Analysis in human geography has shown persistent tendencies of a pluralistic sort: a view of the world as the product of numerous independent and interacting forces. The advent of Marxist geography in the 1970s promised a path in a more totalizing direction. This emphasized the contradictory unity of the world, while placing production as the point both of departure and of return. The social process was conceived as a unity and its different moments as production relations. Society and space represented a further move in a pluralizing direction. Since then critical impulses in human geography have tended to be subordinated to that view. Critical human geography is a product of this. Engaging in research from the standpoint of one particular social moment – the institutional, the cultural and the discursive, among others – is emblematic. It is not enough, however, to criticize this by invoking the generalities of Marx's method. More convincing are actual empirical studies. In this paper I explore the case of South Africa prior to 1990 as a way of demonstrating how constructions of race, space, and gender, along with institutions must per necesita be interpreted as production relations and how this can shed light on particular geographies; a light, I will maintain, that is necessarily beyond the reach of critical human geography.
CITATION STYLE
Cox, K. R. (2016). Geographies, Critical and Marxist, and Lessons from South Africa. Human Geography(United Kingdom), 9(3), 10–26. https://doi.org/10.1177/194277861600900302
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