Spaces of Knowledge

ontological pluralism in contested cultural landscapes

Richard Howitt and Sandra Suchet-Pearson

Macquarie University

Academic discourse typically represents its knowledge as detached, objective and universal. Contemporary institutions of teaching, research, governance and disciplinary thinking are profoundly influenced by Enlightenment thinking. Cultural geography reflects this inheritance. Yet cultural geography’s discursive spaces often try to displace and unsettle it. The ontological and epistemological legacies of European colonialism, however, are highly resistant. Even the most liberal universities operate in ways that place substantial domains of human experience, thought and insight outside the conventional bounds of legitimate knowledge. So, despite its inclusive intent, much post-colonial cultural geography privileges abstract theory rather than grounded practice. Consequently, like other academic disciplines, it produces a ‘hall of mirrors’ in which self-consciously post-colonial theory reflects its own views rather than engaging with alternate ontologies diverse ways of knowing, being-in-place and relating to complex, often contested cultural landscapes at various scales.

This chapter argues cultural geography should explore practical, theoretical and methodological implications of ontological pluralism because landscapes of cultural conflict are often as much about different knowledge systems as about contested claims to land, identity, resources or livelihood. It considers the implications of multiple knowledges (ontological diversity) for cultural geography and seeks to unsettle and challenge the dominance of Eurocenticism, which affects even the new cultural geography, by taking seriously the philosophies and experiences of indigenous groups.

‘Western’ philosophy as a hall of mirrors

People interpret, make meaning and relate to themselves, other people and environments in many different ways. ‘Western’ philosophies, which we broadly define as ‘Eurocentric’ knowledges in this chapter, generally assume external, objective realities exist. Definitional categories, boundaries and relations are set as part of those realities and are easily accepted as a static, natural truth. This approach sets limits on how legitimate knowledge is constructed in ‘western’ philosophical traditions. Christie uses Latour’s imagery to describe how:

… the production of knowledge business in the modern world has been likened to a railroad industry in which knowledge can only run on tracks already laid down from the laboratory out (Christie 1991:1).

Eurocentric thinking, drawing on Enlightenment science, industrial revolution technologies, market economics and/or Judeo-Christian philosophies, run on the tracks of a naturalised and externalised truth founded on a belief in atomism, where the world is divided into distinguishable segments with essential differences:

In atomistic views of the world, identity is marked by irreducible essences, and by discontinuities by boundaries between what (and where) something is, and what (and where) it is not (Christie 1992:2).

Belief in an external world, an objective reality that exists ‘out there’, disguises the cultural construction of ontologies as external, unbiased and naturalised (Christie 1992: 2). The assumption that universal truths can be discovered, and that Eurocentric knowledges have revealed at least some of them, means the idea of knowledge itself is often not problematised in academic discourse. This renders invisible processes that construct knowledge, and many of their consequences. Eurocentric knowledges, boundaries and relationships are conventionally treated in the academy as the only possible knowledges and as universally relevant.

The assumption of Eurocentric knowledges’ universal relevance parallels the political processes of imperialism and displacement. Other knowledges are rendered silent. They are ignored, devalued and/or undermined so that Eurocentric knowledges see only themselves, becoming self-legitimating rather than self-aware. D Rose eloquently describes the circular argument formed by these assumptions as an all-knowing self, centring itself in a hall of mirrors:

The self sets itself within a hall of mirrors; it mistakes its reflection for the world, sees its own reflections endlessly, talks endlessly to itself, and, not surprisingly, finds continual verification of itself and its world view. This is monologue masquerading as conversation, masturbation posing as productive interaction; it is a narcissism so profound that it purports to provide a universal knowledge when in fact its violent erasures are universalizing its own singular and powerful isolation. It promotes a nihilism that stifles the knowledge of connection, disabling dialogue, and maiming the possibilities whereby ‘self’ might be captured by ‘other’ (D Rose 1999: 177).

Irigaray (1985) also draws on metaphorical mirrors. She discusses how the male imaginary duplicates and reflects itself to ensure ‘coherence’ and legitimacy. G Rose expands further upon this in her ‘dialogue’ with Irigaray:

And the mirrors are frozen … Solidified in their repetitive reflection of the same, a solidity of morphological tumescence and of death. And mirrors can be walls. They cluster together, overlap, build a ‘palace of mirrors’ (Irigaray 1985b: 137), provide ‘solid walls of principle’ (Irigaray 1985a: 106). They give form, they turn ideas into structures, edifices, they produce ‘the absolute power of form’ (Irigaray, 1985a: 110), the solidity of concepts, boundaries and order (Irigaray 1985a: 107) (G Rose 1996: 67).

We seek to engage cultural landscapes on the other side of the mirrors constructed by Eurocentric knowledges. We aim to open readers to possibilities unthought of, and spaces inaccessible from within, the hall of mirrors. Blunt and Rose (1994: 15-16) identify two strategies used to open up spaces of resistance. One strategy draws on “imagined geographies” as an “imaginative resource” to challenge colonisation. The other engages with the inherent limits of Eurocentric knowledge itself. Nader identifies three research directions that challenge notions of western rationality as the benchmark for all other cultural knowledge: describing knowledges in traditional societies; ethnographic studies of the sociocultural context of western science; and linking studies of science with studies of other knowledges to encourage "mutual interrogation" (Nader 1996:6).

In this chapter, the self-defining limits of the circular argument which characterises Eurocentric knowledges are exposed by deconstructing key concepts in cultural geography and investigating how Eurocentric knowledges become colonising knowledges. Concurrently, situated knowledges and practices, diverse systems of local knowledge and social organisation arising from cultures being-in-place, are drawn on to challenge and unsettle the position of Eurocentric knowledges within the hall of mirrors. This is done not to romanticise other knowledges but to challenge, unsettle and re-configure the knowledge-power nexus constructed in cultural geography, and elsewhere in the academy.

Geographical knowledges in the hall of mirrors

Academic knowledges positioned within this metaphorical hall of mirrors play vital roles in making invisible, writing over and blocking out other knowledge systems. For example, it is no coincidence that many of the words associated with research are drawn from and embedded in colonising discourses: re-searching, exploring, collecting, journeying, examining, investigating, travelling, discovering. Clifford (1997:194, 196) identifies colonising legacies in his examination of how anthropology problematises the concept of fieldwork a concept similarly cherished by geographers:

Fieldwork has become a problem because of its positivist and colonialist associations (the field as “laboratory”, the field as place of “discovery” … they [anthropologists and ethnographers and we might add geographers] have navigated in the dominant society, often enjoying white skin privilege and a physical safety in the field guaranteed by a history of prior punitive expeditions and policing.

Geographical research is certainly not immune from these colonising legacies, contexts and practices. However, geographers are turning their attention to colonising discourses and ‘post-colonial’, ‘decolonising’ or ‘counter-colonial’ projects. They are probing, questioning and challenging the role the discipline has played in disempowering people and making multiple realities and imaginaries invisible through exploring, charting, locating, mapping and writing (for example, see Blunt and Rose 1994; Driver 1992, 2000; Godlewska and Smith 1994; Howitt and Jackson 1998).

Beyond research and fieldwork, geographical writing has also been scrutinised for co lonising power relations. Academic protocol has sought to imbue academic knowledge and texts as ‘truth’ with a neutral, objective character that cannot be challenged. This automatically excludes some narratives, alienates some audiences and discredits certain texts. Keith (1992: 563) argues that distancing the author from the text powerfully authorises the text and “exemplifies the need of the powerful to rationalise, comprehend and control the seductively anarchic world of the irrational ‘other’”. Geographers, anthropologists, literary theorists and others have been considering the power relations that imbue a text with authority by exploring relations between authoring a text and the editorial control with which authors make decisions (Crang 1992: 542). Much academic writing ignores and makes invisible these relations and the discursive communities they create. By implication this asserts “authority over and ownership of the work” (McDowell 1992b: 62).

A text is not a neutral, passive presentation of an external truth (Christie 1992). It is a partial, active re-presentation of complex worlds using particular strategies to persuade and influence readers for specific purposes (Katz 1992: 496). The power involved in re-presenting people in geographical texts also reflects and produces colonising relationships as peoples’ knowledges and practices are excluded or devalued. Attempting to include people and their perspectives does not mean power relations have been addressed and a ‘solution’ found to ‘the problem’ of representing ‘others’. Processes of inclusion are as saturated with power relations as those of exclusion. Being able to write, the appropriation of other people’s experiences, choosing whom to include and how to include them, the choices other people have made in representing themselves to the author and other authors, the ways the readers interpret the words and the ulterior motive for the usage of the ‘voices’, all involve relationships of power (Crang 1992; Katz 1992).

Human geographers have challenged attempts to include ‘voices’ in projects that aim to speak (or write) on behalf of ‘others’ who have been excluded in Eurocentric representations. The colonising arrogance and politics of appropriation encompassed in such a notion has been challenged (McDowell 1994: 242). In response there has been some “opening up spaces within geography for alternative voices to be heard [and read]” (McDowell 1994: 243). This chapter seeks to open up such spaces, engaging the reader with a polyphony that challenges Eurocentric assumptions of universalism which have silenced and devalued other knowledges. This is the option identified by Crang (1992:536) as:

a form of polyphony grounded much more firmly in recounting the lives of particular individuals, each becoming what we might call a bearer of cultural otherness without collectively forming an ‘Other’.

Unsettling key ideas in cultural geography

Eurocentric knowledges typically assume an essentialised, naturalised truth where boundaries are seen as external to categorically separate entities. For example, philosophical discourse and social science method often assume a profound, categorical distinction between and around key concepts used in cultural geography. For example:

· a separation between space, scale and time;

· language and meaning form singular entities;

· a binary opposition between culture and nature; and

· identities that are singular and static.

Each of these assumptions has been challenged by recent cultural geographical research, but the expectation that such concepts should be categorically distinct and independent persists. Subsequently, academic discourse continues to proceed in a piecemeal way. The further assumption of universal applicability of this approach obscures alternative approaches behind a mass of mirrors. Human existence, communication, identity (and otherness) is always, inescapably and inevitably, embodied, emplaced and (geographically, historically and culturally) contextualized. Thus, conventions and assumptions of Eurocentric knowledge and the practices of academic discourse directly marginalize diverse human experience and contribute to wider political consequences.

Space, scale and time

Following the suggestion of Horvath, Howitt (2001b) argues that five foundational concepts underpin the discipline of geography space-time, place, nature, culture and scale. Human geographers have played a leading role in reconceptualizing dominant concepts of space. For example, Soja (1989: 1) seeks “to spatialize the historical narrative, to attach to durèe an enduring critical human geography”. Blunt and Rose (1994:12) argue space is not a neutral given but that “space itself could … be interpreted in multiple ways but only after its construction in the minds of those perceiving it”. Massey (e.g. 1984) also eloquently explains that neither the spatial, the social nor the natural should or can be theorized independently. These domains co-construct each other. They are co-equal components of any sophisticated social scientific analytical framework.

In challenging notions of space as a non-active element in social relations, cultural geographers have actively investigated how people construct spaces, places, boundaries and relationships. It is not that spatial boundaries and relationships are illusionary or do not exist. Rather, it is necessary to recognise that “the material and ideological are co-constitutive” (Jacobs 1996: 5). Imaginary and real boundaries and relationships around, within and between spaces and places are crucial in understanding power relationships and consequently are vital in imagining and realising relevant and contextualised processes in specific circumstances. Moore (1998: 347) argues for a vision which “insists on joining the cultural politics of place to those of identity” rather than “viewing geographically specific sites as the stage already fully-formed constructions that serve as settings for action for the performance of identities.”

Spatial, cultural and natural processes and relationships are always constituted in time across and between scales. Howitt (1998a, also 2000) discusses the multidimensional and simultaneous interactions that define and are defined within and between spaces. Drawing upon a philosophy of internal relations, Howitt (1993:34) argues the “rigidity of many categorical definitions is unsustainable … Boundaries which previously separated clearly independent, even mutually exclusive, conceptual categories have been transgressed”. He emphasises that “scale, like all spatial relationships, is embedded in the dynamics of social life rather than imposed externally” (Howitt 1993:39). Relationships are contextualized across space, between places, across and between times, within and between groups and territories. This points to a commitment to radical contextualization a commitment to taking context seriously as an ontological element rather than treating it as a superficially contingent element. The practical impact of radical contextualization is apparent that cultural research must both investigate and debate, rather than either assume or ignore, the implications of geographical, historical, cultural, political and environmental context.

Despite the wide acknowledgement of space-time as an integrated concept (eg Massey 1994), geographers’ debate of ideas about space have rarely been matched by similar interest in concepts of time. Time continues to be widely seen as a separate category, often been left for historians to explore. However time, like space, has been constructed in Eurocentric epistomologies on the basis that the world can be seen as it really is. Judeo-Christian and scientific discourses represent time through a time-line on which arrows point to the future, constructing a linear notion of time. Ideas of evolution and social Darwinism reinforce this as a definable progress an inevitable movement towards a singular future. Notions of progress and development, cause and effect contribute towards this taken-for-granted sensation:

Linear time underlies our most cherished notions of “progress” our collective faith in the inexorable, incremental refinement of human society, technology, and thought (Knudtson and Suzuki 1992: 143).

The discipline of history makes it “possible to recover an absolute truth of what happened in history. History is not a story told by the present, it is a fait accompli, which we need carefully to uncover” (Christie 1992: 2). Carter (1987: xiv) critiques histories based on and contributing to a notion of linear bound time. He argues that this type of history replaces spatial events with a historical stage whereby it “is not the historian who stages events, weaving them together to form a plot, but History itself”. This conceptually se[arates space and time.

The fact that where we stand and how we go is history” is not recognised. “In a theatre of its own design, history’s drama unfolds; the historian is an impartial onlooker, simply repeating what happened … Such history is a fabric woven of self-reinforcing illusions [placed within the hall of mirrors] (Carter 1987: xv).

Language, landscape and meaning

Language reflects, shapes and limits how humans understand the world around us. It provides the building blocks of ontology and it simultaneously constructs and limits of our vision. Language reflects and constructs power. For example, concepts of time are embedded in language. English, for example, constructs tenses in ways that reflect and reinforce a view of time as categorically distinct, as either past, present or future. In other words, the linearity implicit in much Eurocentric epistemology is embedded in English language, making it difficult to convey non-linear concepts of time and temporal relations, and their spatial implications. Consider, for example, the use of the verb ‘come’ in the following passage of Aboriginal English:

Kakawuli (bush yam) come up from Dreaming. No matter what come up, they come up from Dreaming. All tucker come out from Dreaming. Fish, turtle, all come from Dreaming. Crocodile, anything, all come from Dreaming (Big Mick Kankinang in D Rose 1996:35).

In this passage Mr Kankinang uses the verb to come without conventional tense markers. For many English speakers this shift from standard English is read as an inability to express the past tense properly because they construct the Dreaming as a time in an ancient past. Yet Mr Kankinang’s grammar here precisely represents an ever-present Dreaming (what the anthropologist Stanner (1979: 24) referred to as the “everywhen”), where things did come, do come and will always come from the continually renewing relationships between people, place and other species and entities that are called ‘Dreaming’. In this reading, the statement offers a potent challenge to conventional temporal thinking in English. It unsettles English tense boundaries and a Eurocentric notion of time by presenting time as simultaneously past, present and future. It very carefully constructs a cultural landscape that Eurocentric philosophies and most English speakers cannot easily comprehend.

In providing a culturally-mediated relationship between foreground and background, between the here-and-now of place and the horizon of space (Hirsch & O’Hanlon 1995: 4), the idea of landscape offers a metaphor for cultural relationships and processes in space-time, place and scale. Hirsch and O’Hanlon’s useful discussion considers the notion of landscape within the discursive space of anthropology. They consider Carter’s (1987) account of the colonial encounter in Botany Bay when James Cook’s expedition encountered/intruded into the cultural landscapes of Eora people. The different cultural readings engaged in that encounter used different narrative forms to contextualize people and landscape. For the European imperial narrative, exploration, discovery and settlement are the central tropes. The other might be unknown, but the human other was constructed as naturally and inherently inferior (capable of being known and dismissed) and the non-human other, however exotic and bizarre, capable of discovery, exploitation, conquest and acquisition (see also Blaut 1993).

Although the task of engaging with the reading of this distant encounter by contemporary Eora people is difficult, perhaps impossible, the central trope of the Eora narrative was the Dreaming. Although indigenous peoples’ sense of place is often glossed as exemplifying a localized world view, the Dreaming offers a scale metaphor which encompasses the infinite within the immediate. It mediates relationships across space and time at vast scales, while retaining an embodiment and emplacement that is concrete, local and specific. Cultural geography’s ‘local sense of place’ gloss for non-European or non-academic ontologies just will not do in such situations. It reserves the only cultural logic of multiple scales for the imperial, acquisitive European gaze, reducing the question of scale in cultural relations to an underlying economic and political logic that is Eurocentric. In the Dreaming, there is an ethical narrative that establishes a very different relationship between the here and now of place and the wider narrative of distant horizons of space, time and social and environmental order. For D Rose (1996), the Dreaming nurtures the landscape as a nourishing terrain country. This term in Aboriginal English encompasses people (countrymen), place (homeland) and past, here-and-now and horizon.

Nature and culture

In the process, the Dreaming reveals and challenges another Eurocentric construction the assumed categorical separation of culture and nature. This construction places the human (culture, society) in a binary opposition with the natural (animals, plants, landscapes, seascapes, lightning, thunder etc.). Within the Judeo-Christian tradition, the creation process itself constructs naturalised boundaries between ‘culture' and ‘nature’. The human, or to be more specific, the hierarchically privileged man, is seen as separate from and more powerful than other ‘living creatures’ (including woman), in large part due to his ability to name them. Science produces classificatory systems which distinguish animals from plants and other things (Whatmore and Thorne 1998; Anderson 1995). Nader (1996: 3) sees the power of science not only in its naming and categorising of the world, but also in the way that the label ‘science’ dismisses other knowledges as inferior or primitive. Science judges itself on its own terms, proclaims itself superior and legitimates its behaviour from within the hall of mirrors.

The characteristics of being able to consciously reason, be rational, and have intent and purpose have been the most pervasive attributes used to externalise society from nature, human from animal and even man from woman (Plumwood 1995, Passmore 1995). In reviewing Eurocentric attitudes towards nature and animals, Passmore (1995: 136) identifies two leading traditions in “modern Western thought”:

· one is Cartesian in inspiration, where matter (including nature and animals) is inert and passive, has no inherent powers of resistance or agency, and humans relate to it in order to reshape and reform it;

· the other is Hegelian, where the human’s task is to actualise nature and animals through art, science, philosophy and technology so that nature can be converted into something with which humans can feel ‘at home’ and not as something from which they are alienated.

Although some contemporary philosophers challenge hierarchical separation of humans and nature, they often fail to get beyond their own epistemological mirrors. For example, in contrast to the relationship encompassed in the Dreaming, Passmore writes:

No doubt, men, plants, animals, the biosphere form parts of a single community in the ecological sense of the word: each is dependent upon the others for its continued existence. But this is not the sense of community which generates rights, duties, obligations; men and animals are not involved in a network of responsibilities or a network of mutual concessions (Passmore 1995: 140, our emphasis).

Eurocentric discourses not only classify animals as a part of nature, but also distinguish between categories of wild and domestic or tame:

And the man gave names to the cattle and to the birds of the sky and to all the wild beasts: Genesis 2:19, 20 (Plaut et al. 1981: 30).

Such categories are easily naturalised in Eurocentric discourse, but they are better understood as reflecting Eurocentric assumptions about evolution and progress (Usher 1995: 203). Linear notions of progress and development see humans progressing from a state of hunter-gatherer through that of pastoralist to the pinnacle of achievement as agriculturalists. Taming and domesticating wild nature and animals civilisation is seen as a progression towards more developed forms of society, away from a primitive, wild existence as hunter-gatherers. The opposition of civilised to primitive ascribes characteristics of wild, untamed nature and animals to societies and people. This version of Eurocentricism justified exhibition of humans in ‘wild’ animal exhibits in some nineteenth century zoos (Anderson 1995: 292). Even in the 1950s, a wildlife refuge was created in Botswana (the Central Kalahari Game Reserve (CKGR)) not only to contain wild animals, but also wild Bushmen (Wilmsen 1995: 222)!

More recently, positive notions of wild and wilderness as an escape, spiritual space and true research domain (or of noble savage as original conservationist or keeper of solutions) romanticise an illusion of a wild based on originality and authenticity, prior to and external from, human control and interference. Experiences of removals, evictions, interventions, control and management are silenced and ignored. Langton (1998: 9) discusses the way Aboriginal people and their land management traditions have been rendered invisible by the application of notions of wilderness to Australian landscapes. She refers to this as a ‘science fiction’ that, like the legal fiction of terra nullius (Australia seen as unoccupied land in Eurocentric Australian law), arises from “the assumption of superiority of Western knowledge over indigenous knowledge systems“ (Langton 1998: 18).

The nature/culture binary, however, is not universally acknowledged in human thinking. There are multiple, shifting ways of organising human experience. Christie, for example, reflects on the task of learning Yolngu-matha, the Aboriginal language of northeast Arnhem Land in Australia:

I failed as I struggled mentally to arrange all Yolngu matha names into a hierarchy. I assumed, for example, that the distinction between ‘plant’ and ‘animal’ is a ‘natural’ one, an ontological distinction, a reality quite independent of human attempts to make sense of the world. But there is no Yolngu Matha word for either ‘plant’ or ‘animal’ (Christie 1992: 5).

In Cree, there is no word corresponding to our term “nature”. There is a word pimaatisiiwin (life), which includes human as well as animal “persons”. The word for “person,” iiyiyuu, can itself be glossed as “he lives”. Humans, animals, spirits, and several geophysical agents are perceived to have qualities of personhood. All persons engage in a reciprocally communicative reality. Human persons are not set over and against a material context of inert nature, but rather are one species of person in a network of reciprocating persons. These reciprocative interactions constitute the events of experience (Scott 1996: 72-73).

In characterising what a non-anthropocentric cosmos look like, D Rose discusses the land ethic of Ngarinman and Ngaliwurru people from the Northern Territory in Australia. In contrast to Passmore’s denial of reciprocity (1995: 140), Ngarinman people say “human life exists within the broader context of a living and conscious cosmos” (D Rose 1988: 379). Williams (cited in Langton 1998:27) also argues that: “Aboriginal people regard the environment as sentient and as communicating with them”. These statements fly directly in the face of all those knowledges which are based on a belief in the universal application of classifications based on the fact that only humans are conscious beings.

Many Aboriginal people have relationships with specific species of animals at personal and tribal scales. These relationships are based on an underlying understanding that through creation animals and humans were, are and will be interrelated. Dreaming stories inform relationships between humans and animals whereby responsibility to country is based on a common heritage and kinship (Rose, D 1996; Suchet 1994; Bennett 1983): “Animals, they’re related to us ... Animals were human before” (Napranum elders in Suchet 1996: 211). Many indigenous people in Canada also relate to ‘animals’ in mutually conscious and reciprocal relationships. In Cree notions of knowing, signing and making meaning animals are an integral part of knowledge systems:

Animal actions, particular qualities and features in the bodies of animals, weather, dream images and events, visions, and religious symbols all fall within the Cree notion of “sign”, with signs constituting knowledge or guidance for actors. Not only humans, but animals and other nonhuman persons send, interpret and respond to signs pertinent to various domains of human action: hunting success or failure, birth and death, and, implicit to these, the circumstances of reciprocity between persons in the world (Scott 1996: 73).

In Africa, the Ju/’hoansi of Nyae Nyae in north-eastern Namibia engage in a dialogue with elephants in which elephants:

must participate in the planning for the harvesting of Marula [a tree fruit] … “We share the resource with elephants and we have decided together, that is the elephants and us, which tree is to be used by the Ju/’hoansi and which by the elephant” (/Ai!ae/Oma cited in Powell 1998:47).

Africa discourses also unsettle the naturalisation of the categories wild, domestic and tame:

Animals have always helped us, and they still do ... The wild animals and the tame ones are the same to us ... (Respected elder Baha Mhlanga from Mahenye cited in Hove and Trojanow 1996: 22-9).

Trreating binaries such as society/nature, human/animal and domestic/wild as self-evident epistemological givens, naturalises assertions and impositions of power and control. The “epistemological transformation” (Esteva 1987:138) that occurs when nature, wildlife and ‘wild humans’ are constructed as resources, legitimates the assertion and imposition of Eurocentric practices of management - intervening, taming, domesticating, controlling, subduing and dominating the wild-wildlife-wilderness. Managerial intervention, however, is not how all people interact with the worlds. D Rose (1988) argues that Ngarinman and Ngaliwurru people are hesitant to intervene in ecological processes. She notes that for many people “… non-intervention is frequently a virtue”. A survey of perceptions of Aboriginal people in Central Australia similarly highlights knowledges that are not based on beliefs in intervention and overt control:

Many people expressed a sense of loss that the [locally extinct ‘native’] animals were no longer around but there was also a pervading sense of passive acceptance about what had happened. Rather than question why the animals had gone and then attempt to act to bring them back, Aboriginal people accept what they perceive as a change in circumstances which is beyond their control (B Rose 1995).

In Canada, what scientists perceive as population declines, are understood very differently by the Inuit:

Elders say that any kind of animal moves away for a while but, according to the government, animals are in decline. To the Inuit, they have moved, but not declined … (Peter Alogut cited in Freeman 1999).

… many Inuit do not believe that “wildlife” can be “harvested”, “managed” or “conserved” as “stocks” or “populations”. Many of these concepts have no basis in Inuit reality (Stevenson 1996).

Aboriginal people at Napranum on Cape York Peninsula insist they have their own way of relating to country and that this may or may not fit into Eurocentric ideas about what land and resource management should be. They often express anger and frustration at not having their ways recognised and respected by other people and cultures who only judge on their own values and priorities: “Use your commonsense, but usually there’s different commonsense” (in Suchet 1999:238).

Concepts and practices of management play an integral role in colonising processes. The development and conservation of resources has been asserted and imposed through management mechanisms such as sovereignty, ownership, laws, institutions, scientific research etc. The tension between indigenous groups’ nominal ownership of their territories, and its appropriation through colonisation processes embedded deep in management regimes, is a hotly contested political process in many places.

In the same way that exercising rights and responsibilities to care for (and to be cared for by) country are reconstituted in Eurocentric discourses as 'environmental’ or ‘wildlife management', and the ontological primacy of the human domain at the top of the hierarchical chain of being is surreptitiously embedded in 'management systems', discourses of human management have also harnessed efforts to liberate the objects of injustice and oppression to regressive structures of discipline and power. This can see indigenous self-determination reconstituted as 'community management'. Rendered invisible are processes of dispossession, theft and genocide (see Tatz 1998, 1999) that produced what the Aboriginal affairs industry reconstitutes as 'communities', as well as assertions of sovereignty and identity and aspirations of being-in-place on one's own terms.

Within this nature and management-centered view of change, the persistence of indigenous rights is seen as simply another element to be managed, another tool in the manager's toolkit. The notion that it is not only residual rights that persist, but epistemological systems, value systems, cultural institutions, systems of customary law, and deeply-entrenched ways of being-in-place is only dimly glimpsed in the nature and management-speak of so-called post-colonial discourse. In many places, diverse elements of indigenous society, economy and ecology continue to shape everyday life for large groups of people. However, ideology disciplines social change to conform to existing patterns, forms and explanations.

Identity and subjectivity

This leads us more or less directly to Levinas and his consideration of otherness, lived experience and ethics. For Levinas (e.g. 1989), the ambiguity of such spaces reflects the self-other relationship, which he sees as foundational in human existence. Levinas represents relations between the self and the other in terms of an ethical imperative in which the face-to-face encounter between the self and the other develops terms for understanding one’s place in society. "Intersubjective space", he writes that space in which one relates to the other(s) “is not symmetrical" (1989 [1947]: 48). For him, this inter-subjective space is a moral space. We occupy moral landscapes in which ethics (responsibility, reciprocity, proximity, collectivity and co-existence) frame and temper interpersonal, structural and political relationships. Cultural landscapes are, therefore, to be understood as simultaneously material and metaphorical.

Levinas' writing disrupts common binaries that underpin western philosophy’s hall of mirrors. Even the self/other binary is disrupted to establish relationships between the self, the other-that-is-like-me and the entirely-other. Levinas grapples to establish terms for engaging with relationships between entities whose coexistence is not reducible to a larger unity. In Time and the Other, he asserts that "existence is pluralist". A plurality, he writes, "insinuates itself into the very existing of the existent" (1989 [1947]: 43). In grappling with the self-other relation, which is always contextualized "because we are always immersed in the empirical world" (1989 [1947]: 43), he targets that which is, by convention, unscaleable and immeasurable the infinite.

In cultural geography, the shift between one-to-one, one-to-many and many-to-many is always troubling. Once this shift is spatialized, it clearly implicates the notion of scales and scale shifting. The link between psychoanalysis, psychology and sociology, however, is not reducible to a measurement or a formula. While individuals, social formations and cultural groupings may be mutually influential, there is no pre-determined causal link between them. One simply cannot predict individual behaviour from the knowledge of social behaviour or cultural values, nor vice versa. Neither can one read off from large structures the details of small events and processes, whether past, present or future (cf Storper 1988). This conundrum leads to many studies that deal with different scales as autonomous spheres of social action as bounded domains. Yet such domains do interact. We do shift between geographical scales and sociological levels. Cultural geographers have begun to engage with issues of scale, but have generally avoided the metaphysical scale (the infinite), generally limiting their scope to a local-global binary.[1]

Geographical endeavours must not only challenge the fundamental building blocks of thought and understanding, but they must be constantly vigilant to the fundamental Eurocentric assumptions underlying the researching and writing of geographical knowledge. For example, it is easy for cultural geography to be captured in the hall of mirrors by representing complex worlds and multiple knowledges within its own terms. Bhabha warns that:

Western connoisseurship is the capacity to understand and locate cultures in a universal time-frame that acknowledges their various historical and social contexts only to eventually transcend them and render them transparent (Bhabha 1990:208).

Always bound by one’s own epistemological understandings, it can be difficult to envision, let alone adequately portray, other ways of knowing. As Christie (1992:2) states “most of us who have been counting ever since we can remember can have little hope of imagining what a world could look like in which reality is unquantifiable”.

It is therefore necessary to critically consider the spatial and temporal settings examined in, and formed by geographical knowledge. This can be a challenging task. Soja describes the “linguistic despair” felt when:

What one sees when one looks at geographies is stubbornly simultaneous, but language dictates a sequential succession, a linear flow of sentential statements bounded by the most spatial of earthly constraints, the impossibility of two objects (or words) occupying the same place (as on a page) (Soja 1989:1-2).

Situated engagement: justice, coexistence and otherness

Rising to the challenge of social justice solely by harnessing the tools of Eurocentric knowledges risks reinforcing colonising relationships. Cultural geography’s post-colonial projects often draw on notions of moving towards something better. Yet such formulations subtly reinforce the almost invisible epistemology of developmentalism, orienting thinking towards a linear narrative. The implicit symbolism is about direction, progression and control exactly what this paper seeks to challenge and unsettle. Le Guin (1989) undertakes a similar exercise of unsettling. She suggests, that 'through long practice I know how to tell a story, but I'm not sure I know what a story is' (1989:37). Her discussion of writing science fiction unsettles the assumption that Eurocentric discourses can simply make the world as we wish it to be. She asks her readers to begin to see that every remote place is simultaneously somebody’s else’s homeland. In her image of ‘dancing at the edge of the world’, she offers an escape from the tyranny of the linear narratives of developmentalism, and glimpses the seasonal and cyclical patterns of time's circle embedded in people-people and people-environment relationships and processes, alongside time's arrow. In such images, there are opportunities to rethink the epistemological foundations that are conventionally used to shape and reshape geographical imaginations so that they may be woven in ways that acknowledge and include those knowledges that are so often rendered invisible.

The idea of ‘situated engagement’ (Suchet 1999) offers a way out of the confines of Eurocentric discourses, which so often render even well-intentioned cultural geographers relatively tongueless and earless in dealing with ontological pluralism. Simply acknowledging the existence and possibility of multiple knowledges is not enough. The ontologies of other peoples need to be understood and engaged with in active partnerships in the construction of knowledge (and power). New interactions and relationships open new possibilities:

At the margins, within the domain of the 'other', one knows that the world, life and people express themselves with rich and interactive presences that are invisible from the viewpoint of deformed power, except, perhaps, as disorder or blockage. The dismantling of this oppressive and damaging pole is a necessary step in moving toward dialogue. Dismantling will fail if it is confined to monologue; we must embrace noisy and unruly processes capable of finding dialogue with the peoples of the world and with the world itself (D Rose 1999: 177).

In these noisy and unruly spaces it is necessary to reconsider the implications of ontological pluralism. Boundaries around concepts can no longer be concrete, impenetrable no-person’s-lands. Rather, they become blurry, fluid, complex, interacting and multiple. As with the metaphor of edges in the constantly shifting and changing tidal zone, boundaries and relationships are conceived of as constructive places which “entwine and interpenetrate in a complex and fecund embrace of coexistence” (Howitt 2001a).

The discursive spaces of ontological pluralism are similar to what Bhabha calls third space “that position of liminality, in the productive space of the construction of culture as difference, in the spirit of alterity or otherness” (1990:209). Others have embraced this sort of space. Lavie and Swedenburg (1996:154, 174), for example, move beyond examining texts to situate their exploration of the boundaries of culture in the everyday, a “terrain of practice and theory”. In her exploration of the postcolonial in the modern city, Jacobs uses the space of the contemporary city to embrace the “unstable negotiation of identity and power” (1996: xi). She calls this space the ‘edge’; "the ‘unsafe’ margin which marks not only a space of openness but also the very negotiation of space itself".

Having challenged the hall of mirrors with its own contradictions and through glimpses into multiple knowledges, we will now further explore the notion of situated engagement. Drawing on D Rose’s (1999) Levinasian notion of ‘situated availability’ and Jacobs and Mulvihill’s (1995: 9) concept of ‘viable interdependence’, situated engagement is introduced as an approach which encourages noisy and unruly engagement in situated, interacting material, discursive and conceptual places. Situated engagement opens up these places in an ethical sense so that everyone’s ground is destabilised and everyone expects surprises, challenges and to be changed (Rose, D 1999). In a practical sense, self-reliance and equitable sharing are celebrated (Jacobs and Mulvihill 1995: 9). Engaging (conversing, interacting, thinking, doing) therefore moves into the realm of not only considering how knowledges form, but also how they interact and how this matters.

From within the hall of mirrors it is almost impossible to imagine talking, thinking, writing, doing, smelling, imagining and realising worlds without ‘law’, ‘spaces’, ‘places’, ‘time’, ‘scale’, ‘nature’, and 'self'. However, local and indigenous communities are doing this as they construct processes, experiences, thoughts and actions. In this diversity of experiences, there can be no singular, correct, model, process, alternative or notion of resistance, empowerment and decolonisation that can apply globally. As Escobar argues:

instead of searching for grand alternative models or strategies, what is needed is the investigation of alternative representations and practices in concrete local settings … One must … resist the desire to formulate alternatives at an abstract, macro level (Escobar 1995:19, 222).

If nothing can be generalised or universalised how does one deal with diversity and multiplicity? By focusing, contextualising and positioning in terms of specific material, conceptual and discursive places, one can practically and actively engage with and recognise diversity. What is vital is recognising that these places are crossed, permeated and saturated with knowledges and experiences that the hall of mirrors is constantly straddling, conflicting, parallelling and/or not touching. It is necessary to simultaneously reach in, reach out and reach across (Ellis 1998), so that one can recognise and engage with these processes, experiences, discourses, systems and structures. This avoids reinforcing and re-centring practices and concepts within the constraints of the hall of mirrors, within the globalising essentialism of the colonial and post-colonial narrative.

In the context of the confrontation of contested epistemologies, local and indigenous epistemologies confront multiple permutations of knowledge-power relations constructed by the hall of mirrors. Concurrently, within diverse local and indigenous settings, multiple individual and collective identities are formed and reformed. In terms of the analysis proposed here, re-constructing this multiplicity and complexity into a set of experiences relevant to specific situations can be neither solely abstract nor solely empirical. Rather, this occurs in the interface and interplay of discursive, material and conceptual spaces that occur in contextualised interactions and dialogue in situated engagement. Communication and interactions aimed at breaking down assumptions and recognising diversity and multiple knowledges is vital because:

The difference of cultures cannot be something that can be accommodated within a universalist framework … The assumption that at some level all forms of cultural diversity may be understood on the basis of a particular universal concept, whether it be ‘human being’, ‘class’ or ‘race’, can be both very dangerous and very limiting in trying to understand the ways in which cultural practices construct their own systems of meaning and social organisation (Bhabha 1990:209).

Fothergill’s analysis of Heart of Darkness argues proximity challenges stereotyping:

… when Marlow specifies the African subject’s historical or political context, the representation tends to be critical of typical European representations. When Marlow erases the specific context, the representation tends to endorse the stereotype (Forthergill 1992:50).

However, Fothergill also warns that an engagement with the specific that brings with it its own cultural assumptions and projects these onto the ‘other’ can reinforce stereotypes by denying difference. Strategies to empower the ‘colonised victim’ often simply invert relationships. These ‘new’ relationships are still based on the same beliefs, with the local, traditional, community or indigenous represented as separate and contained, yet this time superior and progressive. Dialogue remains closed with the other’s silence further reinforced behind mirrors of romantic stereotyping. Romancing unproblematised categories is dangerous and reinforces colonising relationships as assumptions of universality are not challenged. McDowell draws upon hooks to argue that:

… it is not possible to merely invert or reverse old categories, rather we have to decolonize our minds and construct new alternatives. She [hooks] suggests that women and people of colour cannot possibly be immune from hegemonic notions of knowledge. There is no position outside the social construction of knowledge where an unsullied ‘other’ might speak from. ‘Others’ too have internalized that set of Western philosophical dualist concepts that structure knowledge internalized and, often, inverted the dualisms, reluctant to consider the possibility that work is not necessary oppositional because it is created by women (McDowell 1992a: 411).

Esteva talks about the need to challenge and transcend the assertion and imposition of universal values by solidly grounding values in the experiences of “daily life”, of situated places:

I am now more than convinced that if one fully accepts cultural relativism … one must also accept its consequences, i.e., the dissolution of universal values. This does not mean, of course, having no guiding principles to live in community. It means exactly the opposite, having them fully rooted in the perception and attitudes of daily life, instead of supplanting them with artificial constructs which are hypothetically universal and more or less ahistorical (Esteva 1987:138).

Conclusion: shattered mirrors and reflection on reflections

This chapter has argued that cultural geography often relies on Eurocentric discourses. Even self-consciously post-colonial discourses reflect and reinforce pervasive channels of power, such as education, research and governance to privilege and re-privilege Eurocentric ontologies against diverse local, indigenous and non-Eurocentric traditions. Weaving together field experience and secondary literature, it has been argued that these hegemonic discourses construct a hall of mirrors. Many of the most problematic human and environmental relationships of contemporary experience are constructed within this hall of mirrors.

We have argued that cultural geography must consider what is involved in moving beyond this hall of mirrors. Shattering the mirrors and stepping beyond the solipsistic monologue of Eurocentric discourses is necessary, but not sufficient. Cultural geographers face a difficult balancing act in simultaneously nurturing one’s expertise, and minimising its value per se. We have advocated situated engagement as an approach that allows the discipline to address this. In the first instance, this dislodges Eurocentric knowledges from the frame of universalised constructs. Without this frame (or with it constructed as an assumption subject to further consideration) the hall of mirrors is less secure and one has to begin differently to approach empirical questions, value questions and methodological questions as a co-investigator with non-technical experts within the relevant local or indigenous groups. To do this requires consideration of histories, geographies, languages and powers; it involves simultaneously reaching in, reaching out and reaching across (Ellis 1998) from the hall of mirrors and in the process it reveals the logical flaws within the looking glass. We have aimed to open a discursive space that reaches out, across and into a wider discursive community. This engagement opens up situated, interrelated conceptual and discursive places and allows ideas, knowledges and thoughts to be recognised and understood.

The image of shattering the mirrors signals the urgent need to recognise the limits of Eurocentric knowledges. On reflection, shattering is perhaps too violent a response to the violations involved in colonising processes. Perhaps an image of transforming mirrors into windows is more suitable. This would allow knowledges to remain embodied and emplaced (rather than lacerated by splintered glass), but perspectives gained from looking out of windows and seeing multiple knowledges would de-centre the assumption that any single knowledge system is superior or universal. But even this metaphorical transformation is too limited. Looking out of windows is grossly inadequate as a basis for reconciling ontological diversity in real social, political and inter-cultural relations. Windows need to be opened. To allow a breath of fresh air in, these windows must stay open. This will encourage people to actively and intimately reach in, reach out and reach across to engage with each other in embodied and emplaced ways. Opening windows not only allows an engagement with other knowledges, but also opens a window to the soul as one engages on a personal level with one’s own knowledges and understandings. Such reflection on one’s own position shows that it is impossible, and counter-productive, to aim for complete empathy with all knowledges:

The means by which we come to know the unknown Other will always be determined by our own terms of reference, our own horizon of understanding (Fothergill 1992:38-39).

Instead of attempting to induct everyone within an all-knowing gaze, situated engagement offers a way not only to identify differences, but also to celebrate and revel in their limits, tensions and transformative energy.

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