Read No Further....Author(s): Roddy FoxSource: Area, Vol. 21, No. 3 (Sep., 1989), pp. 319-322Published by: The Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers)Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20002766 .

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Comments 319

constituted not only in social being and understanding, but also in terms of material life. Work such as Morgan and Sayer's Microcircuits of capital (1988), recent work by feminist geographers examining the links between patriarchal, material and personal relations (see McDowell 1988), various life-history approaches examining regionalised class, gender and racial consciousness (see Cooke 1987), and particularly Soja's (1989)

whirlwind tour of contemporary Los Angeles, 'Taking Los Angeles apart', indicate the value and excitement of this methodological arena.

As post-graduate researchers in geography, we feel that the' (re-?)assertion of space in critical social theory' is producing results that are far from boring. In which the essential links between the 'personal', the 'academic' and the 'political' (that

McDowell's Editorial rightly emphasises) are evident. This is not to argue that what is necessary is solely a 'revolutionising' of the personal as a means of changing the political, nor merely a restructuring of the political to change the personal. Rather, what is required is the recognition and realisation of the connections between an ontologised critical socio-spatial theory and praxis.

References Cooke P (1987)' Individuals, localities and postmodernism 'Environment and Planning D: Society and Space

5, 408-12 McDowell L (1988) ' Coming in from the dark: feminist research in geography ' in Eyles J (ed) Research in

human geography: introductions and investigations (Blackwell, Oxford), 155-73 McDowell L (1989) ' Editorial-writing it out? ' Area 21, 1

Morgan K and Sayer A (1988) Microcircuits of capital: 'sunrise' industry and uneven development (Polity Press, Oxford)

Porteous J D (1989)' Katharsis: academic writing as self-therapy 'Area 21, 83-5

Sayer A (1984) Method in social science: a realist approach (Hutchinson, London)

Soja E (1989) Postmodern geographies: the reassertion of space in critical social theory (Verso, London)

Watson G (1987) Writing a thesis: a guide to long essays and dissertations (Longman, London)

Read no further ....

Roddy Fox, Department of Geography, Rhodes University, PO Box 94, Grahamstown 6140, South Africa

How refreshing it was to read in the March 1989 issue of Area Doug Porteous urging us to ' write it out ' and John Short's polemic about ' writing in ' our personal experience (Porteous 1989; Short 1989). Before commenting on these two papers there is a prob lem which needs resolution that is raised in Rogerson and Parnell's paper in the same issue (Rogerson and Parnell 1989). I am a boycotted person writing from South Africa. I have some observations about Porteous and Short's papers which should be construc tive for many academics; but ought you to be reading my comments? It could be that

my contribution should be censored by non-publication, alternatively I can simply tell the reader to go no further. I must admit that both options appeal to me since they are paradoxes: I am writing something that will not be read, which was largely what John Short's paper was about anyway. I shall return to the boycott problem later.

My initial comments are concerned with how to keep places in our research and with how to ensure that personal experience stays alive in the research process. One of the biggest problems I have encountered in recent years is in handling numbers. Poten tially they can be fun and are much easier to deal with than the written word. My problem is that once something is reduced to a number it is largely gone; it may have

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320 Comments

been a place, a region, people, a dusty road, the only shop with hot bread for miles, but now it has become a neutral number. Compounding this is the way I treat my number. I put it in rows and columns with lots of other numbers, feed them into a hungry computer, see their glow on the screen and as marks on my printout of decriptive or analytical statistics, but by now my number is lost. Paradoxically, one of the intentions of confirmatory statistics is to lose your original information by compacting it into an abstraction, e.g. a standard deviation, histogram or whatever. Any hope of picking up a vestigial resonance about the original number is slight. This is a problem since to interpret my findings I need to be able to recall what my original numbers represented,

my impressions of their accuracy and a whole rag-bag of other memories about the original information. Clearly my method is failing me, I am distancing myself from my objective when I need to be engaged in close conversation with it. Is there any wonder that in so many papers the author is not ' written in '?

Recently, I stumbled across a set of innovative techniques, Exploratory Data Analy sis, which have helped me to keep alive research I started four years ago and 3500 km away. These techniques, one of which is described below, act in a reiterative manner to keep you in touch with your original information (Erickson and Nosanchuk 1977).

With a little ingenuity they can overcome some of the problems I have outlined above and ensure that you stay in tune with your research.

My research has been concerned with assessing the distribution and composition of ethnic groups in colonial and post colonial Kenya. Figure 1 is a stem and leaf diagram of part of my data. The stem is the column of figures from 9-34 in the centre representing the number of ethnic groups. The leaf consists of two parts, to the left of the stem are acronyms of the 1962 urban centres, to the right are acronyms for 1979. For reasons of brevity a list of acronyms is not given. The diagram shows that in 1962 ELBurgon had 14 ethnic groups, Eldama RaVine had 16, MombaSA had 34. The researcher is easily able to converse with this diagram, it portrays general and particular features and also contains the original information. For example, I may be interested in finding out why there is a cluster of towns with 16 ethnic groups in 1979. I can immediately see which the towns are, SiaYA, Maji MaZuri, KuTuS, MAKuyu, and search my memory for similarities in their history, location, or whatever. Frequently the names trigger off associations from past visits to those towns which helps build up a degree of empathy with the problem and enhances the likelihood of an intuitive insight.

The diagram is laid out in such a way as to make comparison easy. Clearly, there were far more urban centres in existence in 1979 and most of them had more ethnic groups living in them than 1962's urban centres. The diagram also shows that the larger urban centres had the most ethnic groups, but there are exceptions. In 1962, MURang'a only had 18 ethnic groups, in 1979 NGOng had 27. This is a clear example of the way in which the researcher can switch from the general to the particular when using this approach.

So far my comments may seem a little technical and perhaps pre-occupied with method but it is my contention that it is in our methods as well as our written conven tions that we are lacking. One other encouraging point, in one of my recent articles I

ventured for the first time to' put in the personal '(Fox 1988). I fully expected that the

referees would demand the excision of the passage where I ' wrote it in' but just the opposite was the case. I was asked to expand on why my paper was not objective and what the experiences had been that conditioned the directions which the research had taken. At the time I took my lead from the introduction to Hyden's (1980) book where he too discusses the role that experience had on his research. Hyden's remarks about his life in Tanzania made his book both more approachable and understandable. It is my

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Comments 321

Late colonial, 1962 Post colonial, 1979 9 KGI

10 11 12 13 GRI

ELB 14 15

ERV 16 SYA MMZ KTS MAK MAG 17 KLI

KAJ KFI LON MUR 18 KBU MRU KSI 19 KYU WAM MOG SAG VOI MLO NVA 20 KIP KBU KPG MAG NAM

KAK 21 MLO KGY KTN NKU OLY NYU ILO ARV TKA 22 MUH MBW KBN BAR MWI

MAR MDI GIL KER NRI ELD 23 LOD KDO ERV SOL WMU KIT LMU MKO KMU 24 N3O LON KPB MKI

EBU KLE 25 MIG KAJ WIT 26 NYU NAR BUS KNI KWA MAD 27 MRL HBY ARV KFI NGO

NKI NKU 28 MUR HOL KIT 29 MDI WEB NVA ELB 30 KAKLMUMOY VOI 31 KSI KLE BMA ILO 32 TKA KER MRU NKI EBU MKO MAR

NBI 33 NRI MSA 34 NBI MSA MKU KMU ELD GIL

Stem: number of ethnic groups Leaf: acronym of urban centre ELB: below median urban centre according to population size

MSA: above median urban centre according to population size

Figure 1 Stem and leaf diagram of the number of ethnic groups in Kenya's urban centres, 1962 and 1979

belief that the researcher needs to make some statement as to his or her stance as

participant-observer in order for the reader to be able to make an evaluation of the

research. To return to the problem of boycotting South African academics. A selective boycott

raises many problems in assessing who should be boycotted and who should not. My comments above certainly do not fit in with what Rogerson and Parnell discuss as ' peoples' geography ', which would be one non-boycott criteria; but does that make my

observations invalid? How do you assess the work of geographers, and there are many here, who do not work on the human geography of South Africa? What of the geomor phologists, the climatologists and those with interests in other African countries? How

is their work to be assessed and who is to do it? Finally, Africa is a difficult continent in which to live and work. It is riddled with

gross inequalities and inconsistencies. One of the effects of making conditions harder

for academics through isolation will be to drive them away from the region or into other

job opportunities, i.e. away from geography. Do British geographers want to be respon sible for these consequences? What do you know of the realities of Africa? I extend an

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322 Comments

invitation to you to come to Rhodes University and see for yourself something of the complexities and difficulties with which we deal.

References Erickson B H and Nosanchuk T A (1977) Understanding Data (McGraw-Hill, Toronto)

Fox R C (1988) 'Environmental problems and the political economy of Kenya: an appraisal', Applied

Geography 8, 315-35 Hyden G (1980) Beyond Ujamaa in Tanzania (Heinemann, London)

Porteous J D (1989) ' Katharsis: academic writing as self-therapy ', Area 21, 83-5

Rogerson C M and Parnell S M (1989) ' Fostered by the laager: apartheid human geography in the 1980s',

Area 21, 13-26

ShortJ R (1989)' Three problems researching space and place: or, not so much a paper more a polemic', Area

21, 85-7

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