Colegio de Geografia, Fac de Filosofía y Letras

In this chapter, we explore the possibilities of a ‘post-statist’ epistemology in geography and its possible contributions to a radical pedagogical and methodological agenda within the discipline and social sciences more generally. Beginning with a critique of the naturalization of statist logics as indicative of a series of problematic epistemological assumptions within geography, we construct an anarchist epistemological framework for informing geographical scholarship. This framework draws principally from anarchist thinkers, but also other writers such as Pierre Clastres, Boaventura de Sousa Santos and Bolívar Echeverría, offering insights into how geographers can construct new, anarchistic epistemological, methodological and pedagogical frameworks. We argue that hierarchical power relations, typified by the state, need to be recast not as the end-point of a linear process towards efficient and just social organisation but as merely the outcome of spatio-temporally situated processes. In making this epistemological shift, one can find ways of transforming the processes and relations embedded in knowledge production and dissemination. We therefore offer a number of practical methodological and pedagogical approaches that transgress statist and other authoritarian epistemologies, and outline possibilities for geographers to prefigure collaborative, non-hierarchical ways of knowing and understanding the world.

In this chapter we read archaeological scholarship through the 'alien' lens of geography, not to crystallise an archaeological gaze that is supposedly better than geographical perspectives but instead to render our hitherto atomised disciplinary debates open to the possibilities that a conversation of the two may be of use to anarchist historical (and contemporary) geographies. Of particular interest to us is a set of critical literatures in archaeology that can inform geographical understandings of the state and its multiple forms and trajectories. Through an appreciative but critical discussion of archaeological treatments of the state, and drawing from a radical perspective that brings together Deleuzian philosophy and complexity theory, we develop a non-essentialist, anarchist and decolonial reading that can strengthen existing geographical understandings of the diverse pasts, presents and futures of the state. (Forthcoming 2017)