The Disciplinary Dialectics That Has Played Eternal Pendulum Swings:

Abstract

An alternative geographer, or a practitioner of social and economic geography who does not follow the conventional, has a curious habit of unconsciously performing pendulumlike swings: an alternative geographer grown within the institutional pigeon hole of geography first antagonises the conventional practice and seeks a more robust theoretical framework, drawing mainly upon Marxism, or more recently phenomenological philosophy. Eventually, however, he/she degenerates back into the exceptionalism and gives in to support the institution again or sometimes that at higher level. Japanese alternative geography has been particularly plagued with the repeated appearance of such pendulum-like swings since the pre-war period. This paper analyses the peculiar dialectics that gives rise to the curious swings through disciplinary discourse at meta-level; then it describes how this dialectic manifests itself in the developmental trajectory of Japanese alternative geography. The catch is that the practitioner of alternative him/herself is protected by the institution which supports the conventional. The struggle against the conventional is fought only among geographers' community within the institutional boundary, and serious and robust interdisciplinary intercourse with other disciplines of social science is scarce. Thus an alternative geographer has little opportunity to acquire level of comprehension of social and economic theories competent enough to stand alone in the competitive academic environment in general social science. This nature of alternative geography parasitic to the conventional eventually manifests itself in the conversion of an alternative geographer back to the support of the very conventional practices, into chanting for exceptionalism and seeking protection from the institution. On the other hand, the success of alternative geography which has been engaging in the society-and-space debate in the English-speaking countries lies in that they managed, via formulations of spatial theories that made geography a fully independent discipline of social science, to do away with the parasitism and to transcend this sort of eternal pendulum swings. They thus succeeded in discarding the paradoxical yearning for the institutional protection. It is now an urgent task for Japanese alternative geographers facing disciplinary crisis to learn more from this practice overseas, in order to establish higher esteem in the academic division of labour in general as well as that of geography in the international context.

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