ABSTRACT
Almost fifty years ago, the University of Chicago cultural geographer Marvin Mikesell (1969:232) remarked upon the close family resemblances between geography and anthropology: they are, he said, like sisters “separated in infancy and taught to speak separate languages”. In some respects his assessment now seems dated. Even by the late 1970s, a large posse of geographers and anthropologists were speaking in quite similar tongues: the languages included ecosystems, materialisms of various stripe, and deepening engagement with social theory and Marxian political economy. A half a century on, the conversational traffic across the boundaries between the disciplines has in some respects disappeared, and the family relations, as it were, are ubiquitous and intimate. As Roy Ellen (1988:230) put it, “Geography and anthropology share a protean appetite in terms of their intellectual interests…. they [each] have some claim to be the nomads, foragers and bricoleurs of the human sciences.” Spurred in part by the so-called ‘spatial turn’ in the social sciences (see Conley 2012; Warf and Arias 2009) – in effect an effort to spatialize Fred Jameson’s injunction to “always historicize”1 – and by a common drift toward post-structural discourse theory and the intersections of culture and power in a world dominated by neoliberal thought and practice, the two disciplines had become, for want of a better turn of phrase, joined at the head.
