The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Human Geography

By John A. Agnew and James S. Duncan

This volume provides an up-to-date, authoritative synthesis of the discipline of human geography. Unparalleled in scope, the companion offers an indispensable overview to the field, representing both historical and contemporary perspectives.

• Edited and written by the world's leading authorities in the discipline
• Divided into three major sections: Foundations (the history of human geography from Ancient Greece to the late nineteenth century); The Classics (the roots of modern human geography); Contemporary Approaches (current issues and themes in human geography)
• Each contemporary issue is examined by two contributors offering distinctive perspectives on the same theme

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wiley
• Release date: Mar 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9781444395822

Book preview

Illustrations

Figures

3.1 1472, Isidor T-O Map

3.2 Mount Chimborazo

10.1 The space of keywords in human geography and some social and Institutional background factors

16.1 Austin: Not Like Other Places

16.2 Plantation Owner. Mississippi Delta, near Clarksdale, Mississippi

16.3 Plantation Owner. Mississippi Delta, near Clarksdale, Mississippi. This shows the same image as cropped by Archibald MacLeish, Land of the Free (1938)

16.4 British air attack on Hamburg, Germany, January 1943

16.5 The war wrecked streets of Cologne, Germany

19.1 Global Distribution of Population

19.2 Global Distribution of Economic Activity

19.3 Global Distribution of Innovation

19.4 Global Distribution of Scientists

19.5 The Mega-Regions of North America

19.6 The Mega-Regions of Europe

19.7 The Mega-Regions of Asia

27.1 The scope of human geography as defined by hierarchical scales of analysis

27.2 The English city-regions as a discrete scale of analysis

27.3 The international geography of the credit union movement in 2004

27.4 The imagined territory of Padania in northern Italy

27.5 Multilingual restaurant sign in the Barri Gotic district of Barcelona in northeastern Spain

27.6 An ad campaign showing how HSBC has skillfully played on the ambiguity of scalar metaphor and branded itself as the world’s local bank

41.1 North-South Divisions, according to the Brandt Line

Tables

18.1 An Elementary Classification of Metric

22.1 Alpha-level world cities in 2008

41.1 The Development of International Development in the late 20th Century

Contributors

John A. Agnew is Professor of Geography at UCLA, Los Angeles, USA. He specializes in political geography. His recent publications include Globalization and Sovereignty (2009), Berlusconi’s Italy (with Michael Shin, 2008), and Sage Handbook of Geographical Knowledge (co-edited with David Livingstone, 2011).

Kay Anderson is Professor of Cultural Geography at the Centre for Cultural Research, University of Western Sydney. She has authored the award-winning books Race and the Crisis of Humanism (2007) and Vancouver’s Chinatown (1991), plus many publications about race, historiography and Cultural Geography.

Trevor J. Barnes is a Professor and Distinguished University Scholar at the Department of Geography, University of British Columbia, where he has taught since 1983. His research interests are in economic geography and the history and philosophy of the discipline.

Clive Barnett is Reader in Human Geography at The Open University in Milton Keynes, England. He is author of Culture and Democracy (2003), co-author of Globalizing Responsibility (2011), and co-editor of Spaces of Democracy (2004), Geographies of Globalisation (2008), Extending Hospitality (2009), and Rethinking the Public (2010).

Vincent Berdoulay is Professor of Geography and Regional Planning and member of the CNRS research center on Society, Environment and Territory (SET) at the Université de Pau, France. He chaired the IGU Commission on the History of Geographical Thought from 1996 to 2004. His major publications concern the history of geography and planning, epistemology and cultural geography.

Larry S. Bourne FRSC is Professor Emeritus of Geography and Planning, and the founding director of the new Cities Centre at the University of Toronto. His research interests focus on growth and change in urban Canada and on urban form, governance and social inequalities.

Carrie Breitbach is Assistant Professor of Geography at Chicago State University. With Don Mitchell she is the co-author of Cultural Geography: A Critical Introduction (forthcoming from Wiley-Blackwell).

Peter Burke was Professor of Cultural History, University of Cambridge until his retirement and remains a Fellow of Emmanuel College. His books include A Social History of Knowledge from Gutenberg to Diderot (2000) a second volume, From the Encyclopédie to Wikipedia, is in preparation.

Carolyn Cartier is Professor of Human Geography and China Studies at the University of Technology, Sydney. She is the author of Globalizing South China (2001) and the co-editor of The Chinese Diaspora: Place, Space, Mobility and Identity (2003) among many other publications. Her current research program includes projects on the role of the state in China’s urbanization process, and debates over art and culture in the political economy of development in Chinese cities. Forthcoming books are China’s Regional Worlds and Sudden Culture: Urban Redevelopment in Hong Kong and a Politics of Aesthetics.

Noel Castree is a Professor of Geography in the School of Environment and Development at Manchester University. His principal research interest is in the dynamics of capitalism-environment relations. He has also written at length about the conceptual infrastructure of human geography and the wider social sciences – notably the ideas of nature, place and space-time. He is currently managing editor of the journal Progress in Human Geography.

Daniel Clayton is Lecturer in Geography at the University of St Andrews. He is the author of Islands of Truth (2000) and numerous articles on the relations between geography and empire.

Tim Cresswell is Professor of Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London, England. He has written widely on mobilities and place.

James S. Duncan was Reader in Cultural Geography, University of Cambridge until his retirement. He is now Emeritus Fellow of Emmanuel College. His books include Landscapes of Privilege (2004), The City as Text (2005), and In the Shadows of the Tropics (2007).

Stuart Elden is a Professor of Political Geography at Durham University, England. He is the author of four books, including most recently, Terror and Territory: The Spatial Extent of Sovereignty (2009). He is currently completing a history of the concept of territory.

Richard Florida is Director of the Martin Prosperity Institute and Professor of Business and Creativity at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto, Canada. Previously, Florida has held professorships at George Mason University and Carnegie Mellon University and taught as a visiting professor at Harvard and MIT. He is the author of numerous books on cities and globalization including The Rise of the Creative Class (2003).

Emily Gilbert is Associate Professor of Geography and Director of the Canadian Studies program at the University of Toronto. She is the co-editor of War, Citizenship, Territory (with Deborah Cowen, 2008) and Nation-States and Money: The Past, Present and Future of National Currencies (with Eric Helleiner, 1999). She has published on topics such as North American integration; monetary union; borders, biometrics and citizenship; and cultural representations of national identity.

Steve Herbert is Professor of Geography and Law, Societies, and Justice at the University of Washington. His research and teaching focus on the regulation of space through law and policing. He is the author of Policing Space: Territoriality and the Los Angeles Police Department (1977), Citizens, Cops and Power: Recognizing the Limits of Community (2006), and, with Katherine Beckett, Banished: The New Social Control in Urban America (2010).

Andrew Herod is Professor of Geography and Adjunct Professor of International Affairs and of Anthropology, at the University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia. He is also an elected official, serving as a member of the government of Athens-Clarke County, Georgia. He has written widely on issues of labor and globalization. His recent books include: Scale (2010), Handbook of Employment and Society: Working Space (2010), Geographies of Globalization: A Critical Introduction (2009), and The Dirty Work of Neoliberalism: Cleaners in the Global Economy (2006).

Steven Hoelscher is Professor of American Studies and Geography at the University of Texas at Austin. His publications include the books Heritage on Stage, Picturing Indians, and Textures of Place (co-edited with Paul Adams and Karen Till) and articles in the Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Ecumene, The Geographical Review, Social and Cultural Geography, and American Quarterly, among others.

Nicolas Howe is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Environmental Studies at Williams College, Williamstown, Massachusetts, USA. His research interests are in environmental disputes and controversies over religious symbols in public spaces.

Ron Johnston is Professor of Geography in the School of Geographical Sciences at the University of Bristol, having previously held posts at Monash University and the Universities of Canterbury, Sheffield and Essex. Alongside his interests in the history of geography as an academic discipline he has also written widely on electoral studies and urban social geography.

John Paul Jones III and Sallie A. Marston are Professors of Geography at the University of Arizona, USA, and Keith Woodward is Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA. They define a research collective exploring the critical fissures of and alternative paths to ontology in human geography. Following the publication of Human Geography without Scale (2005), they continue to write articles devoted to elucidating the theoretical, methodological and empirical dimensions of site ontology.

Andrew E.G. Jonas is Professor of Human Geography at Hull University, England. He is interested in urban and regional development in the United States and Europe and has made a number of contributions to the scale debate in human geography. He recently co-edited Interrogating Alterity: Alternative Economic and Political Spaces (2010).

Phil Kelly is Professor of Political Science at Emporia (Kansas) State University. A previous Fulbright Scholar in Paraguay, he has authored Checkerboards and Shatterbelts: The Geopolitics of South America (1997) and has edited, with Jack Child, Geopolitics of the Southern Cone and Antarctica (1988).

Paul L. Knox is University Distinguished Professor in the College of Architecture and Urban Affairs at Virginia Tech, Blacksburg USA. He has published widely on world cities and questions of urban design.

Merje Kuus is Associate Professor of Geography at the University of British Columbia. Her work focuses on geopolitics and contemporary Europe. Dr. Kuus is the author of Geopolitics Reframed: Security and Identity in Europe’s Eastern Enlargement (2007) as well as numerous articles on security, identity, and intellectuals of statecraft. Her current research investigates the geopolitical discourses and policy processes that organize European Union’s external relations with its eastern neighbors.

Michael Landzelius is Docent in Built Environment Preservation and is presently Research Coordinator at the Department of Sociology, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. His work on embodiment; built space and commemorative practices; dehumanization; and spatial reification has been published in journals such as Society and Space and Semiotica, as well as in companions and edited volumes

Wendy Larner is Professor of Human Geography and Sociology, and Research Director for the Faculty of Social Science and Law, at the University of Bristol, UK. She has published widely on the topics of globalisation, governance and gender. Recent contributions include a co-edited collection called Calculating the Social: Standards and the reconfiguring of governing (2010). She is also completing a co-authored book called Fashioning Globalisation: New Zealand Design, Working Women and the New Economy (Wiley-Blackwell).

Stephen Legg is an Associate Professor at the School of Geography, University of Nottingham. His research focuses on the cultural and historical geographies of urban and imperial politics in interwar colonial India. His publications include Spaces of Colonialism: Delhi’s Urban Governmentalities (2007) and the edited volume Spatiality, Sovereignty and Carl Schmitt: Geographies of the Nomos (2011).

Jacques Lévy is Professor at EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland. He is best known for his work on urbanization and globalization. His most recent book is L’invention du monde: une géographie de la mondialisation (2008).

David Ley is Canada Research Chair of Geography at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. He is the author of Millionaire Migrants (2010), The New Middle Class and the Remaking of the Central City (1996) and other books and articles on social and neighborhood research in the city.

Jamie Lorimer is a Lecturer in the Department of Geography at Kings College London. He was worked previously at the Universities of Bristol and Oxford. His research interests include the geographies of wildlife conservation, volunteering and citizenship and human-animal relations. Past projects have focused on the UK and South Asia. He is currently developing research relating to the concept and practice of rewilding in European conservation.

Kent Mathewson is Professor of Geography at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge USA. A Latin Americanist, he has published widely on the history of American cultural geography.

Robert J. Mayhew is Professor of Historical Geography and Intellectual History at the University of Bristol, UK. He is the author of Enlightenment Geography (2000) and of numerous articles about seventeenth- and eighteenth-century geography.

Don Mitchell is Distinguished Professor of Geography in the Maxwell School at Syracuse University. With Carrie Breitbach he is the co-author of Cultural Geography: A Critical Introduction (forthcoming from Wiley-Blackwell).

Natalie Oswin is Assistant Professor of Geography at McGill University. She has published numerous articles on queer geographies in journals such as Progress in Human Geography, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers and Gender, Place and Culture.

Anssi Paasi is Professor of Geography at the University of Oulu, currently serving as an Academy Professor (2008–2012) at the Academy of Finland. He has publications on the development of geographical ideas and concepts, on region/territory building and on the socio-cultural construction of political boundaries and spatial identities. His books include Territories, Boundaries and Consciousness (1996).

George Revill is Senior Lecturer in Cultural Geography at the Open University. His research interests include cultural histories of travel and transport and the study of music, landscape and national identity. His most recent book is a cultural history of railways as an icon of modernity for Reaktion Press 2010.

Mitch Rose is a Lecturer in the Department of Geography at the University of Hull, UK. He writes on questions of landscape and material culture and is currently working on a monograph on landscape and identity

Arun Saldanha is Associate Professor of Geography at the University of Minnesota. He is author of Psychedelic White: Goa Trance and the Viscosity of Race (2007) and many articles on race, music, embodiment and travel.

Joanne P. Sharp is a Senior Lecturer in Geography at the University of Glasgow, UK. She is the author of Geographies of postcolonialism: spaces of power and representation (2009) and has published on feminist, political and postcolonial geographies.

Mary E. Thomas is an Assistant Professor with a joint appointment between the Departments of Geography and Women’s Studies at Ohio State University, USA. Her research examines racial segregation among US youth, particularly teenage girls

R. Alan Walks is Associate Professor of Urban Planning and Geography at the University of Toronto. His published work examines the causes and consequences of neighborhood-level social and political inequality, and place effects on social and political outcomes.

Glyn Williams is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Town and Regional Planning, University of Sheffield. He has taught and researched in Development Geography since the early 1990s, with his primary research interests being in poverty, participatory development, and everyday state practices, areas which he has explored through extensive fieldwork in India. He has two co-authored books Seeing the State: Governance and Governmentality in India (with Stuart Corbridge, Manoj Srivastava and René Véron, 2005), and Geographies of Developing Areas: The Global South in a Changing World (with Paula Meth and Katie Willis, 2009).

Wendy Wolford is Polson Professor of Development Sociology at Cornell University. She is the author of To Inherit the Earth (with Angus Wright, 2003) and This Land is Ours Now (2010) as well as many articles about contemporary land reform and social mobilization.

John W. Wylie is Senior Lecturer in Cultural Geography at the University of Exeter, UK. He writes on the geographies of landscape, the self and performance and is the author of Landscape (2007).

Chapter 1

Introduction

John A. Agnew and James S. Duncan

Contemporary human geography in the English-speaking world is amazingly pluralistic in terms of its objectives, subject matter, theories, and methods. This is judged by some as a negative: the field is a doughnut with a hole in the middle because there is no agreement about some central theory or method, usually that preferred by the critic in question. A tendency to laud the most recent and fashionable ideas is similarly put in a dim light. On a more positive note, it is the very absence of a disciplining orthodoxy and the openness to fresh thinking that now makes the field so interesting to a broader audience. Indeed, the flow of influence of the field on others has increased as it has developed its own heterodox ideas about landscape, environment, space, and place rather than engaged in imitating biology, economics, or whatever other field by adopting their current orthodoxies. In our view, the reason for this is not hard to fathom. What seems undeniable is that we all live in a world in which geographic space has been subject to considerable social, economic, and political reformulation and as a consequence how we think about it must also change. If Michel Lussault’s (2009) adage of De la lutte des classes à la lutte des places (perhaps best translated as from class struggle to the struggle of how one fits into the new global spatiality of places) probably overstates the increased importance of place-to-place differences in a globalizing world and the degree to which the basis to many old conflicts has been transcended, it nevertheless captures the sense that old theoretical frameworks are not necessarily up to the task of dealing with new realities. This is the paramount reason for the growth of new ways of thinking in human geography that also appeal to those in fields like literary studies, sociology, economics, international relations, and cultural anthropology. But some conventional approaches are also in crisis because collectively we have become aware of the degree to which established methods of mapping the world and theorizing about it reflect political-economic and technological eras that are passing away. There is much discussion, for example, of the crisis of cartographic reason (e.g. Harley 1987; Farinelli 2009) and the unreliability of geographical fieldwork (e.g. Gerber and Goh 2000; Driver 2000). Human Geography has gone through a veritable renaissance over the past twenty years because its pluralization signifies the advent of new ways of thinking about environment, space, and place that help us read and engage with the changing world around us and engage with critiques of previously dominant practice (Lévy 1999).

The purpose of this volume is to survey the history and contemporary character of the field of human geography in the English-speaking world over a fairly long time period but with a definite emphasis on the contemporary. From the outset, we make no pretense to cover physical geography or contemporary non-English language human geography, except insofar as they have had direct impacts in this world. The book is designed to supplement rather than compete with the other Blackwell Companions addressing such sub-fields of human geography as economic, political, and cultural geography by surveying theoretical trends and substantive emphases that have influenced and shaped all of them. Given this focus, the volume will give considerable attention to historical context as well as to contemporary themes. Much of the concentration on key concepts, key thinkers and key trends in recent publications about the field is missing much if any sense of historical context by which to judge how the present differs from the past. Indeed, a celebratory presentism often prevails in which the new is valued independently of either how much it contributes to the collective enterprise or how it fits into longer-term trends. But we also want to avoid merely duplicating within one volume the sub-field divisions of other Companions and other recent surveys (e.g. Benko and Strohmayer 2004). Thus, beyond chapters that assay the historical legacies of the field, we provide chapters that have a thematic rather than a sub-field orientation.

In both nominalist and more substantive registers, present-day human geogra­phy is still worth situating in relation to past efforts at organizing a field as such. There is still such a thing as the geographical tradition (Livingstone 1992). Much of what goes for geographic research even now involves some situating or positioning in relation to forebears or intellectual ancestors, if only to show how much they have been left behind. In counterpoint to the tendency to dismiss the past as irrelevant to current concerns this volume will try to situate present debates and differences in relation to past ones. Consequently, the book will be divided into three sections: Foundations, tracing the history of human geography (as defined today) in terms of pre-professional ideas and influences from the ancient Greeks down until the late nineteenth century; The Classics, surveying the significant German and French as well as British, US, and other roots of later human geography and then emphasizing the creation of an academic discipline in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the attempts at providing an intellectual rationale for this initiative; and Contemporary Approaches, highlighting the ways in which the field is subdivided and how human geography is practiced today by examining a selection of themes with two different perspectives on each, and the operations of its practitioners in education and the larger world. In this final section we do not aim to have authors confront one another but simply offer their own perspectives on the same theme. The purpose is to emphasize divergent interpretations against the tendency to offer interpretations that suggest a general consensus of opinion or a uniform account of what has been happening over the past twenty years or so. We want to show the pluralism of the field at the same time we illustrate the degree to which recent trends draw on and legitimize themselves by reference to historic precursors.

Globalization and Human Geography

Globalization is a buzzword for a world that is seen as increasingly stretched, shrunk, interwoven, integrated, and less state-centered than in the past. It thus typically involves a claim about the changing nature of the world. But it also can involve a parallel claim that this world needs new theoretical tools or modes of understanding. Approximately since the 1970s when the US government’s abrogation of the 1944 Bretton Woods Agreement liberated major world currencies to float freely against one another, tariff barriers to international trade (particularly in manufactured goods) decreased dramatically, as major corporations began to the see the world as their oyster, and cultural flows of all sorts started to undermine images of stability and homogeneity in territorialized national states, past nostrums about social and moral order (typically located at the scale of the national state) have been thrown into question. Particularly significant for a field such as human geography, long sensitive to issues of scale and geographical differentiation, this has proved to be both crisis and opportunity. Often tagged by parallel if somewhat competing terms relating more to the character of theoretical perspectives than to ontological claims about the nature of the world, postmodernism and postcolonialism are perhaps the most well known, globalization has evolved into a complex theoretical notion relating to a significant degree to the overarching question of how cultural and political attachments are actively mediated through space, all the way from the local to the global, and how the complexities of identity in turn affect popular and academic understandings of the world and how it works. It remains contested because of the relative emphasis placed on the source of its power and whether it is deployed theoretically more ontologically or epistemologically. So, if the sociologist Ulrich Beck sees globalization as a movement to a totally new modernity, the anthropologist James Clifford sees it as an emerging world of enhanced mobility both geographical and psychological, and the geographer David Harvey views it as an economic process involving strategies of capital investment made possible by new space-shrinking technologies (Harvey 2006). Clearly, Beck and Clifford would be more likely to make the claim for epistemological new times than would Harvey.

Critical, then, has been the question of the extent to which old or well established theories and methods can be adapted to the new circumstances or should be sidelined by completely novel ones. Understanding the interconnection of local places, ecologies, and cultural practices in global networks of greater and lesser geographical scope has become the leitmotif of the age. This is the context in which debate over the recent past and present of human geography must be situated. As you will see in the bulk of the chapters in the Contemporary Approaches section of this book, this is the recurring background condition for much contemporary thinking. Many of the disputes aired out there are based in different responses to how to deal with the sense of a dramatically changing world. A field such as human geography is not at all like, say, physics, because its very subject matter is contingent on an ever-changing external world of political and economic actors and cultural forms. Arguably, therefore, theoretical frameworks and research methods must change in tandem. That this does not necessarily entail the rise of some new singular theoretical orthodoxy, however, is also an important conclusion of what we have been saying above.

Chronology versus Tradition in Human Geography

Many accounts of the history of human geography are chronological not just in the sense of sets of ideas associated with or seen as dominant in different historical eras but of new ones replacing previous ones in a rigid sequence rather like in a cladistic or tree diagram of the evolution of species (e.g. James 1972; Peet 1998). Time seems to be a causal factor with some approaches becoming more successful as they branch off prior ones. This can be read as akin to the notion of paradigm shifts developed by Thomas Kuhn to apply to the history of physics. The story of human geography does not seem to fit very well with this conception of intellectual change (Philo 2008). Rather, the field seems to exhibit much more the relative persistence of many approaches over time with different eras associated only with the invention of new ones (and adaptation of old ones) than with the total replacement of older ones. Nevertheless, there are persistent efforts if not only to stand on the shoulders of giants (or to cut them down to size) but to situate new approaches in relation to established ones. Thus, the new cultural geographies of the 1980s and 1990s explicitly situated themselves in relation to such precursors as Carl Sauer’s old cultural geography.

Some sort of minimalist chronology, therefore, seems inevitable. In the first several chapters of this book in particular and many of the others more generally the dating of some key concepts and arguments is part of what they do. By and large, however, they avoid the tendency to see some kind of teleology or generic progress over time with a new wave or avant garde sweeping away previous ones. The focus is much more on how the common strains (such as determinism versus agency, conceptions of races, methodological panaceas, understandings of place or region) that crop up repeatedly as part of the arguments in favor of this or that theoretical approach or philosophical position got started and are reproduced. The first chapters do, however, attempt to offer something extra. This is a consideration of what can be called the historical canon on which the tradition of human geography (the basic concepts and language, the names of Big Figures, the most famous disputes, the original conceptual grounds, the institutional structures of the field) has been built and in relation to which much contemporary debate and dispute is often situated. Even when not openly acknowledged, therefore, the past of the field, its tradition, enters into subsequent practice.

Three chapters explore the Foundations of modern human geography. Where Geography Came From, chapter 2 by Peter Burke, goes back to the Greeks. Subsequent chapters focus on the roles of European exploration and colonialism as vital historical contexts for understanding the field both in the past and in the present. Contemporary debates about cartography and fieldwork, for example, have their roots in these previous epochs. But they are also important in the present day because in many respects globalization represents a challenge to what goes for classical thinking. Yet, as will become clear throughout this book, much geographical thinking about the world remains in many ways trapped in the concepts and orientations of previous eras. The past is never entirely passed. In The Classics, six chapters trace the professionalization of human geography in universities beginning in the nineteenth century. Arguably, it is in Germany and France that modern Anglo-American human geography has some of its most important roots. Contemporaneous British and American geographers borrowed heavily from their continental colleagues and subsequent generations built their careers around interpretations of seminal German and French thinkers. One thinks, for example, of the American Richard Hartshorne’s heavy reliance on the writings of the German Alfred Hettner. Following the chapter on German precursors and French challengers comes one on the institutionalization and development of human geography in the English-speaking world. This is the story of how the field became a subject in higher education and how it has adapted to the increasing emphasis on research at the expense of the teaching (and exploration) that were long seen as its central activities. Finally, two of the great intellectual disputes in the history of the field then take center stage: the argument over whether landscape or region should be the central concept of the field (beginning in the 1920s) and the dispute over region versus space (beginning in the 1950s). With these two sets of disputes we begin our innovation of having two chapters each offering a distinctive perspective, in this case on each of the disputes in question.

Politics of Human Geography

A serious danger lies in seeing the development of the field in an entirely naturalistic light (as if it just evolved) without attending to the ways in various structured choices have always entered into decisions about different approaches. A range of influences have been proposed as critical to the origin, persistence, and relative fading of different theories, methods, and broad philosophical orientations. New ideas never arise in a politico-social vacuum. There are geopolitical, institutional, and micro-political bases to the success or failure, persistence or decline of different idea-complexes. Geopolitical hierarchies make some ideas more equal than others (e.g. Agnew 2007). It seems clear, for example, that ideas generated in US universities (particularly ones with prestigious reputations) tend these days to be more successful, other things being equal, than those generated in more lowly intellectual centers. Not surprisingly, then, centers of intellectual initiative in the history of human geography also have shifted, if with some lag, as geopolitical hierarchies are shuffled. Studies of influential figures in contemporary human geography using citation factors, for example, show a high positive correlation with ranking of universities. As is well known, currently most of the world’s highest ranking universities are in the US and UK.

At the institutional level, some fields and theories are heavily sponsored and successful whereas others must fight for survival. What we have in mind here is the degree to which dependence of universities on external funding directs not only research but also the very academic division of labor itself. In the Cold War historical context of the US, for example, an entire intellectual division of labor arose in response to the US government’s desire to fight Soviet Communism through dividing the world into zones (the so-called Three Worlds) in which different academic disciplines were to be differentially invested. Mainstream economics, political science, and sociology were designated to study the premier modern First World of the US and its western allies, whereas various specialties were trained to study the ideologized Second World of the Soviet Union and its allies and the development problems of the traditional Third World. Special theories and methods were needed to study the latter two Worlds, while normal positivist or law-like behavior being held to characterize the First, no such specialization was needed (Pletsch 1981). Human geography never fit very well into this framework. So, arguably the end of the Cold War has been a godsend for the field, if only because the frozen zones and national borders of that time have now once again been put in motion.

Finally, within fields themselves there are hierarchies of influentials and departmental rankings (and cultures) that affect the flows and persistence of ideas. Knowledge tends to pool up in different places and different strands become identified with them rather than easily transferred from one place to another (Meusburger 2008). Filters of various sorts – cultural, economic, and psychological – interfere with the ready transfer everywhere of codes of knowledge and the reputational backing that come from being associated with knowledge production in particular milieux. But different theories and methods (even schools) are closely associated with different places. Some of this tendency can be put down to a so-called intellectual tribalism in which scholars are inducted into specific norms that include training in particular methods and theories that they then go on to reproduce in their own careers (Campbell 1979; Johnston 2006). This can also involve defending turf against competitors and promoting those who conform rather than those who represent some alternative framework or approach. But the emphasis on defining and defending intellectual turf is also encouraged by institutional mechanisms of various sorts. For example, the Research Assessment Exercise in the UK has had the effect of encouraging claims to novelty in much publication because of the weighting given to so-called innovative as opposed to follow-up research. Because of the metrics used it also encourages a vast amount of self-citation and the citation of others in your particular camp publishing in your journals. One ancillary impact has been to discourage longer-term research projects and the monographs typically associated with them (Harvey 2006). Another has been to encourage the professionalization and specialization of publication at the expense of publishing for more popular audiences in more understandable language as was once apparently much more the case (Downs 2010). Geography’s presumed accessibility to the public, written in ordinary language dealing with observable facts, has, from this point of view, been more curse than blessing.

Thematic Foci

Inevitably, selecting themes for a book such as this is fraught with difficulty. We have chosen those which have been both the subject of most debate over the past ten years from our different positions in Britain and the United States and which also have entertained some of the most sophisticated discussion from the viewpoint of theoretical differences. Obviously, two other people might have come up with themes (and labels) somewhat different from ours. We would like to believe, however, that the ones we have chosen, and the authors we have selected to write about them, give an excellent flavor of the current state of Anglo-American human geography. We have not directed authors to contest with one another nor have we tried to find authors who would provide starkly alternative views on a given theme or about how it has been engaged. In line with previous discussion about the current period as one of globalization we have selected some themes that resonate strongly with that whole broader debate but we have also included some much longer standing themes that are now being addressed in distinctive ways from how they tended to be thirty to forty years ago. Because each theme has two separate authors writing from their own perspectives we would want to emphasize the extent to which this gives a possibly richer reading of the particular themes than would either a collaborative chapter or a single one, however comprehensive.

By way of organization, we have sorted the chapters into four broad categories. The first consists of some themes (nature, landscape, place, territory) that have long been central to but that have also long bedeviled the field. The second are emergent concepts that are redolent of the current wrestling with the presumed effects of globalization (globalization, world cities, governance, mobility, networks and scale). The third grouping consists of chapters about how human geography is engaging with categories that have long loomed large in and across the social sciences and humanities but with new emphases in light of contemporary sensibilities (class, race, sexuality, gender). Finally, we have also included some older themes from the history of human geography that have gone through something of a recent revival of interest (geopolitics, segregation, development).

It is our intention that in reading through the three sections of this book you will acquire a fairly substantial understanding of the early history and institutionalization of human geography as we see it today and a detailed sense of some of the major conceptual disputes and contemporary trends in the field as a whole. Although the whole is intended as greater than the sum of the parts, a book such as this also serves to give hopefully interesting and enlightening overviews of the more specific thematic debates going on in contemporary human geography.

References

Agnew, J. (2007) Know-where: geographies of knowledge of world politics. International Political Sociology 1: 138–148.

Benko, G. and Strohmayer, U. (eds) (2004) Horizons géographiques. Bréal, Paris.

Campbell, D.T. (1979) A tribal model of the social system vehicle carrying scientific knowledge. Knowledge, 1: 181–201.

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Part I: Foundations

2 Where Geography Came From

Peter Burke for David Lowenthal

3 Cosmographers, Explorers, Cartographers, Chorographers: Defining, Inscribing and Practicing Early Modern Geography, c.1450–1850

Robert J. Mayhew

4 Colonizing, Settling and the Origins of Academic Geography

Daniel Clayton

Chapter 2

Where Geography Came From

Peter Burke for David Lowenthal

Introduction

Today, the phrase I’m a geographer has professional and academic overtones. This chapter, on the other hand, is concerned with what has sometimes been called geography without geographers (Miquel 1967–1980, vol.1: 191) or geography before geography (Staszak 1995). The topic might equally well be described as anthropology before anthropology (Liebersohn 2008) or ethnography without ethnographers, or as writing at the borders of history, travel and fiction (Romm, 1992), from the Odyssey to the writer who claimed to be Sir John Mandeville, offering what David Lowenthal calls geographies of the mind. In other words, the chapter focuses on the ways in which the different peoples of the earth were perceived and imagined before the year 1500 and especially before the great division of intellectual and academic labor of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

It is important to avoid two opposite dangers: on one side, that of assuming that geographical thought began in the nineteenth century with the foundation of geography departments in universities, and on the other, that of looking for anticipations of later developments, the dawn of modern geography (Beazley 1897) for instance, rather than placing early writers in the context of their own time and asking what it was that they wanted or tried to do.

What follows discusses the history of the interest in the variety of peoples on earth, the frequent attempts to describe their manners and customs and the rarer attempts to explain this variety in terms of climate or other aspects of the environment. The period under discussion runs from the Greek Herodotus, who is generally described as a historian, to the Genoese Columbus, whom we tend to call an explorer. To link a scholar with a man of action in this way (although Herodotus also travelled and Columbus also wrote) reminds us that knowledge of the world’s peoples, like most kinds of knowledge, has developed out of collaboration or dialogue between theory and practice, between observers in the field (merchants, pilgrims, envoys and mariners) and scholars in their studies (Herodotus 1954).

Unfortunately, little is known today about the contributions to knowledge made in the field at this time. Indeed, little is known even about scholars who lived and worked between the relatively well-documented world of the Greeks and the Romans and that of the late Middle Ages, not to mention their Chinese and Arab colleagues. What follows necessarily involves an attempt to navigate around the many gaps in the record.

The Ancient World

Although the Greeks had a word for it, g x113_Sabon-Italic_10n_000100 ographia (writing about the earth), there was no specialized discipline called geography, let alone human geography, and there were no geographers pursuing it in the ancient world. According to Strabo, author of a 17-volume study, geography was part of philosophy. In any case, scholars did not need to specialize at this time. Today, Eratosthenes and Ptolemy are sometimes described as geographers, but Eratosthenes was a poet and an athlete as well as a writer on mathematics and astronomy, while Ptolemy studied music and optics and was best known as an astronomer.

The names of a number of ancient writers on different peoples (ethnoi) have come down to us, although their works have often been lost or have survived only in fragments. They include Hecateus of Miletos (lived c.530 BCE), author of Histories and Journey round the World; Ctesias of Cnidus (5th century BCE), a physician who wrote about India; Megasthenes (BCE c. 350–290), who travelled to India and wrote the Indika; Pytheas of Massalia, who made an expedition to the North (c.320 BCE); Posidonius of Apamea (c.135–51 BCE), who visited Gaul and wrote about it; Agatharchides of Cnidus (2nd century BCE) who wrote on Africa, and Diodorus of Sicily (first century BCE) whose world history commented on the language and customs of different peoples.

One might reasonably speak of an ancient age of discovery, in the context of Greek colonization of what we call Italy and France, the Persian invasion of Greece and Alexander the Great’s invasion of India. For the Greeks, what was discovered was the barbarian world, since Greeks referred to non-Greeks as barbaroi, people who were unable to speak properly and were therefore not fully human.

The concept was turned against the Greeks themselves by the author of the Book of Maccabees, a Jew writing in Greek. The Old Testament presents other Middle Eastern peoples – for instance, Philistines, Canaanites and Babylonians – in a similar way (Momigliano 1975, Gruen 2000). For their part, the Aryan invaders of India viewed the indigenous inhabitants – and later, the Greeks – as barbarian (mleccha in Sanskrit), in other words people incapable of speech (Thapar 1971: 418).

The foundation of the great library of Alexandria around the year 300 BCE provided a central place for scholars to study reports by travelers to different parts of the earth: one of its librarians, Eratosthenes of Cyrene, has been mentioned already (Jacob 1991: 102–104). The scholars, themselves based in the cities, generally rejected what they called barbarism; sometimes idealized it (an attitude one historian describes as hard primitivism) or they might be ambivalent. The idea of barbaric wisdom gained acceptance among Greeks in the late classical or Hellenistic period (Momigliano 1975: 7). The Scythians and the Germans in particular were sometimes presented as noble savages, reminding the American scholars Arthur Lovejoy and George Boas (1935) of some eighteenth-century idealizations of the American Indians.

What follows concentrates on the views about different peoples (ethnoi in Greek, gentes in Latin) expressed by seven famous ancient writers, four Greeks and three Romans: Herodotus, Hippocrates, Aristotle, Strabo, Caesar, Tacitus and Ammianus Marcellinus.

Herodotus of Halicarnassus (BCE c.484–c.425), wrote a history of the conflict between the Greeks and the Persians, placing this conflict in a wider context. He described the customs of the Persians from personal knowledge. noting, for instance, the way in which they sacrifice to their gods (without altar or fire), their fondness for wines and the importance they give to birthdays (Book One: Chapter 131). Writing about the Persian expedition to Egypt, Herodotus included a lengthy description of the manners and customs of the Egyptians, noting that they were often the opposite of the customs of other peoples: for instance, women attend market and are employed in trade, while men stay at home and do the weaving … Men in Egypt carry loads on their heads, women on their shoulders; women pass water standing up, men sitting down (Book 2: Chapter 35; cf. Hartog, 1980).

Again, before writing about the Persian attack on the Scythians, Herodotus described the customs of this barbaric people, who scalped their enemies, drank from skulls and took steam-baths (Book Four: Chapters 63–74). He quoted the King of the Scythians, who told King Darius of Persia that we Scythians have no towns or planted lands, so that we might meet you the sooner in battle (Book Four: Chapter 127). Herodotus described other peoples in terms of their closeness to or distance from Greek culture (Hartog 1980) and the Greeks in general tended to see themselves as civilized and the rest of the world as barbarians. Their attitude is obviously ethnocentric, but it is unlikely that any people in world history are in a very good position to criticize them for this.

Where Herodotus limited himself to description, the physician Hippocrates of Kos (c.460–c.370 BCE) – or one of his followers – attempted in the treatise On Airs, Waters and Places to explain the character of different peoples by their environments, hard and soft. According to this text, the Europeans, living in a cold climate, were ferocious and warlike, while the inhabitants of Asia were gentle and peaceful people, thanks to their warm climate (Glacken 1967: 80–115).

Aristotle (384–322 BCE), a polymath now best known as a philosopher, gave a political twist to the climatic theory of Hippocrates. In his Politics (7.6.1), Aristotle described the inhabitants of cold regions as full of spirit but somewhat deficient in energy and skill, so that they continue comparatively free but lacking in political organization and capacity to rule their neighbors. In hot regions, on the other hand, the people are intelligent but lack spirit, so that they are in continual subjection and slavery (the germ of an idea that would later be developed under the name of oriental despotism). According to this theory, the Greeks occupied a place between the two, the golden mean.

Strabo of Pontus (c.64 BCE–c.24 CE), was a stoic philosopher and man of letters who lived for some years in Augustan Rome and travelled as far as the frontier of Ethiopia. He attempted to make a synthesis of the geographical knowledge of his time, describing his book both as a geography and as a chorography, in other words a study of different regions. So far as customs and character are concerned, Strabo’s major distinction was between people who were civilized (politikos), like the Greeks and Romans, and those who were barbarians, like the Massagetai, whom he calls self-assertive, uncouth, wild and warlike as well as straightforward and not given to deceit, or the British, described as more simple and barbaric than the Celts, since there are degrees of barbarism (Strabo 4.5.2, 11.8.7: cf. Vliet 1984; Thollard 1987; Jacob 1991: 147–166). Strabo described the Scythians as nomads living in felt tents in a manner that was frugal and self-sufficient, regretting that in his day nomads and barbarians were becoming soft and corrupt. He also had something to say about the nomads of Arabia, the tent-dwellers, living in the desert and keeping herds of camels.

Strabo explained barbarism in environmental terms. All the mountaineers, he wrote, lead a simple life, are water-drinkers, sleep on the ground and let their hair stream down in thick masses after the manner of women. Their wildness is the result of their remoteness. He was not a determinist, however, noting that some peoples lose their former wildness as they become Romanized (3.3.7–8). This remark may remind readers of Victorian views of savages and the civilizing influence of the Empire – an appropriate comparison, since the context in which Strabo’s treatise was produced was that of Roman imperial expansion (Nicolet 1988: 90–95).

The Greeks called the Romans barbarians but the Romans took over the term to describe non-Romans, from the Carthaginians to the Gauls, contrasting their own civilization (civilitas) with the savagery (feritas) of the Other (Dauge 1981). The account of his conquest of Gaul given by Julius Caesar (100–144 BCE) begins with a brief description of the customs of both the Gauls and the Romans. Like Herodotus, Caesar believed that the course of the wars would not be intelligible without this account of the customs of the warriors. Caesar’s description (which draws on a book by Posidonius, who had visited Gaul forty years earlier) distinguished different tribes, such as the Aedui and the Sequani, and different social groups, including the Druids. He also included remarks on the customs and character of the Britons in his narrative of his invasion of Britain. The Germanic tribes were also described by Caesar, who noted that they were warlike and pastoral peoples, and in considerably more detail by Tacitus (c.56–c.117 CE.).

Tacitus described the German manner of fighting on horseback or on foot, their religion, houses and clothes, their banquets, their way of choosing their chiefs and even their habit of washing in warm water – Can one wonder where winter holds such sway? He presented the Germans as noble savages – brave, warlike, frugal and temperate (in eating if not in drinking) – encouraging his readers to make comparisons with Rome in their day, already described by some critics as corrupted by luxury. In similar fashion Ammianus Marcellinus (c.330–c.378 CE), who emulated the work of Tacitus in his own history, produced a memorable description of the Huns, who burst into the Roman Empire in his time, as an untamed race of men (indomitum … hominum genus), the most terrible of warriors who learn from the cradle to endure cold, hunger and thirst, nomads who are almost glued to their horses and eat, drink and even sleep on horseback. It is difficult to resist the thought that Ammianus, a Greek writing in Latin, was recycling the description of the Scythians by Herodotus.

Summing up so far, we might distinguish the description of customs (nomoi or nomaia in Greek, mores in Latin) such as ways of drinking or sacrificing to the gods, from the description of traits of character (ethos in Greek, natura in Latin), such as ferocity or deceitfulness. It may also be useful to distinguish description from analysis, in other words the explanation of customs and character in terms of the environment – highlands and lowlands, rich regions and poor ones – or in terms of the local economy, agricultural or pastoral. Customs and character were often viewed as timeless, but as we have seen Strabo was aware of change in this domain.

A few words on what might be called inhuman geography are in order at this point, especially the idea of monstrous races. Ctesias, for instance, described a one-legged people located in India, while Strabo mentioned dog-headed men and people with eyes in their breast. The Roman encyclopaedist Pliny the Elder described a number of these races in his Natural History.

The Chinese and the Arabs

Like the Greeks, the Chinese (that is, the ethnic Chinese who called themselves the Han or the Hua) generally viewed other peoples as barbarians (fan or sheng-fan), and treated them as scarcely human. Hearts of beasts was a common description of barbarians in Tang times (618–907 CE ), while comparisons of foreign peoples with wolves, dogs, tigers, dragons, wasps, mosquitoes and sharks begin to be found in the time of Confucius (Kong Fuzi, 551–479 BCE). The principal objects of these descriptions were the nomads of the steppes of Inner Asia (the Ti, Jung, Xiongnu, Xianbei, Jürchen, Khitan, Uighur, etc), with whom the Middle Kingdom (Zhong-guo), as the Chinese called their state, had frequent contacts over the centuries, including periods when the kingdom fell under the sway of nomad chiefs such as the Mongols Chinggis and Kubilai Khan (who ruled 1206–1227 and 1260–1294 CE respectively). Southern Chinese peoples, generally known as the Lao, were also viewed as barbarians and sometimes described as black, thanks to the fact that their skin was darker than that of northerners (Schafer 1967).

Unlike the Greeks, however, the Chinese did not show much curiosity about the customs of these barbarians and produced no equivalent of Herodotus. The closest parallel to Herodotus on the Scythians is probably a passage from the most famous Chinese historian, Sima Qian (c.145–c.87 BCE.), who wrote a few pages (1961: 129–162) on a nomadic people of his day, the Xiongnu (formerly identified with the Huns). In his own voice he condemned them, saying that: Their only concern is self-advantage, and they know nothing of propriety or righteousness. However, Sima Qian undermined this judgment by quoting the praises of the Xiongnu by the Chinese eunuch Zhonghang Yue: Their laws are simple and easy to carry out: the relation between ruler and subject is relaxed and intimate. Zhonghang also commented that the Chinese, unlike the Xiongnu, do not know how to fight and build too many houses. In other words, like Tacitus – but nearly two hundred years before him – Sima Qian presented nomads as both brave and frugal.

Poets too produced brief descriptions of non-Han peoples whom they encountered in China, among them nomads and forest-dwellers. Liu Yuxi (772–842 CE), for instance, described the Mak Yao people as hunters and as friends of supernatural beings: At night they cross gorges of a thousand fathoms, while he wrote of another tribe, the Man-tzu, that: The speech of the Man is a clucking sound/the dress of the Man is a mottled linen (Schafer 1967: 51, 54). In Tang times painters and sculptors represented foreign peoples, especially the Persians, in a generic manner with round eyes, curly hair and large noses, as if illustrating the phrase commonly applied to them, shenmu gaobi, deep eyes and high noses. During the Song dynasty (960–1279), a new genre of painting emerged, described as fanzu, barbarian tribes, and representing nomads in distinctive clothes, set in a distinctive landscape and accompanied by horses and tents (Abramson 2003).

Even when Chinese pilgrims visited India in search of Buddhist texts, they sometimes took their prejudices with them. If the monk Faxian (c.337–c.422), in one of his rare recorded glances at secular society, noted with surprise that the inhabitants of Mathura do not kill any living creature, nor drink intoxicating liquor, nor eat onions or garlic, his colleague Xuanzang (c.602–664 CE), travelling on the Silk Road, commented on the hard and uncultivated manners of the people of Bamiyan, the rude and violent manners of the people of Kapisa and the timid, deceitful and avaricious character of the Sogdians (Faxian 1886: 43; Wriggins 2004: 45–49).

A genre of literature concerned with the character and customs of different peoples emerges in the Arab world in the ninth (for Muslims, the third) century and reaches its apogee in the eleventh (fifth). An anonymous Account of China and India was written in Arabic around the year 850 and described different political and economic systems (including the caste system in India). Al-Jahiz (776–868 CE) had much to say about Persians and Turks and noted the influence of the environment on their health and character. Al-Muqaddasi (c.945–1000 CE), wrote a book about the regions of the Islamic world, beginning each section with the climate and moving on to describe the religion, language, economy and customs of that region (Miquel 1967–80, vol.1). Al-Biruni (c.973–1048 CE), a polymath best known as an astronomer and astrologer, wrote an account of India in which he remarked – rather like Herodotus on the Egyptians – that the Hindus differ from us … in all manners and usages and disliked foreigners: "They call them mleccha, i.e. impure, and forbid having any connection with them" (Al-Biruni 1910: 19).

Again, in 1068, Sa’id ibn Ahmad, a judge from Toledo, wrote a book about the nations of the world, arguing that eight peoples (including Indians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs and Jews) had contributed to the advancement of knowledge, while the Chinese were worthy of respect for their craft skills and the Turks for the art of war. The rest of mankind, on the other hand, are more like beasts than men (quoted Lewis 1982: 68).

In the fourteenth (eleventh) century, we find two famous Arab writers, Ibn Battuta and Ibn Khaldun, interested in what we call human geography. Ibn Battuta (1304–c.1368 CE) came from Tangier. His book described the 75 000 mile journey that took him to Baghdad, Mecca, East Africa, Hormuz, Constantinople, Delhi and Beijing and had much to say about the variety of human customs (in Arabic, adab) that he experienced, especially in more remote regions. In Hinawr in South India, for instance, he remarked that: The women of this town and of all these coastal districts wear no sewn garments but only unsown lengths of cloth, one end of which they gird round their waists, and drape the rest round their head and chest. They are beautiful and virtuous, and each wears a gold ring in her nose. In China, by contrast, what impressed the Ibn Battuta was a series of bureaucratic practices: recording the contents of ships and the names of travelers and circulating the portraits of foreigners (Ibn Battuta 1958–1994, vol. 4: 803, 892–893; Chelhod 1978; Euben 2006).

More analytic is the approach of Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406 CE), who came from Tunis and lived at various times in Spain, Morocco and Egypt. His most famous work, the Muqaddimah, is an introduction to history, organized around the opposition between two cultures, the nomadic and the sedentary. The people of the desert are described as tough, frugal and brave, while the people of the city are soft, luxurious and unable to fight. Desert civilization is inferior to urban civilization, but on the other hand the Bedouin are closer to being good than sedentary people are. Above all, the desert people possess and the city people generally (but not always) lack what Ibn Khaldun called asabiyya (group consciousness or solidarity). Desert people sometimes conquer cities and then they become soft and lose their solidarity and so become vulnerable to conquest themselves, so that history often takes the form of cycles. The parallels between the ideas of Ibn Khaldun and those of the Greeks, Romans and Chinese discussed earlier will be obvious enough, although his emphasis on asabiyya is distinctive.

The Western Middle Ages

As in the case of the ancient Greeks, the context for the rise of medieval interest in other cultures was expansion; the medieval expansion of Europe (Phillips 1988) and the consequent clash of civilizations. In the early Middle Ages, the Roman Empire was invaded by the Goths, Vandals, Franks, Lombards and other peoples. In the later Middle Ages came the expansion of Latin Christendom (Bartlett 1993), including the invasion of Eastern Europe by the Germans (the push eastward or Drang nach Osten), and the invasion of Ireland and Wales by the Norman-English, as well as the reconquest of Spain from the Arabs.

The early medieval clashes produced a number of histories of the invaders – the Roman official Jordanes on the Goths, and the churchmen Gregory of Tours on the Franks and Paul the Deacon on the Lombards; but these histories have little to say about ethnic differences or particular customs (Goffart 1988). What one does find in late classical or early medieval writers –