Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
1
Introduction
Folding time and space
The goal of this topic is to demonstrate how various societies have com-
pressed time and space, shaped them toward their own ends, used them as
sources of power, control, and resistance, experienced and gave them mean-
ing symbolically and ideologically, and changed them historically and geo-
graphically. Di
erent social formations gave time and space widely variable
meanings, and, invariably, every set of understandings proved to be tempo-
rary and unstable, to be replaced by new forms and associations which, while
always novel, were not necessarily better. Time and space are indispensable
yet notoriously slippery topics. Few, if any, dimensions of social life are more
important, yet few are so di
ff
cult to pin down conceptually; oceans of ink
have been spilled trying to make sense of them. In part, this problem re
ects
the enormous diversity in the types of time and space that human beings have
produced, from phenomenological time to geologic time, from the space of
the body to the space of the global economy.
Essentially, this work is concerned with how societies are stretched across
time and space and how they interacted with each other, that is, how di
fl
erent
relational geographies have been constructed and how they changed over
time, and what these changes meant for the people who made these processes
unfold. This topic is concerned with the multiplicity of ways in which places
have been tied together at di
ff
erent moments in historical time, the webs
of interconnectedness within and among societies through which goods,
people, ideas, technologies, and power relations
ff
flowed. Because space is not
independent of time, it is therefore also the story of how time was conceived,
measured, and changed. Its focus is on the shifting networks of centrality
and peripherality that are integral to how humans produce, reproduce, and
change their worlds. It addresses an exceptionally wide variety of topics,
from calendars and clocks to trade and telecommunications, in the e
fl
ort
to understand the varying forms that relational space assumed, not simply
in the postmodern present but also in the distant, very premodern past.
The topic therefore o
ff
ers a capitalist, global historical geography of time and
space, and by examining their changes, attempts to come to terms with how
they have been di
ff
erent cultures.
It draws freely from the literatures on transportation and communications,
ff
erentially collapsed, or compressed, by di
ff
