Daniel Hiernaux and Alicia Lindón (eds) Los giros de la Geografía Humana: desafíos y horizontes, Anthropos, Barcelona, 2011. 303 pages. EU 27.00, paper, ISBN: 978-84-76589-93-9.

Los giros de la Geografía Humana: desafíos y horizontes (The Turns of Human Geography: Challenges and Prospects) is a collection of reflective essays that overview human geography’s theoretical turns over the past few decades. Its coeditors, Daniel Hiernaux-Nicolas and Alicia Lindón, are sociologists and experts in geographical thought and urban geography and they are both based in the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana at Iztapalapa, Mexico.  Their previous collection Tratado de geografía humana (Treatise on Human Geography, 2007) managed to bring together prestigious Spanish and Mexican geographers and French scholars, including Jacques Lévy, Lévy Bertrand, Jean-Bernard Racine and Olivier Walther. The contributors discussed the main research trends that animate the discipline within Spanish, Latin American and French academic circles, thus providing a much needed counterpart to contemporary Anglophone human geography readers.

The Turns of Human Geography continues this project. The collection discusses the well-known epistemological ‘turns’ that the discipline has undergone in the last decades, yet from a South American and European perspective. Featuring some of the scholars who had already contributed to the aforementioned volume, the collection provides an updated mapping of the rhetorical, methodological and conceptual shifts that originated in other social sciences and influenced new geographical approaches.

In general, this new collection of essays insists on two fundamental points. First, it claims the inclusion of current geographical research into the global framework of the discursive turns of other social sciences. Secondly, it sets out a defense of the geographical sciences as the main field of study that analyzes scientifically and understands sensitively the problems of contemporary society and its living space.

The book is organized in two parts. The first one comprises contributions by the editors and celebrated geographers such as Jacques Lévy, Paul Claval, and Angelo Turco. Their essays present a general overview of the theoretical shifts in human geography and their philosophical origins. The second part is devoted to turns within some of the main branches of the discipline: economic geography, historical geography, urban geography, geographies of subjectivity, geographies of gender, ‘cybergeographies’, and environmental geography. Here several authors discuss the profound renovations in these areas of geographical knowledge, and how they have been negotiated and intertwined with pre-existing paradigms and practices.

Alicia Lindón’s opening chapter ‘The theoretical turns: text and context’ provides a theoretical introduction to the rest of the volume. Lindón discusses the discursive changes of the discipline that resulted from an ongoing dialogue with the epistemological shifts of social theory. In order to illustrate these interdisciplinary connections, she highlights the ‘lines of force’ that have served as the starting point for recent turns in human geography. These included postmodern, poststructuralist, critical and subjectivist thoughts, which in turn gave rise to linguistic, pragmatic, cultural, biographical, narrative and subjective turns. The author then briefly outlines the most important shifts in human geography, focusing on authors who promoted an ‘interest in recognizing and understanding the immaterial as part of geographic reality’ (page 31). In this regard, Lindón emphasizes the centrality of the ‘subjective turn’ in French social geography, which is, the increasing importance of the ‘sensitive dimension and spatial experience’ of individuals, and the consolidation of the ‘iconographic turn’ in cultural geography.

Hiernaux’s contribution deals instead with the internal dilemmas of geographical knowledge, wondering ‘how geographers have reacted to the demands of these main shifts and which degree of autonomy or dependence has been generated from the adoption of the various turns in human geography’ (page 46). Hiernaux is critical of the role that geography and geographers have played in the processes of conceptual and methodological change within the humanities and the social sciences. Recognizing what he calls an evident ‘conceptual scarcity in the current geography’ (page 48), the author holds that ‘to take on the geographical turn means ... to focus on several aspects that traditional geography has regularly ignored’, including ‘the qualitative, the interpretative and the subjective’ (page 50). For him, the geography of the future should entail three different approaches: a ’technological-scientific’ approach, an ‘applied geography’ approach, and a ‘sensitive geography’ approach.

In the following chapter French geographer Paul Claval presents a series of interesting reflections on the mutations undergone by academic institutions and research organizations. These transformations have been driven by what he believes are two ‘major anxieties: one concerned with the evolution of the means and their balance, and another one that emerges from the wish for greater justice’ (page 63). Thus, Claval sets out a synthesis of the changing processes of our contemporary world which led to the revision of the main concepts, discourses and methods employed by geography. The author raises a dilemma posed in the title of the chapter about the future of geography—‘Dissolution or deepening?’ He discusses how mechanisms affected by globalization enriched current geographical debates. He then points out four main ideas that shaped epistemological shifts: the ‘critical science idea’, ‘the criticism to western approaches ’, ‘the questioning of linguistic, spatial and cultural basics’ of such approaches, and ‘the deep reflection on the connections between objects and subjects’ (page 69).

Angelo Turco’s chapter somehow develops several philosophical anxieties regarding the various epistemological scopes of geography. The author addresses what he calls the ‘narrative figures’ that have been used to explain the different issues studied by the discipline. He thus reflects on the two ‘modes of representation’ related to two ways of conceptualizing the geographical space: the ‘paratactic space’ and the ‘liminal space’. The former  ‘has to do with sequences, locations, coordinates and reifications’ of natural and human phenomena entailing several ‘causal articulations’ (page 91). The latter ‘relates to the spatial forms that compose and recompose the uncertainty of natural phenomena and the unpredictability of human history’ (page 92). The author presents a historical overview from antiquity to the present—though he especially focuses on the time of the institutionalization of the discipline in the last quarter of the nineteenth century—, in which he analyzes the conceptual interweaving between mythos and logos as two different but complementary ways of comprehending the world.

The second part of the book tackles conceptual and methodological turns in specific branches of human geography. Rocío Rosales’ contribution discusses the impact of the ‘cultural turn’ on the topics addressed by economic geography. Rosales claims that only through an interdisciplinary theoretical discussion, formerly originated in sociology, key concepts such as social networking, collective learning and institutions can be addressed. She suggests that this dialogue springs from the traditions that discussed the social organization of market and the role of individuals in it, such as the Marxist tradition and Karl Polanyi’s foundational work. Rosales then shows the impact of other more complex turns, including the institutional and evolutionary ones. Finally, she refers to the concepts of ‘entrepreneurship’ and ‘industrial governance’ as two structuring ideas in current economic geography that explore the ways in which ‘the actors reproduce their socio-economic action’, thus transforming territory (page 133).

Catalan geographer Pedro Sunyer provides a review of the shifts occurred within historical geography. According to the author, the renovation of historical research in geography has involved a broad redefinition of historical geography and its purpose. Current historical geography, Sunyer argues, should not focus so much in ‘rebuilding ... the environmental conditions in which individuals lived’ at a determined time, as in understanding ‘how that space worked in connection with the decisions taken by its protagonists, how such people dwelled that space and that time, how beliefs and human relations influence the perception of the environment’ (page 168), among many other issues. The second contribution by Lindón presents new ways of rethinking urban spaces centered on the subject, their subjectivity, and spatial movements within the city. The author claims a new definition of mobility that is not reduced solely to physical displacement from one place to another. In this sense, Lindón redefines movement as ‘the constant progression of urban life that shapes the city in every moment’. The city is thus conceptualized as a ‘ceaseless movement’ (page 183). This redefinition finds its theoretical justification in the turn to the subject and invites ‘to think and to decipher the city through the daily life of its inhabitants and their ongoing spatial experiences’ (page 184).

In the following chapter Béatrice Collignon addresses a systematically neglected topic in non-Anglophone geography: domestic spaces.  For Collignon domestic spaces have four ‘cardinal virtues’. Firstly, they ‘shed light on the construction of spatial dimension of societies’; secondly, they ‘legitimize everyday life as a geographic object’; thirdly, they ‘legitimize the geography of the banal individual’; and finally, they ‘contribute to the renewal of methods’.  Domestic space, Collignon argues, is thus ‘far from being closed within itself’. Instead, it is ‘a place of constant dialogue between the inside and the outside, between the private and the public, between the individual and society’ (page 213).

Paula Soto discusses feminist geography, which is another area that has not received much attention in Latin American and Spanish geographies. In the first part of the chapter, Soto attempts to show the differences between several ways of understanding the discipline through gender approaches. She maps the various turns or ‘moments’ that have marked the history of feminist thought and activism in academia, focusing on the 1970s and 1980s. In the second part of the chapter, Soto discusses the key links between gender geographies and the cultural and postmodern turns, which, ‘with their concern for difference, meanings and discourse, have invited to rethink and re-elaborate the theoretical positions, categories, and themes of gender geographies’ (page 225). It is here where Soto brings up some of the most pressing issues of gender geographical literature, including ‘partial and situated knowledge’, the representation of otherness, and self-reflexivity.

Liliana López’s contribution discusses cyberspace and virtual worlds as new research areas in human geography.  Taking her starting point in William Gibson’s pioneering Neuromancer (1984), López  presents some of the approaches followed by sociology, cultural studies and human geography, in which ‘the socio-cultural dimensions of technological changes have been highlighted, as well as the spatial and territorial transformations of some dynamics’ (page 247). Establishing interconnections between technologies of communication, cultural discourses, digital representations of the earth’s surface, and radical geography’s investigations, the author provides a clear outline of what the main lines of geographical research on cyberspace have been and might be.

In the last chapter, Gerardo Bocco and Pedro S. Urquijo reflect on the state of environmental geography as part of human geography and the social sciences. Historically, geography has been closely linked with the environmental sciences. This kind of geography was exemplified by holistic views mainly developed in modernity, when the dualistic tension between nature and culture was already revealed. Recent epistemological turns  in the social sciences and philosophy further problematized such tension, thus calling for specific attention to ‘the inextricable connections between society and nature’ (page 264), and not only with the aim of producing knowledge, but also looking for ‘the commitment for the negotiation of environmental policy ..., linking to other socio-theoretical fields’ (page 265).

Besides presenting a synthesis of the conceptual and methodological turns in human geography, the essays pay attention to the institutional frames of science, the processes of transformation of knowledge in an increasingly globalized world, and the place of the discipline in relation to the rest of the social sciences. These reflections are usually inspired by the seminal work of Thomas Kuhn, and, in the Spanish case, Horacio Capel.

In general, this collection, along with other co-edited works by Lindón and Hiernaux on geographical thought, urban geography, and the geographical imagination, attempts to incorporate perspectives on recent critical discourses in the discipline that are different from those set out by Anglophone academia. The essays of Turns, however, paradoxically draw upon social theory and critical geographical thought that are oft-quoted in Anglophone human geography, where they no longer represent a novelty. The book nevertheless opens up an interesting dialogue between the American and British discursive shifts and their reception and adaptation within Spanish and Latin-American geographical traditions.