Cultural Historical Geography

The Rise of Tobacco as an Appalachian Staple

by Katie Algeo

Illegal evictions? Overwriting possession and orality with law’s violence in Cambodia

by Simon Springer

Springer, S. Forthcoming. Illegal evictions? Overwriting possession and orality with law’s violence in Cambodia. Journal of Agrarian Change.

The unfolding of a juridico-cadastral system in present-day Cambodia is at odds with local understandings of... more The unfolding of a juridico-cadastral system in present-day Cambodia is at odds with local understandings of landholding, which are entrenched in notions of community consensus and existing occupation. The discrepancy between such orally recognized antecedents and the written word of law have been at the heart of the recent wave of dispossessions that have swept across the country. Contra the standard critique that corruption has set the tone, this paper argues that evictions in Cambodia are often literally underwritten by the articles of law. Whereas ‘possession’ is a well-understood and accepted concept in Cambodia, a cultural basis rooted in what James C. Scott refers to as ‘orality’, coupled with a long history of subsistence agriculture, semi-nomadic lifestyles, barter economies, and–until recently–widespread land availability have all ensured that notions of ‘property’ are vague among the country’s majority rural poor. In drawing a firm distinction between possessions and property, where the former is premised upon actual use and the latter is embedded in exploitation, this article examines how proprietorship is inextricably bound to the violence of law.

Unofficial Call For Papers: Geography, Ethnicity, and Medicine

by Molly Jones-Lewis

I couldn't fit this whole thing on my status update, so I'm posting it sneakily as a paper.  See the 'abstract' for more details.

Unofficial Call For Papers: Geography, Ethnicity, and Medicine

This is a preliminary call for papers to... more Unofficial Call For Papers: Geography, Ethnicity, and Medicine

This is a preliminary call for papers to form a panel proposal for the CAMWS 2013 meeting in Iowa City. Submission to this panel do not guarantee that the panel will be accepted to CAMWS, but those selected will be part of the proposal. We are trying to find individuals we don't already know who work in this area.

Within the emerging and dynamic field of ancient technical literature there is a wealth of information addressing the way ancients viewed the nature of race and ethnicity through emerging sciences like geography and medicine in the diverse cultures of the ancient Mediterranean. This panel seeks to provide scholars working in this area with a forum to explore the exciting possibilities of this new direction in ancient ethnicity studies as well as an opportunity to collaborate towards further work. We are especially interested in papers that show the interactions between one or more of the fields (geography, ethnicity, and medicine--think Airs, Waters, Places or Pliny the Elder type stuff, maybe), and welcome contributions from any time period, so long as the focus is on the ancient Mediterranean.

Abstracts ca. 100-200 words should be submitted to Rebecca Kennedy (kennedyr@denison.edu) and Molly Jones-Lewis (mollyayn@gmail.com) by July 6, 2013.

"Location of Syria in Byzantine Writing: One question, Many Answers" Journal of Turkish Studies, 36 2011

by Koray Durak

Notes on German loan words in an areal Carpathian context

by Marek Stachowski

A current bibliography of Turkic etymologies 3 (1998-1999 et addenda)

by Marek Stachowski

Geographies of Family and Market: Virginia's Domestic Slave Trade in the Nineteenth Century

by Phillip Troutman

Archived website with mapping data from my dissertation research on enslaved migration out of Virginia, 1790-1860.

US Environmental History and Social Ecology Talk given to Yale University School of Environmental Studies and Forestry 13th April 2011

by Damian White

Talk I gave to Yale University School of Environmental Studies and Forestry, April 13th, 2011 about Murray Bookchin and US environmental history.

The Identification of Gamla

by Danny Syon

In D. Syon and Z. Yavor. Gamla II. The Shmarya Gutmann Excavations 1976–1989. The Architecture (IAA Reports 44). Jerusalem 2010. Pp.1–12.

Fuzzy Set Theory (or Fuzzy Logic) to Represent the Messy Data of Complex Human (and other) Systems

by J. B. (Jack) Owens

Co-authored with Emery A. Coppola, Jr.

Historians and Human Geographers deal with human systems or subsystems of considerable complexity. This situation... more Historians and Human Geographers deal with human systems or subsystems of considerable complexity. This situation presents a dilemma to those who use computational technologies, which demand a high level of precision to organize, analyze, and visualize information: the more complex the system is, the greater the imprecision of the available data. Historians and geographers often feel that their imprecise, ambiguous, contradictory, messy, largely qualitative information does not “fit” well in the available software categories, and they have trouble discussing the results produced when they work within computational environments because category assignment seems so arbitrary. This dilemma appears dramatically with the use of Geographically-Integrated History (GIH) as a research strategy. In this paper, we introduce fuzzy set theory (or fuzzy logic) as a proven solution for dealing with imprecision in complex systems.

Technonatures Introduction White Wilbert

by Damian White

An attempt to survey and think through the political implications of hybridity discourses such as Latour and Haraway for environmental politics. This is the introductory chapter from D.White and C.Wilbert (Eds) Technonatures: Environments, Technologies, Spaces, and Places in the Twenty-first CenturyISBN13: 978-1-55458-150-4, 2009.

Lots of other really interesting cuts in the book from Erik Swyngedouw, Sarah Whatmore, Mike Michael, Steve Hinchliffe and others ...check it out at Available from http://www.wlu.ca/press/Catalog/white-wilbert.shtml

Spanish Christian Sacred Sites: from the library to interoperable web services (WMS – WFS)

by J. B. (Jack) Owens

Co-authored with A. Barral Rojo, M. Castejón Cay, D. Ballari, M. Manso Callejo &  M. Bernabé Poveda

"Spanish Christian Sacred Sites: from the library to interoperable web services (WMS – WFS): Creation of an... more "Spanish Christian Sacred Sites: from the library to interoperable web services (WMS – WFS): Creation of an Interoperable Information Layer on Spanish Christian Shrines"

J. Owens [1], A. Barral Rojo [2], M. Castejón Cay [2], D. Ballari [2], M. Manso Callejo [2], M. Bernabé Poveda [2]

[1] Idaho State University, Pocatello, Idaho, USA
[2] Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain

Paper published in Proceedings of GIS Planet 2005, 30 May-2 June 2005, Estoril, Portugal

Defiant Laughter: Humour and the Aesthetics of Place in Late Nineteenth Century Montmartre

by Julian Brigstocke

Progress and Authenticity: Urban renewal, urban tourism, and the meaning(s) of New York in the mid-20th century

by Daniel London

Progress and Authenticity: New York Tourism in the Age of Urban Renewal

This paper examines how tourist practices and geographies changed in New York during the age of urban renewal, and the... more This paper examines how tourist practices and geographies changed in New York during the age of urban renewal, and the ways in which this reflected and shaped American attitudes towards urban space and its inhabitants.  By the late 1930s charges that the “old” New York was a chaotic and unhealthy environment in need of replacement gained a greater currency amongst the general public just as private-public bodies such as the New York Convention and Visitors Bureau were publicizing the sanitized, commercialized “renewed city” at the expense of its older districts. Framed as a city of modernity and progress in tourist literature, New York visitor practices transformed between the late 1930s and the mid 1950s as the old “slumming” itinerary gave way to a more selective geography concentrated in midtown.  Nonetheless, the growth of mass tourism helped spark a counter-reaction amongst other visitors seeking more “authentic” experiences  in places like Greenwich Village and the Lower East Side - and it was soon apparent that by threatening these places with destruction, the same urban renewal attracting one body of visitors would alienate another. The fear of this occurring was instrumental in convincing city authorities to pass the seminal New York Landmark Preservation Act of 1963.

The Social and Geographical Repositioning of a Minor Printer in Eighteenth Century Antwerp

by Steven Van Impe

Published in 'Gutenberg Jahrbuch' 86 (2011), p. 282-290.

More-than-human histories and the failure of grand state schemes: sylviculture in the New Forest, England

by Carl Griffin

Cultural Geographies, 17, 4 (2010)

As James Scott’s Seeing Like a State attests, forests played a central role in the rise of the modern state,... more As James Scott’s Seeing Like a State attests, forests played a central role in the rise of the modern state, specifically as test spaces for evolving methods of managing state resources at a distance, and as the location for grand state schemes. Together, such ambitions necessitated both the elimination of local understandings of forest management — to be replaced by centrally controlled scientific precision — and a narrowing of state vision. Forests thus began to be conflated with trees (and their timber) alone. All other aspects of the forest, both human and non-human, were ignored. Through the lens of the 18th and early 19th century New Forest in southern England, this paper examines the impact of government attempts to shift the focus of state forests from being remnant medieval hunting spaces to spaces of income generation through the creation of vast sylvicultural plantations. This state scheme not only reworked the relationship between the metropole and the provinces — something effected through systematic surveys and novel bureaucratic procedures — but also dramatically impacted upon the biophysical and cultural geographies of the forest. By equating forest space with trees alone, the British state failed to legislate for the actions of both local commoners and non-human others in resisting their schemes. Indeed, subsequent oppositions proved not only the tenacity of commoners in protecting their livelihoods but also the destructive power of non-human actants, specifically rabbits and mice. The paper concludes that grand state schemes necessarily fail due to their own internal illogic: the narrowing of state vision creates blind spots in which human and non-human lives assert their own visions.

Culture of violence or violent Orientalism? Neoliberalisation and imagining the 'savage other' in post-transitional Cambodia

by Simon Springer

Springer, S. 2009. Culture of violence or violent Orientalism? Neoliberalisation and imagining the "savage other" in post-transitional Cambodia. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. 34 (3), 305-319.

Violence and authoritarianism continue to resonate in Cambodia’s post-transitional landscape, leading many scholars,... more Violence and authoritarianism continue to resonate in Cambodia’s post-transitional landscape, leading many scholars, journalists, international donors and non-governmental organisations alike to posit a ‘culture of violence’ as responsible for the country’s democratic deficit and enduring violence. In contrast, this paper interprets the culture of violence thesis as a sweeping caricature shot through with Orientalist imaginaries, and a problematic discourse that underwrites the process of neoliberalisation. The culture of violence argument is considered to invoke particular imaginative geographies that problematically erase the contingency, fluidity and interconnectedness of the places in which violence occurs. While violence is certainly mediated through both culture and place, following Doreen Massey’s re-conceptualisation of space and place, this paper understands place not as a confined and isolated unit, but as a relational constellation within the wider experiences of space. This reflection allows us to recognise that any seemingly local, direct or cultural expression of violence is necessarily imbricated in the wider, structural patterns of violence, which in the current moment of political economic orthodoxy increasingly suggests a relationship to neoliberalism. Through the adoption of the culture of violence discourse, neoliberalisation is argued to proceed in the Cambodian context as a ‘civilising’ enterprise, where Cambodians are subsequently imagined as ‘savage others’.

Crang, M. 2004. Cultural regions and their uses -- Las Regiones culturales y sus usos: la interpretación de paisaje e identidad. In Regiones culturales Culturas regionales, eds. E. Cortés and R. Castañeda, 67-100. Mexico City: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes.

by Michael Crang

open access repository English version of paper published in Spanish

The idea of cultural regions and regional cultures has a long pedigree in several disciplines and traditions, and in... more The idea of cultural regions and regional cultures has a long pedigree in several disciplines and traditions, and in different national contexts. Indeed the variation of customs and habits across the face of the world seems one of the most basic elements experiencing the world. It is an impulse to curiosity, to travel, a source of misunderstanding and translation and sometimes conflict and hostility. Here I want to explore three consequences or issues thrown up by thinking of cultures as
spatially patterning the world. The first is that of defining which culture occupies which territory. Typically we think of place and culture as bound together – each shaping the other, but I want to
argue that our notion of these ‘regions’ and territories is at least as inflected by how the specific ways that have been used to interpret the world as by cultural patterns. In other words how do we define the ‘region’ or territory, and, relatedly, how do we define the culture. Second, this spatial patterning raises issues of scale. Thus we might at one level talk of ‘Latin American’ culture to refer to the shared histories of conquest, resistance and mixed Indian and Iberian heritage. At another level strong political claims are made by states to claim to legitimacy through the notion that one people form one state. In a problematic relationship to this then are accounts that see regional cultures within – and especially problematically – across nationstate borders. These we might say are thus respectively epistemological and ontological issues with thinking about regions and cultures. The third point I want to make is more of a consequence of how we think about regional cultures. It is to think then about how these ideas are represented, popularised and instantiated in society. So here I am going to chart particular preservation efforts through especially open air
museums. How they move from the realm of academic studies of folklore, ethnology, cultural geography into popular culture, political institutions and so forth. Of course it is not quite as simple as this since I will try and show that academic interest often derives from precisely popular sentiment and the cultural zeitgeist as much as intellectual curiosity.

Placing Stories, Performing Places: Spatiality in Joyce and Austen. Anglia - Zeitschrift für englische Philologie. Volume 126, Issue 2, Pages 312–329

by Michael Crang

Follow the direct link from university repository for access

This paper examines the role of space in sustaining the action of Austen and Joyce’s writings. Using these contrasting... more This paper examines the role of space in sustaining the action of Austen and Joyce’s writings. Using these contrasting textual styles, it looks at the different geographies produced and the texts the different geographies enable. It examines the role of location and connotations from places in sustaining and enlivening novels. But more than this it looks at how the emplotment of novels build differing spatialities that encode senses of the world. In Austen we find a closed, coherent and
orderly world whose boundaries and exclusions make possible the polite society within. In Joyce’s Ulysses, we instead find the overlaying and intermingling of differing spatial scales and forms. The result is a tension between an ordered, systematic spatiality and a chaotic form when its recapitulative structure exceeds its
own boundaries. In both we find a fictive landscape which helps make the novels work by reframing and re-imagining the world. In this sense they do not take place in space but produce their own characteristic spaces.

The balance between urban development and natural forces at Leptis Magna (Libya)

by Enrico Cirelli

co-authored with S. Pucci, D. Pantosti, P.M. De Martini, A. Smedile, M. Munzi, M. Pentiricci, L. Musso

The relationships between human modification of the environment and natural events in the Roman city of
Leptis... more The relationships between human modification of the environment and natural events in the Roman city of
Leptis Magna (UNESCO world heritage), western Libya, are analyzed. For the first time, the history of Leptis
Magna is tested against a geomorphological and stratigraphical reconstruction and radiocarbon dating.
Historical and archaeological interpretations or analyses indicate the occurrence of different extreme
natural events as the cause of the town’s decline: earthquakes, flooding, and tsunami. Geological and
geomorphological surveys investigated the dynamics of the nearby Wadi Lebda, a major dryland stream
that forms the depositional and erosional systems of the settlement area. Alluvial phases were studied by
applying traditional stratigraphic analyses of outcrops and hand-cores. Additionally, the mapped flights of
inset terrace surfaces provided insights into the human modifications of the natural depositional/erosional
environment during historical times and the following alluvial phases affecting the Leptis Magna harbor.
The results integrate the archaeological knowledge by providing some independent chronological
constraints, and indicate that Leptis Magna history was tightly linked to the Wadi Lebda. Aware of the
hazards related to devastating flooding, the Romans were able to cope with the threat posed by the wadi
by performing engineering defensive hydraulic works around the town (dam and artificial channels).
Once the economic decay began and the society could no longer guarantee the ongoing maintenance of
these structures, the decline of the settlement started and the occurrence of destructive floods reclaimed
the populated areas. Conversely, the occurrence of a large earthquake (365 CE), or of a tsunami that
caused the disruption of the hydraulic systems and the infill of the harbor, has been discarded as primary
cause of the decline of Leptis Magna.