The properties of counterinsurgency: On Joel Wainwright's Geopiracy (original) (raw)
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This book review symposium interrogates Joel Wainwright’s recent text Geopiracy: Oaxaca, Militant Empiricism, and Geographical Thought (Palgrave Macillan 2013). Overtly, this text is a scathing critique of the Bowman Expeditions, launched in 2006 with several million dollars of funding from the Foreign Military Study Office (FMSO) of the US Army. Two years later, and well into the first expedition in Oaxaca, Mexico, several groups from Oaxaca responded, accusing the Bowman Expedition of “Geopiracy” and of tricking the indigenous communities involved. In mounting a robust critique of the Bowman Expeditions, in this text Wainwright simultaneously takes on several other pressing issues in the discipline of geography, among them the militarization of geography, power, ethics, transparency and consent in fieldwork, the supposed objectivity and value-less-ness of mapping, and the tepid response to the Bowman controversy mustered by the AAG. In this review symposium a diverse group of geographers respond both to the controversy as a whole, and to Wainwright’s reading and critique of it. Finally, Wainwright concludes this symposium with his response to these reviews.
Manchester University Press eBooks, 2014
I n , the bicentenary of the geographer and naturalist Alexander von Humboldt slipped by largely unnoticed in North America. Given his contributions to the study of the earth, it was a surprising descent into relative obscurity. A medical researcher writing in to the Journal of the American Medical Association had expressed his dismay that Humboldt was 'no longer accorded the recognition he enjoyed during his lifetime' (Frankel,). Frankel was remembering Humboldt's style of collaborative enquiry during famous expeditions to the crater of Vesuvius in the autumn of accompanied by his friends and colleagues, the chemist Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac, the geologist Christian Leopold von Buch, and the Latin American politician Simón Bolívar, who was encouraged by Humboldt to win independence from the repressive Spanish Empire-the namesake for the current Bolívar revolution in Latin America. ey were looking at the live eruptions of Vesuvius but the conversation, undoubtedly, covered the geological, atmospherical, geographical, biological, and humanitarian equivalent of eruptions. As Humboldt wrote in Cosmos, 'Nature … is a unity in diversity of phenomena; a harmony blending together all created things, however dissimilar in form and attributes; one great whole cosmos animated by the breath of life' (Humboldt,. Frankel's hope for a tting bicentenary never materialized; the political climate of the cold war in North America had le little appetite for 'a champion of the liberation of Latin America from the yoke of colonialist oppression' (Rupke, , p.). As a young girl in , my thoughts were not yet straying to Humboldt and his cohort cohort, nor to my own small role in North American colonial oppression. I was sitting on another extinct volcano, Christmas Hill, on the far western edge of the continent on Vancouver Island innocently looking out over the capital of British Columbia named a er the empress herself, Victoria. I was in a remnant patch of native oak meadow deemed by the rst colonial leader, Sir James Douglas, 'a perfect Eden' , and pondering a basic biogeographical question: what was the story of this place? It was a task towards which the cohort would have been well placed to bend their collective minds. But it was the mid-twentieth century, and the descriptive study of place was temporarily out of fashion. Academic trends towards quanti cation and spatial economic theory found footholds in institutions bowing to the nancial pressures of globalization. I was in the middle
Book Review: Geopiracy: Oaxaca, Militant Empiricism, and Geographical Thought
Human Geography
This book review symposium interrogates Joel Wainwright's recent text Geopiracy: Oaxaca, Militant Empiricism, and Geographical Thought (Palgrave Macillan 2013). Overtly, this text is a scathing critique of the Bowman Expeditions, launched in 2006 with several million dollars of funding from the Foreign Military Study Office (FMSO) of the US Army. Two years later, and well into the first expedition in Oaxaca, Mexico, several groups from Oaxaca responded, accusing the Bowman Expedition of “Geopiracy” and of tricking the indigenous communities involved. In mounting a robust critique of the Bowman Expeditions, in this text Wainwright simultaneously takes on several other pressing issues in the discipline of geography, among them the militarization of geography, power, ethics, transparency and consent in fieldwork, the supposed objectivity and value-less-ness of mapping, and the tepid response to the Bowman controversy mustered by the AAG. In this review symposium a diverse group of ...
Introduction: Review Symposium of "Geopiracy: Oaxaca, Militant Empiricism, and Geographical Thought"
This book review symposium interrogates Joel Wainwright’s recent text Geopiracy: Oaxaca, Militant Empiricism, and Geographical Thought (Palgrave Macillan 2013). Overtly, this text is a scathing critique of the Bowman Expeditions, launched in 2006 with several million dollars of funding from the Foreign Military Study Office (FMSO) of the US Army. Two years later, and well into the first expedi- tion in Oaxaca, Mexico, several groups from Oaxaca responded, accusing the Bowman Expedition of “Geopiracy” and of tricking the indigenous communities involved. In mounting a robust critique of the Bowman Expeditions, in this text Wainwright simultaneously takes on several other pressing issues in the discipline of geography, among them the militarization of geography, power, ethics, transparency and consent in fieldwork, the supposed objectivity and value-less-ness of mapping, and the tepid response to the Bowman controversy mustered by the AAG. In this review symposium a diverse group of geographers respond both to the controversy as a whole, and to Wainwright’s reading and critique of it. Finally, Wainwright concludes this symposium with his response to these reviews.
2015
This interview with Dr. Robert T. Tally Jr. (associate professor of English at Texas State University) aims to highlight the strong interrelation between literature and space from the starting point of Geocriticism. With this term, which was coined to define a new discipline able to interact with “literary studies, geography, urbanism and architecture” (Tally 2011: xiv), in fact, Tally offers a theoretical basis for spatiality in relation to literature.
TO DRAW A MAP IS TO TELL A STORY”: INTERVIEW WITH DR. ROBERT T. TALLY JR. ON GEOCRITICISM
This interview with Dr. Robert T. Tally Jr. (associate professor of English at Texas State University) aims to highlight the strong interrelation between literature and space from the starting point of Geocriticism. With this term, which was coined to define a new discipline able to interact with “literary studies, geography, urbanism and architecture” (Tally 2011: xiv), in fact, Tally offers a theoretical basis for spatiality in relation to literature.