Geography
Document Type
Article
Abstract
Characterizing continents is the business of fools, inviting the charge of essentialization, over-generalization, and caricature of nuanced and complex processes varying across space and over time. Likewise it can attract the criticism that to privilege the national or the regional understates the transnational dimensions of social change, and to take a territorialized view diverts attention from the networks that cut across space, linking distant actors and places. This short essay therefore claims neither to be a reflection on Latin America-wide phenomena, and far less a statement on the most significant aspects of the political economy of the region. It does, however, hope to draw attention to issues that merit greater attention from development and economic geographers, issues that are both relevant for and often related to processes of transformation occurring in other regions of the world. I peg these observations around the notion of extraction because I will argue that across the region the last decade has witnessed – or is soon to witness – a deepening of the extractive economy, that this deepening has involved and elicited an intriguing range of state and societal responses, and that these responses are integral to the production of development geographies. I also suggest that these processes offer much fuel for broader discussions in development and economic geography of neo(and post-neo)- liberalisms (Castree, 2008a, b), of the relationships between territory and networks (Bridge, 2008), and of the social production of nature and economy (Prudham, 2005).
The available download on this page is the author manuscript accepted for publication. This version has undergone full peer review but has not been through the copyediting, typesetting, pagination and proofreading process.
Publication Title
Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography
Publication Date
2009
Volume
30
Issue
1
First Page
7
Last Page
12
ISSN
0129-7619
DOI
10.1111/j.1467-9493.2008.00349.x
Keywords
development economics, development theory, social development
Repository Citation
Bebbington, Anthony J., "Latin America: Contesting extraction, producing geographies" (2009). Geography. 495.
https://commons.clarku.edu/faculty_geography/495
Copyright
This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: Bebbington, Anthony. "Latin America: Contesting extraction, producing geographies." Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 30.1 (2009): 7-12., which has been published in final form at https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9493.2008.00349.x. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Use of Self-Archived Versions.