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American Geographical SocietyReview: [untitled]Author(s): James S. DuncanSource: Geographical Review, Vol. 80, No. 1 (Jan., 1990), pp. 85-87Published by: American Geographical SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/215903 .Accessed: 13/03/2011 01:51Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unlessyou have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and youmay use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at .http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ags. .Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printedpage of such transmission.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and studentsdiscover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools toincrease productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact
[email protected] Geographical Society is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserveand extend access toGeographical Review.http://www.jstor.orgGEOGRAPHICAL REVIEWSthese essays. Worster's invitation for geographers to contribute more to environmentalhistory should be welcomed.-MICHAEL E. LEWISSLASH AND BURN: Farming in the Third World Forest. By WILLIAMJ.PETERSa nd LEON F. NEUENSCHWANDERx. iv and 114 pp.; diagrs., ills.,bibliog., index. Moscow, Idaho: University of Idaho Press, 1988. $29.95.ISBN 0-89301-123-1.Written as a personal exploration into the processes and effects of shiftingcultivation, Slash and Burn by William J. Peters and Leon F. Neuenschwanderis essentially a compilation of work by others, specifically with regardto the effects of fire in slash-and-burn agriculture. For persons already versedin the mechanics of tropical forest agriculture, this book offers little newinformation; however, it may be useful as a primer for new students or assupplementary material for discussion in upper-level classes.The book is organized around a central chapter concerning the role offire in shifting cultivation. That chapter, divided into sections on soil andvegetation, draws entirely on data and description from already-publishedsources. The difficulty of comparing studies and circumstances that are widelyseparated in time and space and the lack of a specific research agenda diluteits potential. Perhaps the least familiar information about tropical agriculturepresented here deals with the effects of the burning phase of shifting cultivationon soil properties. Description of the changes in structure, temperature,moisture, and nutrient availability of soil that result from burningintroduces an area of study in which much work remains to be done. Therest of the book, including the chapters on shifting cultivation and on itssocial and economic aspects, repeats general knowledge that would be quitefamiliar to an informed reader.The book is pantropical in scope and includes an extensive bibliography on tropical agriculture. The worldwide survey offers a needed perspective,but the litany of examples from Latin America, Africa, and Asia makes forunconnected and choppy reading. Peters and Neuenschwander clearly havean intense interest in the subject; however, the book reads not like a completedstudy but like the introduction and literature review of a larger work.Short length and high price make it difficult to justify purchase of this book.It would have been better published in more affordable, monograph form.-MARTHA A. WORKSAMERICA. By JEAN BAUDRILLARDX. and 129 pp.; ills. New York: Verso,1988. $24.95. ISBN 0-86091-220-5.Jean Baudrillard is one of the foremost contemporary French sociologists andcultural commentators. His book Amerique was therefore viewed as somethingof a cultural event when it was published in France in 1986. Now thatan English edition, ably translated by Chris Turner, has appeared, this imtheseim-85THE GEOGRAPHICAL REVIEWportant book has become available to English-language readers. America is a wonderfully funny, infuriating, brilliant, deeply flawed work. Baudrillard'sinterpretation of America as a place is based primarily on a cursoryreading of its surficial landscape. Baudrillard, it would appear, has come toAmerica with an idee fixe: the United States is the srcinator and sole trueparticipant in the project of modernity. Although Europe might attempt toemulate, European modernity is merely a dubbed version of the Americansrcinal.Baudrillard attempts to illuminate America as the quintessence of modernityby focusing upon what he terms astral America, not social and culturalAmerica, but America of the empty, absolute freedom of the freeways, notthe deep America of mores and mentalities, but the America of desert speed,of motels and mineral surfaces. Although Baudrillard uses the term modernityto describe America, he is referring to the condition that is now calledpostmodernism. What makes this book doubly interesting is that Baudrillardnot only argues that America is postmodern but also uses a postmodernrhetoric and mode of analysis. As such, America is a fascinating exampleof landscape interpretation, both methodologically and empirically. Baudrillardis one of the important figures within the intertwined movements ofpoststructuralism and postmodernism, and one can see in his work commonalitieswith the landscape writing of such observers as Barthes, De Certeau,and Eco and with the more general postmodern project developed byFoucault, Jameson, and Lyotard. One is particularly reminded of Empire ofSigns, in which Barthes, fifteen years earlier, did to Japan what Baudrillardhas done to America.The condition of postmodernism is one of surface without depth, of freefloatingsignifiers no longer anchored to things signified, of no history, onlya pure circulation of goods and ideas. America, Baudrillard asserts, lies at thecenter of the postmodern world. One can see it in the emptiness of thedeserts, in the endless freeways that transect the country, in the great citiesthat are alive, violent, rotten, puritanical, and poor, in the cannedlaughter on television, in the hyperindividualism of joggers performingutterly inconsequential feats of endurance. He cites Baudelaire, who said thatthe secret of true modernity is found in artifice, and concludes that the trueheart of America is to be found in Disneyland, on freeways, in Safeways,and in the vast deserts of suburban housing tracts. Baudrillard dismisses aspitiable attempts by Americans to copy Europe and thereby to deny theirown culture. Hence the Cloisters in New York and the Getty Museum onthe west coast are absurd, because neither history nor modernity can crossthe ocean. Europe and America, he contends, shall forever remain apart.On the surface Baudrillard's discourse is self-consciously postmodern. Yetan older European discourse runs, perhaps undetected by Baudrillard himself, like a subterranean river through this work: the discourse of Europe's other, a European tradition of inquiry about other parts of the world that inevitablyseems to use those places as mirrors that allow Europeans to see themselvesmore clearly. Labeling this perspective Orientalism, Edward Said argues that86GEOGRAPHICAL REVIEWSsuch a discourse invents the Orient and ultimately reveals more about Europethan about Asia and North Africa. For the Orientalists, natives were closeto nature, primitive, barbarous, violent, irrational-in short, they were everythingthat post-Enlightenment Europeans allegedly were not. Likewise Baudrillard'sAmerica is a society whose primitivism has passed into the hyperbolic,inhuman character of a universe that is beyond us, that far outstripsits own moral, social or ecological rationale. Americans, he adds, are savage, uncultured, ritualistic, violent, and mute. Like the natives as viewedby the Orientalists, Americans to Baudrillard are so implicated in the systemof which they are a part that they need the European intellectual to speakfor them.Baudrillard's rhetoric, like that of his intellectual forebears, reveals himto be an intellectual imperialist; like all such rhetoric, his typically throwsmore light on the center than on the periphery. However, it does illuminateboth. For that reason, America is very much worth reading.-JAMES S.DUNCANAMERICA'S NEW MARKET GEOGRAPHY: Nation, Region and Metropolis.Edited by GEORGES TERNLIEBan d JAMES W. HUGHES. xviii and 371 pp.;diagrs., ills., notes, index. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Centerfor Urban Policy Research, 1988. ISBN 0-88285-127-6.Geographers will be intrigued by the title of this collection. Unfortunately,its editors, George Sternlieb and James W. Hughes, are not geographers andapparently have little notion of what geography is. Although the contributorsinclude a number of geographers, the editors miss a key goal: they have notproduced a new economic geography.As if to set the stage for this volume, Sternlieb and Hughes refer in thepreface to a conference that occurred nearly a decade ago, but they do notidentify the srcins of the papers they have collected. A reference by AnthonyDowns to papers heard previously makes one wonder if these are conferenceproceedings, special essays, or both. In any case, the quality is veryuneven, the editing is insufficient, the data (where they appear) are relativelyold, the figures are marginally professional, maps are completely absent,excitement is missing, analysis is on leave, and conclusions are often anecdotalor presented by allegation. The contributors frequently disagree. Althoughthe book is organized somewhat spatially, from small to large scale,the failure to provide bridging between successive regions makes for additionalunevenness.It is fair to wonder what group of readers was intended for this book,which focuses mainly on high-tech industry and its ramifications and onthe economic and social landscape of the future. Geographers are certain tobe disappointed; nor are economists and planners likely to be pleased. Theimprimatur of the Center for Urban Policy Research may elicit curiosity andsales, but that is hardly fair; neither is the omission of reference to what wasobviously a recent conference. The subject matter is clearly of concern to87
