Performing Economic Geography: Two Men, Two Books, and a Cast of Thousands

Trevor J Barnes
Additional contact information
Trevor J Barnes: Department of Geography, 1984 West Mall, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z2, Canada

Environment and Planning A, 2002, vol. 34, issue 3, 487-512

Abstract: In this paper I use the notion of performance, especially as it has been theorized within the science studies literature, to begin to make sense of the history and continuing practices of economic geography. I argue that not only humans perform, but also objects. In this paper, I focus on the performance of books, and in particular, textbooks, or as Bruno Latour calls them, ‘immutable mobiles’. I argue that textbooks bring four attributes to their performance: they travel easily over distance, thereby bringing their message to a geographically diffuse audience; they allow for ‘an optical and semiotic homogeneity’, that is, they take quite different pieces of the world, and bring them together, manipulating them and controlling them, on the same page; they represent an obligatory passage point in the sense that once they are accepted as the standard summary of a field they are necessarily acknowledged by successors; and finally, their effectiveness is in part a consequence of their rhetoric—defined as the ability to draw together and integrate within the text a wide range of sources and authors. These arguments about the performance of textbooks are illustrated by two case studies. The first is George G Chisholm's Handbook of Commercial Geography , published in 1889, which helps launch economic geography as an academic discipline within Anglo-America. The second is Peter Haggett's Locational Analysis in Human Geography , published in 1965, which in many ways codifies the quantitative and theoretical revolution that first emerged in the United States in the late 1950s.

Date: 2002
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1068/a3440 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:envira:v:34:y:2002:i:3:p:487-512

DOI: 10.1068/a3440

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Environment and Planning A
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().