I found this week’s key reading particularly inspiring in their challenging of the perception of space in history as being a given notion and their effort to bring to the fore studies which questioned such ideas and offered alternative ways of thinking about spatialization.
In the conclusion of his article, Alcalde emphasized once again that “History not only takes place in a given space; it also makes both place and space.”. This statement reminded me of an article I read for an IR course which I found particularly interesting in how it highlighted historical processes of construction of space and more specifically land as well as the role of those processes in shaping current processes of decolonization in a context of climate emergency and environmental crisis.
I thought I would explore this article, written by K. Reibold and titled ‘Settler Colonialism, Decolonization, and Climate Change’, as an example of how some scholars have started to challenge spatialization. In this article, Reibold demonstrates how a specific conception of land and especially a specific ethnogeography, which she defines as the combination of a specific ontology of land with specific land-use patterns defined by the same ontology, were imposed by western settlers onto indigenous populations. This western ethnogeography still serves as a framework as of today in the sense that processes of decolonization such as land retributions are made accordingly to this specific conception of land and thus renders those same processes void. For instance, she explains that western conceptions of land as only relating to issues of property have led to forms of reparations through the giving back of land. However in many indigenous ethnogeographies, the relations to the land and its many components are central in creating sociality and kinship and thus restitution of the land doesn’t necessarily allow the reparation of those destroyed relations, even worse, the current environmental crisis leads to the ongoing unmaking of those relations and the inability to practice specific land-use patterns for those populations. I found this article particularly interesting in how it highlights the construction of space and how looking beyond western notions of land or studying how those became more hegemonic can bring to the fore new issues worth investigating. In terms of transnational history I also think this example really highlights how conceptions of space also circulated and were made or unmade through connections. It also highlights how various conceptions of space can exist and compete within one seemingly singular area, which are revealed by studying the way actors define space.