458 Book reviews / Political Geography 22 (2003) 457–467

opening exposition of the book chapters, which is provided. Such a summary chapter
could have integrated theory with practice, as well as provide for international com-
parisons. On the other hand, this reader serves well as a stimulation for further
research in the areas covered by the chapter authors. Since the study of e-commerce
is still in its infancy phase this stimulation applies not just to the theoretical chapters
(part one) but to the empirical ones, as well (parts 2-3). The book further permits
assessments of wide possible applications of the several forms of e-commerce
presented in parts 2 and 3.
The book chapters attest to the enormous flexibility of the Internet in terms of
boundaries, flows, and network structures. On the other hand, however, the book
shows that side by side with this global openness lie domestic cultures which may
permit unique applications, while blocking others which may flourish in other coun-
tries. As such, this book will be of much value for geographers and social scientists
at large, studying the Internet and its applications. Foremost, it could constitute sup-
plementary reading for economic geography courses at both introductory and
advanced levels. In addition, the book may be of interest for the business community
as well, notably for those wishing to assess possible applications of e-commerce
enterprises in various countries.

Reference

Leinbach, T. R., & Brunn, S. D. (1991). Collapsing Space and Time: Geographic Aspects of Communi-
cation and Information. New York and London: HarperCollins Academic.

A Kellerman
University of Haifa
Mount Carmel, 31905, Israel

doi:10.1016/S0962-6298(02)00036-7

Mapping the present: Heidegger, Foucault and the project of a spatial history
Stuart Elden 2001, Continuum, London and New York, 217 pp ISBN 0 8264 5847
5 PB

Before reading Stuart Elden’s remarkable book, I had taken Foucault’s statement
that ‘Heidegger had always been an essential philosopher for me’ with a pinch of
salt. There is very little mention of Heidegger in Foucault’s translated English works,
and the secondary literature seemed to draw a long bow in discussions of the connec-
tions: the influence of Nietzsche was obvious, but Heidegger seemed a much more
shadowy presence. So I assumed this was another ‘now you see me, now you don’t’
Foucault game. But I have been suitably chastened by Mapping the Present, which
draws on original and unpublished texts as well as available English language sources
 Book reviews / Political Geography 22 (2003) 457–467 459

for both thinkers, to convincingly argue for the crucial significance of Heidegger’s
work for understanding Foucault.
Importantly for geographers, Elden’s central theme is how the later Heidegger’s
non-Cartesian understanding of place and space (what Elden calls ‘the platial’)
becomes integral to his conception of Dasein – being. This imbrication of being and
place, Elden argues, is developed by Foucault in his histories of the discourses,
practices and spaces of madness, medicine and the prison as elements in the birth
of the modern ‘soul’ or subject.
Before arriving at the conception of the spatial in Heidegger’s work, however,
some groundwork is required to trace the turn from the early formulations of the
temporal in Being and Time to the later thoughts on place, space, dwelling, clearing,
boundaries and building (in my experience, the aspect of Heidegger most often de-
contextually appropriated by architects). Elden’s discussion of these developments
tracks Heidegger’s engagements with Greek philosophy – especially the notion of
the polis and the political as being inherently spatial; with Kant, Holderlin and Nietz-
sche; and (somewhat obliquely) touches on the fraught question of his support for
Nazism. In discussing the place of space in Heidegger’s thought, Elden foreshadows
other important Foucauldian themes: of the historical contingency of being – an
historical, as opposed to a transcendent, ontology; the capacity of Dasein to worry
about its being-ness; the concept of ‘equipment’ – the taken-for-granted functioning
of the everyday; technology as ever-more alienated from the world and everyday
experience; and the fusing of these elements into a critique of the present (even if
Heidegger does not always avoid spatial-temporal nostalgia for soil, land, home and
the past).
Dasein is both spatially and temporally ‘present’ in a world of things whose being
is not only captured by physical properties or functional uses, but also by ‘place-
ness’ and capacities for creating space: a jug is not merely a structure of clay for
containing liquids but its very shape creates a void which derives meaning from its
capacity to be full or empty (pp.87-88). Similarly, Heidegger sees space as ‘some-
thing that has been made room for, something that has been freed, namely within a
boundary’ (quoted p.85) - a notion of ‘boundaries’ at odds with Cartesian divisions
of inert pre-given extension. Elden emphasises this generative notion of space as
active in the thing-ness of equipment and in the being-ness of Dasein and in the
derivation of ‘space’ from the particularity of ‘place’, in order to show that Heideg-
ger’s historical ontology is both temporal and spatial, and its implication for the
work of Foucault is best understood as a ‘mapping of the present’.
Elden’s writing is admirably clear and his arguments well-structured, assisting
immeasurably in following his path through some very dense philosophical thickets.
It is curious, indeed irritating, then, that he leaves many Greek terms without direct
translation, and uses Greek script without bracketed approximations in English, so
that I was constantly searching for clues to meaning and checking if two words were
the same or not. Whilst the point made by Heidegger is re-iterated by Elden, that
Greek terms have no direct equivalent in modern cultural contexts and therefore
have often been mistranslated, misused and misunderstood, some signposts for the
uninitiated would be helpful. Another minor irritant is that the Index is wholly inad-
460 Book reviews / Political Geography 22 (2003) 457–467

equate, with quite central terms like ‘Dasein’, ‘being’, ‘space’ missing, and the entry
under ‘polis’, which is rarely translated from the Greek in the text, refers to pages
where the word does not appear in English.
Having outlined Heidegger’s spatial-temporal ontology, Elden turns to Foucault,
where again his impressive scholarship in drawing on untranslated lectures and
texts – including the original, unedited Madness and Civilization - and his re-reading
of translated works, provides the basis for his interpretations of the importance of
space in Foucault’s archaeology and genealogies. Foucault reads Nietzsche through
Heidegger, and it is Heidegger’s spatial concepts that are developed in Foucault’s
thought. Space and time, geography and history are central to Foucault’s
Heideggerian/Nietzschean critique of the present, its unthought practices, discourses
and taken-for-granted circulations of power.
Foucault’s archaeology of the human sciences and genealogies of practices are
thoroughly imbued with space, not just as metaphor, but as an active element in the
deployment of knowledge, the circulation of power, the creation of subjects. The
disciplines of knowledge are bound up with the classifying, observing, practices of
confinement, correction and medical and moral cure, as are co-extensive practices
and knowledges of conflict and resistance (a point which is somewhat underdevel-
oped by Elden).
Disciplinary power is not repressive but productive, and the prison must be seen
as an element in the creation of the ‘modern soul’ (p. 135): Foucault should not
be read through Bentham’s eyes as if describing inescapably carceral society. The
Panopticon is not a description of a real nineteenth century prison, and panopticism
is not simply the spread of technologies of surveillance. In Foucault’s work, the
Panopticon represents a ‘diagram’ (although Elden does not use this term), a concen-
tration of forces that illustrate the workings of a certain type of modern power and
a certain technology of spatial arrangement for the production of docile bodies.
This form of power takes place in diverse sites – schools, factories, monasteries
and particularly army barracks – where the body is disciplined and through it, the
self (or ‘soul’) is trained. It is part of a continuum from individualising anatomo-
power to bio-power that extends to the population (‘bodies in plural’ pp.146-147 -
spatially managed, I would argue, in diffuse regions and locations). And it is an
element in the birth of a society that puts into indissoluable practice both the Enlight-
enment’s discovery of the liberties and its invention of the disciplines (Note 58,
p. 194).
But given the project of placing Foucault’s studies in a context of a wider mapping
of the present and the emergence of the modern soul, it is surprising that Elden pays
little attention to the literature on governmentality and liberal technologies of self-
subjectification (and its neglect of any detailed consideration of space).
My summary is hardly adequate to indicate the depth and complexity of the argu-
ment or the importance of Elden’s insistence on the centrality of the spatial in Fou-
cault’s thought, but I hope it gives some idea of the book’s relevance to the concerns
of geography. That said, however, geographers may find his dismissal of geographi-
cal literature somewhat cavalier, concentrating as it does on geographical theorisation
of space in a broadly historical or cultural materialist framework. He is correct to
 Book reviews / Political Geography 22 (2003) 457–467 461

castigate those authors he has chosen for their misreadings of Foucault and their
attempts to grapple with space with persistently Cartesian equipment. But this ignores
the vast amount of research drawing on feminist or phenomenological approaches
or conducted under the headings of cultural, social, political, or indeed, historical,
geography. While not necessarily Foucauldian, these types of studies put conceptions
of space and place to work and raise questions of embodiment, power, inhabitation,
place, and so are more comparable to the detailed descriptions in Foucault’s major
studies than the abstract theorising of many of Elden’s straw targets.
The somewhat cursory Conclusion could well have expanded on how Foucault’s
meticulous spatial histories and methods could contribute to the already existing
body of research and how (in Heideggerian mode) such detailed studies are central
to practices of theorising. The Conclusion also misses the opportunity to draw out
more explicitly the conceptual affinities between the two thinkers: the book tends to
fall into two parts – Heidegger and Foucault – and while specific links are taken up
in discussion, a closing review would be useful.
But these are minor aspects of a book that simultaneously insists on the careful
reading of original texts and breaks new theoretical ground. Mapping the Present is
essential to understanding Foucault’s spatial histories and through these, to
developing a framework in which space is not just ‘an object of analysis but part
of the conceptual armoury we have for the analysis itself’ (p.151).

M. Huxley
Open University, Department of Geography
Milton Keynes MK7 6AA, UK

doi:10.1016/S0962-6298(02)00037-9

Boundaries of faith: geographic perspectives on religious fundamentalism

Roger W. Stump; Rowman & Littlefield. 2000. 249pp

This book could not have appeared at a more opportune time, given the growth
of interest in religious fundamentalism, much of it based on ignorance, following
the events of September 11th. Whatever is being written about religious fundamental-
ism by political scientists, sociologists and theologians, there is clearly a geographic
dimension which requires attention, both at the local levels of the individual and the
community neighbourhood, as well as at the global and international levels of analy-
sis.
The author is known for his work on what could broadly be described a religious
geography and his attempt to move away from simple descriptive categories to a
broader analysis of how religion impacts communities and spaces at a variety of
levels. It is an area of study within political and cultural geography which has not
been sufficiently addressed in the past and if only for that reason this book is a
welcome addition to the library.