‘Nice maps, shame about the theory’? Thinking geographically about the economic

Abstract

What can geography tell us about the economy other than drawing maps of it? The spatiality of economic activity points towards the practical and performative complexity of the economic as well as to the complexity of geography in its embedding of the economic. While the synthetic nature of geography – its raison d'être is the relationships between, rather than the separation of, processes and things – disrupts economy in profound ways, its treatment by nonpractitioners is weak and over-narrowly interpreted. At the same time, a tendency for geographers to sidestep certain economic imperatives undermines more culturally and socially inflected interpretations of economy. What is at issue here, however, is not simply an attempt to reconcile two disciplines or to reclaim either one of them but a need to embed the one relationally in the other in mutually formative ways. This involves a transcendence of disciplinary perspectives by stressing the complex practices of social reproduction operating at all scales from the ultralocal to the hyperglobal. It is this stress on practice and instance, rather than a determinative claim for place or space, that makes geography matter in the construction of understandings of the economy.