Search Results

This chapter reads nineteenth-century novels set in Rio de Janeiro in terms of spatial practices. Through a combination of close and distant reading, novels are shown to contain detailed scripts referring to spatial practices ranging from the open spaces of sociability, such as the street and theater, to the closed spaces of the house. Within these spaces, the disposition and movement of characters is shown to reflect core aspects of social reality and the strategic and tactical maneuverings available to individuals of varied class status, age, and gender.

This chapter discusses Michel Foucault, the celebrated French intellectual, as a spatial historian of social policy: as someone who, in critical and scholarly veins, consistently probed ideas and practices constitutive of an envisaged ‘right ordering of the social’, particularly but not exclusively in settings from the past of Western Europe. Taking his early-1970s lecture course on The Punitive Society as a pivot-point, the chapter explores a key transition in Foucault’s thinking about the role of space in such an ordering of the social: a shift from seeing space (distance, barrier, boundary) primarily as a tool for excluding troublesome populations (abandonment, banishment, segregation) to seeing space (arrangements, distributions, relations) as additionally a tool for including such populations (reforming, rehabilitation, reintegration). Identifying this transition helps to sharpen understanding of the different ways in which a spatialising of social policy research can proceed.

This chapter develops an interpretation of the problem of the individual and his or her integration into society. Building upon the foundation laid in the first three chapters, this analysis engages a broader range of novels and focuses on the problem of comportment in social settings. History and social theory combine to offer a reading of nineteenth-century Brazilian novels that highlight the key milestones and challenges associated with the growth and development of fictional protagonists, including the themes of education and career.

In this lecture the focus is on A.R. Radcliffe-Brown’s ethnographic work, notably his fieldwork in the Andaman Islands in 1906–8. About the same time, the Danish ethnographer Knud Rasmussen studied the Polar Eskimos in North-West Greenland. While sharing a general quest for ethnographic description of little-known groups, they styled their fieldwork in different ways, saw colonialism in different terms, adhered to different knowledge traditions, and not least, worked in different natural environments. This resulted in very distinct portraits of ‘the natives’, which were to cast long shadows into the present, within which the history of first encounters is firmly embedded.

This chapter analyzes the novel O Coruja, by Aluísio Azevedo. A more obscure novel than those discussed in the first two chapters, this work by Azevedo is also read in both literary and social historical perspective, allowing for an exploration of the themes of environmental determinism and social hierarchies in Rio de Janeiro during the 1880s.

Criticality traces the origin stories of critical mapping while attempting to forward a renewed agenda that sidesteps the baggage of the word ‘critical’. It proposes that the heart of this agenda is in our understanding of how maps disclose and stage information, how maps handle time and liveliness, and the responsibilities of maps and mapmaking.

This chapter considers the historical significance of Australia’s earlier inhabitants, the Aborigines. The First Fleet journalists had a tendency to treat the Aborigines like convicts, which suggests that their history can be also treated like that of the convicts’. It is tempting to imagine that by attending to the occasion and context of aboriginal appearances in, say, the First Fleet chronicles, we can recover their history of travelling. Instead of making fleeting appearances and baffling pronouncements, the Aborigines might emerge as the proponents of a different, spatial history. However, there are no grounds for presuming that aboriginal history can be treated as a subset of white history, as a history within history. If Aborigines remain outside white history, this reflects, not on the Aborigines, but on the essential nature of history as imperial historians have defined and practised it.

This chapter describes and analyzes the novel Sonhos d’Ouro, by José de Alencar. Drawing on literary and social history, the chapter explores the characters and settings in this important novel in order to uncover Alencar’s distinctive vision for social integration and the reconciliation of metropolitan wealth and provincial virtue. The character of Guida Soares is shown to represent the caprice and, concomitantly, the latent potential goodness inherent in capital honestly accumulated; her counterpart, Ricardo Nunes, is understood as Alencar’s proxy for a virtuous and idealistic young man from the provinces. Together, their story represents a version of Bildung wherein an alternative mode of social integration is made possible.

This chapter explores the novel Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas, by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, from literary and historical perspectives. This reading of the novel, long considered a masterpiece of world literature, emphasizes its relation to the literary field in which it was embedded, within and beyond Brazil, as well as the social historical dimensions of the urban space therein depicted. The novel is placed into context with works by Balzac and Flaubert—extending and modifying previous readings that emphasized its sui generis, Brazilian content. Additionally, the chapter shows how Brás Cubas can be read alongside Sonhos d’Ouro—highlighting the different answers to the problem of social integration provided by Machado de Assis and José de Alencar.

This chapter examines the way marriage and money intersected in nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro as depicted in novels and against a backdrop of social historical data. Using parish records and estate inventories, the analysis shows how the realistic commitments of nineteenth-century authors echoed and reproduced an image of social structure surrounding the critical issues of wealth and family in Rio de Janeiro.

But Do You Actually Do GIS? is the introductory chapter, which sets the stage for the interventions--the five factures--of chapters 2 through 6. Importantly, this chapter suggests that the relatively increasing interests in the mapping sciences in a variety of disciplines is related to the crisis of public confidence in higher education around questions of utility and relevance.

This chapter considers history as told by the First Fleet chroniclers: Phillip, Tench, Collins, Hunter, and White. It suggests a reflective return to Botany Bay and a spatial interpretation of the accounts of the First Fleet journalists in order to recover from the Enlightenment logic of cause and effect something of what that logic suppressed. In particular, we may be able to recover that dimension of the convict’s existence which imprisonment and transportation were specifically designed to exclude: his occupation of a historical space. While recovering this lost space may not change the official history, it does represent a timely mutiny against imperial history’s methodological assumptions.

Historians have generally depicted the Amazon as a blank slate before the Pombaline reforms of the second half of the eighteenth century. One gets the impression from the literature that almost overnight, by royal decree, the Amazon filled with new villages.

This chapter illustrates a characteristic strategy of empirical history that suppresses historical accounts of Botany Bay—a strategy that a history of space is bound to resist. Here Botany Bay is a cause that surfaces only as an effect. In the event it inspires, that of possession, the place itself disappears, ceasing to be an object of historical desire. This phenomenon is characteristic of a history that it is linear, that its causes are wholly spent in their immediate effects. No causes are left over to remain a presence in future activity. Thus, Botany Bay is emptied of a future once the First Fleet renders it past. Similarly, Cook is rendered invisible by his own motive power.

This chapter first considers the return journey of travelers as opposed to the one they initially took going forward. The discussions then turn to travelers’ incorporation of their return journey into accounts of their outward journey, and how spatial history only advances by reflection. This discussion sets the stage for examining the historical significance of Australia’s first circumnavigator Matthew Flinders. Flinders helped establish that Van Diemen’s Land (later Tasmania) was an island; and explored the coast where the future Adelaide was situated. He also had a highly developed historical consciousness. In this last respect, his profound admiration for Captain Cook means that, in some way perhaps, to write about Flinders is also, albeit indirectly, to begin to retrace our own steps to Cook.

Movement takes up an issue that transcends digital and critical invocations of the map: time. This chapter explores the historical development of animated cartography through a Deleuzian and Bergsonian framing

Attention draws forward these historical accounts to the present moment of fixation on digital media. This chapter argues that ignoring the rapid pace of mediatization is disastrous for a community-engaged mapping impulse.

This chapter introduces readers to the topography of Alsace-Lorraine from the perspective of the migratory storks that fly over the region each year. It then introduces the concept of “cartophilia” as a passion for map making and map reading that spread across modern Europe from the late eighteenth century onwards. Cartophilia, the book argues, was inspired by European nationalist movements and made possible through affordable new printing technologies. The chapter also provides an overview of the book’s main contributions to the history of cartography, spatial history, and the history of European nationalism. It concludes with a description of the book’s six thematic chapters, each of which focuses on a different kind of borderland map.

Digitality traces the origin stories of digital mapping while attempting to understand the rather artificial ways in which ethics and creative thought is considered separate from technical experimentation. The chapter discusses the site of the Harvard Laboratory for Computer Graphics in the mid-1960s.