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Book reviews 425
is that Muslim identities are heterogeneous.
Though it has become something of a clich to
pluralize human geographies, the plurals in the
title of this book geographies and identities
are well justified and effectively elaborated.
Muslims, as successive chapters demonstrate,
hold one thing in common, and sometimesonly one. Patricia Ehrkamp discusses the com-
plex relationships between religious and
national identity among Turkish immigrants in
Germany, distinguishing between the ways
in which non-Muslim Germans perceive
this relationship (thinking of most Turks as
Muslims) and the more nuanced realities
experienced by the immigrants themselves
(only around two-thirds of whom identify
as Muslims). Cameron McAuliffe finds the
Muslim Iranian diaspora equally mixed,describing Iran as a container of diversity,
neither homogeneously Islamic nor, within
its Muslim communities, homogenous in any
other way (p. 30). Other papers, portraying the
heterogeneity of Muslim communities, con-
test stereotypes about Muslims. Discussing
ScottishPakistani communities in suburban
Glasgow, Sadiq Mir contests stereotypes
that link Muslims (alongside other racial,
ethnic and religious minorities) with inner
cities, and whiteness with suburbs. SamuelZalanga contests the characterization of
Islam as a backward or past-time religion, by
distinguishing between different ways in which
Islam has been used to inform economic devel-
opment strategies. Finding Nigerian Islam
conservative and its Malaysian counterpart
progressive, he argues against characterizing
this or any other religion as conservative or
progressive. Instead, he argues, we should
ask under what conditions a religion does be-
come a force promoting desirable social changeand under what conditions does it become a
fetter (p. 166).
Addressing the heterogeneity of Muslim
identities and geographies, this book also ex-
amines the diversity of Muslim experiences of
gender. In one of the highlights of the book,
Sonja van Wichelen shows how Islamization
in Indonesia has conjured up new images and
discourses of Muslim bodies (p. 93). Cultural
transformation, she explains, revolves around
gendered and sexualized political figures,
bodies invoked through debates about the
practices and regulation of marriage, veiling,
female circumcision, polygamy, and womens
roles. Patricia Ehrkamp examines how someof the same debates have unfolded in Europe,
and been brought there to different concerns:
including Dutch multiculturalism and German
debates about immigration. Other chapters on
gender, the body and Islam include: Tess Kays
study of sisters in sport; an essay by Ellen
Green and Carrie Singleton on the negotiation
of risk by South Asian women; and Gabriele
Marrancis analysis of migration as a gendered
practice. Gender is not always or only about
women, of course, as Peter Hopkins showsin a chapter about the experiences of young
Muslim men in their local areas, in the wake of
11 September. The heterogeneity and change
in Muslim experiences of gender, described in
these chapters, unsettle generalizations about
the place(s) of Muslim women and men, which
are central to stereotypes about Muslims.
So this book is more than the sum of its
parts. A series of detailed empirical studies,
the chapters come together to form a funda-
mentally geographical picture of diversityand agency, both of gender and other
threads of Muslim experience, which con-
test stereotypes about Muslims. Here an
eclectic, scholarly study of a community or
rather a series of interconnected yet distinct
communities becomes something of a pol-
itical intervention.
Richard PhillipsUniversity of Liverpool
Crampton, J.W. andElden, S., editors
2007:Space, knowledge and power: Foucaultand geography.Aldershot: Ashgate. 377 pp.60 cloth, 22.50 paper. ISBN: 978 0 7546
4655 6 cloth, 978 0 7546 4655 6 paper.
Michel Foucault is arguably the most in-
fluential of the French poststructuralist
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426 Progress in Human Geography 33(3)
thinkers whose work has been adopted inthe last 20 years by human geographersin the critical Anglo-American mainstream
of the discipline. It has been argued thatFoucaults work is profoundly spatial, offeringa welcome counterpoint to the domination
of historical ideas in the critical social sci-ences. However, these spatial concepts aredispersed throughout a wide corpus of pub-
lished monographs, essays and lectures, andmany of Foucaults key writings on spaceare difficult to access, or as yet untranslated
into the English language. Also, despite manyresearchers being strongly influenced byFoucault, and the existence of a number of im-
portant monographs deploying Foucauldianideas in particular geographical contexts (see,
for example, Hannah, 2000; Elden, 2001;Philo, 2004), no collection has yet attemptedto review the state of the art of Foucauldianwork in the discipline until, that is, the pub-
lication of Space, knowledge and power.Publicity material claims this is the first
book to engage Foucaults geographies in detail
from a wide range of perspectives, and thatthe book will both surprise and challenge anyreader who thinks they know what Foucault
said and did with space. The book is puffed asan essential text, an exhilarating collectionof essays and the essential reference work.
It is woven together from disparate sources:republished or newly translated criticalwritings from Foucault himself are juxta-
posed with responses from Anglophone andFrancophone writers, contextual explorationsaround the significance of Foucaults ideas in
particular fields, and a series of reflections oncontemporary developments and responsesto Foucault.
The structure of the book is unusual.
Twenty-seven chapters, organized into sixparts, with an introduction and index suggests
a rather atomized 377 pages. Very few editedworks include that many contributions in thatlittle space. The structure is deliberately chosen
to encourage an active engagement withthe subject, instead of offering a definitiveguide an interesting tension with publicity
claims towards its authority as a text.
The editors introduce and justify their
position, claiming the book has twin aims:
namely, to offer a comprehensive overview
of Foucaults engagement with geography
and of geography with Foucault, but also to
open up new themes and questions, so as to
encourage an ongoing engagement. Theysuggest Foucaults position in relation to
geography remains unclear and explain how
their work is organized around the centre-
piece of Foucaults questions to the French
journal Hrodote, appearing here translatedfor the first time.1The editors argue these four
questions are at the centre of Foucaults
engagement with geography, along with his
earlier and oft-quoted Questions on Geography,also reprinted later in this volume. I felt the
device of anchoring the book to Foucaultsquestions toHrodotewas rather contrived only rarely do any of the chapters explicitly
reflect on these questions, or address their
concerns directly.
These newly translated questions are fol-
lowed by more translations of Francophone
responses originally published in 1977 in
Hrodote, from Brabant, Joxe, Racine andRaffestin, and Riou. Specially commissioned
responses from the Anglophone world from
David Harvey, Sara Mills, Nigel Thrift, andThomas Flynn follow, juxtaposing a contrast
across time and disciplinary culture. Thrift and
Harvey are strongly critical of the Foucauldian
project; Mills appears to be tacked in as a
gesture towards gender, but two and a half
pages is clearly inadequate space to develop
these important ideas properly; Flynn is
rather too removed from the geographical
mainstream. A strongly contrasting style
emerges, with French work much more
synthetic, harder to read and less well sup-ported by citation than the more analytical
Anglophone pieces.
The next part of the book situates Foucaults
ideas in Anglophone and Francophone aca-
demic contexts. Elden explores Foucauldian
practice in the late 1970s. Hannah uses
Foucaults own archaeological approach to
examine the discursive construction of
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Book reviews 427
his work, backing up his exploration with
questionnaire responses from those most influ-
enced by Foucaults ideas; this is probably the
most fascinating chapter in the entire book.
Fall contrasts the enthusiastic Anglophone
response of the 1980s and 1990, to the very
limited influence of Foucault on French geo-graphic practice. Raffestin (translated into
English here) assesses whether Foucaults
ideas might have led to, or could still lead to,
change in French geographic practice. I felt
the fascinating material in this section might
have made rather more of the juxtaposition
of initial French responses to subsequent com-
missioned English-language essays. Contexts
are rather too hermetic.
The fifth section (Texts) returns to
Foucaults work with four new translations of
critical passages in his writings on space that
are not widely known, but which are central
in his theorizing of the relations of space and
power, as well as a reprint of his better known
Questions on Geography. A rather strange
structural strategy to organize material in
this way surely it would have been better to
group all the texts together and then reflect on
their significance? The arrangement separates
Texts from Questions; reflection takes
place before the text itself has been read.
The final part of Space, knowledge and
power illustrates contemporary and newly
emerging directions being taken by Anglo-
phone geographers whose work draws in
part on the Foucauldian tradition, with eight
widely varying chapters. The most successful
of these are those that focus on conceptual
critique, notably: Margo Huxleys masterly
development of notions of governmentality;
David Murakami Woods analysis of the
potential of actor-network based approaches
to surveillance studies that move beyond
the Foucauldian figure of the panopticon;
Stephen Leggs exploration of the relations
of Foucault to postcolonial theory and the
work of Edward Said; Philip Howells call for
a more nuanced reading of space in the treat-
ment of sexual geographies; and Matthew
Coleman and John Agnews explicitly
political consideration of post-9/11 geopolitics.
Other chapters in this section are rather less
successful: Kearns chapter sits rather oddly as
a subdisciplinary summary; Cramptons pro-
vides an isolated empirical case study; and
Philos offers a tightly argued analysis of a singleless well-known piece of the Foucauldian
corpus.
The key question is whether this collection
lives up to the puffs and fulfils editorial aims.
Like all collections its coverage is patchy
chapters are seriously uneven in their length
and scope. Some are too brief to convince,
some stick closely to the Foucauldian texts,
others depart and critique. The majority of
chapters, however, are incisive and closely
argued; they alone make this book a very
stimulating read.
I felt the introduction might have intro-
duced key Foucauldian concepts in more
detail and related these more closely to the
historical trajectory of his work, and indeed
to his biography. One is forced back to
the excellent index to discover how these
concepts have been deployed and developed
in Foucaults work biopower, the panopticon,
power-knowledge, discursive formation,
the episteme, disciplinary institution and
genealogy might all have been introduced and
their spatial significance assessed. The rich
resource in this text might then have been
more easily digested.
Spectral characters haunt this work. The
gloomy figure of Foucault is present but is
never really grasped his spirit imbues the
work, but seems rather like the image on
the cover of the work, looking neither at the
subject nor at the reader, but gazing moodily
in slightly fuzzy grey tones in a sideways
direction. French, dead, abstract and absent.
Somehow translation and time make the
whole discourse rather distanced. Several of
the key figures in the first generation of geo-
graphical Foucauldians are also absent:
Gregory puffs the book on the back cover,
but is not there to develop or critique these
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428 Progress in Human Geography 33(3)
ideas in the book itself; Driver responds
to Hannahs questionnaire but it would
have been fascinating to hear how he now
views his earlier engagement with Foucault;
Pickles also eulogizes the book, but is
also absent.
In many ways this is a book for Foucauldians,not a sustained and critical evaluation of the
relations between Foucault and the dis-
cipline. One wonders indeed how many
geographers still regard Foucauldian ideas
as innovative as Huxley comments in her
questionnaire response to Hannah (p. 95),
many staff consider Foucault a bit old hat:
were all Deleuzian, ANT, nature/culture,
hybridity, post colonial now. It would have
been refreshing to have commissioned a wider
critical reflection on the contemporary sig-nificance of Foucauldian ideas 20 years after
his death, instead of the rather scattergun-
like final section. Also the work cries out for
a conclusion to draw themes back together,
encourage critique, make links, and reflect
on the changing significance of the original
man in black. So if you are into Foucault
this is a must-read text. If you remain to be
convinced then I doubt this book will con-
vince you!
Chris PerkinsManchester University
1. The questions are: what are the relations between
knowledge, war and power; what does it mean to call
spatial knowledge a science; what do geographers
understand by power; and what would geographies
of medical establishments understood as interven-
tions look like? They were originally published in
French in 1976, as a response to the journals earlier
questions to Foucault.
Elden, S. 2001: Ma pp in g th e pr es en t: He id eg ge r,Foucault and the project of a spatial history. London:
Continuum.
Hannah, M. 2000: Governmentality and the mastery of
territory in nineteenth-century America. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Philo, C. 2004:A geographical history of institutional pro-
vision for the insane from medieval times to the 1860s
in England and Wales: the space reserved for insanity.
Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press.
Getimis, P.andKafkalas, G. editors 2007:
Overcoming fragmentation in SoutheastEu rope . Sp at ial de ve lo pme nt tren ds an dintegration potential. Aldershot: Ashgate.331 pp. 55 cloth. ISBN: 978 0 7546 4796 6.
Edited by two Greek spatial planners, thisbook gathers together the expertise mainly of
Greek architects, engineers and spatial
economists, and is supported by some other
international scholars. Developed over the
course of six years, as part of two INTERREG
projects (ESTIA and ESTIA-SPOSE), the
volume revolves around the question of
whether the elaboration and pursuit of a
common vision for the spatial development
of Southeast Europe (SEE) is possible. The
answer of the editors is all but univocal, asthey maintain that the complex background
consisting of antithetical integrative and
segmental forces and trends can de facto
have it in both ways. In this sense, the future
of the Balkans (the other name used by some
authors for SEE) remains a mystery also
for spatial planners. Issues of geography (a
rugged terrain), unresolved ethnic and reli-
gious tensions, underdevelopment, and insti-
tutional weakness limit the ways in which
socioeconomic and spatial integration can beimplemented in this part of Europe. Despite
the fact that some institutional reforms,
prompted by the necessity to adjust to the EU
legal framework, have put the SEE in a bet-
ter institutional capacity today, this does
not necessarily transform into an institutional
capability, as confirmed by Kafkalas, Getimis
and Demetropoulou in their introductory
and concluding remarks.
The effectiveness of the policies of transi-
tion and accession is also questioned byPetrakos and Kallioras in their quantitative
study on the impact of economic integration
among the new EU member states during the
pre-accession period. Their statistical evid-
ence shows the increase of regional inequality,
with the emergence of clear winners (the
capital and western border regions in Central
Europe) and losers (the non-metropolitan
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