Presidential Address: Eurocentrism in Geography ‐the Case of Asian Urbanization*

This address is in the nature of a series of reflections on underlying intellectual premises that characterize the relationship between Western geographers (defined as those practitioners who generally reside in Anglo‐America, Western Europe, Australia, and New Zealand) and the part of the world called Asia. The argument presented is that this relationship is essentially one‐sided, in which the Western geographers have defined Asia in their Eurocentric terms. This is part of a broader discourse that may be labelled ‘Orientalism.’ The author, who has spent more than 30 years carrying out research on Asia, analyses these intellectual assumptions in terms of his own experience and suggests how a realization of the Eurocentric premises have enabled him largely to discard them and develop a new model of Asian urbanization. Finally, these trends are related to geography's increasing engagement in the main discourse of social theory. Dans ce discours, il s'agit d'une série de considérations sur les prémisses intellectuelles qui caractérisent les relations entre les géographes occidentaux (soit ceux qui habitent en Amérique anglophone, en Europe de l'ouest, en Australie, et à Nouvelle‐Zélande) et les geographes de l'Asie. L'argument est presenté du point de vue des geographes occidentaux, qui decrivent l'Asie en termes eurocentriques. Ceci fait partie d'un sujet plus large, qu'on pourrait nommer ‘l'Orientalisme.’ L'auteur, qui a fait plus de trente ans de recherches sur l'Asie, fait I'analyse de ces premisses dans le cadre de sa propre expérience, et il suggère que la mise en évidence des prémisses eurocentriques lui a permis de les reletter en gros et de développer un nouveau modèle pour décrire l'urbanisation asiatique. Finalernent, l'auteur fait le lien entre ces tendances et le rôle de plus en plus important joué par les geographes dans la dornaine de la théorie sociale en général. From this vantage point, a question somewhat different from that of most historical sociologists arises. Almost all Western writing has been both Eurocentric and written from the hindsight of the 19th and 20th centuries. It has posed the question, crudely paraphrased: What was so special about the West that made it, rather than some other region, the “master” of the world system? Put this way, the question has a self‐congratulatory ring. It looks into the special qualities of the West to account for its success. By contrast, then, it judges the other contenders as deficient insofar as they lacked the characteristics of the West. (Janet Abu‐Lughod 1978–1979, 6)