)_ • Net result: agricultural society built around Sanskrit and the “eternal law”
(Hinduism) Ideological Foundations
• Polytheism (Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva, and their many “avatar” representations) • Social hierarchy (Varnas/Castes) marked by a high degree of fatalism (samsara
and karma) • Social order and “emotional support”, or an “impregnable rationale for ignoring
pain” (78) Challenges to this order:
• Atheistic, nonviolent Buddhism (Sri Lanka, Tibet) • Monotheistic Islam (Pakistan, Bangladesh) • Modern secularism
Darjeeling the Place
Place Matters
• Places are unique, but not necessarily exceptional, settings. • Places help organize out thoughts, “centers of meaning” (Yi-‐Fu Tuan) • Place is thus marketable and highly imagined
Questions concerning how “place” works? • What do we learn about Darjeeling the city (the real place) through our consumption of Darjeeling the tea (the imagined place)?
• What do you not learn? • Why call it “Darjeeling” tea? How important is authenticity to the work of “place”?
The Concept of Place
Geographer Tim Cresswell offers three major versions of how we might conceive of place:
• Meaningful location (What place is.) Location is made meaningful as “sites of history and identity”.
• Place as dynamic process (how place works). In this context, place is an “embodied relationship with the world. Places are constructed by people doing things and in this sense are never ‘finished’ but are constantly being performed.”
• Place as politically charged way of understanding the world (what place should be). In this version, place becomes “space invested with meaning in the context of power.” It is grounded in asymmetrical power relations among peoples within and between regions of the world.