Anti-Obits

In this section we pay tribute to thinkers who have had a formative influence on radical-Left geography within or beyond the academy. Given the unwillingness of most journals these days to publish such obituaries we regard this as an important initiative.

Our first Anti-obit was published in Antipode in 2005. It is a tribute to James Blaut – activist, teacher and geographer – who contributed greatly to the radical project of Antipode over the years. Below we reproduce Kent Mathewson’s and Ben Wisner’s article dedicated to him. We also feature an exclusive obituary in honour of Allan Pred the formidable and inspiration geographer who passed away in January 2007, written by Richard Walker and Michael Watts.

In future, however, our obituaries will be electronic-only. We will commission obituaries in many cases, but also welcome unsolicited ones which we will consider placing on the site. We hope, as the years go by, that this section of the Antipode website will be the repository for tributes to Left geographers who really made a difference.

Duncan Fuller, Geographer. 10 January 1972 - 3 October 2008.

Duncan Fuller, a geographer at Northumbria University, has died suddenly aged thirty six. To say he was a geographer – in Britain at least – raises images of a small, corduroy trousered, tweed jacket wearing man who is self effacing. Not Duncan. Shaven head, ear rings and a bright top, always in the latest trainers, he was in your face. Permanently. He was literally a big man, the living spirit of iconoclasm.

As a young academic, there was no easy political path for him to follow for the days of big social movements, such as the anti-apartheid struggle, had gone. Immersing himself in explorations of feminist geographies that sought new ways of knowing, learning and doing, he focused his research on how marginal groups experienced and created their life space. Initially the work was focused on credit unions but extended to other minorities such as graffiti artists. In all he did, he caused a stir, especially tackling poverty.

Duncan was immensely concerned with how we know and what we know. He demanded of himself and others a grounded and reflective praxis. While being of the academy, Duncan’s drive was to be beyond the academy. He was a tireless contributor to a critical geographies blog, a founder member of the Participatory Geography Working Group of the Royal Geographical Society and, most recently, pulled together a national team to debate “Public Geographies”, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council over the 2008-11 period. This seminar series will, as it runs forward, acknowledge his unique intellectual and organisational contribution.

He wanted his praxis on the streets. He was distrustful of the academy where he regarded the policed power of knowledge production, not least through processes such as the UK Research Assessment Exercise, and the pedagogic drive to provide education for the status quo as anathema. He said so in a loud, argumentative and frequently blue manner in public. He was against unfair, undemocratic and marginalising structures. He was a people person, an active trade unionist.

He co-led undergraduate field trips to Amsterdam where, among other things, he explored with students the lifescapes of sex workers. He founded a training company in the North of England that taught participatory methodologies, adapted from the developing world, to local authority officers and local non-governmental organisations. He played his part in the research team that mapped tranquillity in Britain.

Quite simply, he was a wonderful, contradictory spirit, rare in these drab, complacent times. He pressed all the buttons for professional and academic advancement by doing what authority did not really want. He got to the centre of things by going to the side. He even managed, in Newcastle, to support the wrong football team. But that was big Duncan.

Lectures were cancelled to mark his death and funeral. He is probably, even now, arguing the odds that his life was worth more than a couple of days off. He leaves a massive gap in the academic community, not least for his students. Most importantly, he leaves a large hole where his love for Ingrid his wife, and their three young children, can never be filled.

Phil O’Keefe
Northumbria University

Readings

Berg L Evans M Fuller D and The Okanagan Urban Aboriginal Health Research Collective (2007)
Ethics, hegemonic whiteness, and the contested imagination of ‘aboriginal community’ in social science research in Canada. ACME 6(3):395-409

Castree N Fuller D and Lambert D (2007) Geography without borders. Transactions of the Institute of
British Geographers 32:129-132

Fuller D. (1998) Credit union development: Financial inclusion and exclusion. Geoforum 29(2):145-
158

Fuller D (2008) What kind of pedagogy for what kind of publics? Progress in Human Geography 32(5):
687-692

Fuller D (forthcoming) Public geographies I: Taking stock. Progress in Human Geography.
http://northumbria.ac.uk/static/5007/taking_stock.pdf (last accessed 1 December 2008)

Fuller D and Askins K (2007) The discomforting rise of ‘public geographies’: A ‘public’
conversation. Antipode 39(4):579-601

Fuller D Askins K Mowl G Jeffries M. and Lambert, D. (2008) Mywalks: Fieldwork and living
geographies. Teaching Geography 33(2):80-84

Fuller D and Kitchin R (eds) (2004) Radical Theory/Critical Praxis. http://www.praxis-
epress.org/availablebooks/radicaltheorycriticalpraxis.html (last accessed 1 December 2008)

Fuller D and Mellor M (2008) Banking for the poor: Addressing the needs of financially excluded
communities in Newcastle upon Tyne. Urban Studies 45(7):1505-1524

Hubbard P Kitchin R Bartley B Fuller D (2002) Thinking Geographically: Space, Theory and
Contemporary Human Geography. London: Continuum

Pain R Barke M Fuller D Gough J Mowl G and MacFarlane RJ (2001) Introducing Social Geographies.
London: Arnold

Allan Pred: Friend and Rebel

By Richard Walker and Michael Watts

Allan R. Pred, one of the world’s leading geographers and social scientists, died of acute lung cancer on January 5, 2007, at the age of 70. He had just retired in May 2006 after forty-four years at the University of California, Berkeley. His last public address, to the Geography graduation in May 2006, was Allan at full bore: raging against a war machine – a secret geography of terror and intimidation – that drew strength from weak citizenship; he eyed the new graduates and asked, “What do YOU know? The clock is ticking. The train is rolling on”.

To colleagues and students, Allan Pred was a formidable intellectual, a brilliant thinker, a great humanist, and a generous teacher. To us, Allen was a hero. He made the Berkeley Geography department the special place it is now, a glimmer of enlightenment in the darkness of the present and a place of retreat that upholds the best ideals of the university. He was the central figure in the transformation of Berkeley Geography from the Sauer School to a critical, left approach. He left an indelible stamp by his devotion to wide-open inquiry, independent thought, public truth, and human liberation. Allen was a loyal and trusted friend, without whom neither of us would have long endured at Berkeley. A speaker at his retirement colloquium put it well: by his intellectual restlessness, his fearlessness in tackling the unstated and silenced, and his willingness to experiment and find a voice of one’s own, Allan had blazed a path of all of us.

The arc of Pred’s academic life is nothing short of remarkable. He entered Antioch College in 1953, age sixteen. During the Fifties, Antioch was a nebula that fashioned a number of intellectual, political and cultural stars, and Allan was part of that galaxy. He graduated in 1957 and then decamped to Penn State University to study Geography. University Park was only a way station. For a student of urban geography in the mid-20th century, the University of Chicago was the City on the Hill: birthplace of classic urban sociology, postwar home to the first group of American urban geographers, and, by 1960, a crucible for a new quantitative and analytical Geography. Completing his PhD in 1962, in little over four years, Pred arrived at Berkeley at the tender age of 25 (he always laughed at the methods of appointment then: Carl Sauer made a phone call and that was that). Within five years he had obtained tenure; by 1971, age 34, he had been appointed Full Professor.

For the better part of four decades, Allan Pred has been at the forefront of human geography. When asked in an interview why he chose Geography, he replied that it offered an unmatched flexibility and cross-disciplinary landscape on which to operate. In keeping with that ideal, his scholarship radically reshaped our understanding of cities, landscape, modernity, place, and race. Pred’s productivity is legendary. Fourteen books and monographs - translated into seven languages – and over seventy articles and book chapters. He was always among the most-cited scholars in the profession. At the time of his death he was completing a new book manuscript, continuing his interest in race, identity and the making of the modern world. At his May 2006 retirement party, one colleague calculated that Pred had penned, on average, about 350 words each day of his working life.

Allan Pred was born in the Bronx in 1936. His father was a high school French language teacher, his mother a housewife and musician. Both grandparents had been Jewish immigrants from Poland. But he rarely looked back to New York or his heritage after his departure for Antioch College. His new horizons were out in the Midwest and later across the Atlantic to Europe – what became a life-long love affair with Sweden. He first visited the country while a graduate student at Chicago, drawn, in part, by the theoretical and scientific innovations of Swedish geographers such as Torsten Hägerstrand (who became a close friend). When he met his future wife, Hjördis, in San Francisco in 1962 the die was cast. They lived between Berkeley and Sweden on a yearly basis, raising bi-lingual children. In the 1980s, they bought a summer home in Sörmland, Sweden, which was Allan’s sanctuary and passion; he treasured the physical work of building and working the land as much as he cherished burrowing into the books and archives.

Perhaps inevitably for a child raised in New York and educated in Chicago, Pred started his career as a theorist of the American city. His international reputation was made in three brilliant books on nineteenth-century US urbanism, each marked by a magnificent control of historical sources and a profound sensitivity to the dynamics of historical transformation. Each proved to be enormously influential across disciplines, as well as theoretically groundbreaking. In The Spatial Dynamics of US Urban Industrial Growth 1800-1914 (1966), he challenged the new economic historians to take seriously the role of urban agglomeration in industrial growth. In Urban Growth and the Circulation of Information, 1970-1840 (1973), Pred linked national growth, mercantile expansion and industrial innovation to the advance of communications and urbanization. And, finally, in Urban Growth Theory and City Systems in the US, 1840-1860 (1980), he charted the way capitalist dynamics ramify across entire city system, more than between cities and rural hinterlands. This classic trio of monographs remains indispensable for any understanding to the urban and economic history of the United States.

Beginning in the 1980s, Pred’s formidable intellect turned from the American to the Swedish city, and in the process his gaze shifted from urban political economy to modernity as a way of life and mode of experience. Pred’s perseverance and his eye for historical sources yielded unexpected fruits in his new Swedish project. He discovered an archival goldmine, a treasure trove of neglected church and state papers on nineteenth and twentieth century life. What followed was an exhilarating series of projects designed to unearth the making of place, everyday life, and popular identities in the transit to what he called, ‘Swedish modern’. He began with rural enclosures and peasant life in the 19th century, in Place, Practice and Structure: Social and Spatial Transformation in Southern Sweden, 1975-1850 (1985) and moved quickly to the world of Stockholm’s working class at the fin de siècle in Lost Words and Lost Worlds: Modernity and the Language of Everyday Life in Late-Nineteenth Century Stockholm(1990). In Recognizing European Modernities: A Montage of the Present (1995), Pred’s vision grew even bolder, taking on that apotheosis of modernity, the World’s Fair, as it took shape in Stockholm in three different forms over three generations. Inevitably, he turned to contemporary Swedish life and the deafening silence surrounding the question of race. In two powerful and controversial books – his stunning excoriation of cultural racism, memorably entitled Even in Sweden: Racisms, Racialized Spaces, and the Popular Geographical Imagination (2000) and The Past is Not Dead: Facts, Fictions and Enduring Racial Stereotypes (2004) – Pred courageously exposed a deep vein of pain and shame.

In migrating across the Atlantic and addressing modern Swedish identity, Pred’s scholarship shifted radically in both conception and style. Deeply influenced by the work of Walter Benjamin and his theory of montage, Pred experimented with a distinctive prose style – at once poetic and stark – and a remarkable integration of image and text, of ethnography and commentary. For some, this body of work resembled a postmodern turn, but Pred never neglected the hard-edged world of material life and capitalist economy even as he delved deeper into cultural and visual studies. In the end, his achievement was truly original and distinctive. Not surprisingly some took umbrage at his language – most memorably in a snide review by Patty Limeick in the New York Times Book Review – but nobody doubted the erudition of his scholarship, the breadth of his analysis, or the willingness to take a chance on escaping the confines of conventional thought and banal didactics.

As his stature within the social sciences grew, the honors followed. He was awarded the Anders Retzius medal by the Swedish Society for Geography and Anthropology (sometimes called Geography’s Nobel Prize) in 1991. He was honored by the Polish Academy of Sciences several years later, and twice by the Association of American Geographers, in 1978 and 2005. He was elected a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy in 2005. For his contributions to Swedish social science, he was awarded the Willy Brandt Professorship in 2001 and an honorary doctorate from Uppsala in 1992. He held visiting appointments at the École des Hautes Études de Sciences Sociales and the University of Lund and, earlier in his career, served as a consultant to the Swedish and Australian governments. In recognition of his extraordinary achievements and contributions to campus life at Berkeley, he was made Professor of the Graduate School in 2005.

Always a tireless campaigner for Geography as a field of study, Allan always promoted the importance of space and place in everyday life. Space was, in his view, a sort of foundation stone for all of the human sciences. Seeing, measuring, perceiving and creating space was, Pred wrote, central to the birth of modernity. An internationalist and advocate throughout his career, it was entirely appropriate that the Association of American Geographers awarded special honors to him in 2005 for his “stalwart leadership within the discipline” and “his outstanding intellectual and personal ambassadorship….throughout the international academy”. As he once said, not bad for a kid from the Bronx.

Pred was in every sense a fixture on the Berkeley campus. Arriving in the early days of the Free Speech Movement, he was thrown headlong into the ferment that consumed the decade. He never shied away from support for the students, for free thought, or for the Rights of Man – and Woman. A great supporter of women students and colleagues, and a committed advocate of racial equality and affirmative action, he was, above all, a man of the people who never forgot his humble roots. An optimist in matters of human possibility, he nonetheless had few illusions about the workings of power and its corruptions. Still, his favorite New Yorker cartoon, pinned on the wall of his office through his years as department chair, pictured a baseball boxscore with the Realists scoring a run in every inning and the Utopians shut out until the end. The final score: Utopians 1, Realists 0.

Pred contributed to the Berkeley campus on many fronts – the library, Graduate Council, Scandinavian Studies, tenure and promotion committees, affirmative action, and minority representation among them. He never shirked the thankless committee duties, and his knowledge of university affairs was voluminous. Most importantly, he served as the Chair of the Department of Geography between 1979 and1988, during a critical period of transformation and growth. All departmental Chairs develop their own personals styles. His was chairing by stealth: a remarkable combination of administrative genius, healthy distrust of those in power, a ferocious determination, and a memory like an elephant (many have thought that he would have been a world-class labor negotiator). He was a mongoose at university in-fighting; he knew what he wanted, he never gave up, and he almost always won. Not many people knew that side of him. But his wise counsel was sought around campus. As a colleague his hallmarks were loyalty and honesty, a profound political acumen, and a great generosity of spirit. He was a consummate academic citizen.

A dedicated teacher and mentor, Allan’s influence reached across the campus, especially into Anthropology, Literature and Sociology. His graduate seminars – always large, unruly and overpopulated – drew ethnographers, historians, planners, and students of rhetoric and literature. He reveled in the work of graduate advising, and his door was always open. He elicited a kind of affection from students that one can only envy, becoming a cult figure for some – the last thing he, of course, wanted. And he managed to charm despite questionable taste in clothes, appallingly bad socks, hair always askew, and a funny hitch in his speaking voice. Indeed, those things were part of his slightly eccentric persona and immense charm, and his deep humanity at close quarters. We hope his students and friends will pick up his fallen banner, emblazoned with a rebellious streak and hopeful radicalism, and carry it on for another 70 years.

Allan was dismayed to be diagnosed with cancer; he never smoked, rode his bike to school every day, ate like a horse, and hardly ever had so much as a cold. As usual, there's no justice. But he was typically fair-minded and philosophical about his fate. He had no regrets, and came by that as honestly as any man could. He had lived a blessed life, he said, full to the hilt, doing what he liked best, living well in Berkeley and Sweden, happily married 44 years to Hjördis, and always proud of his children, Michelle and Joseph. It was a great life for a good, even great, man. He will be sorely missed.

The Geographical and Political Vision of J.M. Blaut*

Kent Mathewson and Ben Wisner

*This tribute was published as an introduction to a special issue of Antipode on the life and work of Jim Blaut

Diversity and Unity in the Blaut Ouevre

Blaut’s contribution to geography and development studies is exceptional for its range, methodological complexity, as well as its unity over nearly 50 years. Beginning his career in the 1950s and 1960s as a cultural geographer concerned with the practicalities of agricultural production in the tropics, he quickly began to critique top down attempts to ‘modernize’ peasant agriculture by ‘tropicalizing’ the techniques of European and North American farming (Blaut, 1967; 1970; also see Johnson et al., Mathewson, and Sluyter, all in this volume). He also appreciated before many others the importance of what has become known as indigenous technical knowledge – and he employed, as did a few other geographers and anthropologists of in his generation, techniques that would later become standard for researchers and NGOs alike under its contemporary name, participatory research. A good example is Blaut’s study of the farmer perceptions of the causes of soil erosion in the Blue Mountains of Jamaica (Blaut, 1959a). Blaut had a life-long preoccupation with methodological and theoretical questions that balanced and informed his ‘mud on the boots’ fieldwork.

These experiences with the rich knowledge possessed by farmers in Singapore, Jamaica, St. Croix, Costa Rica, and Venezuela led Blaut to a more general question. How do children learn, informally, to become farmers? How do children, more generally, learn to map and to navigate about on the surface of the planet? These questions led to a series of empirical studies and theoretical debates that began in the 1970s and were ongoing still at his death (Stea, in this volume). Blaut and his close colleague, David Stea, discovered that mapping skills spontaneously learned very early in childhood are actually ‘unlearned’ during formal schooling (Blaut & Stea, 1974; Blaut, 1997a; Sowden et al., 1997). Blaut built on a series of cross-cultural studies of children’s place learning (Blades et al., 1998) to develop a theory of mapping as a human universal (Blaut, 1991; Stea et al., 1996).

Eurocentrism and diffusionism – bedrocks of Western imperialism to the present day – necessarily privileges one group’s knowledge and skill over another’s. Blaut spent most of the last two years of his life writing against those Eurocentric and diffusionist assumptions, what he called the ‘colonizers model of the world’ (Blaut, 1993; Sheppard, & Rodrigue, both in this volume). He believed these assumptions denigrate and ignore peasant farmers’ local knowledge, and they also tend to ignore and, indeed, to destroy through mis-education early childhood mapping skills. Some of the fiercest academic polemics to involve Jim Blaut centered not on his overt political ideas or anti-imperialism (Harvey, in this volume), but over whether (following the Swiss psychologist Piaget), children have built in stages and limitation in their ability to understand spatial relations. Seeing this as yet another Western, rationalist idea whose roots go back to the 18th Century philosopher Kant, Blaut coined the phrase “Can’tiaism” – employing a rather esoteric pun (thus, the belief that “children can’t ...”) and attempted to refute it (Blaut, n.d. (a)), asserting, “Children Can!” (Blaut, 1997b).

Ultimately, Eurocentrism must deny human universalities such as mapping and spontaneous, local innovation by peasant farmers. Contemporary imperialism may give lip service to the universality of human rights, but its Eurocentric assumptions demand that the West name, enumerate, and protect them. African philosophers – whose work Blaut knew – have also countered the claim by Western academic philosophy that Africa cultures have produced no ‘philosophy’ in the strict sense, only ‘folk wisdom’. Thus one sees a unity in Blaut’s contribution that embraces his studies of tropical agriculture, of place learning, and his critique of Eurocentrism.

In 1994 Blaut brought these themes together nicely in a paper given at the University of the West Indies entitled “Eurocentrism, Diffusionism, and the Assessment of Tropical Soil Productivity” (Blaut, 1994). He notes that Eurocentric diffusionism leads to certain typical claims about family farmer in the tropics and tropical soils:

Blaut also notes that from the 1930s onwards tropical soil science was producing data that contradicted these claims, yet the dominant assumptions remain and still influence policy. In one striking example, he shows how “irrational” refusal to drain hillside farms on the contour is based on local knowledge that such drainage is likely to lead to land slides.

Blaut as Theoretician of Anti-Imperialism

Blaut is perhaps best know to readers of Antipode as an early and rigorous critic of modernization theory and policy in development. Blaut’s critique of Eurocentrism and diffusionism as essential pillars of Western imperialist ideology and world view is quintessentially geographic. He was voracious reader of history and painted on a world-scale canvass. The work he produced during the last ten years of his life (Blaut 1992; 1993; 2000; but see also his earlier, shorter, embryonic works, 1969; 1970a; 1976; 1987a) were detailed, scholarly, yet polemical treatments of the origins and trajectory of a world system we know today as neo-liberal globalization. In this he was a pioneer, with such authors as Immanuel Wallerstein, Edward Said, Franz Fanon, Andre Gunder Frank, and Samir Amin in conceptualizing the world from the point of view of the subaltern, the colonized, and the oppressed.
Blaut argues that diffusionists believe that “independent invention is rather uncommon, and therefore not very important in culture change in the short run and cultural evolution in the long run” (1993: 11). In fact, he finds that many historians and proponents of development-as-modernization believe that “only certain select communities are inventive” (p. 12). Diffusionism’s basic model is based on the assumption that Greater Europe has been, and is, the Inside (source of modernity and innovation) and that non-Europe is the Outside (See Rodrigue, & Sheppard, both in this volume). This division and the innate superiority of Europe is based in the assumption that Europe enjoys a better mode of thinking (rationality) as well as better climate and better soils (Blaut, 1994). Diffusionism then makes seven claims (pp. 14-17; see also Blaut, 2000: 3-12):

This model of the world began to take shape in the 15th and 16th Centuries, finding full flowering in the 18th and 19th. Although these propositions seem extreme or even ‘straw men’, all one has to do is look at recent best selling books such as Ben Barber’s Jihad vs. McWorld (Barber, 1996) or Thomas Barnett’s The Pentagon’s New Map to find what Blaut exposed as ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ alive and well. Barnett (2004) calls them the ‘core’ and the ‘gap’ (for a critique of this view see Peet, in this volume).
The exceptional thing about Blaut’s treatment is the level of detail and meticulous historical research he brought to it. Although only two of the planned three volumes in his project to demolish Eurocentrism were finished by the time of his death (Blaut, 1993; 2000), he went a very long way toward that goal (Wissoker, in this volume). These two volumes provide essential vaccine against a new, virulent Crusader Virus that began to sweep the world from the U.S. White House and Pentagon shortly after September 11, 2001. Although the notion of ‘spatial modernization’ was unique to one discipline – geography (Soja, 1979) – and therefore a specialist and obscure concept, assumptions about diffusion and innovation run like fat throughout the marbled meat of development theory and practice. Blaut’s critique, therefore, provides as important a corrective lens as, for example, Wolfgang Sachs archeology of the concept of ‘development’ (Sachs, 1999) or of Said’s deconstruction of the idea of ‘orientalism’ (Said, 1988).

Blaut as Activist and Teacher

Blaut’s contribution to geography and development studies is also noteworthy for the way in which he put his ideas into practice. He was a strong advocate of Puerto Rican independence from the United States and wrote extensively on the national question, publishing in Spanish as well as English, in aid of that struggle (Blaut & Stea, 1975; Blaut, 1987b; Blaut & Figueroa, 1988; Santana, in this volume). He also wrote a good deal about ghettoes as internal colonies, again his intellectual efforts guided by his solidarity with the cause of Puerto Ricans (and other minority, oppressed groups) (Blaut, 1974; Blaut et al., 1983). Blaut was also active promoting the rights of the Palestinian people and in support of the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa (Falah, & Soni and Maharaj, both in this volume).
Jim Blaut was also an exceptional teacher who mentored a generation of students who now find themselves in many professions (Koch et al., in this volume) and who took some Blaut’s basic ideas and developed them in new directions (Varanka, & Johnson et al., both in this volume).

Blaut as Academician

Beyond Blaut’s persona as political activist, public intellectual, committed colleague and mentor to many geographers and younger scholars in a number of fields, Jim Blaut was a professional academic with a solid, if somewhat shifting, status within American geography. His academic career spanned the second half of what has been called “the American Century.” He, of course, took lifelong issue with the both conceits and deceits that underwrote much of this characterization. But by the same token, American geography did achieve a certain global preeminence during the same period. In many ways that deserve their own recognition, Jim Blaut was an important figure or actor in American geography’s accomplishments during this period. A full bio-bibliographic essay on his life and work has not yet been written (but see Mathewson and Stea 2003 for an overview). In important ways, this special tribute volume of Antipode contributes to that larger project. Each article and item provides insights and anecdotes, accolades and criticisms, that otherwise might not have been recorded. Three articles (Mathewson’s, Sluyter’s, and Stea’s) trace the development of Blaut’s involvements in cultural geography, cultural/political ecology, and spatial cognition/place learning across his career, thus follow important threads in biographical format. Other contributions to the volume focus on specific topics and themes without the same sweep, but offer rich nodes of understanding and analysis that should be crucial in constructing the larger picture that we hope will eventually be completed.

In this introduction we can only give the contours of his academic career. One way to do this assessment is to consult the various guides and directories in which he was listed. Of course, this kind of acontextual approach tells us little or nothing of the twists and turns his career took as a result of his political and scholarly commitments. For example, one of the issues that Jim Blaut’s career as a political activist-scholar raises was his relation to academic establishments, particularly geography’s, at various levels and to degree he was excluded from, or included in, the normal articulations of professional activity and employment. There are several directories to draw on. The Association of American Geographer’s Directory (published every 4 or so years between 1949 and 1987), and the AAG’s Guide to Departments of Geography in the United States and Canada (published annually since 1969) are the main ones. Besides being the principal records of AAG membership, they record how the members themselves viewed their topical and regional interests. There are two minor sources with information on Blaut as well -- Schwendeman’s Directory of College Geography of the United States (published annually since 1949), and Orbis Geographicus, the World Directory of Geography compiled and published by the International Geographical Union (periodically since 1952).

Blaut first appearance in a directory is in Schwendeman’s for the academic year 1950-51. Schwendeman’s directories provide data on courses taught, number of students enrolled, and so on. Earlier editions listed graduate students along with faculty. James Blaut is listed as a doctoral candidate along with nine other students. Apparently, he started out in the Ph.D. program, though he was awarded a MS degree from LSU in 1954. Blaut reappears in the 1959 directory as graduating in 1958 (fall) with the title of his dissertation listed. From this minimal information, one might conclude that he entered with promise, but took more time than the average, at that time, to complete a doctoral program. Thus, nothing special here. Of course, going beyond this and into the record of his extensive/intensive Singapore fieldwork, Lectureship in geography at the University of Malaya, military service, publication and conference paper production, topped off with a remarkable dissertation and an appointment at Yale, all within eight years, Blaut’s growing biography already marks him as someone to watch.

The other minor source to chart Blaut’s visibility, and perhaps viability in mainstream professional circles, is the Orbis Geographicus. Blaut is first listed in the second edition (1960). It gives his academic employment history: Asst. Lecturer, University of Malaya 1951; Instructor, Yale 1956; Assistant Professor, Yale 1958; Department of Geography, Yale. He is not listed in the next three editions (1964/66; 1968/74; 1980/84). In the 6th edition (1988/92) he reappeared. Along with his employment history, his topical specialties are noted. Blaut listed them as: cultural geography; history of geography; environmental perception. His areal interests were: Caribbean; Latin America. Looking at his presence and absence in this global register of geographical personalities, one is left wondering by what criteria the selections were made?

During the 1960s Blaut taught at several different institutions, both in the U.S. (University of Connecticut 1966-67, Clark, 1967-71) and the Caribbean (University of Puerto Rico 1961-63, College of the Virgin Islands, 1964-66). His research and publication continued, but not at the pace and place(s) he managed while at Yale. On the other hand, he was involved in a number of internationally visible research initiatives with tropical agriculture, spatial cognition, and educational development. Starting in the early 1970s he begin publishing once again in “established and prestigious” outlets and continued for the next 30 years. He also continued to publish in Antipode through this entire span, a dozen articles and a number of other items. But he left another geography graduate program (Clark in 1971) and after another interlude in the Caribbean (University of Puerto Rico, 1971-72) landed at the University of Illinois-Chicago in 1972. That was to be his institutional base for the rest of his career, and life. One is left wondering what the criteria are for inclusion (or in his case, exclusion…) in these world directories of geography? Not having international visibility? Not teaching in a graduate department of geography? Not publishing in the “right” places? Or, perhaps publishing, but in the “wrong” places? During this period Blaut seemingly met all of these criteria: international research and teaching; graduate faculty member; publications in flagship journals; publications in radical outlets. That he reappeared in the 1990s may mean that the weight of his continuing production, both in the established as well as critical outlets opened the door once more.

Looking at the AAG Directories and Guides, we can see Blaut’s shifting preferences in terms of topics, areas, and nomenclature.

Blaut first appears in the 1956 AAG Directory. The entry is fairly comprehensive, with all of his degrees up to that point (including his certificate from the Imperial College of Agriculture in Trinidad). His specialties are listed as: geog. of tropical small-holder agriculture, cultural geog. of Southeast Asia, tropical soils and agricultural economics. At the time he was serving as a Physical Geographer (EM), at the Quartmaster Research and Development Center, 939 Eighth Ave., New York, NY. The next AAG directory (1960), published in 1961, gives variants on the above information.

His specialties have shifted slightly: geog. of tropical peasant agriculture (especially Southeast Asia and Caribbean), cultural-geographic theory, farm management. At this time, he was Assistant Professor at Yale. The 1964 AAG directory was a streamlined edition. It provided minimal information: “BLAUT, James M., 210 W. 70th St. (Col. Of the Virgin Islands).”

Subsequent directories (1970-87) offer coded data on topical, area, and language specialization, along with educational and employment histories. In the 1967 directory, Blaut listed “theory of geography” first, followed by cultural geography, and planning, regional. Middle (Caribbean) America, Southeast Asia, and Latin America (Hispanic) are his areal emphases, and his languages Spanish, French, and German. By 1970 cultural geography comes first, along with agricultural geography, philosophy of geography. The areas are similar, but the Hispanic lands are narrowed to Northern South America & West Coast. For languages, Malayo-Polynesian replaced French. He is not listed in the 1974 directory, indicating an apparent membership lapse at the beginning of his move back to Chicago. He reappears in the 1978 directory, with history of geography replacing philosophy of geography. The areas are the same, but foreign language skills are no longer listed. In 1982 historical geography replaces agricultural geography, with the areas remaining stable. For the 1987 directory (the last before the directory was combined with the Guide to Departments) Blaut replaced cultural ecology with cultural geography, added environmental perception while dropping history of geography, and keeping historical geography. He goes back to Latin America (Hispanic America) and has joined three specialty groups: environmental perception, Latin American, and socialist.

His listings in departmental entries in the AAG’s Guides to Departments provide yet another glimpse of how he saw himself in terms of disciplinary specializations. The first AAG guide was published in 1969 (for 1968/69). For this listing and the following three years his self-declared list under Clark’s auspices was: peasant agriculture, environmental perception, Middle America. Between 1973 and 1980 he does not appear in the Guide because his new department at University of Illinois-Chicago Circle is not listed. When it did make it, in the 1980 edition, Blaut listed his specialties as: cultural, behavioral, geographic learning, history and philosophy, peasant agriculture, Latin America. He kept these same designations for the next twenty years.

One could make various inferences from these listings. His specialties cluster around several nodes: cultural geography (cultural and cultural ecology); agriculture (peasant farming, rural planning); behavioral (environmental perception; geographic learning); history & philosophy (history of geography, geographic theory); historical (no specific emphasis indicated). They show his regional interests as basically stable, but the “West Indies” replaced the “East Indies” as the main focus of his island geography, while the Caribbean rimlands remained his other Latin American domain. As the papers in this special issue demonstrate, Blaut was at home in all these subfields and areas and ranged well beyond in his general knowledge and interests. But trying to bind Blaut to, or bound him by, some set of discrete specializations misses the essence(s) of Jim Blaut and his remarkable fifty-year trajectory in geography. From beginning to end, Jim was a philosopher of process. For Jim, himself a study in mind and matter in motion, “all is process.” The relational places and spaces of his work and works converge in more ways than can be possibly charted here. The contributors to this volume, however, have mapped portions of this terrain. We hope that not only the “mapping of Jim Blaut” and his remarkable career will continue, but that the many ideas and things he set in motion, both within geography and without, will have a long and vital life of their own.

Kent Mathewson and Ben Wisner

References:
Mathewson, K., and D. Stea (2003) James M. Blaut (1927-2000). Annals of the Association of American Geographers 93: 214-222.

Colin Ward (1924-2010)

Colin Ward, who has died aged 85, was the most read as well as the most original British anarchist writer of the second half of the twentieth century.

Brought up in suburban East London, he was a ‘failure’ at school, leaving at fifteen to take jobs in building, municipal housing and then a series of architects’ offices, thereby generating the expertise for the bulk of his output as a writer. In the mid-sixties he retrained as a teacher but for most of the seventies was education officer for the Town and Country Planning Association, resigning in 1979 to become a full-time author.

It was conscription into the British Army during the Second World War that radicalized him since, posted to Glasgow, he admired its anarchist orators, attended their weekly meetings and began to write for Freedom Press’s periodicals. On demobilization in 1947 and back in London he was invited to join Freedom’s editorial collective, thus beginning intimate association with the people who were to become, in his description, his ‘closest and dearest friends’.

His spare-time journalistic apprenticeship was daunting, writing articles for Freedom, a weekly throughout the fifties. He was enabled to break from this treadmill when his fellow editors gave him his head from 1961 to 1970 with the monthly Anarchy (while they continued to bring out Freedom for the other three weeks of the month). Anarchy exuded vitality, was in touch with the trends of the decade, and appealed to the young – and it continues to excite. Its preoccupations centred on housing and squatting, progressive education, workers’ control, and crime and punishment. It showcased Ward’s distinctive anarchism, already apparent in his articles for Freedom, but now standing alone or supported by likeminded contributors.

It was the editorship of Anarchy that released him from the obscurity of Freedom and Freedom Press and made his name. During the sixties he began to be asked to write for other journals, not only in the realm of dissident politics but also such titles as the recently established New Society. From 1978 he became a regular contributor to New Society’s full-page ‘Stand’ column; and when ten years later New Society was merged with the New Statesman he was retained as a columnist for the resultant New Statesman and Society with the shorter, but weekly, ‘Fringe Benefits’. He also wrote a long-running column for Town and Country Planning and an ‘Anarchist Notebook’ for Freedom, and in addition contributed columns to the Architects’ Journal.   Through his columns many unsuspecting readers were exposed to anarchist ideas for, whatever he might be doing, he always saw himself first and foremost as an anarchist propagandist.

His first books came as late as 1970-72, but these were intended for teenagers and published by Penguin Education.  It was the third, Anarchy in Action (1973), which was his only work on the theory of anarchism, indeed the only one ‘directly and specifically about anarchism’ until his final publication, Anarchism: A Very Short Introduction (2004). In Anarchy in Action he makes entirely explicit hishighly original anarchism (even if, as he always acknowledged, much indebted to Kropotkin and Landauer). The opening words have been much quoted: ‘The argument of this book is that an anarchist society, a society which organizes itself without authority, is always in existence, like a seed beneath the snow, buried under the weight of the state and its bureaucracy, capitalism and its waste, privilege and its injustices, nationalism and its suicidal loyalties, religious differences and their superstitious separatism’. His kind of anarchism, ‘far from being a speculative vision of a future society...is a description of a mode of human organization, rooted in the experience of everyday life, which operates side by side with, and in spite of, the dominant authoritarian trends of our society’.

It is Ward’s vision of anarchism, along with his many years of working in architecture and planning, that account for his concentration on ‘anarchist applications’ or ‘anarchist solutions’ to ‘immediate issues in which people are actually likely to get involved...’    Although he claimed in 1997 that ‘all my books hang together as an exploration of the relations between people and their environment’ (by which he means the built, rather than the ‘natural’, environment), and while this clearly covers nine-tenths of his oeuvre, it seems rather (as he had put it earlier) all his publications are ‘looking at life from an anarchist point of view’. So the ‘anarchist applications’ concern housing: Tenants Take Over (1974), Housing: An Anarchist Approach (1976), When We Build Again Let’s Have Housing That Works! (1985) and Talking Houses (1990); architecture and planning: Welcome, Thinner City: Urban Survival in the 1990s (1989), New Town, Home Town: The Lessons of Experience (1993), Talking to Architects (1996) and (with Peter Hall) Sociable Cities: The Legacy of Ebenezer Howard (1998); education: Talking Schools (1995); education and the environment: (with Anthony Fyson) Streetwork: The Exploding School (1973), The Child in the City (1978) and The Child in the Country (1988); education, work and housing: Havens and Springboards: The Foyer Movement in Context (1997); transport: (with Ruth Rendell) Undermining the Central Line (1989) and Freedom to Go: After the Motor Age (1991); and water: Reflected in Water: A Crisis of Social Responsibility (1997). A surprisingly large number of his books were written in collaboration, something he particularly enjoyed, for he was an exceptionally friendly as well as generous man.

Ward was scornful of most other anarchists’ obsession with the history of their tradition: ‘I think the besetting sin of anarchism has been its preoccupation with its own past...’  Still, despite his own emphasis on the here-and-now and the future, he wrote four important historical works, the first two with Dennis Hardy and the third with David Crouch: Arcadia for All: The Legacy of a Makeshift Landscape (1984); Goodnight Campers! The History of the British Holiday Camp (1986); The Allotment: Its Landscape and Culture (1988); and Cotters and Squatters: Housing’s Hidden History (2002). The masterly Arcadia for All, a history of the ‘plotlands’ of south-east England, is simply a natural extension back into the recent past of his major interest in self-build and squatting in the present, while Cotters and Squatters draws from their entire historical record in England and Wales. In Goodnight Campers! the entrepreneurial holiday camps are traced to their origins in the early twentieth century and the ‘pioneer camps’, in which a key role was played by major organizations of working-class self-help and mutual aid:  the co-operative movement and trade unions. The historic importance of such institutions in the provision of welfare and the maintenance of social solidarity was to become a theme of increasing significance in Ward’s work; and he is currently being identified as a ‘pioneer of mutualism’.

In 1966 he married Harriet, the daughter of Dora Russell, the feminist advocate of birth control and libertarian schooling, and she survives him.

David Goodway

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