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Book Review
| Improved Earth: Prairie Space as Modern Artefact 1869–1944. By Rod Bantjes. Buffalo, N.Y.: University of Toronto Press, 2005. xi + 204 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index.
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| If Michel Foucault turns you off, you will not get past the first sentence in this book. Postmodern, poststructuralist, Marxist analyses are explicit, front and center throughout Improved Earth. The book is driven by theory. Bantjes uses the Canadian Dominion Land Survey and the rise of the farmers' Co-operative Commonwealth Federation in Saskatchewan as a case study for a "Foucaultian history of 'spaces,'" or as Foucault is quoted here, "spaces" and "powers" "(both of these terms in plural)—from the great strategies of geopolitics to the little tactics of the habitat" (p. 3). |
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The subject is the same as Seymour Martin Lipset's Agrarian Socialism (California, 1959), and Bantjes is a sociologist too, but the approach could hardly be more different. Lipset's book is an empirical study of the "conditions under which new social movements may emerge in our society"(p. vii). Lipset ended his book on a hopeful note: "As long as there are social organizations that produce men who do not accept the status quo, who see 'the inhumanity of man to man' as a crime, there will be hope in the human race" (p. 286). For Bantjes, après Foucault, even emergent grass-roots movements of political and economic resistance and cooperative self-organization serve as Benthamite "spots" for the state's "panopticon" techniques of surveillance and control (pp. 42, 70). |
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But rather than just being subjects, Bantjes argues that prairie wheat farmers were agents of modernism. They did not hold much truck with romantic rural localism, which was ironically promoted and supported at times by the state as a solution to prairie space. Instead, they sought translocal forms of political and economic organization—particularly a Wheat Pool, a producers' cartel—that would enable them to deal with the transformations of space and time wrought by the emerging global capitalist economy. This engagement, however, led to outcomes they could not control. Their failures, from Bantjes's perspective, reinforce a pessimistic conclusion about the extension of private-property rights—even to genetic inventions—in "a legal 'grid' in the making that will more pervasively individuate and commodify nature and pre-structure human relations than any nineteenth-century project of land survey" (p. 126). |
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Improved Earth is a thin book thick with theory, in contrast to books such as William Cronon's Nature's Metropolis (Norton, 1991) and James Scott's Seeing Like a State (Yale, 1998) which make comparable arguments about the structuring of space and time and economy and polity by the state and capitalist markets, but do so in a way that is easier for theory-averse readers. It is astonishing that neither of these books appears in Bantjes's bibliography. If he did not use them, he should have. Improved Earth should be read by anyone interested in the application of Foucault's ideas, particularly in analyzing the structuring of space in environmental history, an important, blossoming field. It could, perhaps, be used fruitfully in a graduate seminar, alongside some of the other books mentioned above, but it is hard to imagine any but the most advanced undergraduates getting much traction here. |
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Jon Christensen is a research fellow in the Center for Environmental Science and Policy and a graduate student in History at Stanford University. |
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