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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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