Writing orderly geographies of distant places: The regional survey movement and latin america

Cultural Geographies (formerly Ecumene)

Volumn 4, Issue 3, 1997, Pages 273-299

  Naylor, Simon ^a   Jones, Gareth A ^b  

^a KEELE UNIVERSITY   (United Kingdom)

^b SWANSEA UNIVERSITY   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

GEDDES, P.; HISTORY OF GEOGRAPHY;

LATIN AMERICA;

EID: 0031419651     PISSN: 14744740     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/147447409700400302     Document Type: Article

References (102)

1. B. Willis, ‘Recent surveys in Northern Patagonia’, Geographical Journal 40 (1912), p. 607.
2. I. Bowman, ‘Northern Patagonia: a résumé of Mr. Bailey Willis's surveys along the Forty-First Parallel’, Bulletin of the American Geographical Society (1914), pp. 348-57; C. C. Fagg, ‘The history of the Regional Survey Movement’, Presidential Address to the Regional Survey Section (9 June 1914). On Geddes's contribution, see P. Boardman, The worlds of Patrick Geddes (London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978); P. Mairet, Pioneer of sociology: the life and letters of Patrick Geddes (London, Lund Humphries, 1957), p. 128; and H. Meller, Patrick Geddes: social evolutionist and city planner (London, Routledge, 1990).
3. R. J. Halliday, ‘The sociological movement, the Sociological Society and the genesis of academic sociology in Britain’, Sociological Review n.s. 16 (1968), pp. 377-98; D. Livingstone, The geographical tradition (Oxford, Blackwell, 1992); D. Stoddart, On geography and its history (Oxford, Blackwell, 1986).
4. The use of surveys and transects are fundamental to the evolutions of geography both in Europe and Latin America. La Condamine's expedition to the Ecuadorian Andes in the 1730s and Humboldt's work in the Andes in 1799 both employed the transect. Moreover, use of the regional survey and transect was not restricted to Europeans.
5. W. S. Barclay, ‘The River Paraná: an economic survey’, G3 eographic3al Journal (1909), pp. 1-40. This paper was presented at the RGS and received comments from invited speakers which were subsequently published as an appendix. Branford's survey is entitled ‘Regional sociology: study of a type region with its associated groups and their activities. Region selected for study - the region of the River Plate’ (1906) and held in the Sociological Society Archive, VB96, Keele University, hereafter referred to as VB1906. Hardy's survey is entitled ‘Paraguay: rediscoveries in South America’ (1910) and held in the Sociological Society Archive, VB279, Keele University, hereafter referred to as MH1910.
6. D. Matless, ‘Regional surveys and local knowledges: the geographical imagination in Britain, 1918-39’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers n.s. 17 (1992), pp. 464-80.
7. C. C. Fagg and G. E. Hutchings, An introduction to regional surveying (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1930), pp. 136-7.
8. Geddes had visited Mexico to see his brother and collect specimens for the British Museum in 1879. While there he went blind and used the time to develop his idea of ‘thinking machines’, a series of grids of complementary and opposing links between social and hard science; Boardman, The worlds of Patrick Geddes.
9. Matless, ‘Regional surveys’, p. 468.
10. Foucault's Discipline and punish: the birth of the prison (London, Allen Lane, 1977) has been particularly informative in relation to the exposition of the interconnections of power, representation and space. See also, ‘Questions on geography’, in C. Gordon, ed., P:ower/knowledge selected interviews and other writings 1972-77 (London, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1980) and ‘Space, knowledge and power: an interview with Paul Rabinow’, in P. Rabinow, ed., The Foucault reader (Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1984). For work by geographers, see T. Barnes and J. Duncan, eds, Writing worlds: discourse, text and metaphor in the representation of landscape (London, Routledge, 1992); D. Gregory, Geographical imaginations (Oxford, Blackwell, 1994).
11. T. Barnes and J. Duncan, ‘Introduction: writing worlds’, in Barnes and Duncan, Writing w,orlds pp. 1-17.
12. In relation to imperial representations, see Edward Said on the novel (1979 and 1993), Griselda Pollock on art (1992), Brian Harley on the map (1988 and 1992) and Mary Louise Pratt on the travel account (1992): E. W. Said, Orientalism (London, Penguin, 1979) and Culture and imperialism (London, Vintage, 1993); G. Pollock, Avant-garde g:ambits gender and the colour of art history 1888-1893 (London, Thames & Hudson, 1992); B. Harley, ‘Deconstructing the map’, in Barnes and Duncan, Writing w,orlds pp. 231-47 and ‘Maps, knowledge and power’, in D. Cosgrove and S. Daniels, eds, The iconography of landscape (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 277-312; M. L. Pratt, Imperial eyes: travel writing and transculturation (London, Routledge, 1992).
13. A. McClintock, Imperial leather: race, gender and sexuality in the colonial conquest (London, Routledge, 1994); Pratt, Imperial e;yes Said, O.rientalism
14. Orlove, ‘Putting race in its place’; and R. D. Salvatore ‘North American travel narratives and the ordering/othering of South America (c. 1810-1860)’, Journal of Historical Sociology 9 (1996), pp. 85-110.
15. Linnaeus’ plant taxonomy is probably the best known and maybe the first example of such a global ordering attempt: W. Blunt, The compleat naturalist: life of Linnaeus (London, Collins, 1971); L. Koerner, ‘Carl Linnaeus in his time and place’, in N. Jardine, J. Secord and E. Spary, eds, Cultures of natural history (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996).
16. Pratt, Imperial e,yes p. 33. Greenhalgh notes that the imperial exhibitions displayed certain places as ‘over there’, as places created only through conquest; P. Greenhalgh, Ephemeral vistas: the expositions universelles, great exhibitions and world fairs, 1851-1939 (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1988).
17. B. Latour, Science in action: how to follow scientists and engineers through society (Milton Keynes, Open University Press, 1987). See also John Law on ‘long-distance control’ and the expansion of the Portuguese trade routes to India, and Thomas Richards on the imperial archive; J. Law, ‘On the methods of long-distance control: vessels, navigation and the Portuguese route to India’, in J. Law, ed, Power, action and b:elief a new sociology o?f knowledge (London, Routledge, 1986), pp. 234-63; J. Law, ‘Technology and heterogeneous engineering: the case of Portuguese expansion’, in W. E. Bijker, T. P. Hughes and T. J. Pinch, eds, The social construction of technical systems: new directions in the sociology and history of technology (Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1987), pp. 111-34; T. Richards, The imperial archive: knowledge and the fantasy of empire (London, Verso, 1993).
18. According to Latour, this calculation site emerges as a centre once a cycle is established between sites: the point of accumulation for the data gathered at other places. It is also the point where data are summarized and converted into information, or k.nowledge In fact, the centre's ability to collect, hold and summarize data is what gives it the power to act at a distance on many other points. It must be noted, however, that we are not implying that this hierarchical relationship of centres and peripheries is in any way esssentializable or given. Rather there is a relational and fragile network of points which may easily decompose or be resisted. With specific regard to the regional survey-Latin America relationship, we employ Latour's notion of (constructed) centres and peripheries, not because we want it to signal an always-already superior quality of European methods of mapping, but because it is useful for the analysis of any such hierarchies which may exist in the literature.
19. Notions of ordering and translation have been emphasized in the work of Bruno Latour, Mary Louise Pratt and John Law on the histories and sociologies of science. For discussion of the spaces and spatialities of science and its methods, see, F. Driver, ‘Making space’, Ecumene 1 (1995), pp. 386-90; S. Hinchliffe, ‘Technology, power and space: the means and ends of geographies of technologies’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 14 (1996), pp. 659-82; N. Thrift, F. Driver and D. Livingstone, ‘The geography of truth’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 13: (1995), pp. 1-3.
20. Salvatore, ‘Ordering/othering’, pp. 85-6.
21. Subsequently printed as an appendix to Barclay's paper in the Geographical Journal p. 39. Branford and Barclay were familiar with each other's work and methods. Barclay actually petitioned Keltie (RGS secretary in 1908) to ask Branford to comment on his paper at Barclay's presentation at the RGS in 1908; W. S. Barclay Archive, Correspondence block 1911-20, RGS. See also n. 6 above. As here, the majority of the writing carried out by members of the Regional Survey Movement is imbued with a male gender. While this is clearly problematic, for the sake of continuity we will present texts in their original form for the rest of the paper.
22. There has been considerable debate concerning the nature of British expansionary endeavours in Argentina. In addition to Britain's (failed) attempts to capture Buenos Aires by force in 1806 and 1807, it has been argued (as well as disputed) that Britain asserted an ‘informal imperialism’ over Argentina via financial investment and control. Whether the dominance of the financial market in Buenos Aires by British banks was part of a broader imperial endeavour or not, control was lost after the Baring crisis in 1890-95; C. Jones, ‘ “Business imperialism” and Argentina, 1875-1900: a theoretical note’, Journal of Latin American Studies 12 (1980), pp. 437-44; H. S. Ferns, ‘Argentina: part of an informal empire?’, in A. Hennessey and J. King, eds, The land that England lost Argentina and Britain, a special relationship (London, British Academic Press, 1992), pp. 49-62.
23. See A. Hale for one such example: ‘The River Plate and its possibilities’, Scottish Geographical Magazine (1909), pp. 426-31.
24. Cited in J. P. Dickenson, Ways of looking the British in nineteenth century Brazil (mimeograph, 1994), p. 5.
25. From V. Branford to W. S. Barclay (Nov. 1908) in the W. S. Barclay Archive, RGS Correspondence block 1911-20.
26. Greenhalgh, ‘Ephemeral vistas’; Richards, The imperial archive.
27. E. Reclus, ‘A great globe’, Geographical Journal 12 (1898), pp. 401-6.
28. H. Meller, ‘Philanthropy and public enterprise: international exhibitions and the modern town planning movement, 1889-1913’, Planning Perspectives 10: (1995), p. 300.
29. Boardman, Lives of Geddes; Livingstone, Geographical t;radition Meller, ‘Philanthropy and public enterprise’.
30. Geddes's ideas concerning the Outlook Tower are outlined in an unpublished paper (‘being four letters to an Indian friend’) held in the Le Play library collection, University of Keele: P. Geddes, ‘A needed research institute: geographical and social’ (date unknown), p. 4.
31. V. Branford, ‘The regional survey as a method of social study’, in Conference on regional surveys: papers read at the meeting of the Provisional Committee for the Development of Regional Surveys, at the Imperial Institute (London, London Geographical Institute, 1915), pp. 9-10.
32. Orlove, ‘Putting race in its place’.
33. Branford, ‘The regional survey’, p. 9.
34. V. Branford, notes on ‘Eutopia’ (undated), Sociological Society Archive VB20, Keele University.
35. The sense of direction was particularly useful in Latin America, as even in the nineteenth century few travellers or scientists were ‘trail-blazers or pioneers’ going into uncharted territory, but travellers ‘along established routes, to visit established places, and mainly to use established modes of transport’. Indeed, it is interesting to note how often the accounts of surveys are described as ‘explorations’, as if the encounter was with an undiscovered region rather than one already subjected to almost four hundred years of European intervention; Dickenson, Ways of l,ooking p. 3.
36. V. Branford and P. Geddes, The coming polity (London, Williams & Norgate, 1917), pp. 13-14.
37. H. J. Fleure, ‘Regional surveys in relation to geography’, in A conference on regional surveys, p. 6.
38. Mumford, The culture of cities, p. 306.
39. Geddes, ‘A needed research institute’.
40. Matless, ‘Regional surveys’. It is possible that Geddes took some inspiration from the National Imperial Exhibition held in Edinburgh in 1886.
41. Geddes, ‘A needed research institute’, p. 2.
42. To Branford especially, the regional surveyor should ‘map his observations’; ‘The regional survey’, p. 9.
43. VB 1906; Branford, ‘A hall of vision’.
44. VB 1906.
45. VB 1906.
46. VB1906.
47. VB 1906. All placenames conform to Branford's text.
48. VB1906.
49. Many leading geographers fell into this category. John Young Buchanan, for example, as a major shareholder in an Argentine railway, had more than an academic interest in studying the impact upon trade and population. Similarly, Isaiah Bowman's study of ‘the frontier’ in Latin America was motivated in part to identify colonization possibilities, which endeared him to business and government.
50. K. Jones, ‘Nineteenth century British travel accounts of Argentina’, Ethnohistory 33 (1986), pp. 195-211; Pratt, Imperial eyes.
51. Foucault, ‘Questions on geography’, p. 75.
52. Letter from Mr Harry Skinner to J. S. Keltie (RGS secretary, 1909) (8 Feb. 1909), W. S. Barclay Archive, correspondence block 1911-20, RGS. The RGS declined funding for such an expedition.
53. Hardy also owned an estancia (farmstead) in Paraguay, while both he and Branford were involved in land colonization schemes in Paraguay and Mexico, either directly or as advisers to philanthropist admirers of Geddes such as the soap magnate Joseph Fels; Sociological Society Archive, VB254 and VB45, Keele University. Not all these business ventures were a success: in a letter to Branford, Hardy laments that his estancia is ‘nothing but weeds. It gives me a heart disease to see my work thus annihilated in a short time’ (17 Oct. 1913), Sociological Society Archive, VB165, Keele University. See also Mairet, Pioneer of sociology, p. 128; Meller, Patrick Geddes.
54. Correspondence between Victor Branford and M. A. Rodriquez (21 Mar. 1910), Sociological Society Archive, VB254, Keele University. Land prices in Paraguay were a primary concern for all railway companies eager not to pay over the odds.
55. As well as his report, Hardy also sent a lengthy letter to Branford, entitled ‘Notes on Agriculture in Paraguay’ (17 Oct. 1913), Sociological Society Archive, VB165, Keele University.
56. Unpublished report on the Parguayan Central Railway by Victor Branford (1912), Sociological Society Archive, VB32, Keele University, p. 8.
57. W. S. Barclay Archive, Library MSS vols. 2, 3, 6 and 7, RGS.
58. Although Geddes is often remembered for his contribution to urban planning, urban areas are ignored in the regional surveys of Latin America. In this, the surveys adopt a similar ideological tone to nineteenth-century Argentine writing which drew a civilization- barbarism dichotomy between Buenos Aires (at the time the size of Boston) and the pampas, while occasionally glorifying the gaucho as the untainted, true Argentine.
59. See also R. Grusin, ‘Representing Yellowstone: photography, loss and fidelity to nature’, Configurations 3 (1995), pp. 415-36.
60. Barclay, ‘The River Paraná’, p. 3 (emphasis added).
61. Barclay also suggests that the bañado, estero and laguna swamps of that region present dangers to horsemen and that they are breeding grounds to ‘tick and other pests to stock, and are valueless apart from a precarious water-supply’. As such, his classifications are also imbued with the desire for economic and logistic progress. I.b,id p. 17.
62. Cf. Latour, Science in action.
63. Hardy, The geography of plants, p. 302.
64. D. Livingstone, ‘The moral discourse of climate: historical considerations on race, place and virtue’, Journal of Historical Geography 14 (1991), pp. 413-34.
65. B. Willis, ‘Recent surveys in northern Patagonia’, Geographical Journal 40 (1912), p. 608.
66. Although see Figure 1 (W. S. Barclay Archive, Library MSS, RGS).
67. Barclay, ‘The River Paraná’, p. 8.
68. G. E. Church, ‘Argentine geography and the ancient Pampean Sea’, Geographical Journal 12 (1898), p. 387.
69. Pratt, Imperial eyes p. 151.
70. Undated letter by E. Reclus (Keele archive, VB96).
71. D. Christison, ‘The River Plate region forty-three years ago’, Scottish Geographical Magazine 25 (1909), pp. 469-81.
72. A printed reply to W. S. Barclay's paper presented at the RGS (Nov. 1908) and published as an appendix to Barclay, ‘The River Paraná’.
73. M. G. Mulhall, ‘Explorations in South America’, Scottish Geographical Magazine 4 (1888), p. 147.
74. J. A. Campbell and D. N. Livingstone, ‘Neo-Lamarckism and the development of geography in the United States and Great Britain’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers n.s. 8 (1983), pp. 267-94.
75. Fagg, ‘History of the Regional Survey Movement’, p. 72.
76. Halliday, ‘Regional Survey Movement’. N. L. Stepan, ‘The hour of eugenics’: race, gender, and nation in Latin America (Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1991).
77. VB 1906. Branford wished to make comparisons between the River Plate survey and the work of M. Demolins, a leading environmental determinist, former student of Le Play and colleague of Geddes at Edinburgh, although this doesn't appear ever to have taken place. The prospect of Latin America as a racial laboratory was also present in Vaughan Cornish's work on the Panama Canal; D. Matless, ‘A modern stream: water, landscape, modernism, and geography’, Environment and P:lanning D Society and Space 10 (1992), pp. 569-88.
78. Branford and Geddes, The coming polity pp. 8-9.
79. Halliday, ‘The sociological movement’; Matless, ‘Regional surveys’, p. 467.
80. Branford, ‘A hall of vision’.
81. D. Matless, ‘Ordering the land: the “preservation” of the English countryside, 1918-1939’ (University of Nottingham, Ph.D. thesis, 1990).
82. Branford, ‘A hall of vision’.
83. Matless, ‘Regional surveys’, p. 472.
84. A belief that locals were ignorant of their surroundings was widely held in both scientific and travel narratives. Mulhall, for example, makes the astonishing claim that, ‘Incredible as it may seem to Europeans, there are still portions of this republic, as large as Ireland or Scotland, of which little or nothing is known in Buenos Ayres’; Mulhall, E,xplorations p. 145.
85. Hardy, Geography of plants, pp. 159 and 136-7. Hardy's clumsy inclusion of meztisos with the indigenous population is problematic, as the former possessed neither the cultural identity nor the history of exploitation of the latter. Moreover, the territorial expansion of the meztiso often took place at the expense of the indigenous population, and during the early part of the twentieth century many governments adopted a policy of meztizaje (mixing) to promote the mixed-blood population as the ideal type at the expense of the indigenous.
86. Barclay, ‘The River Paraná’, p. 14.
87. H. W. Bates, for example, described Belem in 1848 as ‘a gloomy place with mean houses, inhabited by idle soldiers, slovenly dressed women and naked children where “people of all shade in colour of skin, European, Negro, and Indian, but chiefly an uncertain mixture of the three… So striking, in the view, was the mixture of natural riches and human poverty… [even though] compensating every defect, rose the overpowering beauty of the vegetation” ‘; cited in Dickenson, Ways of looking, p. 10.
88. Cf. Livingstone, Geographical tradition.
89. Hardy, Geography of plants, p. 108.
90. Hardy, MH 1910, p. 151.
91. Branford, ‘British and Germans in the River Plate’, unpublished paper (n.d.), Sociological Society Archive, VB279, Keele University, p. 8.
92. See also D. Matless, ‘A modern stream’, pp. 578-79.
93. Hardy was instructed to ‘report upon lands which you may think worth while to have inspected’, and colonization opportunities receive explicit attention in reports as well as correspondence between Branford and M. A. Rodriguez, manager of the Paraguayan Central Railway (9 Mar. 1909; 22 Dec. 1909; 18 July 1910); Sociological Society Archive, University of Keele. Hardy was later to become involved in the highly successful Tezompa valley land colonization scheme in Mexico.
94. MH 1910, p. 10.
95. MH 1910, p. 2. Not that the presence of ‘foreign elements’ are always regarded positively. Branford was acutely aware of the geopolitical importance of the River Plate, and took it upon himself in a number of talks to warn of German interests in the region. In one text, ‘British and Germans on the River Plate’, Branford notes: ‘It is dramatic enough for the English traveller, seeking direction or hospitality of the chance settler on the plains of Bolivia, or in the forests of Paraguay, to find himself confronted - a by no means unique experience - with mural decorations consisting of a magnificent portrait of the Emperor William III flanked by similar reproductions of Moltke and Bismarck.’
96. Matless notes the relevance of the racial division of labour employed during the construction of the Panama Canal to the ongoing acclimatization debate during the early 1900s. As with Hardy, Vaughan Cornish constructed racial labour types such as the ‘Spanish labourer’ to illustrate the ability of South Europeans to work under conditions of extreme heat, more effectively than either the Americans, British or West Indians; Matless, ‘A modern stream’.
97. Church's paper was presented as a presidential address to the Geographical Section of the British Association, Bristol, Sept. 1898.
98. K1eele MS 279, p. 4. It is interesting to note that Geddes advocated the railway station as the suitable starting-point for ‘getting to know’ a region. From here various transects would be conducted gathering information on the location of housing and amenities, transport lines, health and welfare, which could then be interpreted using the triad of place, work and family.
99. Barclay, ‘The River Paraná’, p. 34.
100. Boardman, The worlds of Patrick Geddes. For a literature on European ‘imperial’ endeavours in Latin America, see Pratt, Imperial Eyes; Salvatore, ‘North American travel’ Jones, ‘British travel accounts of Argentina’; Hennessey and King, The land that England lost; S. Naylor, ‘Regulation, movement and territoriality’; and J. Franco, ‘Un viaje poco romántico: viajeros británicos hacia sudamérica, 1818-28’, Escritura 7 (Caracas, 1979), pp. 129-42.
101. P. Hall, Cities of tomorrow (Oxford, Blackwell, 1988); N. Payton, ‘The machine in the garden city: Patrick Geddes’ plan for Tel Aviv’, Planning Perspectives 10 (1995), pp. 359-81. Matless, ‘A modern stream’.
102. Branford, ‘Eutopia’.