Book review showing that Moral Geography is still an academically respectable term
from Post-Structuralism & Radical Politics Newsletter, no. 3, Feb 2001 P. 12, Book Reviews
Moral Geographies is a clearly written
account that is comprehensive in its survey of contemporary ethical debates,
covering figures such as Walzer, O’Neill, Etzioni, Kymlicka and Baumann. Sometimes the discussion is necessarily
schematic, given the format of an advanced textbook. Perhaps its deepest intellectual
debt is to MacIntyre’s argument in After Virtue that
morality is ‘always to some degree tied to the socially local and particular’.
For Smith this points the way to how geography, with its explicit attention to
the sensitivities of location and place, might interact with ethical notions.
As Smith suggests, it is in supplying a fuller picture of context that the
geographer can intervene in ethical debates since all ethical theories and
moral practices ‘are embedded within specific sets of social and physical
relationships manifest in geographical space, reflecting the particularity of
place as well as time’. Some of the most interesting sections of the book are
where Smith examines the moral implications of particular places, trying to
demonstrate how landscape can be interpreted through a moral lens. One example
is the construction of the ‘Polish Manchester’, Lodz,
with its deeply industrial landscape and its absent presence of the largest
Jewish ghetto in Europe, liquidated in the Second World War. Another chapter
explores conflict in the city space of Jerusalem between liberal and orthodox
Jewish communities, while a later chapter looks at postapartheid
South Africa’s attempt to link an African community-based morality to general
economic questions of development.
Although not conceived on such a grand scale as Harvey’s
book, Moral Geographies does clearly indicate how any postmodern/poststructuralist/radical politics cannot afford to ignore
geographical questions of space and place. As Smith concludes his book, a
‘geographically sensitive ethics’ will stress the importance of context ‘of
understanding the particular situation; how things are, here and there. If the
human capacity of putting one’s self in the place of others is to be an
effective wellspring of morality, this requires understanding that place, as
well as those others.’
Andrew Thacker
University of Ulster at Jordanstown