Matthew G. Hannah. Governmentality and the Mastery of Territory in Nineteenth-Century America. (Cambridge Studies in Historical Geography, number 32.) New York: Cambridge University Press. 2000. Pp. xiii, 245. Cloth $59.95, paper $22.95.

Matthew G. Hannah offers a contribution to the historical geography of American state formation in the Gilded Age by using some of Michel Foucault's analytic repertoire to treat the career, work, and publications of Francis Amasa Walker. Special attention is paid to the U.S. censuses of 1870 and 1880, and to Walker's writings on political economy, migration, and education. The book is busily suggestive and, at times, quite insightful.	1
Hannah begins by laying out an analytic framework drawn, oddly, less from Foucault's work on governmentality than from his writings on discursive formations, surveillance, and discipline. "Governmentality" is defined hastily as state-centred and statistically based observations of the social body, or as the practical use of statistics in governmental projects. Hannah sees governmentality as a way of extending his own primary interest in "the logic of social control" (p. 6) operative in the period. To follow Foucault in analyzing statistical discourse, claims Hannah, one must inquire into the places at which statistics emerge, the nature of authorities empowered to speak statistically, and the substance of the statistical determinations they make. Once addressed, such questions will lead us to the investigation of actual statistical practice. Here we will be concerned with the conditions of access to objects of observation ("abstraction"), the manner in which objects are specified ("assortment"), and the process through which observations generated in the field are concentrated at an authoritative central site ("centralization"). This "cycle of social control" will be completed by an analysis of the ways in which statistics are mobilized in regulatory projects.	2
Hannah follows this outline consistently and to some positive effect. His concern with the emergence of statistics yields an interesting account of the changing media in which statistical material was published, from the antebellum general periodical literature to discipline-specific publications in which masculinized professional expertise reigned. Walker is seen both as an active participant in these transformations and as a representative statistical authority. Hannah points to the ways in which Walker's military training and brand of masculinity migrated with him into state service. Because men monopolized statistical production in the federal government and in late nineteenth-century professional associations, Hannah claims the literature has missed the inherently masculinized nature of governmentality.	3
Given the comparative weakness of the central government, census making was the major project in which statistical determinations of the social body were made. Hannah thus analyzes the conduct of the censuses of 1870 and 1880. He is alive to the ways in which census knowledge is dependent on the conditions of its own production and on the interpretive grid embodied in census design. What is observed is bound up with the logistics of the observational process, including the quality of the observers, and Hannah points to the ways in which the census for Walker was another military operation. Particularly instructive is a discussion of how Walker gave material substance to the social body as a national body in his remarkable Statistical Atlas of the United States (1874). The atlas specified elements in the social body and bound them to spatial divisions.	4
The final chapters in the book deal with Walker's analytic work. Through his writings on political economy, migration, and education, we see Walker taking population as an object whose dynamic principles can be known and mastered through statistical analysis. His main concerns were with labor mobility, white middle-class fertility decline, and the dangerous influx of "foreigners." Hannah is insightful in pointing to the ways in which gender was central to these concerns. Women's domesticity, for instance, provided the element of fixity necessary for civilization under conditions of labor mobility. And white men's "shrinking" and "withdrawal" from their reproductive duties, faced with the degraded lives of the foreign element, were at the base of fertility decline.	5
I found it rewarding to read this book, although I also found it to be theoretically gawky. Foucault arguably broke with the structuralist logic of his discourse analysis and moved well beyond the analysis of "docile bodies" in his governmentality work, which was certainly not about "social control." Rather, Foucault attempted to give a non- Marxist version of modern state formation and government capable of accounting for the ways in which individual conduct had become implicated in governmental thought and practice, particularly under political liberalism. Key to the elaboration of this project was an awareness of the importance of statistical thinking and practice in relation to population. But Foucault also broadened the concept "government" to refer to all dimensions of the "conduct of conduct," to all attempts to structure the autonomy of others. And he also became interested in the ways in which individuals drew on technical resources and social practices to fashion themselves. In his final formulations of the concept, "governmentality" referred to the intersection of technologies of power, domination, and meaning making with technologies of the self.	6
Hannah seems to have absorbed little of this, and, seen in this light, some of his observations are less than telling. For instance, "governmentality" is masculinized only because Hannah defines the projects of moral and social reform in which women were invested as nongovernmental. Yet, clearly, they were about the government of the conduct of others. If one followed the analysis of techniques of the self, Walker would not appear, as he does in the book, as a subject constructed through the structure of discourse, but as an active agent of self-fashioning in a particular context. We could make better sense of the migration of military tactics from the battlefield to the office in that way, since it is not discourse that migrates. Similarly, the problem of middle-class fertility decline could be analyzed in terms of technologies of self. And the astonishing representational innovations in Walker's atlas could be probed through an analysis of the technology of meaning making from a governmentality stance. Hannah has done a good deal of interesting work in this book; yet the analytic promise of governmentality might be better realized.	7
Bruce Curtis Carleton University

posted by Lloyd at 10:52 AM