Chris Philo

Spaces of citizenship: an introduction

Abstract The various papers and commentaries in this issue are framed by a brief discussion of 1. (1) the growing significance for human geographers of ‘citizenship’ as both a source of concepts and a focus for substantive research; 2. (2) the way in which citizenship serves as a meeting-point for the contemporary concerns of both political geographers and social-cultural geographers; and 3. (3) the various different kinds of ‘spaces’ in and through which citizenship is fostered, practised and contested, all of which are tackled in the contributions to the issue.

Postmodern Rural Geography? A Reply to Murdoch and Pratt.

Abstract Jonathan Murdoch and Andy Pratts thoughtful response (Journal of Rural Studies9, 411–427) to Philo (1992) (Neglected rural geographies: a review. Journal of Rural Studies8, 193–207) is considered. Their suggestions about the engagement between rural studies and the intellectual currents of ‘postmodernism’ are important ones, and offer both an extension of the claims made by me and a critique of my own lack of self-reflexivity. I outline my partial agreement with their analysis, but offer certain qualifications arising from a different understanding of ‘postmodernism’. I indicate my approval of their call for a ‘sociology of postmodernism’ alert to the making of ‘the rural’ as a concept in circulation, but argue that central to this call is the necessity of investigating the senses of rurality held by all manner of ‘other peoples’ beyond the academy. In this respect, then, the approach of Murdoch and Pratt may be more consistent with my own ‘postmodern rural geography’ than it might first appear.

Escaping Flatland: A Book Review Essay Inspired by Gunnar Olsson's Lines of Power/Limits of Language

In this paper I offer reflections on Gunnar Olssons 1991 text, Lines of Power/Limits of Language, concentrating particularly on its attempt to ‘write’ a new geometry of social thought which will enable the expression of a critique—itself almost impossible to formulate in human language—directed at the interweaving of taboos (boundaries to the unspoken) in Enlightenment Reason with operations of power in sociocultural life. The suggestion is that Olsson is striving to escape from what he regards as the ‘flatland’ in which much current social thought is entrenched, and is thereby seeking an altogether less-constraining ‘spaccland’ which will allow him to understand quite ‘other’ truths about the connections between the abstract (the immaterial) and the concrete (the material), I outline something of what Olssons new conceptual geometry entails, but at the same time question the extent to which this geometry carries with it problems not so different from those that bedevilled ‘spatial science’. Furthermore, I argue that Olssons will to think ever more abstractly—and in so doing to take his geometry into abstracted realms strangely removed from the contexts of everyday human life—separates him from precisely those everyday contexts in which people cannot help but be ‘philosophers’ dealing with the imponderables of taboos, power, truth, and morality in order simply to ‘get by’.

Book Reviews : The student's companion to geography. By A. Rogers, H. Viles and A. Goudie, eds. Oxford, Blackwell. 1992. x + 386 pp. £50.00 cloth, £14.95 paper. ISBN 0 631 17089 8

This is an intriguing if somewhat curious collection, a ’pick and mix’ assortment of short essays designed principally for undergraduate students to dip into when seeking guidance about various facets of academic geography (its concerns, its history, its ideas and methods, its source material, its organization and personnel, and also its career possibilities). One aim of the collection is obviously to enthuse students about geographical inquiry, and particularly valuable in this connection are the two essays by Gale and Roberts offering personal reflections in their ’attraction’ to the discipline. These authors hence speak of the ’challenge and pleasure of decoding landscape’ (p. 20), as well as stressing the need to regard the world as ’an interrelated whole, people and land, past and present’ (p. 24). Not dissimilar sentiments lie behind certain of the great traditions constituting geography’s history, as Livingstone’s excellent chapter tells us, although the technologically sophisticated and politically