Daniel Hiernaux and Alicia Lindón (eds) Geografías de lo imaginario, Anthropos, Barcelona, 2012. 256 pages. EU 20.00, paper, ISBN: 9788415260417.

This is a collection of short essays that share a common interest in the ‘geographies of the imaginary’, as the title of the book itself makes clear from the beginning. The collection has been edited by the Mexico-based geographers Daniel Hiernaux and Alicia Lindón, and it can be considered part of a larger and fruitful editorial project which has involved an important and heterogeneous group of mostly Latin-American, Spanish and French geographers, sociologists, and cultural theorists. Previous outputs by the same editors included collections such as Tratado de Geografía Humana (2007) and Los giros de la Geografía Humana (2011).

Geografías de lo imaginario can thus be claimed to be an expression of this ongoing collective effort to provide a large Spanish-speaking audience with a general framework for making sense of contemporary changes in human geography. Contextualizing such issues within different European academic traditions and trying to put them into dialogue is not an easy task at all. Lindón and Hiernaux must be commended for having somehow helped bridge the gap between these sometimes isolated realms and streams of geographic research.

In this new volume, the topic articulating such collective effort is the ‘geographies of the imaginary’. The editors are interested in identifying a particular research field about imagination and imaginaries that might be addressed from a geographic point of view. In other words, they are interested in the exploration of social, cultural and material geographies through the analysis of the formation and reproduction of the spatial imaginaries mingled in our ordinary life practices.

The editors find the justification of the book itself in what they assume to be a longer and lasting absence of questions about imagination, subjectivity, inner worlds and topics alike in geographic thinking. In this sense, the collection presents two different yet related kinds of essays: the former are theoretical and the latter empirical. The theory-oriented chapters (authored by Alicia Lindón and Daniel Hiernaux, Paul Claval or Vincent Berdoulay address precisely this ‘lack’ in the field. These chapters present authors that have been pivotal in the anthropological treatment of the idea of ‘l’imaginaire’ (such as the French thinkers Gaston Durand, Gaston Bachelard, or even Mircea Eliade and Cornelius Castroriadis) and suggest new research avenues in geography.

The editors make clear from the beginning that it is not their purpose to present an exhaustive overview of the concept and research trends on the ‘imaginary’, nor to put forward a comprehensive or unitary theory about spatial imaginaries that might be presented as a reference point in geographic research. Quite the opposite, the book is an expression of the variegated and multifaceted nature of the notion, as well as its heuristic potentialities in the field. If the geographical imagination is intentionally put to work polysemically, it is to shed light on its conceptual and methodological richness.

The well-established tradition of (mostly French and German) anthropological and philosophical considerations on the ‘imaginary’ provide the basis for reflections on the relations between myths, religions’ imaginaries and modern ideologies (Claval), the active role of individuals in the appropriation and remaking of sets of images produced within society (Berdoulay), or even the mingling of imaginaries with ordinary life (Lindon’s interest in the so-called Lebenswelt). This is the privileged conceptual horizon in these initial chapters, and the one that sets the whole scene. In these pages the geographer’s musings about the lack of attention to spatial imaginaries in the history of geographic thought is marked by that theoretical choice.

The authors nevertheless seem to underestimate the otherwise long history of the interest in imagination and subjectivity in Anglophone geography. In Hiernaux’s chapter, for example, Wright, Lowenthal, Tuan, Dardel, and even more recent critical contributions such as Cosgrove’s, Soja’s and Gregory’s are barely mentioned. These authors do not receive any in-depth treatment, nor is it explained how their work might connect to the various contributions in the volume (if there exists, as it seems to be the case, a true concern with ‘the voids within geographic theory’, to use Lindón’s words).

On the one hand, it might be argued that the richness of the book lays precisely in the aforementioned theoretical choice, for it firmly grounds the research object in a different conceptual horizon. Furthermore, it considerably widens up the common philosophical references of mainstream geographical theory, even challenging at several points the tenets of postmodern geography (especially in Berdoulay and Lindón’s criticisms).

On the other hand, however, this same theoretical option might be considered as seriously restricting the dialogue with previous and current work on geographical imaginaries in English-speaking geography, since it refuses to take into serious account existing work that falls under the banner of ‘geographical imagination’ and ‘imaginative geographies’. Steve Daniels’ recent piece (2011), for example, offers just a taste of the great variety of topics and research drawing upon these concepts. As a result, it is likely that the readership used to Anglophone human geography will miss some indication as to how the volume might be placed in relation to this existing literature, especially if they are already familiar with Lindón and Hiernaux’s previous book about the ‘giros’ (turns) of contemporary geography.

Given their reliance on the idea of ‘turns’ as an interpretative framework for mapping the last decades of Anglophone human geography, it might strike the reader that there is no explanation on how work on geographical imaginations relates to these ‘turns’. After all, such epistemic breaks can be explained as a deep transformation of the discipline’s geographical imaginations themselves. This is true to the extent that a more self-reflexive attitude has taken over the geographers’ habitus towards their own research practice.

I believe the reader will make the most of the book if she or he takes it as a series of exemplifications of the potentialities and possibilities of researching spatial imaginaries. In this respect the volume provides us with a good example (out of many) in which research on spatial imaginaries and geographical imaginations can be carried out.

Another strength of the book is its wide variety of empirical case studies, ranging from the history of modern imaginaries of nature (Debarbieux) to the construction of contemporary tourist images of Patagonia (Bertoncello), to the production of exotic ‘others’ in the context of colonialism through the circulation of objects between the metropolis and the colonies (Staszak ), or through women’s travel literature (García-Ramón and Ceralols).

The collection contains also a few chapters performing a dialogue between the aforementioned theoretical pieces and the more thematic ones. These chapters imprint the whole project with a clear political and normative orientation, for they give a proper example of what are both the relevance and the stakes of taking into account the issue of spatial imaginaries in the context of contemporary geographic global transformations. Concerns about the vanishing of local traditional landscape imaginaries due to intense urban regeneration and environmental exploitation (e.g. see Nogué’s chapter), or about the loss of urban places as ‘keepers’ of our bonds and affections (as stated in MacCannell’s chapter, and similarly in Maffesoli’s contribution, which takes up the question of new proximity relationships in the city, or in Neve’s chapter, which focuses on music as an active agent in creating sense of place) draw attention to the current crisis of place representation and the damage to our very ability to imagine alternative possibilities for collective life and place-making.

The major contribution of the book is that its spatial imaginations illuminate political potential as analytical tools rooted in the utopian strength of geographic research itself. The exploration of these spatial imaginations suggests how new alternative territorial identities might be articulated in our societies. It also suggests how human well-being and senses of places might be carried out by different social groups and individuals. 

References

Daniels S (2011) Geographical Imagination. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 36: 182-87.