3. Genealogy of geography
Foucault borrowed the term genealogy from Friedrich Nietzsche (Genealogy of Morality ), with which he achieved a new methodological step forward, and he marked genealogy as the history of the locality. It is a kind of counterbalance to the Hegelian interpretation of world history, which begins the chapter Geographical Basis of World History with the aspiration to totalize historical consciousness as a world-historical process.
These natural differences must, above all, be regarded as exceptional possibilities from which the spirit springs; in this way, they represent the geographical basis. But, of course, we do not care to get acquainted with the soil as an external place. Still, we care about getting acquainted with the natural type of locality, closely connected to the kind and character of the people who originated on such soil. That character is precisely how nations appear in world history and occupy a position and a place in it. - Nature should neither be overestimated nor underestimated; the mild Ionic sky has undoubtedly contributed much to the grace of Homer’s poems, but it alone cannot produce Homer, nor does it always produce them; poets did not appear under Turkish rule (Hegel, 2006: 96).
In an essay entitled Nietzsche, Genealogy, History , Foucault demonstrates the power of what he sees as Nietzsche’s genealogical method, a ”multidisciplinary technique for discovering contingent historical trends that support contemporary discourse and practices of power.” That is why he states that, unlike the Hegelian sun of world history, ”genealogy is gray; it is petty and patiently documentary. ”Foucault (2012b: 90) simply emphasizes the difference between archeology and genealogy: ”In two words: perhaps it could be said that archeology would be a method inherent in the analysis of local discursive practices, and genealogy a tactic that, based on the described local discursive practices, into play introduces the liberating knowledge that results from them. And to establish the project as a whole. ”Therefore, for him, the goal of genealogy is to understand the ”history of the present” independently of the known historical narratives and political ideologies that represented the past. Huxley (2009: 255) sees genealogy as ”a method for discovering power exercises, which are involved in setting up certain regimes of truth and valorizing subordinate knowledge.” Thus Foucault’s methodological turn towards genealogy is expressed in the bookSupervise and Punish (1997), which became one of his most famous books. He defines modernity as a disciplinary society shaped by new forms of power. His interest in the genealogical history of the present inspired Foucault to the next series, a trilogy of the history of sexuality, which, despite its differences, ”consistently uses Nietzsche’s deconstruction of the origins of the Western soul and submissive regimes of truth, ethics, and identity.”
Dreyfus and Rabinow (1982: 119) emphasize that the genealogy of knowledge consists of two different corpora: first, from other opinions and theories that have not been established or widely recognized, and, second, from local beliefs and understandings. It seeks to discover these two kinds of knowledge and their struggle to pass them on to others while not claiming to be more accurate than institutionalized knowledge. It represents only the missing part of the puzzle, and it works by isolating the main features of some current political mechanisms and then following them to their historical roots. These historical roots are available to us only thanks to these described corpora of knowledge. That is why Foucault (2012b: 90) defines genealogy as a kind of endeavor with the aim of ”breaking the yoke of historical knowledge and becoming free” and becoming a cadre for ”opposing and fighting against the coercion of unitary, formal and scientific theoretical discourse.” That is why local knowledge contrary to the ”scientific hierarchy of cognition and the internal effects of power” is essential to him.
Unlike the method of archeology, which is neither formalizing nor interpretive, genealogy is an interpretive, analytical method which, according to Pete (1998), is ”opposed to traditional historical methods of research.” It does not seek to recognize a fixed essence or internal laws. Still, it seeks ”discontinuities, avoiding in-depth searches and recording the past to undermine the notion of a modern march of progress.” As in the previous case, to better understand it, it is necessary to clarify the essential concepts that arise from discursive practices (power, knowledge, and body) and which essentially determine genealogy as a method.
The genealogist finds hidden meanings, sublime truth, and depth of consciousness, which are equally false: instead, the genealogical truth is that things have no essence. In archeology, Foucault sought a space in which we encounter objects and talk about them based on rules regulated by the system. In genealogy, this field is considered a space where social practices occur when subjects engage in a repetitive domination game. History is not the progress of universal achievement, but humanity is moving from one authority to another. Exploring the order of knowledge, as the order of the new discursive practice of the time, Foucault distances his genealogical approach to learning from the history of science:
What distinguishes what we might call the history of science from the genealogy of knowledge is that the history of science is essentially placed on one axis, which is, in general, the axis of knowledge-truth, or, in any case, the axis that goes from the structure of knowledge to demands the truth. In contrast to the history of science, the genealogy of knowledge is placed on another axis, the axis of discourse - power or, if I may say so, the axis of discursive practice - confrontation with power (Foucault, 1998: 217-218)
In History of Sexuality I , Foucault argues that modern ”bio-power emerged in the seventeenth century as a coherent political technology, when the stimulation of life, and the growth and care of the population, became the main challenges of the state.” created modern human sciences, which were still associated with bio-power technologies. Their goal was to produce an obedient but productive body (bodies in advance) and, not as a consequence, capitalism (Dreyfus and Rabinov, 1983). Foucault’s (2012b: 83-112) 1976 lectures emphasize particular aspects of genealogy interesting to geography. First, he favors autonomous, decentralized theoretical production whose correctness does not depend on the approval of established regimes of thought. Second, of subdued knowledge, he means blocks of historical knowledge disguised as functionalist and systematization theory, which usually disqualifies knowledge as inadequate, naive, below the required level of science. Third, by reviving the history of struggle and through that subdued knowledge, Foucault thinks critical discourse can reveal a new essential power. In this sense, genealogy deals with the detailed rediscovery of efforts, reconstructions that would not be possible unless the tyranny of globalizing discourse is eliminated. It is a methodological discourse that Foucault believes in and which genealogy of power he should follow.
Based on this, we can try to deconstruct the imposed political-geographical discourse on the civil war in Sarajevo.11This civil war began with the murder of a Serb wedding party in Sarajevo in 1992 and ended with an international conference in Dayton (USA) in 1995., which starts from the ”fact“ that there were Serbs in Sarajevo and Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1992-95. carried out an “ethnic cleansing” of Muslims (Dahlman & Toal, 2005: 644)22The authors mention the term ethnic cleansing on eighteen occasions, although many facts were not known at that time (2005), not to mention impartial historical studies and judgments of relevant courts.Which neglects the number and structure of the population (before and after the war) as a basic geographical fact. In doing so, they draw their conclusions based on indicators for two smaller inland cities (Zvornik and Jajce) and neglect the state capital, with the most significant demographic, economic and political significance. This kind of interpretation of geographical data is a typical example of a selective approach to facts, which should deconstruct and recognize all discontinuities in these statements, which means rejecting the imposed ”truths” and returning to Foucault’s local knowledge. The best basis for beginning the deconstruction of such approaches is to present the geographical facts about the number and national structure of the population of Sarajevo before and after the war.
Table 2: Ethnic structure of the population of Sarajevo 1991-2013.