How Geographers, Anthropologists, and Literary Scholars Narrate the Spatial Turn

Abstract

This paper analyzes a series of emblematic instances of narrating the spatial turn in three disciplines: geography, anthropology, and literary studies. The term “spatial turn” itself suggests a transdisciplinary phenomenon, a sort of Zeitgeist that affected a range of disciplines in the humanities and social science, and possibly natural science. Such a view can be established for all three disciplines under discussion; at the same time, however, the (mostly implicit) notion is also widespread that geography has precedence over other disciplines in matters of the spatial turn and the production of spatial concepts. The coexistence of these two views and the resulting paradoxes are critically analyzed with reference to the concept of the spatial turn as introduced and elaborated by the geographer Edward Soja. – Whereas the fundamental distinction in Soja’s depiction of the spatial turn is that between space and time (as the spatial turn is seen as a victory of spatial thinkers over “history boys”), this distinction is entirely absent in anthropology, especially in its subfield referred to as the anthropology of space and place. Here, the term “space and place” is used in a more or less arbitrary manner, but the predilection for “place” is clear. The conceptual discussion (or polemics) regarding the preference for space or for place, characterizing current geography, is nevertheless absent in this subfield. Therein, the spatial turn is reduced to the claim that a new notion of space emerged in anthropology at the beginning of the 1990s. After the turn, space was no longer viewed as a container or a setting, as it moved to the fore. This field is mostly a fad that presupposes a serious lack of knowledge of the history of the discipline. Anthropology is actually a discipline fundamentally dependent on spatial thinking. For this reason, it used to be closely related to geography. A central concept linking the two disciplines was that of landscape. Anthropology of landscape as a subfield is older and more coherent than “anthropology of space and place”, and the leading spatial thinkers in the discipline are being associated with it. In this subfield, the notion of the spatial turn is not accepted because it simply does not make sense. – By contrast, the spatial turn in literary studies is a rather obvious and hardly contestable fact. The turn can be observed in the return of the interest in extraliterary reality characterizing a range of new theoretical schools and programs. For Westphal, the rediscovery of the “referential function” implies transcending textualism, thereby crossing the borders of the humanities, and hybridizing the discipline with social and natural sciences. In a more specific vein, however, the spatial (or, say, topographical) turn in literary studies reveals itself through its cartographical aspiration, upgrading the mapping of non-fictional literary phenomena with the mapping of fictional spaces of literature. This ambition seems particularly intriguing (and enigmatic) from the perspective of anthropology – a discipline that renounced ethnological cartography (unwisely, in this author’s mind) about half a century ago.