Cresswell - 2013 - Weeds, Plagues, And Bodily Secretions a Geographical Interpretation of Metaphors of Displacement

Weeds, Plagues, and Bodily Secretions: A Geographical Interpretation of Metaphors ofDisplacementAuthor(s): Time CresswellSource: Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Vol. 87, No. 2 (Jun., 1997), pp.330-345Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of the Association of American GeographersStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2564373 .

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Weeds, Plagues, and Bodily Secretions: A Geographical Interpretation of

Metaphors of Displacement Tim Cresswell

Department of Geography, University of Wales, Lampeter

Metaphor has been the subject of a long and sustained tradition in geographical inquiry. Metaphors have been seen as evidence for people's attachment to the earth, as ways of developing a new theory, and as sources of misleadingly simple geographical understandings in the wider realm of "theory." In this paper, I interpret metaphors which are not obviously geographical in nature to reveal how metaphors can be understood as ways of thinking and acting with geographical and political implications. I focus on the ecological metaphor of the "weed," the medical metaphor of "disease," and the bodily metaphor of "secretion" and suggest that these have been used to label people and actions as "out-of-place," as if they were weeds, diseases, or bodily secretions. The point is that these metaphors are ways of acting and not merely poetic flourishes. Positioning these "metaphors of displacement" within the theories of, and geographical engagement with, metaphor, I argue that geographers could profitably engage themselves with interpretations of metaphors as they are used in contexts of social power and conflict in the world beyond academia. Key Words: disease, displacement, metaphor, practice, secretion, weeds.

A metaphor ... by virtue of what it hides, can lead to human degradation (Lakoff and Johnson 1980:236).

he recent interpretive turn in the social sciences and the advent of cultural studies have led to an increased interest in issues

of language and representation in general and metaphorical meaning in particular. Although metaphor traditionally has fallen within the do- main of literature and linguistics, in the 1960s the fields of structuralist and poststructuralist philosophy (Barthes 1967) and the history and philosophy of science (Hesse 1963; Pepper 1961) be- gan to take an interest. Geography's interest in metaphor is even more recent (Barnes and Dun- can 1992; Price-Chalita 1994; Demeritt 1994). Geographers have used metaphors to describe geographical features such as "foothills" (Tuan 1978), to advance geographical understanding (Buttimer 1982; Livingstone and Harrison 1981), and to interrogate geographical understandings in social and cultural theory (Smith and Katz 1993; Bondi and Domosh 1992). Here I examine a fourth usage of metaphors, a usage less obviously

linked to the discipline of geography. This usage deploys metaphors to imply the inappropriateness of particular actions in particular places. Toward this end I suggest that metaphors are used not simply to illuminate landscapes and theories; they are rather central and active components of our understandings and our actions in the world. They are inseparable from the way that we live the world.

The main part of this paper considers the usage of metaphors that describe people and actions as out-of-place. Three of these metaphors-weeds, disease, and bodily secretions-serve to link order to place and space not only as a descriptive device, but also as a way of thinking and acting. I begin by noting the incompleteness of objectivist, interactionist, and antifoundationalist accounts of metaphor and the advantages of a materially grounded, experientalist account. I then illustrate the significance of metaphor in thought and action by looking at metaphors of displacement and their mobilization in political discourse. Finally, I suggest new ways of using old metaphors by looking at the use of displacement metaphors in postmodern(ist) texts.

Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 87 (2), 1997, pp. 330-345 (C 1997 by Association of American Geographers Published by Blackwell Publishers, 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, and 108 Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4 1JF UK.



Metaphors of Displacement 331

Metaphor Objectivist Accounts

During the long history of philosophy and the shorter one of the social sciences, metaphor has not stimulated great interest nor much inquiry. For the most part, metaphor has been thought of as a residual and decorative device. As Max Black (1962:25) has suggested: "To draw attention to a philosopher's metaphors is to belittle him, like praising a logician for his beautiful handwriting." Indeed, for philosophers and linguists, metaphor is regarded as interesting only when transformed into literal propositions. This attitude is rooted in "objectivist" accounts of meaning, that is, accounts that rely on the capacity of language to fit "objective reality" (Johnson 1987). Perhaps because metaphor crosses conceptual boundaries, objectivists regard it as a residual of the more serious debates over truth and literal meaning. Since objectivists map linguistic constructions onto a world that has clear categorical boundaries, they tend to devalue metaphor. Its linguisti- cally transgressive nature, in other words, makes it unsuitable for objectivist inquiry. Metaphor has little role to play in the constitution of objectivist "reality."

Consider the metaphor time is money (Johnson 1987). The objectivist understands metaphor as an analogy or comparison between its two parts. The metaphor is meaningful insofar as there are literal similarities between time and money. Both can be spent and wasted; both run out. For the objectivist, these are properties that exist objec- tively in the world, and thus the metaphor can be made (through literal translation) to fit the world. When Tuan (1973) argues that metaphor's im- portance to geographers lies in the way landscape is described metaphorically (using body parts, for example, to describe landscapes, e.g., headlands, foothills), he relies on objectivist similarities between the two.

In the objectivist account, metaphor is marginal and decorative, an interesting artistic and rhetorical device at best and a camouflage for serious (read objective) truth at worst. Harvey, among others, has suggested that metaphors can "hinder objective judgment" (quoted in Barnes and Duncan 1992: 10). This view, as Lakoff and Johnson (1980) point out, reflects an enlighten- ment view of truth as a product of an empirical

science suspicious of figurative devices. Thus Locke argued:

if we would speak of things as they are, we must allow that the art of rhetoric, besides order and clearness; all the artificial and figurative application of words eloquence hath invented, are for nothing else but to insinuate wrong ideas, move the passions, and thereby mislead the judgment.... (quoted in Lakoff and Johnson 1980:191).

Such suspicions have remained dominant until quite recently. Since the 1960s other views of metaphor have been advanced. Structuralism was one of the first significant challenges to literal interpretations of metaphor. For structuralists, metaphor is thought of not as marginal, residual, or decorative but as central to human endeavor. One of structuralism's basic tenets (in linguistics) derives from Jakobson's distinction between metaphor and metonymy.1 Based on his study of language disorders (aphasia), Jakobson focused on speech and the operations of selection and combination (Lodge 1977).

In selecting and combining words to make meaningful sentences, selection is the process that leads to the possibility of metaphor. Selection is based on similarity and thus the possibility of substitution. Metaphor can be thought of as a "substitution based on a certain kind of similarity" (Lodge 1977), or an "association by substitution" (Barthes 1967). Similarity and difference com- bine to form a metaphor. Jakobson's structuralism thus retains a literal view of metaphor when it claims that metaphors are selected on the basis of literal similarities between things. That said, metaphor in Jakobson's view is no longer marginal or merely decorative, but central to human understanding.

Interactionist Accounts

Other philosophers of language have argued that metaphor plays a serious constitutive/creative role in our perception and construction of reality. One line of thought, traced through Samuel Coleridge, I. A. Richards, and Max Black, suggests that metaphors create new perceived worlds and, indeed, that thought itself is largely metaphorical. Max Black's (1962) interaction theory suggests that metaphor does not get its meaning from some antecedent similarity but



332 Cresswell

actually creates similarities, hence the meanings of at least some metaphors are not reducible to literal similarities. In this view, the metaphor time is money acquires its meaning from the interaction of the entire set of connotations of both time and money. To break down the metaphor, as objectivists do, is to miss crucial new meanings that arise from the interaction of the two terms: "for the metaphor to work the reader must remain aware of the extension of meaning, must attend to both the old and new meanings together" (Black 1962:39).

This view of metaphorical meaning is linked to scholarly discussions of metaphor in scientific and philosophical reasoning (Pepper 1961; Colling- wood 1940) which argue that metaphors transform knowledge in ways that differ from formal logic. Stephen Pepper (1961), for instance, main- tains that "root metaphors" are at the heart of "world theories." These metaphors enable people to understand the incomprehensible by substitut- ing a "common-sense fact" for the incomprehensible. Thus the world, and most things in it, become understandable through the use of either mechanistic metaphors (world as machine) or organicist metaphors (world as organism). Meta- phorical analogies thus generate ideas which provide leaps in understanding, extending, as Mary Hesse (1963) has argued, into scientific theoriz- ing itself. The use of metaphor in the history of science, though a topic tangential to this paper, points toward the creativity of metaphors-their ability to transcend old worlds and create something quite new.

This interactionist view of metaphor finds geographical expression in the endeavors of human- istic geographers. Anne Buttimer (1982) describes the association of "root metaphors" with various paradigms of geographic thought. Metaphors of the earth as organism, map, machine, and context have provided the language for positivists, humanists, and Marxists alike. The use of these metaphors, she argues, exposes the thought processes active in these various philosophical schools and suggests a way out of the paradigmatic argument in geography, namely to create new metaphors for the earth and proceed from there. Buttimer's concern with root metaphors is reflected in the grand historical "metaphorical visions" of the "book of nature," of "man as microcosm," and of the "world as machine" (Mills 1982). They also arise in Cosgrove and Daniels's (1993) discussion of textual and visual metaphors in geography (e.g., landscape = text).

They suggest that the competing metaphors of text and vision in landscape reflect deep-rooted preoccupations of post-Renaissance humanism (Cosgrove and Domosh 1993). Their favored metaphors are contested in turn by David De- meritt (1994), who focuses on the competing metaphors used in cultural geography. While environmental historians use the metaphor of nature as historical actor, the "new" cultural geographers describe landscapes as texts and theaters, thus emphasizing human agency over natural agency. Demeritt proposes new metaphors that might open a conversation between these two camps, e.g., Haraway's "cyborg" metaphor that allows for a partly created nature which, nevertheless, has agency.

Geographers, then, have been intrigued by the uses of metaphor in their academic discipline and the ways in which it uses new metaphors to develop new ways of thinking. They have focused not on the literal translation of metaphors, but rather on the new meanings that their connotations are capable of producing.

Antifoundationalist Accounts

A third view-the antifoundationalist-re- gards metaphor as an absurd falsehood that gets its power from its ability to jolt us out of our everyday ways of thinking (Davidson 1979). In this view, metaphor is reducible neither to literal propositions nor to a creative interaction of sepa- rate universes of meaning. The antifoundationalist account rejects the possibility of mapping language to the world in any straightforward way. Thus the metaphor time is money means that time is (literally) a form of exchange consisting of paper notes and metal coins the possession of which entitles the bearer to various privileges. Metaphor, in this sense, is a "voice from outside logical space" (Rorty 1991:13). Despite the antifoundationalist refusal to translate metaphors into literal propositions in order to map them to the world, this account remains an objectivist one as it depends on the literal absurdity of particular combinations of meanings. As Johnson (1987) has argued:

Davidson's motivations are Objectivist through and through. Meaning is, at base, literal. To grasp the meaning of an utterance is to know its truth conditions literally interpreted. Since metaphor has no meaning beyond that of a literal sentence used in the utterance, what most people call the "meta-




phor's meaning" is no meaning at all Johnson 1987:72).

In this paper I use an antiobjectivist account of metaphor, one concerned with the way that metaphors are used in the world in its widest sense.

The Materiality of Metaphor

Metaphor in the objectivist, interactionist, and antifoundationalist accounts remains, for the most part, a philosophical/linguistic issue. Meta- phor is decorative, or marginal, or a way of thinking and perceiving. The emphasis is on the workings of creativity and the mind. More recently Lakoff and Johnson (1980) have provided an experientialist account of metaphor. In this view, metaphor is at the heart of rationality and central to the construction of "truth." Truth, they argue, is neither the objective "view from no- where" (Sack 1992) nor the subjective product of individual intuition. Rather truth is relative to understandings grounded in our experiences as cultural and social beings and constructed through metaphor. An example of metaphorical understanding is the notion of wasting and steal- ing time. To understand a newspaper article claiming that employees stole time from their employers, we have to mobilize a metaphorical understanding of time as an entity that can be stolen. Only if we understand this metaphor can the sentence have any claim to truth (or, indeed, to make sense). This metaphorical understanding of time is thus a historical product of western culture and therefore does not seem problematic. Such an understanding of time is not a "poetic flourish," but a deeply engrained way of compre- hending the world. Such metaphors are taken as literal and affect our practices. We do not actively compare time to money, but our temporal practices are structured through the metaphor when we spend time; we act metaphorically.

Many of our most important truths are not physical truths, but truths that come about as a result of human beings acting in accord with a conceptual system that cannot, in any sense, be said to fit a reality completely outside of human experience. Human experience is, after all, real too.... Since we act in accord with our conceptual systems and since our actions are real, our conceptual systems have a major role in creating reality. Where human action is concerned, metaphysics, that is, our view of what exists and what is real, is not independent

of epistemology in the broad sense of human understanding and knowledge (Lakoff 1987:296).

While metaphors are usually thought of as words and language, not as thought and action, Lakoff and Johnson argue that metaphor is "per- vasive in everyday life... in thought and action: (1980:3). They insist that people experience things and act upon them through a conceptual system which is largely metaphorical. For example, the metaphor argument is war is reflected in everyday expressions such as "his criticisms were right on target" or "he shot down all my arguments." Such metaphors are literal. When we conceive of arguments as war, we attack positions and lose ground. The way we argue is, according to Lakoff and Johnson, partially structured by the concept of war. Thus the argument is war metaphor, like the time is money metaphor, is one that we live by in western culture. It is a metaphor that informs and structures the actual act of argument. We conceive of argument as war and act accordingly: a culture having the conceptual metaphor argument is dance would argue in a way that is almost unrecognizable as argument.

We are rarely conscious of such conceptual metaphors; we do not consciously choose words, but speak and act on an assumed concept. "We talk about arguments that way because we conceive of them that way-and we act according to the way we conceive things" (Lakoff and Johnson 1980:5). Metaphors highlight some aspects of a concept, but they hide others. The argument is war metaphor focuses our attention on the competi- tive aspects of an argument and conceals its co- operative aspects. Henri Lefebvre (1991) has suggested that metaphor (and metonymy) may be thought of as an act rather than a simple "figure of speech." Metaphorical understanding of a concept such as space tends to naturalize the spatial realm and, what is more, to make it transparent, unseen. Metaphor, then, can be understood as a mode of thought and action that is implicated in everyday life. This extends metaphor beyond rhetoric or theoretical understanding and into the realm of practice and experience.

There is, however, one more step in this argument. The creation and maintenance of metaphorical understanding is an inherently political process and one that is more likely to be produced by people in power than by people who are relatively powerless. Power, at least in part, involves the ability to impose metaphors on others.



334 Cresswell

The power over metaphor is thus not merely an academic device for encouraging new theoretical insights; it is in fact a material power which is constantly and unavoidably mobilized in everyday life to define what is thought to be true (and, thus, as untrue). Metaphorical constructs such as time is money and argument is war define reality and sanction an array of activities and prohibit others. The ability to create and sustain metaphors is profoundly ideological.

To summarize, metaphors are culturally grounded and unavoidable ways of comprehend- ing the world. These deeply engrained ways of understanding are inevitably linked to our actions (practices). The creation and maintenance of metaphors is, therefore, an inherently political project with material effects and consequences. It is my purpose to move beyond introspective academic discussions of metaphors. While I have no doubt that root metaphors are at the heart of ways of thinking about the world (Buttimer 1992), that metaphor and analogy provide new insights into cultural (Demeritt 1994; Cosgrove and Domosh 1993) and economic geography (Barnes 1991), that new metaphorical spaces may be constructed for a feminist project (Price- Chalita 1994), and that the adoption of explicitly geographical metaphors (mapping, travel, etc.) in social and cultural theory is important (Smith and Katz 1993; Price-Chalita 1994; Bondi and Do- mosh 1992), I am also convinced that the geography of metaphors provides insights on the wider world of social and political life.

We must look beyond geography to find metaphors considered as a way of thinking and acting that has geographical implications for life in the wider world. Dick Hebdige (1993:274) writes of the "virtual power of figurative language" in which metaphors are never "just" ornaments on a mantelpiece of rational language. "Metaphors,") he argues, "are themselves an essential (if unsta- ble) component of realpolitik, acting as focalizing agents capable of drawing together diverse, even antagonistic constituencies" (Hebdige 1993:272). Metaphors are acts that encourage some thoughts and actions and discourage others, and this has geographical implications. Many metaphors are distinctly geographical acts that encourage spatial thoughts and actions while pro- hibiting others. Most metaphors we use in daily life are neither the root metaphors of grand theories, nor the obviously geographical metaphors of mapping and position. Many are metaphors that

tell us what and who belong where; they are, as such, constitutive moments in the spatiality of everyday life.

Out-of-Place Metaphors The remainder of this paper considers meta-

phors used in the media and by governments to focus attention on the "out-of-placeness" of people and actions. Following a brief rationale for my focus on displacement metaphors, I turn to the metaphors of weeds, disease, and bodily filth and their powerful geographic implications for the treatment of people and practices.

My focus on metaphors of displacement is rooted in a belief that place is one of the primary factors in the creation and maintenance of ideological values (what is good, just, and appropriate) and thus in the definition of appropriate and inappropriate actions and practices. The notion that everything "has its place" and that things (e.g., people, actions) can be "in-place" or "out- of-place" is deeply engrained in the way we think and act (Cresswell 1996). Such is our acceptance of these ideas that they have achieved the status of common sense or second nature. As Pierre Bourdieu (1990) has argued, common sense ("doxa" in his lexicon) produces the strongest adherence to an established order. People act as they think they are supposed to; they do what they think is appropriate in places that are also appropriate. It is therefore essential for powerful groups in any given context to define common sense and that which goes unquestioned. When individuals or groups ignore this socially produced common sense, they are said to be "out-of-place" and defined as deviant. Frequently, this labeling of "out-of-placeness" is metaphorical, based on analogies which themselves refer to common sense expectations. Perhaps the most familiar of these metaphors is that of "dirt." Mary Douglas (1996) has considered our understanding of dirt in some depth. Wherever dirt is identified, she argues, there is "matter-out-of-place." Thus shoes in their "proper place" are just shoes, while shoes on the dining table become dirt. The metaphorical use of dirt, then, relies for its effect on an unsaid and normally unquestioned structure of "proper places" which (silently) demands appropriate behavior. Below I focus on three other sets of metaphors which imply "out-of-placeness": weeds, plagues, and bodily secretions.




Weeds

In 1991 the U.S. Department of Justice selected two pilot sites, Kansas City, Missouri and Trenton, New Jersey, for a new urban program known as "Weed and Seed." In the words of the U.S. Attorney General, William Barr:

Weed and Seed is a community-based, comprehen- sive, multi-agency approach to combating violent crime, drug use and gang activity in high-crime neighborhoods. The goal of this strategy is to "weed out" crime from targeted neighborhoods and then to "seed" the targeted sites with a wide range of crime and drug prevention programs (U.S. Congress 1992).

This program was based on an earlier state- funded project known as the "Violent Trafficers Project" begun in Philadelphia in August 1988. The May 20,1992, minutes of the Select Commit- tee on Narcotic Abuse and Control (U.S. Con- gress 1992) reported that the Philadelphia project had produced a "flourishing Spring Green Neigh- borhood." The Committee also reviewed the pilot project in Kansas City in the Ivanhoe neighborhood. The pilot project had spent $200,000 on activities such as neighborhood clean-ups, the removal of abandoned cars, and an anti-graffiti campaign. The committee met in the context of the Los Angeles riots of April 29 after which President George Bush had announced a $19,000,000 package for urban renewal in Los Angeles. Following the Committee's review of the program, and in light of the events in Los Angeles, it recommended the wider application of "Weed and Seed" and approved sixteen cities as future sites, including Atlanta, Chicago, Charleston, South Carolina, and Wilmington, Delaware. In 1993, an additional $500,000,000 was to be re- quested for urban programs. Although Demo- crats supported the general concept of investing in the inner city, some were suspicious of the Weed and Seed program. Charles B. Rangel presented evidence to the committee that the vast majority of funds were spent on weeding rather than seeding and that the program was essentially funding for police action against poor black com- munities through the imposition of martial law.

The major strands of activity in the program include policing, the creation of enterprise zones, and provision of services. The places selected for program funds were chosen on the bases of the:

... presence of grass roots community organizations open to the Weed and Seed concept, high incidence

of gang-related violence; high rates of homicide, aggravated assault, rape and other violent crimes; high number of drug arrests; high (school) dropout rate; high unemployment rate; and the presence of public housing developments, including high-rise apartments (William Barr, U.S. Attorney General. U.S. Congress House Select Committee 1992).

The success or failure of the program is not an issue here; my concern is with the weed metaphor. Weeds are the botanical equivalent of dirt. Just as dirt is matter out of place, weeds are plants out of place. There is very little that can be said to unite plants classified as weeds other than their unde- sirability.

Here is a section on weeds from an ecology textbook.

Fugitive species ... are the "weeds" of the plant and animal kingdoms, which colonise temporary habi- tats, reproduce, and leave quickly before the temporary habitat disappears. . . . One large group of fugitive species are the weeds. Weeds are plants which grow entirely or predominantly in disturbed areas, and they produce large numbers of seeds adapted to long-distance dispersal by wind or by animals (Krebs 1985:52-53).

Weeds are plants that are uncultivated and unde- sired; they crowd out the cultivated specimens in the garden or farm field. Many plants become weeds simply by being in the wrong place. Weeds (real or figural) are furtively mobile fugitives that colonize available waste ground, and then move on to take over new ground. They also reproduce abundantly. Whereas a garden often implies a sense of order with each plant in its correct place forming a harmonious whole, weeds, through mobility and rapid reproduction, spoil this ordered environment. Weed is also a verb; to weed is to remove useless, harmful, and undesirable plants from the order of the garden or cultivated land. Indeed, the Select Committee on Narcotic Abuse and Control provided a lexicon of ecological metaphors in justification of the Weed and Seed program. The Philadelphia program had produced a "flourishing Spring Green neighborhood"; Weed and Seed was to be applied to neighborhoods with strong "grass-roots" commu- nities; disruptive elements would be "weeded" out, and "seed" money would be provided to regenerate the urban environment (U.S. Con- gress 1992).

Using the "weed" metaphor in the context of urban areas such as Los Angeles is not merely



336 Cresswell

descriptive. The "Weed and Seed" program referred also to the government's prescriptive goal of ridding problem areas of undesirable inhabitants (weeds) and planting them with the proper inhabitants (community centers, job schemes, and police stations). This connotation of out-of- place people is attended by a host of other less obvious implications based on the characteristics of weeds. These out-of-place people may be viewed as weak but cunning, as reproducing quickly, as "fugitives" always on the move. All of these reinforce a representation of "aliens" invad- ing the proper order of the American city. I am not suggesting here a simple substitution view of the weed metaphor. Describing people in the inner city as weeds produces a new set of meanings that arise from the metaphorical interaction of weeds and allegedly disreputable people.

Behind the weed (and seed) metaphor lies the ugly history of the more generally organismic metaphor, city as ecosystem. The metaphor has long been associated with the Chicago School of sociology (see Jackson and Smith 1984; Cappetti 1993) and Robert Park's belief that the city is a "product of nature." Criticisms of the urban ecology school are well known and need not be re- peated in detail (see Smith 1980). What is not well known is the translation of these metaphors into legal practice. The city as ecosystem metaphor is not just theoretically inappropriate; it is a way of acting which has serious consequences in people's lives. As Carla Cappetti (1993) has shown, Robert Park would quickly slip from the conscious use of natural metaphors of the virtually literal description of "moral climate" and "innate dispo- sitions." It was this biological morality that later became the centerpiece of the sociology of deviance which described deviance as a "pathology" of the inner city. It was in the slum that Park found the embodiment of humanity's "primitive" traits. The city, in Park's eyes, broke people down, removed the veneer of culture, and left people with little more than a "nature" which resembled plants and animals (Park 1984:41). As David Delaney and Michele Emanatian (1993) have persuasively argued, metaphorical reasoning played a significant role in the legal judgments of disputes over racial segregation in the U.S. during the mid-twentieth century. These judicial opin- ions reveal how judges deployed metaphor in ways that served powerful interests. Borrowing metaphors straight from the Chicago School's theorization of invasion, succession, infiltration, and encroachment, judges literally decided where

black people could and could not live. Delaney and Emanatian conclude that these urban ecological understandings helped to create and maintain certain material conditions in cities and neighborhoods. The judge who wrote an opinion statement that a restrictive covenant "furnishes a complete barrier against the eastward movement of colored population into the restricted area" (quoted in Delaney and Emanation 1993:10) was using the metaphorical language of urban ecology and, because his words simultane- ously had material effects, he was sustaining a particular set of sociospatial conditions. The pos- sibilities of challenging and changing urban ethnic segregation were foreclosed by the metaphorical naturalization of social conditions. As Delaney and Emanatian point out:

the decisions reached in these cases were consequential. They were clearly consequential to the parties involved. Thousands of people ... were put out of their homes or confined to substandard housing. More generally, the body of law developed through these cases created, we might say, a formi- dable barrier to the use of legal action in the fight against racial inequality and injustice. It is in this regard above all that metaphor and metaphorical reasoning matters (1993:21, emphasis in the original).

In cases involving racial segregation through restrictive covenants or by other means, judges often acted metaphorically; they acted as though people were plants that invaded spaces, formed ecosystems, and produced barriers.

Park's city as ecosystem metaphor certainly led to particular ways of seeing the city and its inhabitants. The grand theory and ethnographic tradi- tions of the Chicago School both leaned heavily on the metaphor of nature. This understanding shifted from the obviously metaphorical (humans acting like nature) to the status of "dead metaphor" (see Barnes and Duncan 1992:11), one that is no longer recognized as metaphorical (humans are nature). The usage of dead metaphors is equivalent to Kuhn's "normal" science, to busi- ness as usual, to Bourdieu's "doxa," the unquestioned realm of common sense which produces and reproduces the established order. The dead metaphors of urban ecology through the middle part of the century influenced the study of deviance and the treatment of "deviance" by social workers, judges, and others. The metaphor, in other words, provided not only a new way of describing the city but also a way of thinking and acting. Indeed, my use of the past tense is prema- ture in light of the U.S. Weed and Seed program.




Disease/Plague

Metaphors of ill health (disease, infection, plague, epidemic) are often used to label people and activities as deviant and "out-of-place." As with the weed metaphor, users rarely distinguish between being described as a disease and being treated as diseased. One example of the use of disease metaphors is the press and government descriptions of the so-called New Age Travellers in Britain (see Rojek 1988; Vincent-Jones 1986; Lowe and Shaw 1993). New Age Travellers have been a feature of British life for more than a decade. Many travelers believe in a "New Age" spirituality, and some follow anarchist philoso- phies. This mixture of people from the city and country lead a traveling lifestyle, living in caravans, trailers, and buses and camping on common and unused land. Their mobility is interrupted by a summer season of free festivals featuring music and dance. Ethnographies of the travelers reveal a common desire to escape the materialist trap- pings of contemporary British life (Lowe and Shaw 1993). Since the mid- 1980s, the travelers have been a constant thorn in the side of the British authorities who have made many attempts to put an end to their way of life. The police, media, and Conservative government have in- sisted that the travelers are often violent and unhealthy trespassers living off the state. Here I focus on public reactions to events after the banning of the free Stonehenge festival in May 1986.

One newspaper article referred to the travelers as being in "quarantine" from society (Weaver 1986:36); others described them as a "plague of locusts" ("Plague of Locusts" 1986:6) and as "pests" ("Crop of Trouble" May 30, 1986:2). A farmer claimed that the travelers would "poison" his land and that "the three fields they have taken over ... will be disease-ridden and unusable as a result for at least two years" (enkins 1986:3). After a clash with police in riot gear, one paper wrote of the need to clear the "pollution of ring worm, tape worm and viruses from the hippies' diseased dogs, cats and goats" ("Convoy Is Halted" 1986:2). Home Secretary Douglas Hurd described them as an "affliction" on the land (House of Commons June 3, 1986). The Depart- ment of Health and Social Security recommended "putting up protective screens in offices where hippies claim benefits" because, it was alleged, many hippies had hepatitis or were carriers of the disease. The report reassured staff that

blood contact was needed to catch hepatitis, but went on to recommend against going to campsites to pay benefits or to inspect the accommodations as it would be "highly undesirable, unpleasant, and potentially dangerous." Continuing with the language of epidemic, the report observed that: "Wales and the South-west are the most affected by hippie invasions, although the problem is spreading to the Midlands, North London, Hert- fordshire and Essex" (Henke 1986:1, 30). The implication at the end of the report was that relatively large numbers of out-of-place people were taking over an ordered (healthy) environment. The countryside location of the convoy and the reference to locusts and pests provides a rural twist to the metaphorical implications (de- stroying healthy rural crops). Although these re- ports stop short of labeling the travelers as foreign, they do suggest that they are "outsiders" (Sibley 1981), probably from the city.

As with the weed metaphor, the metaphors of disease and plague imply out-of-placeness. Some of the characteristics of plagues and disease that might be attributed to travelers thus include a disregard for spatial boundaries, a capacity for rapid spread, a threat to "normal" function, and the possibility of foreign origin. In using disease metaphors for transgressive people and actions, users compare society to the human body. In the traveler example, the social body is hegemonic society which is threatened by the actions of the travelers. Society is, in this case, manifested in the supposedly "natural" environment of the British countryside replete with neat boundaries and property-owning inhabitants.

The use of disease metaphors constitutes a way of thinking and acting, and this is evident in the metaphorical connections between disease and the military reactions to it. Susan Sontag makes this point in Aids and Its Metaphors (1988) by describing the variety of metaphors used to discursively construct the human body and AIDS. The most powerful of these is the military analogy. Sontag presents a typical example:

Scouts of the body's immune system . .. sense the presence of the diminutive foreigner and promptly alert the immune system. It begins to immobilize an array of cells that, among other things, produce antibodies to deal with the threat. Single-mindedly, the AIDS virus ignores many of the blood cells in its path, evades the rapidly advancing defenders and homes in on the master coordinator of the immune system, a helper T cell . . . (Quoted in Sontag 1988:17).



338 Cresswell

Using the metaphor in this fashion, she observes:

implements the way particularly dread diseases are envisaged as an alien "other," as enemies are in modern war; and the move from the denomination of the illness to the attribution of fault to the patient is an inevitable one, no matter if patients are thought of as victims. Victims suggest innocence. And innocence, by the inexorable logic that governs all rela- tional terms, suggests guilt (Sontag 1988:11).

Sontag's argument, in simplest terms, is that metaphors (e.g., military metaphors of illness) directly intervene in the perception and treatment of the people to whom the metaphor is applied, that is, disease and treatment are thought of and acted upon as war. In war situ- ations, extreme measures are called for, and normal legal process is suspended. The use of military metaphors in the description of AIDS is inevitably linked to the treatment of AIDS. The military metaphor, Sontag insists, "overmobilizes, it over- describes, and it powerfully contributes to the excommunicating and stigmatizing of the ill" (Sontag 1988:94).

We are not being invaded. The body is not a battle- field. The ill are neither unavoidable casualties nor the enemy. We-medicine, society-are not authorized to fight back by any means whatever.... About the metaphor, the military one, I would say. . . . Give it back to the war-makers (Sontag 1988:95).

If an actual disease is metaphorically understood in military terms, then a metaphorical disease (such as travelers) will likely retain the military implications. It is no coincidence, therefore, that the media's use of disease metaphors for travelers were often connected to military metaphors. The press described travelers as "armies" and their movements as "invasions." The Daily Mail for instance, headlined "Row over the 'Out- law' Wandering Army" (June 1, 1986:2). In an account of travelers' visits to social security offices, the Daily Mirror referred to a "dole office siege" (Hard Up Hippies" 1986:2). The military metaphor extended to the House of Commons where Home Secretary Douglas Hurd referred to the travelers as a "bunch of medieval brigands" (Weaver 1986:1). The implication is that travelers are a plague and that military solutions are justified. It thus becomes acceptable to place perspex screens in front of social security officers likely to be visited by travelers for fear of hepatitis (a disease spread only through blood contact), or to confront a group of travelers with 780 police

in riot gear and armored cars. The destruction of cars, caravans, and buses in the so-called Battle of the Beanfield is seen as justifiable. More signifi- cantly, the successful application of such metaphorical understandings legitimate the treatment of travelers as a disease in the new British Crimi- nal Justice Bill (1993) which effectively outlaws nomadism as a way of life (Sibley 1995). Indeed, the metaphorical description of the travelers as disease is only one in a series of metaphorical understandings which have been used to legitimate changes in the law and thus in the treatment of marginal groups.

As Vincent-Jones (1986) has indicated, changes in property law (and thus the treatment of transgressors) require public support for the institution of private property. Such support is generated by metaphorical representations which depict transgressors such as travelers and squatters as a serious menace to society as a whole (rather than just to wealthy landowners for instance). This, of course, is the threat of disease which spreads without regard for the "guilt" or "innocence" of its victims. Travelers and squatters are thus described as a danger to all domestic premises.

In order to generate these fears, the media referred to the squatters in the 1970s with reference to the squatters' alleged animal behavior, toiletry habits, and revolutionary ambition.2 This metaphorical insinuation of disorderly and dangerous behavior takes the squatting issue out of the particularity of the cases involved and devel- ops an understanding of the squatters as a threat to all. This prepares the ground for society to insist upon criminal measures against "trespassers." As Stuart Hall has repeatedly shown (1978, 1988), hegemonic power is not based on brute repression but on appeals to common sense. Meta- phorical descriptions of threatening transgres- sions are credible because they make ideological sense out of an apparent crisis. In the case of squatters and travelers, threats to private property are immersed in a sea of signification which includes metaphors (such as disease) of degener- ate out-of-placeness. A division is thus constructed that separates "ordinary people" from the threatening bands of deviants. The description of travelers as a "plague of locusts" is embed- ded in just such a distinction:

They despise work themselves but make life a pur- gatory for those who do labour to earn their own living. They descend like a plague of locusts on land which is not their own.... The whole of law-abiding, tax-paying, job doing and job seeking society is taken




for a ride every time one of these hippie convoys trundles on its sponging way ("Convoy Is Halted" 1986:6).

The metaphor of disease encourages us to think of the travelers as not "us." Even if "we" have never seen a traveler, the threat that is posed to a Somerset farmer is discursively portrayed as a threat that "we" should wish to neutralize. In this fashion the metaphorical construction of the travelers (or squatters) paves the way for changes in the law.

The Criminal Law Bill of 1977 followed on the footsteps of the squatting scare (Vincent-Jones 1986). The bill gave police the power of entry in order to search for and arrest people suspected of one of several new crimes. The House of Com- mons debate over the bill included many references to the "squatting problem" which fed off the media's metaphorical representations of squatters (Vincent-Jones 1986). The common sense that had been created over the preceding years was mobilized to legitimate the new law. The moral panic (Cohen 1972) over travelers involved similar metaphorical understandings and similar attempts to change the law. The Criminal Justice and Public Order Bill of 1993 criminalizes the traveler's lifestyle by making trespass a criminal offense, banning unofficial festivals, removing the obligation of local councils to provide sites for nomadic people, and making it possible for police to break up large numbers of people suspected of traveling together. In addition to the bill, the police have established a computer database to track the movement of "known travellers" whether or not they have committed a crime. All of these actions are legitimated through the constant references to travelers in metaphorical terms of disease and transgression. As in the case of AIDS, disease metaphors quickly lead to military metaphors and military solutions. As Stuart Hall has argued in relation to the moral panics of the 1970s:

The state has won the right, and indeed inherited the duty to move swiftly, to stamp fast and hard, to listen in, discreetly to survey, to saturate and swamp, to charge or to hold without charge, to act on suspicion, and to hustle and shoulder, in order to keep society on the straight and narrow. Democ- racy, the last back-drop against arbitrary power, is in retreat. It is suspended, the times are exceptional. The crisis is real. We are inside the "law and order" state (Hall 1978:37).

The conceptual metaphor society as human body makes possible the metaphor of transgres-

sion as disease and legitimates the (military) rem- edy. In other words, the use of a metaphor such as disease is not just a tool of language (a discur- sive trick), but a kind of understanding and a way of acting. As with the weed and general ecosystem metaphors, metaphorical understanding has consequences "on the ground" for thousands of people whose lives are deemed "out-of-place."

Bodily Secretions

Excrement and its equivalents (decay, infection, disease, corpse etc.) stand for the danger to identity that comes from without: the ego threatened by the non-ego, society threatened by its outside, life by death (Kristeva 1982:71).

Bodily secretions provide another metaphor of displacement. Urine, feces, vomit, and menstrual blood are all examples of substances used to define someone as out-of-place. Here I examine the use of such substances in metaphorical references to the Greenham Common Peace Camp in Berk- shire, England. The camp was the result of a 1981 march by a group known as Women for Life on Earth between Cardiff, Wales, and Greenham Common Air Base, which was to be the first site for American Cruise missiles armed with nuclear warheads. On arrival, the group won the support of other peace activists and unions and the marchers decided to stay and set up camp on the perimeter of the base as a permanent protest to the presence of the Cruise missiles. Between Sep- tember 1981 and March 1984 (the arrival of Cruise), the women became the object of anger from the Conservative government and the right- wing media. Up to several hundred women main- tained a permanent presence at the base, On several occasions they were joined by up to 50,000 other women supporting them for particular actions such as an "embrace of the base" (December 11, 1983). Many women stayed on at the base throughout the 1980s, even after the missiles had been removed as part of a treaty between the U.S. and the Soviet Union.

The site became an icon for political action in the 1980s (Liddington 1989). Here I concentrate on the language used by the media in reaction to the camp during the early 1980s. Consider this reference to the camp:

Almost the entire area within several hundred yards of the perimeter fence of R.A.F Greenham Com- mon is in constant use as a lavatory-including the gardens of local residents. Soiled sanitary towels are



340 Cresswell

used to "decorate" the fences and surrounding areas (White 1984:18).

In this quotation, bodily secretions are used to describe phenomena perceived as out-of-place. In the context of general reporting on Greenham Common, the reference to defecation and menstruation, although apparently literal, can be read as a metaphor for a general notion of the women as "out-of-place." As Alison Young (1990) has suggested, the analogies between feminist, sepa- ratist political protest and functions of the human body are far from arbitrary. Rather these analogies served as a means for the media to ensure a negative image of a dissenting minority.

Of all the possible functions or attributes of a human body, it is the production of malodorous waste and effluence that is imposed on the Greenham protest and made to seem appropriate. The peace camp is described as if it were both the mechanism for producing waste and the result. In metaphor's parade of resemblance and analogy, the two become indis- tinguishable (Young 1990:99).

The Greenham women were constantly referred to as various bodily secretions. One guard at the airbase told the Daily Mail:

There have been times when the "ladies" pinned their used sanitary towels to their clothing, or hung them from the fence for us to remove. They like to make a point of squatting to relieve themselves on the path we patrol Games 1983:7).

The truth of such descriptions is not at issue here, but it is worth nothing that one journalist, Caroline Blackwood, was so shocked by the description of bad bodily hygiene that she went to the camp to find out for herself:

I found the charge that the Greenham women lived like dogs and that they were smearing Newbury with their excrement almost the most chilling one.... The claim of Auberon Waugh that the Greenham women smelt of "fish paste and bad oysters" also haunted me for it had such distressing sexual asso- ciations. . . (Blackwood 1984:1-2).

On arrival Blackwood encountered an elderly, grey-haired woman busily knitting. Blackwood found herself dreading "that she might suddenly behave like a dog and defecate" (Blackwood 1984:5). What I am suggesting here is that the union of protesting women and bodily secretions in the media produced a metaphorical understanding of the women that pointed to their (alleged) displacement. The interaction of women and mal-

odorous bodily products produces a special gen- dered form of horror like that experienced by Caroline Blackwood.

The metaphors of bodily secretion or corporeal waste are frequently used to imply the existence of a transgression. Building on the work of Mary Douglas, Julia Kristeva in The Powers of Horror (1982) suggests that references to bodily filth represent the other side of an established bound- ary, a margin.

Why does corporeal waste, menstrual blood and excrement, or everything that is assimilated to them, from nail-pairings to decay, represent-like a metaphor that would have become incarnate-the objective frailty of symbolic order? (Kristeva 1982:69).

Excremental discourse relates the scale of the body to wider symbolic economies of place. As Douglas (1966), Stallybrass and White (1986), and Kristeva (1982) have all suggested, images of the body often serve as a microcosm for the anxieties and dreads of the social macrocosm. Bodily secretions are particular instances of the more general "dirt" metaphor that Mary Douglas has specified as meaning nothing more (nor less) than "matter out-of-place" (Douglas 1966).

Shoes are not dirty in themselves, but it is dirty to place them on the dining table; food is not dirty in itself, but it is dirty to leave cooking utensils in the bedroom, or food bespattered on clothing, similarly, bathroom equipment in the drawing room; clothes lying on chairs; out-door things in-doors; upstairs things downstairs; under-clothing appearing where over-clothing should be, and so on (Douglas 1966:36).

In a geography of normality that is constructed through various acts of territoriality, in which there is a place for everything, nonconformity to spatial order results in dirt. Douglas's work provides a useful tool for decoding general references to dirt in reactions to people and actions considered out-of-place, but she makes no reference to the social groups who are able to control the definition of "dirt." Sophie Laws, on the other hand, makes this point clear:

Pollution beliefs can be read as statements about power relations in society. They define, according to the dominant ideology, what is "matter out of place, " and this in turn makes it clear who has control of such social definition (Laws 1990:36).

The Greenham women were metaphorically described as dirt because they were women on their own outside a heavily masculinized air force




base (Cresswell 1994; Young 1990). The use of dirt metaphors to describe Greenham women is evidence for a way of understanding these women as out of place.

Bodily secretions are a particular type of dirt. Most cultures have some kind of pollution rituals involving bodily cleanliness. The orifices of the body connect the inside to the outside and the stuff that goes into them or comes out of them is subject to the strictest taboos as such substances transgress the inside/outside ordering of the world. Metaphorical references to such substances invariably imply threats to order.

Menstruation is frequently thought of as a form of disorder in which things have "gone wrong." We do not have to restrict ourselves to colorful media reactions to the Greenham women to see this view of menstruation; it also informs the presumed objectivity of medical textbooks which use different metaphors to describe bodily processes in men and women (Martin 1990,1992). A common metaphor in the description of female bodies is that of a production system in which the body produces estrogen and eggs among other things. The point of this production system is to provide the correct conditions for the implanta- tion of a fertilized ovum in the latter half of the monthly cycle. Menstruation, then, is inevitably described as a failure. Here Emily Martin illustrates the way some textbooks describe menstruation:

The fall in blood progesterone and estrogen "de- prives" the endometrial lining of its hormonal support, "constriction" of blood vessels leads to a "diminished" supply of oxygen and nutrients, and finally "disintegration starts, the entire lining begins to slough, and the menstrual flow begins." Blood vessels in the endometrium "haemorrhage" and the menstrual flow "consists of this blood mixed with endometrial debris." The "loss" of hormonal stimu- lation causes "necrosis" (Martin 1990:75).

This view of menstruation as failed production, Martin argues, inevitably contributes to negative views of the process. The female body becomes a "disused factory." The metaphorical descriptions are instrumental in producing an image of failure. By contrast, the metaphorical description of male reproductive physiology notes that sperm production is "remarkable" and "amazing" for its "sheer magnitude." The difference depends on the value (or lack of value) placed on the "product." Need- less to say, there is nothing "natural" or "objective" about metaphorical descriptions of bodily processes in physiology textbooks. As Martin observes:

Menstruation could just as well be regarded as the making of life substance that marks us as women, or heralds our non-pregnant state, rather than as the casting off of the debris of endometrial decay or as the haemorrhage of necrotic blood vessels (Martin 1990:80).

Metaphors such as these arise out of specific hierarchical structures of power and serve to reproduce such asymmetrical power relations. In- deed, it is hard to imagine such imagery not having an effect on medical research and the treatment of men and women by the medical profession. A possible interpretation of the use of menstruation metaphors in descriptions of the Greenham women is that medical notions of menstruation as failure have been translated into metaphorical understandings of the women as "failures" who are not busy in the reproductive and domestic roles assigned to them.

The Greenham women clearly threatened established notions of order by their presence outside the airbase. The symbolism of excrement and menstrual blood was prevalent in descriptions of them. In addition, at a more sinister level, the actions of people around them continued the excremental theme. Air force personnel frequently bared their posteriors to the women and unknown people poured pig feces over some of the women's tents at night.

Greenham women were not just described as dirt, they were treated as dirt. Blackwood describes the reaction of one local resident to the view from a window overlooking both the women's camp and the base:

She took me to her bedroom. The camp looked rather unimportant from a higher perspective. Mrs. Scull had a really fantastic view of the desolation of the missile base. From her window, you could see much more barbed wire than you could from the ground. It seemed to roll into infinity.

She asked me to imagine how pretty her view had been before the women had set up their camp. She saw that I was taken aback by the uninterrupted vista of military vehicles and barbed wire (Black- wood 1984:98).

A similarly surprising observation was made by the Under-Secretary of State for Transport, Lynda Chalker, in the House of Commons:

I have verified for myself what an eyesore it [the peacecamp] is. It offends against the normal stand- ards of Air Force establishments. It spoils some pleasant common land and is a potential, if not an actual, environmental health hazard (U.K. Parlia- mentary Debates 1983:147).



342 Cresswell

Both Mrs. Scull and Lynda Chalker, MP, were able, without a hint of irony, to describe the peace protesters as an eyesore and an environmental hazard while looking at a huge base of concrete slabs and bunkers wherein lay the far greater environmental hazard of nuclear warheads. Both thought of the women as dirt and pollution, but not the base. The U.S. Air Force's deployment of Cruise missiles with nuclear warheads was viewed as legitimate while the women were viewed as threatening. As befits polluting substances,3 local and national government did their best to expel the women, at times forcefully.

Ecological, disease, and secretion metaphors can all be used to imply displacement. Although their specific implications are different, the result is a common portrayal of geographical disorder in which citizens of the inner city, travelers, and Greenham women are regarded as out-of-place. Beneath this similarity are nuanced differences. Bodily secretions prompt revulsion (see Kristeva's 1982 discussion of abjection), weeds prompt a callous desire for removal (without revulsion), and disease prompts fear (Tuan 1979). Revulsion, callous indifference, and fear are feelings that result from perceptions of displacement and that guide actions. Weeds demand to be cut down, secretions need to be made clean, disease must be quarantined and kept apart. These metaphors thus mobilize different ways of dealing with displacement, but the end is the same-to restore things to their proper place.

Metaphors in Action Metaphorical meaning is not in any way natu-

ral or inherent; metaphors change over time and across cultures. While metaphors such as weeds and disease have been used to label and treat people and actions as deviant, similar metaphors have gained a more positive meaning in postmodern academic discourse. Displacement has been positively celebrated (occasionally to excess) by many writers who have been placed under the postmodern banner. The geographical metaphors of travel, tourism, and nomadism have been theoretical rallying points for James Clifford (1992) and lain Chambers (1994). The weed metaphor in the form of the "rhizome" has been given a positive twist by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1983). Rather than seeing the weed as something threatening to be removed, they write of the rhizome as a liberating, dynamic entity which

provides lines of escape from the confines of territorial power. The nicely ordered garden with everything in its place displeases Deleuze and Guattari; they revel instead in the constant mul- tiplication and unmanageability of the weed/rhizome. While the classic plant (e.g., a tree) is rooted and understandable in terms of its fixity, the rhizome exists on a level plane of multiplica- tion and differentiation. It is never finally trace- able to Althusser's famous "last instance." Rhizomes cannot rely on any generative principle for meaning.

As an underground stem a rhizome is absolutely distinct from roots and radicals. Bulbs and tubers are rhizomes.... Even some animals are rhizomorphic, when they live in packs like rats.... In itself the rhizome has many diverse forms, from its surface extension which ramifies in all directions to its con- cretions into bulbs and tubers. Or when rats move by sliding over and under one another. There is the best and worst in the rhizome: the potato, the weed, crab-grass (Deleuze and Guattari 1983:10-11).

Deleuze and Guattari are masters of metaphorical transformation. Their work uses the rhizome/weed metaphor along with schizophrenia and nomadism (all previously signifiers of chaos and disrepute) in ways which generate new ways of thinking about everything from books to theories of signification. Their tactic is to use the formally negative in potentially transformative ways. Displacement ceases to be a threat and becomes a virtue (or perhaps the threat becomes a virtue). The use of new metaphors (or the new use of old metaphors) in intellectual life is, of course, well documented (Pepper 1961). The transformation of displacement metaphors in postmodern discourse, however, hints at the possibility of metaphorical contestation in the wider world. This paper has attempted a geographically informed consideration of metaphors as actions in a wider political world. I have shown how the metaphors of weeds, plagues, and bodily secretions have been used to constitute people and actions as out-of-place. In response we might suggest new metaphors (as has been the tradition in intellectual life) as new ways of thinking and acting toward marginal(ized) groups. We might also follow the lead of the postmodern theorists and transform already existing metaphors into more positive (or at least ambivalent) acts. If Deleuze and Guattari have been able to transform weeds, nomads, and schizophrenics into intellec- tually positive metaphors, then surely it is possible




in the nonacademic realm to contest the value placed on geographically loaded metaphors.

Clearly the metaphors I have described here are metaphors in action-ones that are related to a whole array of more recognizably physical actions designed to maintain particular forms of order in space and place. U.S. federal, state, and local governments, under the banner of "Weed and Seed," fight antidrug and antigang wars through the physical removal of public space and incursions on private space (Davis 1992); travelers branded as a "plague of locusts" find their lifestyle outlawed; and the Greenham Peace protesters, tarred by an excremental discourse, are targeted for removal. The metaphorical understandings are as much actions as the physical actions themselves. Once an inner-city resident is understood to be a weed, he or she can be treated like one. Weeds, disease, and bodily secretions need to be stopped, hence society is seen to be justified in taking desperate measures.

The casual acceptance of a metaphor carries a host of implications that follow, as if by nature, from the original term. Geographers' engage- ments with metaphor have been restricted to its use in language and text, e.g., within the discipline or as geographical metaphors (mapping, travel, etc.) for the wider society. A more liberal view of metaphor as thought and action will enable human geographers to develop a fuller appreciation of human action in space. The significance of metaphor to geography extends, in other words, well beyond the use of metaphor in geography. The geographical interpretation of metaphors as they are thought and acted out in the realms of politics and ideology can do much to delineate the praxis of everyday life. Indeed, by critiquing and transforming established metaphors or by suggesting new ones, geographers might provide alternative and more provocative ways of thinking and acting in space.

Acknowledgments I would like to thank Phil Crang, David Delaney,

Michele Emanatian, Chris Philo, and three anonymous reviewers for their help and inspiration in the thinking and writing of this paper.

Notes

1. Metonymy is the linguistic and literary act of referring to something by one of its constituent

parts, for example, "the crown" for the monarchy or "wheels" for a car.

2. During the 1970s "squatters" were portrayed as a "folk devil" in much the same way as travelers have been portrayed in the 1980s-1990s. Squat- ters and travelers share the need to use property and land owned by the other people. While squatting is largely an urban phenomenon, the travelers tend to move through the countryside.

3. The women were evicted from common land for the first time on May 27, 1982. They moved to Ministry of Transport land, from which they were evicted on September 29, 1982. The evictions continued throughout the mid-1980s. See Young (1990) for a complete account of the use of force in the removal of the women on these occasions.

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Correspondence: Department of Geography, University of Wales, Lampeter, Dyfed SA48 7ED, Wales, U.K.



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Cresswell - 2013 - Weeds, Plagues, And Bodily Secretions a Geographical Interpretation of Metaphors of Displacement