Notes for session on Geography - Social Reproduction

Hart’s essay offers a critique of current methods prevalent in area studies which starts off from the premise that place is a well defined, bounded, static unit available for study. This conception which forms the guiding principle of area studies is similar to the principle informing ethnography as a practice in general (which also begins with the well defined, bounded area called ‘field’). Hart tries to address this central problematic of area studies and conventional ethnography by offering two methodological alternatives: critical ethnography and relational comparison. Drawing on Appadurai and Burawoy, he states that both these methods can be effectively used to conceptualize space not as statsis but as flows. This method immediately breaks down the neat straitjacketed divisions between societies and different kinds of economies (capitalist and non capitalist) and pushes for an approach that makes one see their interconnectedness and their mutual constitutive nature. The process of capitalism hence becomes an ongoing project with constant accumulation through dispossession. He further says that primitive accumulation is an ongoing process which tries to bring in as many non commoditized forces as possible into the domain of capitalist market exchange. This point is the connecting thread between Hart and Roberts (who discusses the commoditization and privatization of water). In an argument similar to that of Hart, Roberts shows how primitive accumulation can be extended to the problematic of water management and distribution. Water and land become fictitious commodities (in the Marxist sense) when capitalist forces privatize and restrict access to it. Commenting on the transition of water from a non-commodity to a commodity, Roberts says that this process directly affects the social relations of reproduction (which are gendered and racialized) and perpetuates the injustice inherent in them. And this process is so naturalized that the injustices underlying the process are overlooked by the state, and state allies with capitalist forces to achieve the neoliberal goals of empowerment and development.

Mitchell et al. question the artificial division between productive labour (waged and by extension the economic base), which is seen as value generative in traditional Marxist theory and socially reproductive labour (unwaged and by extension the political, cultural and social superstructure) and argue that they are not mutually exclusive but co-constitutive. In this context they consider Braudel’s (French Historian) work in emphasizing the role of socio-economic factors in the making and writing of history, a story of mixture and hybridity.  They try to dismantle the ‘categorical binary of production and reproduction’ from a Marxist, feminist, post structural position and argue that in contemporary societies blurring of work and play (i.e. non-work) is not only accepted but also seen as positive in some cases. Ultimately both are work and that’s what makes you a person – gives you value as a modern, rational agent. They call for a return to 1970s feminist perspective – that everyday life is politically and practically important.

The above piece builds on Katz’s essay: that globalization impacts on values and value systems. Is a given. Any effort to counteract these impacts must start with the sphere of social reproduction and not reproduction as the former is being rescaled to privilege the latter. She suggests adopting a research strategy of topographies and counter topographies to help frame a political response to globalisation’s impact. Topography at a very basic level as place based knowledge and counter topographies as the linkages between topographies i.e. contour lines which link places / sites of similar impacts in the sphere of social reproduction across the world. Thus a network of both specific and fluid knowledge base which she says builds on situated knowledge and standpoint theory.

Harvey’s writing can in a way be seen as the precursor to the above pieces. He calls for justice, both social and environmental, in a post modern world. He considers space, place, time and nature as the four material frames of daily life (or social reproduction or life’s work to use Mitchell et al’s term) and argues that these are getting impacted in a capitalist economy, resulting in injustice. 

In this chapter, he builds on Munn and Gurevich to position spatio-temporality as the precondition to value establishment and argues that not only is capitalism “accelerating time” but also “annihilating space”, resulting in an imbalance. He calls for a need to recognize the larger multidimensional aspects of space and time within which the binary or dialectic of place-space, long term (ecological)-short term (capitalistic), objective space and time exist.

Social practices both define and are defined by spatiotemporality (and hence value systems) and societies transform from within and without through the establishment of new systems of spatiotemporality. Conflicts could and do arise due to differences between personal constructions of space-time and dominant public or objective notion of space- time. Harvey discusses class, gender and ecological struggles as outcomes of such differences. Further, building on Marx to argue that in a capitalist society money becomes the relational umbrella to bridge these different spatio-temporal domains and value systems into a singular system. One needs to understood this before one can attempt to address the imbalance – a call for a moral economy?

Rashmi and Krupa