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JOSEPH E. TAYLOR, III
BOUNDARY TERMINOLOGY
ABSTRACT
In response to environmental historians' growing usage of spatial theory and terminology, this essay seeks to clarify the development of terms used to describe state spaces. The essay urges historians to be more deliberate in defining and using spatial terminology, and to give greater consideration to how these concepts have been used in other disciplines. Historians' insights about the contexts and contingencies of the past are critically important for the formation of social and environmental policy, but to matter beyond their discipline, they must better attune themselves to how other scholars and policy makers have been using boundary terminology.
| ONE MORNING IN MARCH 2005, more than forty bleary-eyed historians trundled into a room at the Warwick Hotel in Houston to discuss "Stories that Cross the Line." Despite the meeting's 7:10 a.m. start on Saturday morning, there was excitement in the room. The more who showed up, the more there was a collective sense that something was afoot. Could it really be that so many of us were working on one of the hippest topics in historical research? The answer was an emphatic yes! As historian after historian introduced him- or herself to the room, the single word invoked more often than any other to describe their research was transnational. By the end of the introductions the room was abuzz. This had been one of those rare breakfast meetings when the attendees actually discussed the subject of the meeting. The energy built throughout the meal, yet by the time we broke up for the day's first sessions, I had grave reservations about what had just happened. The meeting crystallized a mounting concern about how historians have conceptualized transnational. The term was already so diffuse that most practitioners could offer no more precise meaning than "something that crosses an international line."1 This essay is an attempt to explain why such blurring is a problem. |
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Historians have accepted the arguments of critical geographers such as David Harvey, Henri Lefebvre, and Edward Soja that we live multidimensionally, and that spatial as well as temporal analysis must inform our exploration of experience. As geographer Alan Pred put it, "Power relations, while abstract and intangible, are always somehow associated with the concrete conduct of social life in place, always in some way involved with 'the capacity to organize and control people, materials, and territories.' ... Thus, struggles, of whatever focus and scale, are always at some level struggles over the use and meaning of space and time." This notion is hardly novel among environmental historians. In the last two decades Don Worster, Ian Tyrrell, Dan Flores, Chris Sellers, Richard White, and others have challenged us to be creative with our narrative spaces. They have encouraged us to cross borders and think globally, to imagine the role of the body and bioregions in the past, and to embrace a range of scales in our analyses. Following the lead of Tyrell and others, the entire discipline of history has grown more enamored with transnational themes, seeing in the movements of people, goods, and ideas the means to capture the dynamic and diffuse articulation of financial, cultural, political, and military power in globalism, and to critique the power and limits of the nation state in historical praxis. Put simply: Space matters. We no longer even debate the point, yet far too often our narrative spaces remain overdetermined and underanalyzed.2 |
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