In other words, what is being advocated is ``a decisive shift away from what we may
call `trait' geographies to what we could call `process' geographies'', which retain the
heuristic impulse behind imagining areas but treat them as contingent and variable
artifacts (Appadurai, 2000, page 7). This concern to rethink the spatiality of social life
can benefit from recent contributions that criticise the social sciences for their wide-
spread practice of treating space as ``self-evident, unproblematic, and unrequiring of
theory'', and of seeing ``history as the independent variable, the actor, and geography
as the dependentöthe ground on which events `take place', the field within which
history unfolds