The final quarter of the twentieth century has been a time of dramatic change within biblical studies. Their content and their modes of production have evolved in unison. In this essay, I explore the emergence of social world studies, their location in a larger field of scholarship and scholarly communication, the relationship between their early focus on decentralization and decentralization in modes of communication, and the studies' movement toward cognitive and cultural phenomena, especially space and critical spatiality, that inform and regulate social processes. The last interest, as foreseen by Foucault, is shared across Western cultures and across disciplines. This emphasis is related to postmodern developments and the emergence of globalization sustained by late- century technologies, especially electronic modes of communication. Because scholarship during this period has focused increasingly on social theory as is evident in social world studies, a shift toward space and critical spatial studies within biblical could be anticipated.

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The great obsession of the nineteenth century was, as we know, history, with its themes of development and suspension, of crisis and cycle, themes of the ever-accumulating past, with its great preponderance of dead men and the meaning glaciation of the world. . . .The present epoch will perhaps be above all an epoch of space ( Foucault: 22).

For Jonathan Boyarin ". . . 'postmodernism' implies not the progressive supersession of the modern, but a critique from within that preserves the freedom of modernism while dismantling its progressivist pretensions to be the last and culminating word" (Boyarin: 438). Although incomplete, the description captures the spirit of this quarter century and calls attention to two important traits. We live in a cultural swirl that mixes so-called modernist experiences with postmodernist, and the latter challenges the stability, certainty, absolutism, and hegemony of the former. By these canons, in 1975 Norman K. Gottwald and Frank S. Frick stepped forward in a challenged and challenging modernist-postmodernist world when they organized the Society of Biblical Literature Social World of Ancient Israel Consultation and prepublished the Consultation's charter document in the SBL Seminar Papers. Although unforeseen at the time, theirs was a movement against modernist pretensions and toward postmodern critique. With hindsight many seemingly unconnected developments can now be understood as related elements in the constructs of an integral, complex, fluid academic/public world.

The early and mid-1970s are often credited with turning toward postmodernism. Architect Charles Jencks, for example, identifies a day and hour, place, and momentary event in 1972 that marked the end of modernism (23). While most support Boyarin in rejecting precise temporal boundaries, the last half of the twentieth century, especially the last quarter, has witnessed economic, political, social, and cultural transitions and transformations that can be labelled "postmodern."

Spatiality looms large in this milieu. Social space has become a major concern in social theory especially in fields like cultural geography and postmodern cartography. With Kevin Hetherington, I contend that space has become a primary interest among social theorists (20). A decade ago, David Harvey and Stephen Toulmin associated the movements wrought by and accompanying postmodernism with changes in society's spatial and temporal subtexts, and those in turn with shifts in economic bases and modes of production. They agree that subtexts are cultural presuppositions or world views that are generally unexamined because they are assumed to be "the way things are." Toulmin, however, denies a distinct demarcation of modernity from postmodernity, implying continuing subtexts and opting for a transformed "humanized modernity" rather than postmodernity (180). The well-formulated spatial and temporal theories and practices associated with the organized worlds inspired by Descartes and Newton, he says, remain intact.

Although Harvey agrees that space is a cultural subtext and can be useful in assaying social and cultural shifts, he equates the transformation from modernity to postmodernity with a change in space and time experience.

It is, however, by no means necessary to subordinate all objective conceptions of time and space to this [physicists'] particular physical conception, since it, also, is a construct that rests upon a particular version of the constitution of matter and the origin of the universe. The history of concepts of time, space, and time-space in physics has, in fact, been marked by strong epistemological breaks and reconstructions. The conclusion we should draw is simply that neither time nor space can be assigned objective meanings independently of material processes, and that it is only through investigation of the latter that we can properly ground our concepts of the former. This is not, of course, a new conclusion (203-4 [emphasis added]).

Space and time are basic categories of human experience whose meanings, according to Harvey, derive from material processes. Hence, spatial subtexts are constructs that result from praxis.

Developments within biblical studies, including social world studies, are part of this fabric. The content of biblical studies and their praxis, i.e. their modes of investigation, production, and dissemination, have been transformed in this quarter century. It is important to emphasize that the content and practice have been symbiotic, as Harvey suggests in other arenas. Bible and literature, on the one hand, and Bible and history, on the other, emerged as subspecialties within the discipline the same time that new outlets for scholarship were being established. Semeia, an experimental journal for biblical criticism, first published in 1974, provided an impetus leading the field toward new literary modes of biblical interpretation. In the same year, Scholars Press (SP) was launched in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Montana, and an annual meeting program structure that invited research proposals (such as the Social World Group) from rank and file members of the American Academy of Religion (AAR), the American Schools of Oriental Research (ASOR), and the Society of Biblical (SBL) literature meeting jointly was formalized. Robert W. Funk, then Professor of Religious Studies at UM, provided vision and enthusiasm for these endeavors with considerable support in the University and AAR from his colleagues, Ray L. Hart, then editor of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, and Alexander P. Madison, Director of University Printing Services.

Meanwhile in the U.K., Australian and British colleagues, David M. Gunn, David J. A. Clines, and Philip R. Davies were independently planning JSOT Press and its Journal for the Study of the Old Testament (JSOT) during 1974-75 and began publication in Sheffield University's Department of Biblical Studies in 1976. Within a few years, the press had grown substantially so that in 1979 Gunn founded Almond Press with monograph series devoted to studies on Bible and Literature and the Social World of Biblical Antiquities. Meanwhile Clines and Davies nurtured JSOT into Sheffield Academic Press (SAP) which quickly became a major international publisher in biblical studies and other disciplines. In each instance, the new outlets filled quickly with forms of scholarship that previously had not surfaced, and the Almond Press Social World series became the principal forum for published scholarship begun in Gottwald's and Frick's Social World Group and a subsequent SBL/AAR Sociology of Monarchy Seminar co-chaired by Frick and myself.

These developments reveal how scholarship's content is enmeshed in its economics, politics, and sociology, associations that Harvey has argued affect transformations in cultural subtexts. A founding principle of Scholars Press and to a lesser extent of JSOT Press was that scholarship and the crafts and technologies supporting it are inseparably linked. Indeed, the founders thought that for innovative scholarship, particularly humanities scholarship, to emerge and survive in an age of increasing centralizing among publishing outlets, rising costs, and growing elitist ranking among academic institutions -- which drive innovation from bookstores, libraries, and classrooms -- alternative modes of scholarly discourse with differing economies under the custody of scholars themselves must be introduced. ²

The role of technology in these developments, usually ignored, deserves emphasis. The founding of the new publishing outlets corresponded with the printing industry's displacing linotype with off-set printing technologies.³ This innovation was contemporaneous with the introduction of first, IBM Selectric typewriters with typing elements that included bar codes that could be read by optical scanners, and later, first generation word processors with daisy wheel elements. These, in effect, removed typesetting from the printer's shop and placed it in individual scholars' offices. An industry transformed itself, as did its supporting economies.

It was no accident that the first composition room for SP was the Department of Religious Studies office in Missoula and for JSOT the office of Sheffield's Department of Biblical Studies. By giving academics new custody over the editing, management, and material production of their own work, the technology enabled them to create new academic space for themselves, their research, and in other ways, their colleges, seminaries, and universities. In the early 1970s neither Missoula nor Sheffield was considered a first-tier research space. On several spatial scales, they were peripheral. Spatial practice changed the playing field in the U.S. and U.K. by creating new centers of scholarly publication. These made affordable resources, often written by non-traditional and younger scholars and on topics using new approaches, available to those who were otherwise excluded from national and international scholarly discourse. Indeed, the decentralizing that occurred in scholarly communication practices interlaced with the emphasis on non-centralized societies being pursued in social world studies. Again, this was more than a coincidence. New spatialities, new spatial practices, and new spatial studies developed in on two planes, even if their relationships were not fully recognized at the time.

The exceptional concatenation of founding events, changing scholarly circumstances, and new technologies demonstrates that the biblical scholarship took part in the full blooming of Boyarin-style postmodernism in the early and mid 1970s . All aspects of the scholarly enterprise -- content, scholar, technology, and institutional base -- entered into new organic relationships. Two new "non-commercial" academic presses headed by university-based "full-time" academic teaching scholars in English-speaking countries from three regions of the globe, two new experimental journals, and two new modes of biblical interpretation that focused both on literary studies and social scientific approaches entered the scene simultaneously. Each exhibited anti-centralizing tendencies that challenged modernist "progressivist pretensions" cited above. Contrarily, there is ample evidence that such experimental research, program units, articles, and monographs were not previously nurtured, and in some cases not tolerated, in existing establishment institutions, meetings, journals, and presses. The reciprocities demonstrate what I am stressing, namely, that without changes in the economies, politics, and sociology of scholarship the new voices and new approaches such as social world studies could not have been introduced when they were. If spatialities had not changed, the field would have remained the same.

Twenty-five years later at the end of the twentieth century, similar changes in scholarship, economies, and modes of communication and dissemination are occurring. Computer-based electronic communications and aligned technologies of the internet and world-wide web continue to transform commerce, education, travel, and almost every other human endeavor. We may classify internet resources a "defining technology" whose impact is comparable to and shared with that Jay David Bolter attributes to computer technology: technology that affects a culture well beyond the capacity of the technology itself.

A defining technology develops links, metaphorical or otherwise, with a culture's science, philosophy, or literature; it is always available to serve as a metaphor, example, model, or symbol. A defining technology resembles a magnifying glass, which collects and focuses seemingly disparate ideas in a culture into one bright, sometimes piercing ray. Technology does not call forth major cultural changes by itself, but it does bring ideas into a new focus by explaining and exemplifying them in new ways to larger audiences' (Bolter: 11).

Visualized internet traffic is a clear model and symbol of societies' social practices and experienced spatialities. But the claim for the internet and world-wide web can be extended. Not only does the technology "bring new ideas into focus," as Bolter's definition stipulates, it creates a "space of flows" that stands over against a historically rooted "space of places" (Castells: 376-428), and it displaces the industrial age's defining mode of production with today's mode of information (Poster). Technologies used for communication and publication are further decentralized, moving now from the press to individuals' offices, homes, and automobiles.

Following these leads and borrowing John Ruggie's argument for postmodern international relations, I contend that the cluster of practices and technologies we know as "the Net" are forcing a new social epistemology, i.e. the "mental equipment" needed for understanding spatiality today (157). This is a space where territorial boundaries are diminished or abandoned, where communications and changes are instantaneous, where communities are formed by individuals working in solitude, where global no longer implies assembled parts, and where "where" loses much of its previous force. For social world studies, it invites a review of presuppositions and subtexts, keeping minds open to issues of territoriality that modernist scholarly essentialist pretensions have struggled to define, defend, and foreclose.

These past and current changes, therefore, make today's spatial subtexts especially powerful and important for understanding history and society -- past, present and future. The mutations affect the pasts we construct as well as the way we construct the past. Information, visualization, and spatiality operate in a new organic synthesis. Today's society becomes visual informational space while past societies' spatial subtexts are thrown open for reinvestigation. Expectedly, space is in the forefront of disciplines as they redefine their subject matters. Serious minds are exploring the anthropology of cyberspace (Escobar), architecture of cyberspace (Benedikt), sociology of cyberspace (Turkel), and urbanology of cyberspace (Boyer). In a different sphere, a cyberdiocese has been established with its own ordained Roman Catholic bishop (http://www.partenia.fr). Each testifies to redefined social and cultural spatialities based on globalized relationships that electronic technologies now sustain. The milieu confirms Foucault's prediction and suggests a devolving of territorial boundaries and territorial spatiality that modernist scholarship felt it had demonstrated. While they are beyond our scope, places like Nunavut, Quebec, Kosovo, Ireland, Wales, Scotland, Israel - Palestine, the Soviet Union, the ethereal space of offshore commerce, and city "nations" like Hong Kong and Singapore demonstrate present-day practical consequences of territorial unbundling and a search for new spatialities.

In order to discuss space and critical spatiality two discoveries of the past 25 years must be recalled. They are 1) a shifting from "scientific accuracy" models to "social theory" models of scholarship and 2) realization of the importance of segmented social systems and their modes of production and organization for understanding non-state societies

As in other disciplines, biblical studies has witnessed a movement beyond exclusive modernist "scientific accuracy" models toward postmodern "social theory" models of scholarship. Although social world criticism is a litmus test for this claim, the same transition has been explicit in cartography where a move toward postmodernism and deconstruction championed by the late J. B. Harley and others has introduced alternative epistemologies rooted in social theory rather than scientific positivism. "[T]he task is to search for the social forces that have structured cartography and to locate the presence of power and its effects in all map knowledge" (1992: 2). There postmodernism is challenging Enlightenment and modernist assumptions by exposing alternative rules governing the cultural production of maps. Contrary to the belief that maps are neutral mimetic representations of real physical and social worlds -- i.e. images with scientific reliability that will become more accurate with new technologies such as Global Positioning Systems and satellite imaging -- social theory is demonstrating that maps like other texts disguise social contexts and impose their own hegemonies of power and privilege. The hegemonic strategies are first the "rule of ethnocentricity," the tendency for societies to put themselves at the center of maps, and second the "rule of social order," the tendency of cartographers to use verbal text on maps as commentary in order to convey information and impressions about classifications and measurements of social and political factors beyond the physical or human landscape (Harley, 1992: 6).

"Biblical studies" could be substituted for "cartography" and the forgoing statement would retain its validity. Confidence in scientific accuracy models of research began to wane as historical critical and literary critical methods and their companion comparative philological studies that had held sway were supplemented and challenged by new approaches. Not surprisingly, power and privilege were at stake. The former approaches enjoyed the authority of senior scholars and major research centers, mostly northern hemisphere white males together with their alma maters and places of employment. Convinced of the exclusive validity of traditional methods, they and their approaches dominated the field for much of this century until other approaches were proposed by new voices seeking a first hearing in the guild. As the mood and balance began to shift because of new economies of scholarly discourse, questions that could not be answered by earlier methods and approaches became legitimate research interests, albeit often in the recesses of the discipline inhabited by graduate students, minority academics, and researchers at second- and third-tier institutions. The march toward scientific accuracy as the only or primary goal slowed as certainty about past "truths" and scholars' ability to "recover" them in literature and history were challenged.

The new mood led directly to the second new awareness, i.e. of segmented social systems. Diminished confidence in scholars' ability to determine authors' intentions and ancient meanings forced specialists to think more broadly about cultures and societies in toto rather than searching piecemeal through texts and artifacts for an individual author's or actor's statements, actions, or aspirations. The forest came into focus as the trees began to fade. Social world studies demonstrated that the nature and organization of ancient societies, including those commonly referred to as "ancient Israel," organized themselves according to varying economic strategies. Earlier perceptions of high centralization that followed predictable lock step evolutionary stages of non-state development were abandoned or greatly refined. We must admit that the evolutionary bias of early studies using social theory models, including those in social world of biblical antiquity studies, sometimes employed wooden cross-cultural comparisons uncritically. To the extent that the studies lacked sophistication, their specific conclusions are open to reinterpretation. Nevertheless, the comparisons, clumsy as they may have been, enabled users to detect information embedded in literary and material remains that otherwise could not have been noticed. Furthermore, the attempt to investigate ancient societies freed investigators from essentialist quests for ancient "facts" and "truths" about individuals and isolated events that prevailed in modernist scientific accuracy models of research. Thus, in spite of shortcomings, early uses of social theory advanced scholarship and knowledge of the past.

Segmentary societies figured prominently in early studies by Wilson, Gottwald, Frick, Coote and Whitelam, myself (1981; 1983; 1988), and others.⁴ Each borrowed freely from comparative sociology and political anthropology, and understandings of segmentation varied accordingly. One of the least complicated, but when examined in light of comparative ethnography most accurate, is the late Ernest Gellner's classic description that proposes only two characteristics (4). Social order is maintained through balanced opposition rather than being enforced from above by a monopoly of power. And, units within a segmented system -- families, tribes, moieties, etc. -- are apt to describe themselves by using kinship and/or territorial terminology. I accept Gellner's view, and as we progress we shall see additional reasons for doing so.

But social world studies have continued to develop and expand their scope. The technological changes that have moved the world into an age of space and globalization have pressed academic disciplines not only toward other territorialities, but also toward cognitive issues. Social scientific means of analyzing ancient social structures and institutions now include interest in cognitive aspects of ancient social worlds such as spatiality. In spite of surface appearances, this late-century interest in mental aspects of ancient societies is not a return to earlier quests for authors' intent. The earlier interest centered on individuals, real or fictive, while the latter remains focused on societies and cultures, and their interest is in cultural subtexts rather than explicit claims and actions. Hence, the discipline has not entered a circularity.

A parallel development within archaeology is illuminating. There essentialist, positivist, and modernist preprocessual archaeology that examined ancient data as if it were innately "history" or could be read as factual history gave way to processual "new" archaeology with interest in social processes that can be recovered from material remains. This in turn raised questions that moved the discipline toward postprocessual quests such as postmodern and cognitive archaeology, subfields that examine societies' cultural phenomena (Renfrew and Zubrow). Social world criticism has moved biblical studies in the same direction(s).

Most of these observations have been made before. The novelty is the emphasis on spatiality. I am not concerned with either modernist cause-effect relationships or the intellectual history of a discipline, but with the way that praxis, spatiality, and content interact to play off against status quo positionings that would hold privileged spaces for themselves. Although new modes of production did offer new openings for innovative research, I do not mean that new technologies merely opened new opportunities for innovations in scholarly organizations. Opportunism was never the issue. The circumstances were more complex and profound.

Much recent biblical scholarship has emphasized the connections among authors, readers, and texts, and how the experiences in the worlds of each are enmeshed in understandings of the others. Similarly, in their studies experience of European nation-states, Sasson and Whitelam have demonstrated the influence that scholars' personal experiences has on reconstructions of the biblical past. My argument is analogous although rooted in the economies and experiences of modes of scholarly communications.

I am proposing that living in the last quarter of the twentieth century when decentralizing tendencies witnessed in two stages of communication technology, first printing, then electronic, has affected scholars' thinking, their social epistemology. The formation of new presses and journals in the 1970s, made possible by new technologies, contributed -- for some consciously, for others unconsciously -- to interests in new topics of research. Not surprisingly, those interests centered on ancient processes that were analogous to ones at work in the scholars' own lives. The first decade of social world studies in the Social World Group and Sociology of Monarchy Seminar examined almost exclusively the place of non-centralized segmentary societies and their relation to centralized systems! This was surely influenced by George Mendenhall's peasant revolt hypothesis, the experience of Vietnam, and Norman Gottwald's long-term work on tribal Yahwism. But technological changes in the academy were instrumental as well.

Today, electronic technologies again force new questions about alternative boundaries, ethereal spaces, and networks of relationships. And once again social world studies have engaged the issues, this time in a decade of research in the AAR/ASOR/SBL Constructs of Ancient History and Religion Group (now the AAR/SBL Constructs of the Social and Cultural Worlds of Antiquity Group), and in the year 2000, in an AAR/SBL Constructions of Ancient Space
Seminar co-chaired by Jon L. Berquist and myself.

Beyond the spatial theory outlined below, a theoretical basis for these claims can be found in philosophy and sociology of science where science is understood to be a moral achievement rather than a quest for truth. The same can be argued for any scholarship. Without trust and consensus among scholars there is no scholarly knowledge (Harré: 19-21). Knowledge that is not public and does not evoke a consensus is not considered scholarly. And a new consensus can displace an earlier one as knowledge advances. John Ziman argues convincingly that the locus for consensus building and consensus changing is publication (8-9). That is where scholar, community, and knowledge intersect and interact. Because he was speaking in an age dominated by print-media, his remark should now be recast to include electronic forms of "publication." In any case, control over modes of communication affects scholarly space by either opening or limiting access, thereby controlling the rise and demise of consensus and careers.

Readers will recognize autobiographical traits in my descriptions.⁵ For me electronic communication technology did not begin the process of illuminating relationships between technology and scholarly content. The internet and web are not the first or only metaphors or cultural symbols appropriate to changes in spatiality. If Renaissance art and the invention of single point perspective signaled and symbolized a breakthrough whose consequences were felt from artists' paintings to the bundling of territorial space in ways that gave rise to the concept of nation-states under single sovereigns (Edgerton; Ruggie: 159), the symbolic equivalent in the age of unbundling is holography. This technology, following on two-dimensional cubism, offers new "mental equipment" by shattering single point perspective. In an earlier study, I stressed that in a hologram any viewer within the image's parallax can see an entire image in three-dimensional splendor from his or her own perspective (1988). As Renaissance painting allowed societies to focus on spatiality from a sovereign's perspective thereby nurturing territorial rule and boundaries, so holography breaks that monopoly and distributes its rewards evenly among all who can and care to observe. Modernist spatial boundaries dissolve; stable images become fluid; and dimensionality increases. Postmodern multi-perspective imagining enters, and alternative spatialities must be sought.

Critical spatiality attempts to confront social and historical disparities by consciously counterbalancing nineteenth and twentieth century (over)emphases on society and especially on history. Emerging within postmodern geography and cartography, critical studies on space seek to reintroduce spatiality in an ontological trialectic that includes historicality, sociality, and spatiality (Soja 1989: 131-137; 1996: 70-76; also, Harley 1992). Like a surveyor's theodolite that is missing one of its three leveling screws, omitting, ignoring, or suppressing spatiality leads to imbalanced, distorted, and continually flawed understandings and practices in the real world.

Many lenses are available for penetrating surface appearances. "Landscape," "land," "place," "home," "geographical imagination," and other related concepts are all employed (e.g. Tuan; Hirsch and O'Hanlon; Gregory 1994a; 1994b; 1995). However, before summarizing and applying the theories I borrow, it will be helpful to cite a case that illustrates the importance of critical spatiality: Mrs. Rosa Parks on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama.

Mrs. Parks' simple gesture of refusing to relinquish her seat to a white male in the front of a bus on December 1, 1955, ignited the American Civil Rights Movement. Her's was an act against long-term discriminatory practices that occluded her and all other black people from a particular space, and it was a catalyst for radical racial change in the U.S. The front of the bus was of course physically the front of a bus. It was a material space (Soja's Firstspace below). And the bus had been designed in such a way that the front was preferred over the rear for its comfort, ability to see, ease of access, etc. (Soja's Secondspace).

But they were not the issues giving the front seats their meaning and significance. American culture, U.S. history, slavery, racial discrimination, and the bus being in a southern city meant that Mrs. Park and all African-Americans were by practice and policy marginalized, excluded, and denied access to that space. Her rights and dignity, indeed her entire life, were spatially circumscribed and controlled in such a way that we cannot understand the Civil Rights Movement, U.S. culture, or the trauma in our society if we ignore space and its meaning on that bus. Ironically, the space was simultaneously central and peripheral. Holding it was central to both the cause and the counter-cause. Holding its center also made it marginal, off limits, and out of bounds for those who did not hold it.

Yes, history was an issue, and so was society. But it was space and contesting space with a spatial practice that changed life in America's southlands. Segregated praxis was overwhelmed by integrating action. The same for the strikes, marches, and sit-ins that followed in those painful years. Clear evidence, I propose, that spatiality is constructed through social practice and that there is a spatiality beyond Firstspace and Secondspace that we will discuss below. We must understand Mrs. Parks' spatiality, and understand it critically the same way we would understand her status not just historically, but critically historically. Critical spatiality is an important part of an ontological trialectic.

The scene forces critical spatiality by raising a telling question. If someone born, raised, and living in that time and place had been asked to portray that society, would this scene have entered the record? The answer is "probably not!" The persons compiling the record would undoubtedly have been the same as those deciding where Mrs. Parks could not sit. They would appeal to history and society as reasons for maintaining the status quo. The interplay of the material Firstspace and social designer's Secondspace would continue unchallenged and unscathed. Without Mrs. Park's action, her power, knowledge, and space would remain in a singular interlocked hegemony that excluded her.

Much of the work on critical spatiality is inspired by Foucault's concept of heterotopia and Henri Lefebvre's monumental, Production of Space, whose views are extended by geographer Edward W. Soja (1989; 1993; 1996). For the first, heterotopia are places of Otherness that in relation to other sites either unsettle spatial and social relations or cause alternative representations of those relations. They are spaces of alternate ordering which may or may not be places of oppression and resistance (Hetherington: 41).

Several themes unite cultural geographers who develop concepts of alternative spatiality. First, space and place are not treated as sets of relations outside of society but implicated in the production of those social relations and are themselves, in turn, socially produced. Second, space and place are seen to be situated within relations of power and in some cases within relations of power-knowledge. Power is said to be performed through spatial relations and encoded in the representation of space or as 'place myths.' Third, spatial relations and places associated with those spatial relations are seen to be multiple and contested. A place does not mean the same thing for one group of social agents as it does for another (Hetherington: 20).

Although not always, the alternate spaces are often seen as places of resistance, struggle, or change, as suggested in the example of Mrs. Parks cited above. Lefebvre emphasizes such contesting and associates it with capitalism. For him, space is produced in society through a triadic process consisting of "Spatial Practice," "Representations of Space," and "Representational Spaces" (33). Spatial practice (espace perçu, perceived space) produces space by capitalist production and reproduction. It is both medium and outcome of human activity, behavior, and experience. Representations of space (espace conçu, conceived space) are the hegemonic ideological representations associated with this space that obscure its social practices by rendering them invisible. These mental spaces are representations of power, ideology, control, and surveillance. Resistance to these relations must make them visible. Representational spaces or spaces of representations (espace vécu, lived space) linked to resistance movements do just that. Associated with the clandestine and underground side of social life these are spaces as directly lived. They are, therefore, spaces of freedom and change.

Soja draws heavily and explicitly on Lefebvre as well as on the literature of minorities and marginalized individuals and groups such as the writings of critics Cornell West, Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, and bell hooks (1996). Edward Said's studies on Orientalism are especially important for him, as they are for others (compare Boyarin; Gregory 1995).
In his first study, Soja spells out the need for restoring spatiality to the status of equal partner with historicality and sociality (1989). In a later article, he describes the stages in the development of modernity that he presumes have led to the present condition of postmodernity (1993: 117-123). His most cogent and sustained arguments for critical spatiality, however, are found in his third study entitled Thirdspace (1996). There he moves beyond Lefebvre's Marxism in an effort to embrace the unvoiced and disenfranchised who are persistently excluded because their spatiality is ignored (1996: 106-144).

Soja proposes two trialectics, one ontological, the other epistemological.

The three moments of the ontological trialectic thus contain each other; they cannot successfully be understood in isolation or epistemologically privileged separately, although they are all too frequently studied and conceptualized this way, in compartmentalized disciplines and discourses. Here again, however, the third term, Spatiality, obtains a strategic positioning to defend against any form of binary reductionism or totalization. The assertion of Spatiality opens the Historicality and Sociality of human lifeworlds to interpretations and knowledges that many of its most disciplined observers never imagined, while simultaneously maintaining the rich insights they provide for understanding the production of lived space (Soja 1996: 72).

The trialectic ontology on its own, however, does not satisfy Soja's concerns. Again following Lefebvre, he proposes "Thirding-as-Othering" as a means of escaping the binarisms, dialectics, and opposition that lead to a "closed logic of either/or" that capture physicalist (materialist) and mentalist (idealist) geographers in a hopelessly closed, mutually reinforcing exchange. In it geographers trade the material world and representations of it as if they were object and subject when in fact they are one and the same. Openness to "a third possibility or 'moment' that partakes of the original pairing but is not just a simple combination or an 'in between' position along an all-inclusive continuum" enables one to consider other spatialities (1996: 60).

To introduce social spatiality produced through social practice, a trialectic epistemology of spatiality is proposed. Social space is not a thing but a set of relations that are produced through praxis. He offers his own descriptions of this trialectic of spatiality, each with its own epistemology: Firstspace (perceived space), Secondspace (conceived space), and Thirdspace (lived space). For him, all spaces are all three (private communication 5/27/99).

Firstspace epistemologies tend to privilege objectivity and materiality, and to aim toward a formal science of space. The human occupance of the surface of the earth, the relations between society and nature, the architectonics and resultant geographies of the human "built environment," provide the almost naively given sources for the accumulations of (First)spatial knowledge. Spatiality thus takes on the qualities of a substantial text to be carefully read, digested, and understood in all it details. As an empirical text, Firstspace is conventionally read at two levels, one which concentrates on the accurate description of surface appearances (an indigenous mode of spatial analysis), and the other which searches for spatial explanation in primarily exogenous social, psychological, and biophysical processes (1996: 75).

This is the space that has dominated geography. It is positivist, materialist, and becomes increasingly detailed with new technologies as mentioned above. It is the space of the physical world, but can also be that of social entities that geographers study. Alone, however, it is fundamentally incomplete and partial (1996: 78). The boundary separating it from Secondspace is blurred.

Despite these overlappings, Secondspace epistemologies are immediately distinguishable by their explanatory concentration on conceived rather than perceived space and their implicit assumption that spatial knowledge is primarily produced through discursively devised representations of space, through the spatial workings of the mind. In its purest form, Secondspace is entirely ideational, made up of projections into the empirical world from conceived or imagined geographies. This does not mean that there is no material reality, no Firstspace, but rather that the knowledge of this material reality is comprehended essentially through thought, as res cognito, literally "thought things." In empowering the mind, explanation becomes more reflexive, subjective, introspective, philosophical, and individualized (1996: 78-79).

Secondspace is the domain of artists and architects who present the world of their imaginations. It encompasses the cognitive maps which, in some cases, become substitutes for "real" maps that plot Firstspace. If Secondspace images were taken seriously, Firstspace would collapse into Secondspace as the latter becomes the substitute for the former.

Soja's description of Thirdspace is not as precise or detailed as the others. Like "Thirding-as-Othering," Thirdspace is a "strategic reopening and rethinking new possibilities" that shift from epistemology to ontology, an "ontological rebalancing act [that] induces a radical skepticism toward all established epistemologies" (1996: 81). Relating Thirdspace to Lefebvre's spaces of representation, he stresses political choice and lived space as strategic locations and places of resistance.

These spaces are also vitally filled with politics and ideology, with the real and the imagined intertwined, and with capitalism, racism, patriarchy, and other material spatial practices that concretize the social relations of production, reproduction, exploitation, domination, and subjection. They are the "dominated spaces," the spaces of the peripheries, the margins and the marginalized, the "Third Worlds" that can be found on all scales, in the corpo-reality of the body and mind, in sexuality and subjectivity, in individual and collective identities from the most local to the most global. They are the chosen spaces for struggle, liberation, and emancipation (1996: 68).

Others agree on the importance of spaces/places filled with meaning, emotion, and struggle.

Places are constructed and experienced as material ecological artifacts and intricate networks of social relations. They are the focus of the imaginary, of beliefs, longings, and desires (most particularly with respect to the psychological pull and push of the idea of "home"). They are an intense focus of discursive activity, filled with symbolic and representational meanings, and they are a distinctive product of institutionalized social and political-economic power (Harvey: 316).

Thirdspaces, i.e. the lived spaces, command Soja's attention. They (or it), he insists, have been lost or suppressed and need to be restored. A trialectic that brings lived space into tension with physical space and mental conceptions of it is required, and Soja believes that postmodernism is doing so. This is the space that I have attributed to Rosa Parks and to those who are excluded from the world's resources such as publishing and internet access. It is the spatiality that must be examined critically the same way scholarship has examined history and society in order to understand, as best we can, what happened in the past and is happening in our world today.

I borrow a first application from work on postmodernism and medieval polity. International Relations specialist John Ruggie argues that "the spatial extension of the medieval system of rule was structured by a nonexclusive form or territoriality" where frontier zones rather than firm boundary lines allowed mobility lost in modernist structures (151). He claims that first the modernist period is a territorial "epochal threshold" (144), and as we've already noted, second as a result of dominant modernist perspectives, today new "mental equipment" is needed in order to think about territoriality (157), and third single-point perspective is important for understanding modernist territoriality (159). For him, medieval territoriality holds a corrective model.

In contrast to the modernist perspectives, during the medieval period legitimacies were nested and overlapping. This concept of multi-perspective institutional forms, he contends, "offers a lens through which to view other possible instances of international transformation today," where, again as we've noted, a process of territorial unbundling and rebundling is occurring across the globe (172). Therefore, the search for paradigms bypasses the modernist era and returns to premodern conditions in search of insights and models.

Ruggie is not alone. Regarding the European Union, James Anderson also links today to the medieval period and to changes in spatiality.

Whereas the medieval-to-modern transformation involved sovereignty over everything, secular and spiritual, being bundled together in territorial states, we may now be witnessing an accelerated unbundling of territoriality, with for example the growth of 'common markets' and of various transnational (or, more strictly speaking, transstate) functional regimes and political communities not delimited primarily in territorial terms . . .
The medieval-to-modern transformation in sovereignty and territoriality has been linked to changes in the social experience and conceptualization of space and time. It is hypothesized that a contemporary modern-to-postmodern transformation, or the emergence of 'late-modern' political forms reminiscent of medieval Europe, is associated with similarly radical changes in how we are now experiencing space-time in conditions of accelerating globalization (134).

Anderson goes on to argue that the modernist bundling of territoriality, sovereignty, and nationalism was in fact a historical anomaly. "The historical uniqueness of this modern system of rule is suggested by the contrasting variety, fluidity, nonterritoriality, or nonexclusive territoriality of premodern political systems" (141). He continues by proposing what might be called a cluster of postmodern "nested sovereignties" modelled on the overlapping authorities and hierarchies of the medieval era (147-150).

Ruggie's and Anderson's claims for fluidity, nonexclusive territoriality, and alternative spatialities have been graphically illustrated. A number of medieval Muslim maps do not contain clear boundary markers or lines separating territories (Brauer). In Muslim geography, "border zones" existed where boundary lines did not. These were areas where the sovereignty of neighboring powers competed and overlapped at the outer reaches of the sovereigns' domains. On the margins, neighboring powers compete and/or share "control."

It was demonstrated that in fact medieval Arabo-Islamic geographers, . . . if they admitted the existences of political boundaries at all, did not conceive of the margins of adjoining individual states as sharp borderlines. . . . geographers described all such borders in terms implying boundary zones of significant depth surrounding a core area of any given political entity within which its capital was located. Transition zones associated with external frontiers were shown to be occupied by a mixed border population differing in its composition from that of the core areas of these states (Brauer: 65).

A central polity's power diminished in proportion to a region's distance from the center, and the maps reflect this. Geographers between 820 and 1320 A.D., nevertheless, did not seem to have a concept of area, a lack that Brauer credits to the breakdown of communication between these specialists and Arabo-Islamic mathematicians of the day who were already using area as an abstract concept (67). From this he resolves his own query:

With these data we concluded that, in accordance with Ibn Khaldun's dictum, medieval Muslim states were indeed conceived of as being surrounded on all sides by boundary zones and hence lacked the sharply defined territory that would require border lines. Clearly, one could conclude that such states cannot have been conceived of as territorial states by the people of the time (67).

Although he does not develop his insight, Brauer strongly implies a linkage between boundary lines and statehood or nationhood. In other words, as many others have argued, boundary lines are constitutive parts of nations, states, and empires, but are lacking in less centralized political structures. Boundaries are associated with a particular kind of knowledge, power, and spatiality so that in non-state environments spatiality bears a different meaning.

Comparative ethnographic examples of "premodern" territoriality are limited, but the available studies are both compelling and reminiscent of Gellner's description of segmented societies and Soja's claims for Thirdspace. Caroline Humphrey's work on landscapes in Mongolia demonstrates the way in which people identify with uses and practices rather than appearances or views of land. "In Mongolian culture itself landscapes are more in the nature of practices designed to have results: it is not contemplation of the land (gazar) that is important but interaction with it, as something with energies far greater than the human" (135). The land pervades inhabitants and their herds, and it influences where they graze and settle.
Humphrey contrasts two notions of "energies-in-nature" found among the chiefs on the one hand and the shamans on the other. In terms similar to those used by Soja, she notes that these "emerge by the exercise of different forms of agency which are socially constituted in a basically asymmetrical way" (136). People actually have relationships to natural entities so that nature's "unpredictable energies and beneficial powers can be tamed by ritualized actions" (137). Both chiefs and shamans engage with land on behalf of social groups, but the chiefly groups characteristically do not include women where the shaman groups do.

The chiefly landscape is an ego-centered universe with a center that moves. It includes the sky and all its phenomena and therefore is more hierarchical than the shaman landscape. The goal is a reaching upward to join the earth and sky, and the position of the center does not matter. This landscape determines nomadic patterns with a new center established with every new camp.

In the shamanic landscape, the earth is female and the sky male. It opens up a vision of the cosmos. "Here the earth as a whole, with its complexities and its subterranean depths, is seen in relation to the sky, with its ethereal layers" (149). Where the chiefly landscape is "punctual" focusing on centrality, the shamanic includes the idea of laterality and movement. Notions of power are also contrasted. Chiefs (and Buddhist lamas) gain legitimacy from social processes, where shaman gain their power directly from the energies of the world rather than from social training.

How the experience of space and land can be used in order to create a sense of Thirdspace is apparent in Tom Selwyn's anthropology of modern Israeli landscape. There he documents how landscape contributes "potent metaphors" that force the will to establish and maintain the State of Israel (114-134).

Selwyn's study is in some ways the reverse side of Soja's coin. Instead of showing how a Thirdspace epistemology that depends on social practice can expose the lived space of others, he demonstrates how creating Thirdspace experiences in a particular land can transform a Firstspace into a Thirdspace, a lived space, that is loaded with meaning for its inhabitants. Sadly, but predictably, he illustrates as well that the same process depends on, or at least results in, a redefining of indigenous inhabitants, Arabs and others, as the "bad others" (114, 117-119).

For early Zionist settlers the redemptive quality of physical labor blended with ideology to enliven ideas of liberation and redemption.

First, there was the idea of establish a direct and working partnership both with the land, and more broadly, with the landscape as a whole, in order to express a human nature that had become cramped and partial in the ghetto. Secondly, there was the comparable notion of cognitively associating land, landscape, and the 'nature' therein with the resurgent nation. Thirdly, subsuming both of these, was a strong holistic ethic in which the 'whole person' was realized only within the encompassing framework of the nation organized on the basis of collective ownership and collective agricultural work: ideologically, this was not an individualistic revolution, but an essentially socialist one. Fourthly, there was the idea of building and releasing the 'old-new' Jewish culture (to borrow form Herzl) based on farming rather than commerce: rediscovering, in some senses, a way of life which was widely believed to have ended for Jews with the sacking of the Second Temple. Fifthly, there was the ideal of the 'pioneer' (chalutz) who was associated with a particular and recognizable set of dispositions towards the landscape and who went out into the land and countryside to discover its most intimate pathways, characteristics, and secrets in order to settle on and in it. Radically connected with these dispositions and practices were views about social relations which challenged established ideas and values about hierarchies of sex, age, and (in a more problematic sense) class. Indeed the significance of the term chalutz was, precisely, that it combined these elements. Finally, the whole project was conceived of as a redemptive process from which, as Liebman and Don-Yehiya (1984: 49) put it 'God was excised, and nature...emphasised' (117).
Moving to the contemporary scene, Selwyn argues that landscape metaphors form part of a moral discourse to be used in making distinctions between "us" and "them" -- the good and the bad. Activities organized by the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel (SPNI) such as walking tours, workers' education programs, scouting practices, and studying land in a way that bases it on both the Bible and science creates a knowledge of the country. Each activity, first of all, is just that, an activity, and each involves a degree of physical exertion. The idea is to experience the space "holistically," associating history, architecture, ancient studies, and other realms that when woven together produce patriotic feelings. One SPNI administrator noted, "We don't like to say we teach love of the country; it just happens by itself; its fascinating" (120).

Selwyn concludes by showing the connection between the SPNI (in Hebrew, the Society for the Defense of Nature of Israel) and the Israel Defense Force. He suggests that the use of the word "defense" is significant. Why does Israel's nature and landscape need defending? The short answer is ecological. The long one has a great deal to do with the State and politics. Writing Holy Land guide books and sponsoring biblically based museum exhibits by romantic, Bible-loving, empire building peoples abroad (and Selwyn emphasizes the British) contributes to the fusing of a defense myth.

. . . nature touring serves the fundamental function of uniting a potentially divided society. He [Ze'evi] sees Israel as being split between orthodox and non-orthodox Jews, between Ashkenazim and Sephardim, between the political left and right and so forth. The only common factor they have is a properly organized landscape. This is the only arena in which Jews from all these divisions, as well as others from abroad, can be guaranteed to express their common nationality. . . . Conservation of the landscape, and intimate contact with it, thus appears as the surest way of protecting the nation as a whole, both from internal schisms and external influences and threats. In that sense the Israeli government is right to recognize the part played by the SPNI -- and the Israeli landscape it defends -- in the war effort" (131).

One of the most widely quoted statements on premodern space -- in spite of its critics and its occasional cultural insensitivity -- is geographer Robert Sack's study of human territoriality. Sack notes that in band and tribal societies "[f]amily, kin, and ritualized friendships provide the complex channel of reciprocity through which labor, resources, and products flow to equalize discrepancies and to share in times of emergencies" (57). There is an organic linkage between peoples and their territories so that the balanced opposition in segmentary systems is not between geometrically defined or delineated geographical spaces. The balance is between peoples and, speaking geographically, between territorialities they occupy because opposing peoples are there. The locations can be places, thirdspaces, and lived spaces as outlined above. Territoriality is "the attempt by an individual or group to affect, influence, or control people, phenomena, and relationships, by delimiting and asserting control over a geographic area" (19). The effort to exclude and control means, of course, that some are included and other are not. Hence, Sack can claim, "Territories are socially constructed forms of spatial relations and their effects depend on who is controlling whom and for what purposes" (216).

This description of a redistributive economy in segmented societies draws attention to a perception of spatiality among such peoples. Classification by geographical area is unnecessary. People do not determine who is a member of their group and who is not by referring to territoriality. Instead, they reverse the priorities. They and territory are identified by membership in a group. By this Sack insists that members of segmentary societies perceive themselves are networks of alliances (i.e, reciprocal exchange groups) and not residents or custodians of territory. This is a different spatiality from that of peoples who see themselves as members of territories and states.

The purpose of this essay is programmatic rather than historical or an application of spatial theory to biblical data. Restrictions of space require that the latter be postponed for a longer study. However, we may indicate several areas where critical spatiality can enhance social world studies of biblical antiquity.

First is studies on genealogies and studies using them. Keeping in mind the character of medieval paradigms, ethnographies, and information regarding segmentary societies and their spatialities cited above, we now understand that genealogies convey substantial spatial information. In fact because they were used and reused as they passed from non-centralized to centralized systems -- as Wilson demonstrated two decades ago -- genealogies can be used to gain perspectives on space in multiple ancient social circumstances. Similarly, mixing kinship and place names conforms to Gellner's second criterion for segmented systems, i.e. self-identification in kinship or territorial terms. In the ancients' spatiality, they are one and the same. The terms stand for sets of relationships among peoples expressed sometimes by naming the peoples and at other times the spaces the peoples are known to reside in or control. As in the modern examples reviewed by Selwyn, those spaces can be included because the people feel that they "belong" there. It is the territoriality noted by Sack, their lived space, their Thirdspace.

Critical spatiality exposes the difficulty if not the folly in trying to draw detailed maps based on genealogical texts. Brauer's review of medieval Muslim territoriality and mapping is symptomatic of the wider problem. The most that could be reconstructed on such a basis would be estimates of border zones and overlapping "sovereignties" of segmentary leaders.
This proscription applies to most attempts to map biblical antiquity as if cartographers had textual Firstspace data available. As warned by Soja, their Secondspace mental conceptions of material Firstspace become substitutes for it. Firstspace collapses into Secondspace, and Thirdspace, especially of those who did not write the text, is ignored.

Examples of such collapsing are abundant in biblical scholarship as they are, according to Selwyn's description, in modern Middle Eastern politics. A paradigm is the way that the Table of Nations in Genesis 10, reused in the Book of Jubilees, has affected and been used in cartographic studies. There the Bible's attempt to claim both world-wide expanse for Noah's family in a post-diluvial age and central unifying ancestry for Noah has ensnared cartographers who ignore critical spatiality. Taking the genealogies as mimetic representations of a then-known-global network of territorialities, they have attempted to plot the statements graphically onto Asia, Africa, and Europe. It is interesting to observe how the fusion of biblical and premodernist medieval cartography are caught up in modernist scientific accuracy quests for reclaiming the past.
The classic map-texts of the Table of Nations are the T-O (terra-oceanus) maps of the medieval period. The earliest extant example may be Isidore of Seville's seventh century C.E. diagram in De natura rerum (Stevens: 272). The dual processes of ethnocentricity and social ordering are already evident. The maps are circular illustrations of an ocean enclosing Asia (top), Europe (left) and Africa (right) separated by a "T" shape. The "T" presumably stands for three bodies of water, perhaps the Don and Nile atop the Mediterranean. In these Christian attempts to organize and theologize space, Jerusalem stands at the center at the intersection of the waters which leads Sack to observe, "wherever one actually is located in physical space is immaterial unless one is at the center in the heavenly city, Jerusalem" (85). In Thirdspace epistemology, all other spaces are "non-Jerusalem."

The medieval T-O form has become an anachronistic model for recent attempts to understand the Table. We see this failure in Philip Alexander's mapping of Noah's family from the second century B.C.E. Book of Jubilees 8-9 using the medieval T-O template (1982; 1992). Alexander supposes that a drawing, i.e. a map, of the textual division of the earth among Noah's descendants has been lost from the manuscript tradition but that an original drawing based upon the Ionian world map tradition and the Hebrew Bible had been included (1982: 197). He substitutes his own T-O drawing and claims,

If what we have argued above is correct, then the world map represents in an unusually concrete form the harmonization of the Bible and "science": the author of Jubilees interpreted the Bible in light of non-Jewish "scientific" knowledge of his day" (1982: 210).

Apparently caught in an impulse for scientific accuracy, Alexander collapses the cartographic tradition by combining later map forms with earlier verbal images. In a second article he moves closer to the social theory that might have saved him.

. . . [the author used] the principle of genealogy (derived from family and tribal history) to organize certain geographical data, viz., the nations of the world known to him. He arranges them in families, relates them in terms of descent from common ancestors, or from each other, and, by tracing them back to Noah's three sons, Shem, Ham and Japhet, integrates them into the narrative of sacred history (1992: 980).

Here is a case where awareness of critical spatiality would assist and guide a scholar in a different direction. Alexander's later description casts the Jubilees material in terms of genealogy and segmentation which brings him close to grasping the spatiality that characterized ancient society. But he does not catch either the social world or spatial implications of his own remarks.

A second area where critical spatiality can illumine social world studies and ancient spatial subtexts is the so-called settlement period. In response to current intense and sometimes bitter arguments about the origins of Israel, Peter Machinist surveyed most of the passages that others examine when arguing for or against settlement from outside Canaan. Without explicitly taking sides in the internal peasants' revolt versus the external invasion/infiltration debates, he concluded,

In sum, the biblical story tradition of Israel entering as outsiders to take over Palestine should not be dismissed historically, despite the buffeting it has taken in the wake of recent study of Israelite origins. . . . The pervasiveness of this tradition in the Hebrew Bible, and the multiple historical contexts in which it seems to occur there, suggest a protean adaptability to the problems and crises that ancient Israel had to face. Particularly crucial in this regard, as we may now see, was the sense of marginality and contingency inherent in the tradition . . . . This explanatory power of our story tradition, it may be added, did not cease with the end of the biblical period. As the Passover Haggadah makes clear, Israel in a sense is always emerging from Egypt and the Wilderness to enter its promised land; the desire is only that it should stay there and live an exemplary and prosperous life (1994: 54; emphasis added).

Machinist's attempt to read the tradition faithfully can be applauded for its caution and thoroughness. However, when the same stories are reread in toto, as he has done, but without historical presuppositions and in light of critical spatiality, a different conclusion might be reached. The stories' historicity may not be in their "historical" claims. They may not depict either a material or social Firstspace.

The spatiality that is argued from the "maximalist" side in the so-called "maximalist - minimalist" debate that is in the background of Machinist's study presumes Firstspace and Secondspace in the stories. The disputants presume a people physically outside a Firstspace -- longing to be inside that Firstspace -- who describe that Firstspace according to their Secondspace perceptions. This casts the debate in a dialectic that uses modernist, Cartesian spatial subtext terms that do not conform to Late Bronze-Early Iron Age or any other segmented biblical mentality.

The spatiality that is claimed and whose recognition is desired in the stories must be the territoriality of a segmented society. It is "people space," not bordered territories. And it is Thirdspace, the lived space of outsider peoples. As with Mrs. Parks, there is a "sense of marginality and contingency." It is a space that is sought and hoped for, regardless of the location of the speakers. For unlike Mrs. Parks, according Machinist's claim, "This explanatory power of our story tradition . . . did not cease with the end of the biblical period. . . . Israel in a sense is always emerging from Egypt and the Wilderness to enter its promised land." There is a desire and struggle that is felt always and anywhere the speaker may be. To repeat, it is a Thirdspace, a lived space, in this case felt to be obstructed and impeded. Hence, we may ask whether or how the hope was to be fulfilled? Would moving into a Firstspace satisfy? Apparently not, according to the claim of perpetuity. Therefore, is the tradition "historical" because it tells of a people who share a desire? Or because it tells of a desire never achieved? Both? Neither?

The story's continual reuse within the tradition and its recalling of the so-called tribal period suggests that segmentary space and Thirdspace are envisaged, the kind that is not easily mapped onto Firstspace modernist territoriality. But such questions cannot be answered without examining them in a postmodern historicality, sociality, spatiality trialectic that includes critical spatiality. And that must wait for another space.

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SCHOLARS PRESS was organized a year ago as a response to a crisis. The price of scholarly books, tuned to the budget of the major university collection, was rapidly making the personal library a thing of the past. Worse, since high prices meant sinking sales and fewer new titles, younger scholars had fewer publishing opportunities. A downward spiral threatened scholarly discourse itself. . . . SCHOLARS PRESS has attempted to reverse that spiral by letting scholars do for themselves that they once hired others to do for them.

3 The "Note" continues, SP's production utilized ". . . modern cost-cutting techniques once considered beneath the dignity of a scholarly publisher . . .," a veiled allusion to photo offset printing replacing linotype -- a hotly debated issue at the time. Indeed, in order to win over editorial boards, Madison once typeset the same page twice using both technologies. When confronted with the evidence, members could not tell the difference. The case was won!

4 My sampling is limited to participants in the Social World Group and Sociology of Monarchy Seminar. No slighting is intended for important contributions made by others on this continent or elsewhere, especially Europe (e.g. Neils Peter Lemche, Bernhard Lang, Frank Crüsemann) that in several instances were published in the outlets mentioned here.

5 In the absence of a history of either press, I rely in part on personal experiences, files, and memory. By peculiar coincidence, on March 20-23, 1974, although not a delegate, I hosted the meeting of the "Committee of Fifteen" comprising five members each from the Council on the Study of Religion (CSR now CSSR), AAR, and SBL at St. John's Provincial Seminary in Plymouth, MI, where I had lived when I began teaching at the University of Michigan. At the meeting, the Center for Scholarly Publishing and Services with SP part of it was formally established and Missoula chosen as its location and Robert Funk its director. The meeting site was chosen only a few days before because the seminary offered space for the press for five years at no cost if it should be located at UM where David Noel Freedman, SBL President-Elect, taught. By coincidence, he was also ASOR's VP for Publication. The CSR was involved because Funk had cooperated with its director, Norman Wagner of Waterloo Lutheran University (now Wilfrid Lauier) on several society and publishing projects (the first book published at Montana was a CSR volume [1971]), and because member and subscriber lists for AAR and SBL were maintained by CSR. The lists and their management fees were important for the economies of the Press and distribution of its publications. Wagner did not attend the meeting.

My interest in publishing technologies and economies heightened when I met Gunn, Clines, and Davies in Sheffield on May 12, 1976, where discussions of the two presses persuaded me to accept posts at Montana. From then my involvement has continued: Associate Director of SP (1976-78); chair of RS at UM -- SP's legal base until it received IRS tax-exempt status in the late 70s and its institutional home until it moved to Chico, CA, in 1980 (1976-86); editor of the Almond/SAP SWBA (1982-91); publication of my book in SWBA (1988); ASOR VP (and BASOR editor), when I negotiated for SP to be again ASOR's publisher.

Finally, my move to CWRU in 1986 was motivated in part by my interest in holography and electronic publications. Now the "most wired university in the U.S." (Yahoo 1999), the institution encourages faculty to think spatially and use the internet and technologies of cyberspace.

[Addendum: Sadly, since this writing, Scholars Press has been closed and disbanded for reasons that remain unclear and unexplained. The move marks the demise of what some have called "the major twentieth century contribution to scholarly collaboration in our disciplines.]