The Secret, the Unspeakable, the Unsaid spatial, discourse, and political economic analysis

CRITICAL CULTURAL GEOGRAPHERS EXPLORE THE same terrain as anthropologists who study space and place. We borrow their spatial strategies, while they return the compliment by capitalizing on the cultural. These papers represent a radical deployment of spatial analysis, one with potential for anthropologists. Allan Pred's unspeakable spaces links a museum exhibit and public space, historically juxtaposing the artifacts in the exhibit and the people in the plaza to decode their racist message. Michael Watts's geography of violence threads psychological repression and aggression through the eye of a political economic analysis of statehood. Are these papers, then, suggesting a new kind of spatial analysis? One that includes multiple scales—the space of the nation, the space of the city, the space of the sect or group, as well as the space of the object, building, square or even the human being? Are we seeing an expansion of spatial analysis to the symbolic realm where anthropologists search for cultural meaning? Another dimension of these papers is their search for hidden meaning—the secret in the Watts paper, the unspeakable in Pred's. These geographers bring their spatial tools and knowledge of the cultural to excavate what lies beneath. In my own research, I connect spatial analysis of gated communities with what residents say about them, relying on critical discourse analysis to identify covert concerns with social order, elitism, and racism. Language, like space, is a form of social practice that is historically situated and dialectical to the social context, that is, both socially shaped and socially shaping. Since language is widely perceived as transparent, it is difficult to see how it