Grand regional narratives

It was a pleasure to read Alexander Murphy’s (2013) paper and in terms of its broad thrust – that human geographers need to get out a little bit more – I do not demur. Murphy is of course not the first person to make the point that geographers should be bolder in engaging with the big debates, and that we need to do so in a way that enables our work to cross over to other disciplines and, perhaps more importantly, beyond academe. I am still slightly bruised by a referee of one of my papers submitted to a journal with a practitioner as well as an academic readership who said the language was ‘overly academic and obfuscates the main messages’ and that it was ‘full to the brim with the jargon of post-modern, “critical” geography – a small and obscure, mostly American academic enterprise’. And I thought that I wrote in an accessible style!

This commentary does not address the entire sweep of Murphy’s paper, but focuses mainly on the section on regional narratives – and does so with regard to how we engage, or might engage, with the East Asian region. As I try to explain below, I do not think that many people would contest Murphy’s underpinning point that we need to be more ambitious; the question is how, where and in what ways. Ambition can be misplaced.

Murphy makes a distinction between metanarratives and grand narratives arguing that ‘a grand narrative [is] a mesoscale narrative that is rooted in a generalized interpretation of circumstances and events, but does not necessarily embody the kind of overarching, conceptually rooted explanation that typifies a metanarrative’. If I were going to stretch this a little further, it seems to me that Murphy is drawing a distinction between a metanarrative as being deductively arrived at, and a grand narrative emerging from an inductive approach. The former is a generalisation based on a conceptual or theoretical framing (theorising down), while the latter is one that is rooted in empirical engagement (theorising up). Although Murphy does not explicitly make this distinction, my sense is that his call for geographers to capture the ‘middle ground’ through ‘empirically grounded generalized stories’ is making just this point. I do wonder, therefore, whether such grand narratives occupy not so much the middle ground (so, ‘lower’ than metanarratives, in his terms) as a ground approached from a slightly different direction, possibly using a different set of explanatory tools. He also makes the important point that making the claim for grand narratives is ‘decidedly not the same as asserting that those narratives have some authoritative or all encompassing character’.

Turning to the East Asian realm, we can see (at least) three such grand narratives, when it comes to explaining East Asian modernisation and development. They are grand narratives to the extent that they are ‘empirically grounded generalized stories,’ which have become ways of thinking about and interpreting the modernisation of Asia, which have also filtered through into policy debates and popular discourse. There is the neo-liberal, Asian miracle grand narrative (most famously – although partially erroneously – associated with the World Bank’s 1993 East Asian miracle report), the developmental state grand narrative (associated with scholars such as Robert Wade, Alice Amsden and Chalmers Johnson) and the more culturalist, Asian values grand narrative (linked to Kishore Mahbubani and politicians such as Mahathir Mohamad of Malaysia and Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore). Each has its evident weaknesses, but there is no doubt about the way in which they have become shorthand devices for entering into critical discussions about the origins of rapid growth in the region. Geographers have contributed to this debate, to be sure, but mostly at the margins and few non-geographers would, I think, highlight their work as seminal.

There is a fine line, however, to be navigated between grand narratives that ambitiously bring clarity and understanding to the patterns of the world, and those that become problematically reductionist. This, arguably, happened when the International Monetary Fund (IMF) interpreted the Asian economic crisis as just another Latin American economic crisis but on an Oriental stage, requiring the same mix of interventions. As Joseph Stiglitz (2000) wrote of the IMF in the aftermath of the crisis, ‘critics accuse the institution of taking a cookie-cutter approach to economics, and they’re right’. Many scholars and policy makers believe that the effect was a deeper and longer recession, and greater penury than there needed to be had the differences between countries been more fully understood and, furthermore, had they been taken more seriously. There are clear dangers with generalising and assuming away difference in the interests of explanatory symmetry. Public geographies have their attractions but also their dangers. ‘Impact’, as geographers (and all other scholars) in the United Kingdom now have to pay attention to, can be negative.

If we consider not so much what geographers have done, or might do, but rather what other scholars have done then it becomes clear that it is possible to make empirically grounded generalised stories that resonate powerfully and more widely. James Scott’s (1985) Weapons of the weak, for example, is based on a study of one village (‘Sedaka’) in Peninsular Malaysia and has spawned a multitude of studies of ‘everyday resistance’. It seems to me that there are two ways of thinking about how geographers might engage in the manner that Murphy encourages. One way, like Scott, is to develop ways of looking and thinking about an issue (conceptual framings), which might be quite narrowly based on geographical and/or thematic terms and then generalising from them. The second is to build generalisations about a region – what Murphy calls ‘characterizing regions’ in his discussion of Southwest Asia/North Africa. While it is the latter that Murphy emphasises in his paper, personally I find greater scope and possibilities with the former. As he says, there is the need to take the many fine microstudies carried out by geographers and make more of them. I am in favour of ambition but also wary of academic overreach. Some themes or issues are conducive to generalisation, others less so – and this distinction is not always obvious.

In place of grand narratives, Booth (2012: 2) makes a case for what he terms ‘parsimonious truths’. He seeks to map out an explanatory space between grand theorising and cross-country generalisation on the one hand and microassertions on the other, in the form of middle-range propositions that do not overlook the contextual contingencies that are so important to geographers. It is important to note that geographers’ concern for context (evident in the microstudies that Murphy writes about) is not for reasons of caprice. In making the interventions that Murphy recommends, we need to avoid one-size-fits-all interpretations such as that applied to the East Asian region in the aftermath of the Asian economic crisis. Development in the region has been heterodox and ‘… appropriate growth policies are almost always context specific’ (Rodrik, 2007: 4). So we need to generalise but also not skate over difference. This might seem an impossible task, but I think there is scope for just this sort of approach if we keep to the fore what and where we are generalising.

While I go along with much of Murphy’s paper, what I find slightly perplexing is his critical discussion of the Global North/Global South dichotomy. It might be thought that this is just the sort of attention grabbing generalisation for which Murphy seems to be making a case. And yet, he dismantles the framing on the grounds that not everywhere in the South is poor (Singapore, New Zealand, etc.), that there are environmental determinist overtones to the designation, and that the constituent countries of the Global North and Global South are too disparate to be corralled in this manner. He seems to imply in his paper that geographers make reference to the Global South as if it was an entirely unproblematic category, which does not ring true to me: not one of my development geographer friends would, I think, use the term in the manner that he suggests. We know all these things: that there are some rich places in the South and many that are no longer poor, and therefore that the designation contains a good deal of heterogeneity; we also appreciate that the term does not imply causality – that the South is (mostly) tropical + poor does not mean that tropical = poor (although the new environmental determinists such as Paul Krugman have resurrected just this argument). My understanding of the term Global South is that it pays and draws attention to the unequal power relations and inequalities that continue to play a role across the world. It therefore invites us to consider relations between countries.

To end, I think there is a puzzle at the heart of Murphy’s paper. As he admits, to some degree he is merely echoing the views of a host of prominent geographers before him – for instance, Doreen Massey, Ron Johnstone, Peter Dicken, Peter Taylor and Alastair Bonnett. Why are the concerns that Murphy articulates so intractable? It is not as if they have been hidden from view. For me, what is missing from Murphy’s paper – and perhaps this is the challenge that he offers to us – is a sharp articulation of the what, where and how of grand narration. In his paper, he provides us mainly with the why. Getting research ‘out there’, converting research into policy, for example, is not simply a case of being ambitious, thinking broadly and writing accessibly. Jones et al. (2013: 2) at the Overseas Development Institute in London (who are in the business of getting research into policy) have recently published a brief on knowledge, policy and power, arguing that ‘…defining, selecting and promoting knowledge in policy is an inherently variable and complex process – as much concerned with matters of power and politics as it is with rational debate and problem solving’. They do not suggest that the research/policy interface is ‘hopelessly context-specific’ but they do highlight the challenges and difficulties of navigating the divide.