A short cultural history of anglo-american economic geography: bodies, books, machines, and places

• Trevor J. Barnes ^[1]
  1. [1] University of British Columbia

     University of British Columbia

     Canadá

     
• Localización: Encounters and engagements between economic and cultural geography / Barney Warf (ed. lit.), 2012, ISBN 9789400797468, págs. 19-37
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • My aim in this chapter is to provide a cultural geographical history of the very discipline of economic geography. I write that history by focusing on four cultural elements: bodies, books, machines, and places. My theoretical starting point is similar work carried out in science studies. From the beginning of that field there was recognition that scientists were and are never simply “brains in vats,” disembodied, displaced and disembedded from culture. Knowledge never arrives from pure brainpower. Rather, it is the outcome of embodied and located cultural practices that include the use of various cultural artifacts. Scientists are not faceless organs of scientific rationality, but real people with particular kinds of socially defined bodies, histories, skills, and interests. Those characteristics make a difference to the kind of knowledge produced, even to the most rarefied forms of scientific inquiry and representation. I make a similar argument about economic geographers from the first stirrings of the discipline in late nineteenth century Western Europe through to the present. I draw upon various studies, many of them archive based, which I have carried out on the history of economic geography over the last 15 years.