Geographies of Exclusion: Society and Difference in the West
David Sibley
Language: English
Pages: 224
ISBN: 0415119251
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Images of exclusion characterised western cultures over long historical periods. In the developed society of racism, sexism and the marginalisation of minority groups, exclusion has become the dominant factor in the creation of social and spatial boundaries. Geographies of Exclusion seeks to identify the forms of social and spatial exclusion, and subsequently examine the fate of knowledge of space and society which has been produced by members of excluded groups. Evaluating writing on urban society by women and black writers the author asks why such work is neglected by the academic establishment, suggesting that both practices which result in the exclusion of minorities and those which result in the exclusion of knowledge have important implications for theory and method in human geography. Drawing on a wide range of ideas from social anthropology, feminist theory, sociology, human geography and psychoanalysis, the book presents a fresh approach to geographical theory, highlighting the tendency of powerful groups to purify' space and to view minorities as defiled and polluting, and exploring the nature of difference' and the production of knowledge.
rise, particularly in 1973, amounting to ‘a national mugging scare’,35 and this fixed the idea of black youth as an inherently criminal minority and inner cities as inherently criminal localities. Susan Smith’s quotations from Birmingham newspapers, like ‘Society at limit of leniency’ and ‘Angry suburb’, indicate a panic which was generated through the stereotyping of minority group and locality. This required a silence about policing, unemployment, the population composition of the district and
occurring in western societies. This lags behind the desanctification of time, he suggests, but is an inevitable consequence of modernization, the progress of materialism and rationality. I doubt that this is the case.There seems to me to be a continuing need for ritual practices to maintain the sanctity of space in a secular society. These rituals, as in ancient Israel or Brobdingnag, are an expression of power relations: they are concerned with domination. Today, however, the guardians of
chiffonniers from the city, first from the area around the place Maubert, then from the rue Mouffetard, then from the thirteenth arrondissement out to the zones and the faubourgs, for reasons, it is said, of Hygiene. Horror was not the only reaction, however. There was also a fascination with the culture of the ragpickers. Although they were excluded and restricted in their activities by city ordinances, they also created their own spaces in the shanty towns and asserted their independence from
folk-devils targeted in this legislation. These groups are other, they are folk-devils, and they transgress only because the countryside is defined as a stereotyped pure space which cannot accommodate difference.37 NATIONAL IDENTITIES AND ALIEN OTHERS The dominant image of the English countryside which underscored debates on the Criminal Justice and Public Order Bill touches on questions of national identity. The countryside, as it is represented by those who have a privileged place within it,
an THE EXCLUSION OF GEOGRAPHIES / 160 enterprise which reduces ‘the self to pure mind, abstracted from sensuality and material immersion in nature’. Pursuing this path, we might argue that the structuring of academic knowledge into ‘pure’ subjects and the separation of academic knowledge from practice are also masculine traits, reflecting an abhorrence of mixing or merging. Mixed knowledge could be seen as dangerous knowledge, knowledge which threatens hierarchical power structures. Autonomy,