Spatial Anthropology Research Articles

Minding the emptiness of nothing: methodological nothingness and the spatial anthropology of futility

ABSTRACT As an exercise in autoethnographic fieldwork, resolving to sit in meditation practice (zazen) in the middle of a road traffic island, flanked by the concrete expanse of an expressway flyover, one’s presence partly concealed by vegetation, does seem a rather pointless endeavour. And insofar as it does lack an obvious rationale, its ‘purpose’ becomes that of an exercise in futility predicated on the phenomenology of both emptiness and nothingness. Emptiness here is invoked with reference to the Mahayana Buddhist concept of sunyata, which prompts awareness of, and philosophical reflection on, the constitutive entanglements of form and emptiness. Nothingness, for its part, is oriented towards observation of what Georges Perec calls the ‘infraordinary’, a process of seeing and writing ‘flatly’ that is ‘barely indicative of a method’. Taking this method-that-is-not-a-method as its performative starting point, this paper sets out some tentative thoughts towards a spatial anthropology of futility that is centred around a futile fieldwork experiment in methodological nothingness. In keeping with the subject matter under discussion, the paper is written ‘on the go’ in the sense of starting from nothing and foregoing a purposeful direction of travel other than that which is tactically premised on the methodological elicitation of something from nothing.

Dis/placing teacher identity: performing the ‘brutal forms of formalities’ in English Further Education

ABSTRACT This paper analyses how teacher identity is shaped by professional standardisation and regulatory apparatuses in the context of English Further Education from a specifically spatial perspective. We focus on how these apparatuses erode teachers’ sense of identity and, paradoxically, quality by establishing what anthropologist Marc Augé (1935–2023) calls ‘non-places’. Drawing on interview data and Augé’s spatial anthropology, we discuss how places can define, foster and erode identity and, thus, practice. Our data shows how teachers’ accounts of their changing spatial experiences reflects the transient nature of their own interpretations of how identities are shaped in these shifting contexts of ‘dis/placement’ wherein the process of identity construction frequently places individuals in contact with another side of themselves.

Songlines Are for Singing: Un/Mapping the Lived Spaces of Travelling Memory

Putting to work the dialectical concept of ‘un/mapping’, this paper examines the immateriality of cultural memory as coalescent in and around songlines: spatial stories woven from the autobiogeographical braiding of music and memory. Borrowing from Erll’s concept of ‘travelling memory’ (2011), the idea of songlines provides a performative framework with which to both travel with music memory and to map/unmap the travelling of music memory. The theoretical focus of the work builds on empirical studies into music, place and cultural memory in the form of interviews conducted across the UK in 2010–2013. The interviews were designed to explore the way peoples’ musical pasts—memories of listening to music in the domestic home, for example, or attendance at concerts and festivals, music as soundtracks to journeys, holidays or everyday commutes to work or school, music at key rite of passage moments—have coloured and given shape to the narratives that structure a sense of embodied selfhood and social identity over time. Songlines, it is shown, tether the self to spaces and temporalities that map a tangled meshwork of lives lived spatially, where the ghosts of musical pasts are as vital and alive as the traveller who has invoked them. Analysis and discussion is centred around the following questions: How should the songlines of memory be mapped in ways that remain true and resonant with those whose spatial stories they tell? How, phenomenologically, can memory be rendered as an energy that remains creatively vital without running the risk of dissipating that energy by seeking to fix it in space and time (to memorialise it)? And if, as is advocated in the paper, we should not be in the business of mapping songlines, how do we go about the task of singing them? Pursuing these and other lines of enquiry, this paper explores a spatial anthropology of movement and travel in which the un/mapping of popular music memory mobilises phenomenological understandings of the entanglements of self, culture and embodied memory.

After Englobement

This article positions Peter Sloterdijk’s spheres project against Carl Schmitt’s spatial writings, showing that Sloterdijk’s anthropo-philosophical approach to spatial analysis implies a theoretical strategy for thinking beyond Schmitt’s fatalistic view of the deep contingencies shaping human social existence. Schmitt’s spatial pessimism is particularly noticeable in Land and Sea, in which he recounts the unfolding of world history as a succession of spatial epochs, arguing that the modern era can best be understood as the achievement of a centuries-long path toward a unified global space of nihilistic anarchy—a development that he comes to refer to as englobement. The legacy of Schmitt’s spatial history of modernity can be seen most urgently today by its influence on the emergent right-wing identitarian and neo-Eurasian movements, which seek to transform Schmitt’s pessimistic nostalgia for a prior mode of spatial ordering into an expansionist geopolitics. The author maintains that, against that legacy, Sloterdijk proposes “spherology,” a unique practice of spatial anthropology through which he teases out an art of writing at the service of experience, seeking to understand the phenomenon of human togetherness not in terms of determinate political or territorial forms but as a function of shared spaces (spheres) set up and stretched out through shared living in them. By affirming and potentially informing the ever-renewable possibility of lived extendedness in local-shared enclosures, Sloterdijk’s theorization of the spatial constitutes a compelling countercurrent or immunological defense against the forces of nostalgia and resignation that feed into reactionary spatial thought.

The locus of my study of Tokyo: From building typology to spatial anthropology and eco‐history

AbstractFor over 40 years, I have been conducting research from a variety of perspectives in the somewhat complex and difficult‐to‐read megacity of Tokyo. In this paper, I consider the characteristics of urban space in Tokyo and present an overview of my research objectives, methods, and the results obtained at each stage. The architectural typology methods to which I was introduced in Italy formed the basis for my Tokyo studies. However, as this methodology was established for Italian cities, which were designed artificially around architecture, it has limitations in exploring Tokyo, a Japanese city that was created in harmony with nature. Therefore, I have adopted the concept of "spatial anthropology" in my research, which makes it possible to identify the characteristics of Japanese cities that make them significantly different from western cities. Furthermore, the concept of eco‐history, which aims to enable new research on cities and territories by integrating history and ecology, allowed for a different perspective of Tokyo as a “water city.” This research illuminates a true affluent city that coexists with an environment suitable for the 21st century, which differs from the urban model of the modern Western development type.

Urban secrets? Affinities and anthropologies of South African cities

This paper reflects on the discussions of a collective of academics in and around Johannesburg, Africa’s iconic city built on the extractive capital of gold mining. Captured aptly in William Kentridge’s art film Johannesburg: Second Greatest City after Paris (1989), the city is brought into an imaginary relationship with a romanticised Parisian experience. This comparison is taken up through an endeavour to read, re-read, imagine and re-imagine Johannesburg in relation to visions of the French capital contained in the writings in Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project with its “convolutes” of the Parisian arcades of the nineteenth century. The authors locate these discussions within debates addressed to urban anthropology in South Africa now, delving into the theories, methods and insights presented in a scholarly meeting and associated city tour held in 2017, and through the papers submitted for this special issue. This essay considers how an authorial collaboration comprising an anthropologist, historian and an architect might contribute differently to debates current in the spatial disciplines and anthropology, and how such a multi-disciplinary reading of a seminal text about a European city might resonate with our location in Southern Africa.

Spatial Bricolage: The Art of Poetically Making Do

This paper provides an introductory overview to the Humanities special issue on ‘spatial bricolage’. The individual contributions that make up the special issue are outlined and salient themes pulled out that address and respond to some the wider discussion points raised throughout this introduction. These are closely focused around the central concept of bricolage and the idea of the researcher as bricoleur. Some background context on the anthropological underpinnings to bricolage is provided, alongside methodological reflections that relate the concept to ideas of ‘gleaning’ as a creative and performative engagement with everyday spaces as they are ‘found’ and rehearsed in practice. A core focus on questions of method, and of autoethnographic approaches in particular, is presented alongside questions of research ethics and the policing thereof by institutional structures of disciplining and audit in the neoliberal academy. It is argued that bricolage is, among other things, a practical response to a field of practice that at times constrains as much as it allows space to roam, unimpeded, across disciplinary boundaries. From the overarching purview of spatial humanities and spatial anthropology, it is shown that discussions of bricolage and the researcher as bricoleur can help make explicit the poetics and affects of space, as well as the ethical and procedural frameworks that are brought to bear on how space is put into practice.

Vernacular or not? Preliminary thoughts in developing a methodology to understand the imijondolo

The informal dwelling could be considered a cultural universal in its global replication as immediate shelter prompted by modernism and modernisation. Simultaneously, one could argue that such buildings are of vernacular construction, most being assembled of found materials in a manner which satisfies the various definitions of vernacular architecture. Interrogating the interface between the informal dwelling and traditional or vernacular accommodation could assist in disentangling the position of the informal dwelling. Furthermore, this understanding could provide insight into appropriate methods of addressing the informal housing issue. This article presents preliminary thoughts in which the archetypal Zulu dwelling or iQhugwane is used as a control against informal dwellings or imiJondolo constructed on urban peripheries in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Using spatial anthropology and architectural analysis, comparative linkages between the traditional and the contemporary could aid in positioning the informal dwelling as an architectural vernacular, and suggest a prognosis as to its architectural and cultural sustainability.

Andrews, H. (Ed.) (2014) Tourism and violence. Ashgate Publishing limited. xvi+250pp. (figures, tables, bibliography, index), Price £58.50. ISBN: 978-1-4094-3640-9. (Hardback)

Andrews, H. (Ed.) (2014) Tourism and violence. Ashgate Publishing limited. xvi+250pp. (figures, tables, bibliography, index), Price £58.50. ISBN: 978-1-4094-3640-9. (Hardback).Hazel Andrews at John Moores University in Liverpool, UK has written and edited a pioneering attempt to integrate violence into the tourism research. Using cases from a range of disciplinary approaches, this book is a fundamental work for understanding the role that violence plays in tourism. It is a work that shows the dark side of tourism and violence as part of the industry. The thirteen essays that make up the book illustrate the negative side of human behavior and the morbidity caused by violence as a tourist attraction.Violence is a form of interaction between subjects manifested in behavior or in situations: either deliberately learned, intimidated, or threatened to physical, verbal, or psychological harm either to an individual or a community. Violence, being a form of interaction between subjects, occurs in tourism through political instability, terrorism, insecurity and crime.This book intends to understand the role of violence in shaping products and tourism practices, in addition to addressing its understanding from a multidisciplinary approach with social, anthropological and ethnographic perspectives. In Chapter 2, drawing on a selection of ethnographic spaces of transit, Les Roberts sets out to explore the violence of non (the disruption of the habitus place), and casts a closer critical reflection on the spatial anthropology of these landscapes as spaces of violence. These violent effects can be experienced as horrific and destructive, but they also allow for the cultivation of more positive feelings of dislocation.In Chapter 3, Lozanski reflects on the violence that occurs in other places (those defined through racial, religious, and cultural differences from Western - centric norms, or Third World geographies). Lozanski argues that in developed countries, violence is not usually visible, while it is more visible in other places. When tourists are attacked in these other places, law enforcement is more efficient. Finally, it poses the contradictions between traveller's fantasies of, and aversions to, violence.Chapter 4 is a discussion of the ways in which violence towards women appears to be sanctioned in aspects of the everyday tourism practices. In particular, the author examines examples from two islands in the western Mediterranean, one from Menorca and one from Mallorca.In Chapter 5, Louise Platt analyses Liverpool's case using ethnographic data. The author considers how the myths of the city of Liverpool can be linked to popular culture. Platt also explains that the city's re-branding in 2008 depended on the mythological greatness of Liverpool's past. The author shows that linguistic violence can be enabling when applied to the case of place image or myths of place.Since the 1980's, battlefield tourism was reactivated in France, in particular through the emergence of tourism policies that place value on war heritage. …

Deep Mapping and Spatial Anthropology

This paper provides an introduction to the Humanities Special Issue on “Deep Mapping”. It sets out the rationale for the collection and explores the broad-ranging nature of perspectives and practices that fall within the “undisciplined” interdisciplinary domain of spatial humanities. Sketching a cross-current of ideas that have begun to coalesce around the concept of “deep mapping”, the paper argues that rather than attempting to outline a set of defining characteristics and “deep” cartographic features, a more instructive approach is to pay closer attention to the multivalent ways deep mapping is performatively put to work. Casting a critical and reflexive gaze over the developing discourse of deep mapping, it is argued that what deep mapping “is” cannot be reduced to the otherwise a-spatial and a-temporal fixity of the “deep map”. In this respect, as an undisciplined survey of this increasing expansive field of study and practice, the paper explores the ways in which deep mapping can engage broader discussion around questions of spatial anthropology.

Religion and Architecture in premodern Indonesia. Studies in spatial Anthropology, written by Domenig Gaudenz

Religion and Architecture in premodern Indonesia. Studies in spatial Anthropology, written by Domenig Gaudenz

Vernacular or not? Preliminary thoughts in developing a methodology to understand the imijondolo

The informal dwelling could be considered a cultural universal in its global replication as immediate shelter prompted by modernism and modernisation. Simultaneously, one could argue that such buildings are of vernacular construction, most being assembled of found materials in a manner which satisfies the various definitions of vernacular architecture. Interrogating the interface between the informal dwelling and traditional or vernacular accommodation could assist in disentangling the position of the informal dwelling. Furthermore, this understanding could provide insight into appropriate methods of addressing the informal housing issue. This article presents preliminary thoughts in which the archetypal Zulu dwelling or iQhugwane is used as a control against informal dwellings or imiJondolo constructed on urban peripheries in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Using spatial anthropology and architectural analysis, comparative linkages between the traditional and the contemporary could aid in positioning the informal dwelling as an architectural vernacular, and suggest a prognosis as to its architectural and cultural sustainability.

Religion and Architecture in Premodern Indonesia: Studies in Spatial Anthropology, written by Gaudenz Domenig

Religion and Architecture in Premodern Indonesia: Studies in Spatial Anthropology, written by Gaudenz Domenig

The Rhythm of Non-Places: Marooning the Embodied Self in Depthless Space

Taking as its starting point the spatiotemporal rhythms of landscapes of hyper-mobility and transit, this paper explores how the process of “marooning” the self in a radically placeless (and depthless) space—in this instance a motorway traffic island on the M53 in the northwest of England—can inform critical understandings and practices of “deep mapping”. Conceived of as an autoethnographic experiment—a performative expression of “islandness” as an embodied spatial praxis—the research on which this paper draws revisits ideas set out in JG Ballard’s 1974 novel Concrete Island, although, unlike Ballard’s island Crusoe (and sans person Friday), the author’s residency was restricted to one day and night. The fieldwork, which combines methods of “digital capture” (audio soundscapes, video, stills photography, and GPS tracking), takes the form of a rhythmanalytical mapping of territory that can unequivocally be defined as “negative space”. Offering an oblique engagement with debates on “non-places” and spaces of mobility, the paper examines the capacity of non-places/negative spaces to play host to the conditions whereby affects of place and dwelling can be harnessed and performatively transacted. The embodied rhythmicity of non-places is thus interrogated from the vantage point of a constitutive negation of the negation of place. In this vein, the paper offers a reflexive examination of the spatial anthropology of negative space.

Spatial Anthropology of Traditional Thai-Islamic Dwellings in Eastern Bangkok

Accelerated urbanization and the tremendous effort in achieving a state of modernization have significantly transformed the Bangkok cityscape over the past few decades. This situation inevitably accounts for the demise of traditional Thai dwellings, or ruan thai, the inherited tradition and the dwellers′ way of life rooted in an agrarian society. Among the existing ruan thai in the Bangkok Metropolitan Area, it is remarkable that there are not only Thai residents but also those from diverse cultural groups such as Muslims, the Mon and Laotians. This paper is a study of the spatial anthropology of the ruan thai resided in by Thai Muslims in the east of Bangkok. Based on field surveys and oral history, its central goal is to examine the spatial characteristics of Thai-Islamic dwellings, which reflect a dialogical relationship between the socio-cultural and spatio-temporal dimensions. Grounded in the context of a matriarchal society, the case studies constitute several spatial aspects shared by typical Thai dwellings. Nonetheless, it is important to note that the Islamic way of life plays a crucial role in the way the dwellers use space, particularly in terms of the invisible, yet fixed-feature, sphere.

Architectural and Spatial Design Studies: Inscribing Architecture in Design Studies

The present article argues for the inscription of architecture – as well as studies of design in various spatial scales – within the fi eld of design studies. It claims the need for bridging these two areas of inquiry, architecture and design studies, and for creating a new fi eld that intersects architecture scholarship with design studies, but also with a variety of other fi elds, such as cultural and urban geography, vernacular studies, interior design, spatial anthropology, material culture, and media studies. This fi eld could be tentatively named as architectural and spatial design studies, showing its affi liation with a broader range of spatial disciplines and practices that include – but are not limited to – architecture, as well as with the fi eld of design studies.