Book Reviews

Mona Domosh and Joni Seager, Putting Women in Place: Feminist Geographers
Make Sense of the World. London: The Guildford Press, 2001. 215 pp. ISBN
1-57230-668-8 (paper).

In recent years, a number of new introductory textbooks for teaching geographies

of gender have emerged, updating the pioneering but now out of print Geography
and Gender (WGSG, 1984). In the UK, the Women and Geography Study Group
worked as a collective to produce Feminist Geographies (1997), while Australian
feminist geographers have recently produced their own introduction to feminist
geographies, Placebound: Australian Feminist Geographies (Johnson with Huggins
and Jacobs 2000). Mona Domosh and Joni Seager’s Putting Women in Place pro-
vides an important contribution to this field, aimed particularly at North American
readers. I am sure that this well-written and wide-ranging book has already
become an established core text for introductory courses in geography and gender
in many universities and colleges.
The book begins by inviting readers to see the ways in which gendered relation-
ships and gender issues structure the everyday spaces of their daily lives: “[W]e
see this in typical middle-class homes in the United States, where the garage, base-
ment and barbecue pit tend to be men’s spaces, while the kitchen and living room
are women’s domains” (p xiv). Through this example, the authors stress their
central themes—the gendering of space and place, and the role of space and place
in the making of gender. These themes are developed through six substantive
chapters, which focus on “Home”, “Women at Work”, “The City”, “On the Move”,
“Nations and Empires” and “The Environment”. Perhaps not unexpectedly, these
chapters vary quite considerably in their approaches. While the chapters on “Home”
and “The City” are primarily centred on North American and British examples
with a considerable historical focus, other chapters are very wide-ranging. Thus,
chapter four, “On the Move”, encompasses such diverse topics as disability,
poverty and access to transport, gay spaces and “cruising”, “auto-masculinity”,
global migration patterns, refugees and sex tourism. While such diversity provides
an excellent showcase of different topics that require a gendered approach, it can
reduce the possibility for developing a more grounded theoretical argument
about a particular issue.
What I liked most about this book was the wealth of illustrative materials,
which helped to make the book interesting and accessible to students. In addition
to the detail of the chapters on “Home” and “The City”, the chapter on “Nations
and Empires” was particularly well written and illustrated, drawing on a range of
historical work which would add a new and different dimension to many courses
on geography and gender. Surprisingly—and in marked contrast to the approach
of Placebound—there is no discussion of postcolonialism in this chapter or
elsewhere in the book (such as the chapter on the environment). This omission

© 2003 Editorial Board of Antipode.

Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street,
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Book Reviews 409

undoubtedly reflects the framing of the text by the authors around their own par-
ticular interests and specialties. It does, however, provide an interesting example
of how feminist geographies are cast differently in different contexts.
Perhaps related to this issue, one question I had as I read this textbook was
whether the authors downplay the theorising of gender and, even more import-
antly, debates about gender and difference. They engage with issues of gender
and race and gender and poverty at different points in the book, and some chap-
ters take a more global view, rather than simply a North American perspective.
But there is no sustained discussion of gender theory or of the politics of differ-
ence. I suspect that the authors are well aware of this and that it was a deliberate
choice to make this book a student-friendly and introductory text to the relation-
ships between gender, space and place. However, I would imagine that teachers
using this text might want to engage students with questions about the complexity
of theorising a term such as “gender”; indeed, many students would raise these
questions of difference themselves. Perhaps, for more advanced courses in gender
and geography, this text might be read alongside Linda McDowell’s Gender,
Identity and Place (1999) which has a more self-consciously theoretical approach.
Similarly, that text could usefully provide further reading on some of the topics—
such as homelessness and gender, for example—introduced in Putting Women in
Place without references for follow-up reading useful in the preparation of course
papers.
As those cited on the cover of Putting Women in Place attest, I am sure that pro-
fessors in North America and elsewhere seeking a core text for an introductory
course on geography and gender will readily assign this book. This is a highly
accessible and thought-provoking text that will engage undergraduates unfamiliar
with thinking about the relationship between gender and geography, and it is a
welcome addition to the existing literature. In addition, I am sure that individual
chapters in this book will be used by teachers of a wide variety of courses in social
and cultural geography.

References
Johnson L with Huggins J and Jacobs J (2000) Placebound: Australian Feminist
Geographies. Victoria, Australia: Oxford University Press
McDowell L (1999) Gender, Identity and Place: Understanding Feminist Geographies.
Oxford: Polity Press
Women and Geography Study Group of the Institute of British Geographers (1984)
Geography and Gender: An Introduction to Feminist Geography. London: Hutchinson
and Explorations in Feminism Collective
Women and Geography Study Group of Royal Geographical Society with the Institute
of British Geographers (1997) Feminist Geographies: Explorations in Diversity and
Difference. London: Longman

CLAIRE DWYER
Department of Geography
University College London
London
UK
c.dwyer@geog.ucl.ac.uk
410 Antipode

Bent Flyvbjerg, Making Social Science Matter: Why Social Inquiry Fails and How It
Can Succeed Again. Translated by Steven Sampson. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press, 2001. 216 pp. ISBN 052177568X (paper).

This is a philosophical book that makes a very strong (and persuasive) argument
against the possibility for the development of predictive theory in the social sci-
ences along lines of the sort that exist in the natural sciences. In Flyvbjerg’s view,
the prospects for success are so bleak that we should simply abandon the pursuit
of predictive social mechanisms and explanations that apply in all contexts and in
all times. The book also makes a compelling, though more vague, argument for
the replacement of predictive theoretical ambitions by a value-inspired, context-
embedded, narrative-argument-driven form of analysis in the social sciences.
Flyvbjerg is not a postmodern relativist about social analysis: he finds his inspira-
tion in Aristotle’s notion of phronesis. He believes that it is possible to marshal
evidence in favor of one’s position and that one can do this in better and worse
ways that can be disputed. He just thinks that this is all we can do, and that as long
as we are clear on our value commitments, this is actually not such a bad thing
at all.
The arguments that Flyvbjerg presents against predictive theory are not original
to him, but they are presented in an extremely lucid and readable way. All told,
four arguments against the identity of natural and social science and the possibility
of stable, cumulative, predictive social theory are presented. Flyvbjerg agrees
(in one way or another) with three of the four. He does not agree with the “pre-
paradigmatic” view that suggests that social science is just too young as a mode of
inquiry to have developed a normal science yet. He agrees that there is nothing
to suggest that the emergence of such normal science is impossible; but he also
emphasizes that there is nothing a priori about the current situation suggesting
that it will happen, either.
The three other arguments that he likes—some in modified form—all point to
the distinctive dilemmas associated with constructing scientific theory on human
beings. There is the Garfinkel/Giddens hermeneutic-phenomenological point that
situationally bound and reflexive agents studied by equally situationally bound
and reflexive scientists makes for reliable prediction only as long as both situations
remain stable. Michel Foucault’s argument from the Order of Things is also favor-
ably presented, though not without important modification. Foucault claims that
stable, cumulative, predictive science about human behavior is not possible because
human beings both constitute these sciences and, at the same time, are their object.
No science can objectivize the skills that make it possible. Flyvbjerg agrees with
this, but disagrees with Foucault’s suggestion that this is a very specific syndrome
associated with modern knowledge. Flyvbjerg thinks it is a more general dilemma.
The final argument presented—and the one that Flyvbjerg likes the best—draws
on the “tacit skills” claims made by theorists such as Hubert Dreyfus and Pierre
Bourdieu. Here, the brief against science targets the mismatch between the
analytical requirements of scientific theory and the reality of human action in
real contexts. For theorists like Dreyfus and Bourdieu, famously, human action is
not a matter of rule-following. Rather, it is a dense process of improvisation and
creativity produced by the interaction between the challenges presented by
context and the accumulated learning and judgments of the agent. Even though
there may be rules that are known to the agents, rule-following does not describe
Book Reviews 411

action in such situations. Rather, agents are exercising skill and expertise. Know-
ing the rules of chess, for example, does not determine any particular game of
chess—the skill of the player does. Rules do not make the game. The conundrum
that human beings understood in this way pose for science is that predictive
theory requires clear rules that apply independently of context. But it is extremely
difficult to construct a set of rules independent of context about actors whose
actions can only be understood within contexts.
At the end of the day, Flyvbjerg admits that it still might be possible to develop
a theory of context that might be able to square the circle presented by the reality
of skillful, non-rule-based behavior and, hence, make predictive theory about social
action possible. But he is very skeptical (everything hinges on the vast difficulty
of constructing an adequate theory of context). He urges us to not waste our time
looking for a solution—we have had well over two hundred years to do so, with no
success yet anywhere in sight! Instead, he argues for the adoption of an alternative
social science: abandon the ambition for predictive theory and instead embrace
our inescapable embeddedness in context and develop context-specific skills to
reflect on and improve our situations.
In itself, this is not an entirely new or original suggestion, either.
Hermeneutic theory—and, in particular, many strands of American prag-
matism—have been arguing this since at least the beginning of the last century.
What is distinctive in Flyvbjerg’s suggestion is that we understand this activity as
the enactment of Aristotelian phronesis: prudent, deeply embedded practical
judgment, driven by and in the interest of value commitments. Flyvbjerg gives
us four questions that he believes should guide a form of phronetic social
science: Where are we going? Who is winning and who is losing? Is it desirable?
And what should be done? Researchers, in his view, should throw themselves
deeply into an empirical realm that is important to them and construct analyses
that attempt to improve that situation. Moreover, they should use whatever
tools they believe will further such a project: statistics, case study, formal
modeling, interpretation, narrative, and so on. Just make clear arguments, tell
good stories, learn your case and be humble enough to think that you can be
wrong. Expect people to argue with you.
This is not exactly rigorous methodological guidance for social scientists. But it
is also not at all bad advice! The strength of the constructive part of Flyvbjerg’s
book is that it recommends very sensible and practical guidelines for inquiry in the
context of a rejection of positivist social science as a vocation. It also provides
interesting empirical illustrations of how this might be done. The book will be
especially interesting to radical geographers from this point of view, as Flyvbjerg
presents a very extensive case example from his own work on urban development
in Aalborg, Denmark. There, he demonstrates how immersion in a real process
on the part of the researcher makes it possible to identify relations of power and
possibilities for transformation that could not have been deduced beforehand. He
also illustrates quite well, in this case, the way in which narrative plays a crucial
analytic role in the critical argument.
The weakness of the book’s constructive argument, in my view, is that it veers
too strongly into a exegesis of Foucault as a paradigmatic phronetic social scientist,
rather than considering some of the other varieties of context-committed social
analysis that have emerged—the tradition of American pragmatism, in particular,
seems oddly absent in the discussion. Flyvbjerg also feels very strongly that
412 Antipode

traditional Aristotelian phronesis does not contain an adequate treatment of

power relations, so he spends some time trying to incorporate the Foucaultian
theory of power into his four questions (ultimately giving rise to the who wins/who
loses question noted above). This is interesting, but very clearly “extra” and not
obviously necessary or intrinsic to pragmatic, phronetic social science—nor is
Flyvbjerg’s Foucaultian power the only way that practical pragmatic social
scientists can address the problem of power.
That said—and a reviewer always has to say something like that—this is a
very good book about what social science should be. It should be widely read and
will provide great ammunition for qualitative social-scientist graduate students
studying for their general exams. It will be especially useful for geographers, as
the most extensive empirical examples of the alternative methodology in action
involve geographical and urban dilemmas.

GARY HERRIGEL
Department of Political Science
University of Chicago
Chicago, IL
USA
g-herrigel@uchicago.edu

J Donald Hughes, An Environmental History of the World: Humankind’s Changing

Role in the Community of Life. New York: Routledge, 2001. 264 pp. ISBN
0415136199 (paper).

World environmental history has arrived. A field that for practical purposes did
not exist prior to 1990 has, as of the early 21st century, emerged with great vigor,
boasting such important recent studies as Mike Davis’s Late Victorian Holocausts
(2001) and J R McNeill’s environmental history of the 20th century (2000). But,
however vigorous, the world-historical movement within environmental studies
has taken shape at some remove from social theory. Population dynamics, techno-
logical change, economic expansion, even the nature-society relation itself—all
remain drastically undertheorized. That the neglect of social theory may cause
serious problems for the analysis of contemporary and historical socioecological
crises is nowhere more evident than in J. Donald Hughes’ An Environmental
History of the World. Above all, conspicuously lacking from this text is a concep-
tual apparatus that might identify the specificity of environmental transformation
in distinct historical formations. As a result, differences between, for instance, the
Inca empire, feudal Europe, and the world capitalist system are flattened out,
reduced to mere quantitative variation.
In An Environmental History of the World Hughes, “adopts ecological process as
its organizing principle” (p 8). In this conception of ecological process, two ideas
are privileged—first, the notion of “balance,” conceived as “harmony in movement”
(p 13); and second, the proposition that “humans are part of ecosystems” and that
consequently “culture is part of nature” (p 5). For Hughes, the environmental
history of the world is in very large part the story of population growth and tech-
nological change; the latter is often reduced to, or rendered synonymous with,
economic development. Ideas of nature and impulses towards conservationism
Book Reviews 413

are at times important, but only rarely, and their relation to socioecological contra-
dictions is unclear.
The environmental history that takes shape out of these conceptions is a
curious one. In the first place, conceptions of both ecological balance and social
process are integrated into the text more as descriptive categories than as explan-
atory mechanisms. For instance, population growth is repeatedly invoked as a
force driving ecological change, but its relation to other social processes is never
well developed. Nor is the fruitful notion that “humans are part of ecosystems”
(or its inverse) allowed to shape the narrative, which, despite its laudable intentions
ultimately reproduces a dualistic rather than a relational conception of nature-
society interactions.
In each of the chronologically organized chapters, Hughes presents three case
studies that, in principle, offer three different angles of vision on the environ-
mental history of successive eras in world history. In our encounter with the
medieval era, for instance, we discover the contrasting environmental histories
of the Incas, Pacific Islanders, and Europeans. However interesting the cases are
in themselves, Hughes provides no criteria for their selection (why not China?
Africa? the Middle East?), nor does he make clear the broad argument these
cases support. He clearly regards the era as important: “Preparations for rapid
modern changes were made in the Middle Ages,” he asserts (p 83). Yet he never
argues the point, nor does he consider any of the vast literature on the world
economic history of the later middle ages, especially Janet Abu-Lughod’s (1989)
now-classic restatement.
Hughes wrote most of the volume’s 24 case studies as short essays for the
journal Capitalism Nature Socialism (CNS). (Perhaps as a consequence, the volume
has a certain cobbled-together feeling.) Given Hughes’ association with CNS,
one would expect to find a certain engagement with social theory, Marxist or
otherwise. But no such engagement is to be found. This serves to undermine the
critical edge of An Environmental History of the World, which concludes with the
sound observation that “An unprecedented crisis of survival is likely in the new
century which is beginning” (p 213). Unfortunately, Hughes provides no basis for
comparing this ecological crisis with earlier crises. Rather than suggest the
outlines of a method that might allow for meaningful ecohistorical comparisons,
Hughes offers up a grab-bag of contemporary environmental concerns: “exces-
sive” population growth; “the cultural attitudes of the modern industrial age”
(p 213); “a new technological revolution” (p 206); “an emerging world trading
system” (p 209).
Eclecticism aside, Hughes’ great failing is his total neglect of labor and, conse-
quently, of class relations and the historical specificity of socioecological relations
in distinct modes of production. This narrow conception of economic and environ-
mental history, resting upon technology, population, and markets, leads Hughes
to write about the Green Revolution without a word concerning class relations,
land struggles, or the capitalist transformation of property relations! In another
passage discussing 19th-century British imperialism, Hughes gives a scant one
paragraph to the creation of plantation monocultures (again, not a word on
labor), but four paragraphs to European hunting expeditions (pp 125–126).
An even more troubling implication of this narrow approach is found in the
problem of ecological crises in the transition from one historical system to another.
Ignoring the relation between labor, class, and nature, Hughes cannot see what
414 Antipode

distinguishes capitalism from the social systems that preceded it. In the case of
medieval Europe, as we have seen, Hughes resorts to teleological explanation: the
modern world economy was the outgrowth of the medieval era. But of course, this
is not really an explanation at all. The problem of transition is erased. To do this,
Hughes must ignore a considerable body of work on medieval European agrarian
life that holds that feudal class relations tended to limit reinvestment in the land,
generate (historically specific) patterns of population growth, and thereby under-
mine the fertility of the soil over the long run. An alternative approach, stressing
the role of feudal production relations in their socioecological totality, might
point to the multiple relations between soil exhaustion, climate change, epidemic
disease, and the political-economic conjunctures of the 14th century. Such an
approach would suggest how changing agrarian class relations in an era of crisis—
which Hughes recognizes in his useful (if limited) discussion of medieval Florence
—tended to favor European expansion and the rise of capitalism. From this stand-
point, the regional ecological crises of feudalism (and other precapitalist systems)
might be contrasted with capitalism’s globalization of ecological problems, and
the transition between the two systems explained (see Moore 2002)
An Environmental History of the World merits consideration as an ambitious but
deeply flawed survey. The volume does not stand up well to its rivals—foremost
among them Clive Ponting’s A Green History of the World (1991) and John Bellamy
Foster’s The Vulnerable Planet (1994)—in terms of either narrative power or
theoretical sophistication. Perhaps more than anything, Hughes’ book indicates
the great need for theoretical-historical synthesis in a field where the manifold
relations of local-global, nature-society, and capital-labor (or lord-peasant)
demand constant interrogation and reinterpretation.

References
Abu-Lughod J L (1989) Before European Hegemony: The World System, AD 1250–1350.
Oxford: Oxford University Press
Davis M (2001) Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third
World. London: Verso
Foster J B (1994) The Vulnerable Planet: A Short Economic History of the Environment.
New York: Monthly Review Press
McNeill J R (2000) Nothing New under the Sun: An Environmental History of the
Twentieth-Century World. New York: Norton
Moore J W (2002) The crisis of feudalism: An environmental history. Organization &
Environment 15(3):296–317
Ponting C (1991) A Green History of the World. New York: St. Martin’s Press

JASON W MOORE
Department of Geography
University of California, Berkeley
Berkeley, CA
USA
jasonwmoore@earthlink.net