History Of Geographic Thought Research Paper

Since geography gives information on distant places, the ways to reach them, their economy, population, and culture, it is important for rulers. Governments rely either on empirical knowledge accumulated by local persons or on objective evidence gathered by their cartographic, statistical, and ethnographic services for the management of a territory. In the first case, the local agents of the sovereign know the country they are in charge of so well that they can develop policies of their own. Hence, there is a tendency for all governments to develop centralized forms of control, for which they need special forms of geographic knowledge. Modern enterprises also have to develop geographic skills. They have to locate resources, exploit them, and distribute goods. A part of modern geography is linked with their activity.

The history of scientific geographic thought has always been situated in this context, with an eye to the type of practices used by ordinary people as well as to the skills developed by administrative services in gathering and interpreting spatial data. The discipline was institutionalized for several reasons:

(a) the will to provide the state (or other power institutions) with valuable knowledge for domestic control or overseas expansion;

(b) a curiosity for the low culture forms of geographic lore and their preservation; and

(c) the will to provide the citizens of modern nation states with an image of their country and the rest of the world in order to build or strengthen their national identity and explain how the contemporary world is working.

1.2 Geographic Narratives And The History Of Geographic Thought

Geographic thought was expressed through standardized forms of narratives. The history of the discipline is partly that of the transformation of geographic discursive fields. What were the publics aimed at, the rhetoric used to attract or convince them, and the type of knowledge judged convenient for them? In Greek and Roman times for instance, according to one of the established geographic genres, geography was often presented as the account of a journey by Icarus.

From the Renaissance onwards, geography developed, as narratives on the newly discovered lands and the strangeness of their inhabitants, universal geographies, i.e., pictures of all the places and countries of the Earth, or quantitative assessments of the population, activities, wealth, and military assets of the provinces of kingdoms in order to facilitate their control. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, geographers developed other types of narratives: the description of exotic places for tourists and the analysis of national territories for the civic instruction of young people.

Geography is a complex discipline. Its changes are partly explained by the ways it was institutionalized and partly by the evolution of the discursive fields geographers developed in order to gain a large readership. However, its transformation mainly reflects the dynamics of its scientific purposes. It is convenient to distinguish five different scientific programs that were transformed into traditions later.

2. The Five Approaches In Geography

2.1 Geography As A Science Of Terrestrial Locations. Cartography

The first program was linked with the problems of orientation. In order to build a reliable system of place locations, Greek geographers discovered that the best solution was to rely on an abstract grid of reference (Jacob 1991). The idea appeared with the first forms of mapmaking. For the Ionian mapmakers in the late sixth and early fifth centuries BC, all territories had geometric shapes. The idea of spherical coordinates, which appeared in the third century BC, was conducive to the first scientific cartography. At the same time, it provided a coherent grid of reference for locating places. As expressed by Ptolemy (AD 98–168), geography became ‘the sublime science which reads in the sky the image of the Earth.’

The Earth is a sphere and terrestrial positions, i.e., longitudes and latitudes, can be measured through the observation of the Sun and stars. Erastothenes (273– 192 BC) was the first to develop this line of research. Hipparchus (second century BC) proposed the idea of geographic coordinates. In the second century AD, Ptolemy synthesized the accumulated data in this field. His contribution was preserved and improved by Arabic geographers during the Middle Ages. The rediscovery of his texts in the fifteenth century marked a new start in the history of geographic thought. In the seventeenth century, Bernhardus Varenius (1622– 1650) modernized the cosmographic approach through the introduction of the Copernician view of a Sun-centered Universe.

The major problem for this conception of geography came from the impossibility of keeping time, so that astronomical observations were unable to give a measure of longitude—a weakness which subsisted from Antiquity to the discovery of the marine chronometer by John Harrison (1693–1776) in 1735. Until the mid-eighteenth century, one of the main tasks of geographers was to compile data relative to distances in travel accounts. From the mid-eighteenth century, mapmaking became the task of specialized engineers and scientists. They provided geographers with the topographical maps they needed.

Geographers ceased to be responsible for the basic cartography, but the problems of location and mapmaking remained important for them. Their role changed; they learnt in the nineteenth century to use statistical sources to produce thematic maps. During the twentieth century, remote sensing facilitated the gathering of data on land use, vegetation, temperatures, atmosphere, etc. Thanks to computing facilities, the building of geographical information systems has recently become easy; one of the most prized skills of contemporary geographers is to provide administrations or firms with this new cartographic aid to decision-making.

Thanks to cartography, geographers were the first able to describe the Earth as seen from the sky—the Icarus’ viewpoint, according to Greek geographers. It was essential for getting an objective description of the face of the Earth and its regional divisions.

2.2 Geography As Description. The Regional Approach

The second agenda developed by geographers was the description of the Earth’s surface and its regional differentiation. During Antiquity, it was illustrated by Herodotus, Marinus of Tyre (first or second century AD) and Strabo (64 BC–AD 20). Arab geographers improved much of the knowledge of the Middle East, India, the Far East, and Africa south of the Sahara. With the great discoveries, the program became really worldwide.

The main problem was: What to describe and how to describe it? Thanks to the map and the vertical perspective it offered, geographic description was different from the travelers’; it was not structured along itineraries, but on the apprehension of regional units as seen from above. Such a perspective allowed for the contraction of much information, but it destroyed the link between direct observation and description, hence the dryness of many descriptions until the eighteenth century.

Because there was no standardized vocabulary to speak about the details of topography, rocks, plants, animals, and human activities, geographers were unable to grasp the real world in their narratives. Sometimes, they preferred to provide their readers with information on local mythology (in the Greek and Roman times), the history of Christianity (during the Middle Ages), and the local coats of arms and heraldry (in feudal Europe). In a way, the travel accounts of the Middle Ages and Renaissance are generally more interesting for today’s geographers than the geographical publications of the time.

Everything changed in the eighteenth century, with the development of natural history and a new curiosity for human activity. The work of Linne in botany and zoology, a few geologists for rocks, and the first agronomists for rural life, created the technical terms geographers needed in order to write precise descriptions of the world. Thanks to Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) and Johann-Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746– 1827), geographers began to offer descriptions on two scales: one was based on both fieldwork and direct observation, and the other on the synthetic vision of the map-reader. Carl Ritter (1779–1859), one of the pioneers of modern geography, has been trained in a Pestalozzian school, just as Elisee Reclus (1830–1905). Alexander von Humboldt (1779–1859) discovered the value of first-hand contact with landscapes through his training as a natural scientist and his contacts with Georg Forster (1754–1794), who was on Cook’s second voyage around the world.

The quality of geographic description kept increasing with the development of new scientific fields: pedology, meteorology, and climatology on the natural side of the discipline, and agronomy, demography, and social and cultural anthropology on the human one. Many of these research fields were initially explored by geographers and then turned independent.

Because of the improvement of geographical descriptions, geographers conceived their discipline in a different way: they began to consider that one of its major advantages was to deal with the real world. The idea that geography was a science of concreteness appeared. Geographers did not consider themselves only as scientists; description was an art, so that they had to display a literary bent.

During all of the nineteenth century and a good part of the twentieth, when writing descriptions, geographers felt to provide impartial views of the world since their work was based on objective observations. They considered that the descriptions and modes of regionalization developed by laymen were subjective and as such, not reliable. They preferred to ignore them.

2.3 Geography As Explanation: The Perspective Of Natural Philosophies And Natural Sciences

As soon as description progressed in the eighteenth century, a third task appeared for geographers: they had to explain the distributions they observed. A precise description was necessarily conducive to questions about the causes responsible for the patterns read on the maps or the features discovered through fieldwork. Geographers had to give an explanatory dimension to their analyses.

During the first half of the nineteenth century, the main interrogation was about the interaction of natural features, their mutual conditioning, and their influence on the destiny of human groups. In the seventeenth century, Varenius had opened the way through his analysis of position. In order to explain terrestrial distributions, he stressed the role of latitude and of the major topographic accidents. He opposed inland and coastal locations. In the first half of the nineteenth century, this approach was transformed into a coherent paradigm: the analysis of position, well exemplified by Alexander von Humboldt and systematized by Carl Ritter. The major factors in the shaping of the Earth and the explanation of regional distributions were latitude, altitude, continental versus coastal locations, and the patterns of mountain ranges and coastlines. This kind of analysis had to be developed at different scales.

Geographers used these tools to explain the distribution of particular natural features: the altitudinal patterns of vegetation in tropical mountains for Alexander von Humboldt. Ritter wished to explain how the destiny of peoples was shaped by the countries they inhabited. Behind these projects, the influence of early nineteenth century philosophies was obvious. Humboldt stressed the harmony between the different levels of the geographic reality according to the natural philosophies of his time. Ritter followed Herder (1744–1803) when exploring the influence of environment on cultures.

This first type of explanation, linked with the German philosophies of late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, was displaced by a natural science perspective when Charles Darwin (1809–1882) stressed the role of the environment in the transformation of life. Geographers of the late nineteenth century, Friedrich Ratzel (1844–1904) in Germany and Paul Vidal de la Blache (1845–1918) in France, built human geography on this evolutionist, either Darwinist or neo-Lamarckian basis. Their ambition was to explain human distributions through the analysis of the mainly ‘vertical’ (or local) relations people had with their milieu. In fact, they combined the analysis of position inherited from Ritter with an ecological approach. They stressed both the significance of local environments (the ecological approach) and of circulation (the analysis of position). The risk with the ecological approach was to accept a deterministic interpretation of human beings nature relationships. Circulation offered a way to escape this danger.

Vidal de la Blache used the idea of genre de vie as the main concept of the new approach. In order to exploit an environment, people developed sets of techniques and practices that were soon transformed into a way of life because of the force of habits. The main interest of the genre de vie notion was to give a social dimension (the force of habits) to human geography and to stress the role of techniques in the mediation between human groups and the environment.

Even if Ratzel and Vidal de la Blache were conscious of the significance of circulation, their human geography tried mainly to explain the influence of physical geography on human distributions and the way people took advantage of natural endowments. The role of social relations and of distance as an obstacle to interaction was practically ignored. Human geography was at its best when it used the genre de vie paradigm to explain regional structures through the interaction between physical forces and social groups. Unfortunately, this approach could not work in urbanized and industrialized societies, where genre de vie became too complex to be a useful means of investigation.

Because human geography was unable to explain satisfactorily the distribution of social groups and artifacts on the surface of the Earth, some geographers, specially in Germany, preferred to define geography as the science of landscape, which avoided splitting the discipline between natural and social parts.

The analysis of position played a central role in the first efforts to investigate political geography. Alfred T. Mahan (1840–1914) and Halford Mackinder (1861–1947) stressed the opposition between inland locations and coastal ones. This theme became central to geopolitical studies in the first half of the twentieth century.

Thanks to the natural sciences, an explanatory dimension had been introduced in geography. Geographers succeeded in organizing efficiently physical systematic disciplines: geomorphology, climatology, biogeography, pedology, hydrology, oceanography, etc. On the human side of the discipline, the results were less impressive. Geographers capitalized more on the analysis of position than on the ecological paradigm. Even cultural geographers like Carl Sauer (1890–1975) did not try to explore systematically the role of techniques in the distribution of human groups. By the mid-twentieth century, a feeling of dissatisfaction had developed in human geography.

2.4 Geography As Explanation: The Social Science Approach

Many geographers tried to give a new start to their discipline. The most successful was Edward Ullman (1912–1976). His diagnosis was clear. Human geography failed because it was conceived as a natural science. Overemphasis had been given to the study of human beings milieu relationships. Circulation, the other face of human geography as defined at the end of the nineteenth century, had been neglected. In order to build a modern geography, emphasis had to be given to social interaction (Ullman 1980).

Geographers discovered that economists had developed an interest for spatial economics since the beginning of the nineteenth century. They had explored the influence of distance upon the location of farming, industrial activities, and services. Geographers decided to take advantage of the results of spatial economics to give a more systematic dimension to human geography. It was the basis of the new geography of the late 1950s and 1960s.

In a way, this new geography translated Ritter’s position into social terms. Instead of focusing on the opposition between inland and coastal locations, for instance, it focused on the dialectics between center and periphery. The center was defined in terms of social physics as the point or the area that enjoyed the highest accessibility to the totality of a social group. Procedures were invented to measure centrality and to map it. The idea of population or income potential changed the traditional vision. Instead of the center as a point, it presented the center as an area. In the United States, a central core, the manufacturing or industrial belt, appeared as the main feature of the territorial structure.

Geographers relied on spatial economics to develop their new understanding of human geography, but they went far ahead of economists in their analysis of spatial organization. The regional geography of the first half of the twentieth century fell short of a systematic formulation. Thanks to the works of Edward Ullman, Torsten Hagerstrand (born 1916) and a few other geographers, the way space was organized—through specialization, the development of networks, the dynamics of scale and external economies, and the opposition between center and periphery—became clear.

During the 1970s and 1980s, a few geographers, for instance, Paul Claval (born 1932), tried to extend the analysis of spatial interaction to non-economic aspects of social life, either social relations or political structures. Instead of focusing on transport costs, they analyzed communication, the structuring influence of commutation costs, the role of medias, and the significance of symbolism. In this way, they provided a new understanding of the dynamics of globalization, so evident from the 1960s.

The emphasis on social interaction had positive effects on geography in many respects, but it reduced the interest in the ecological approach at a time when ecology came really of age and pollution became a major problem at the local, regional, and global levels.

2.5 Geography And Postmodernity: The Cultural Approach And The Experience Of Nature, Place, And Society

From the early 1970s, a strong critical movement developed in geography. Young colleagues struggled against the conception of their discipline as a natural science and the interpretation that was given to its social dimension. The positivist approach considered social relations as natural facts. It ignored their historical dimensions and their creation through human agency. As a result, neo-positivist geographers did not criticize the hierarchical structures and spatial organizations of the groups they observed and explained, even if they were conducive to exploitation and oppression.

From the eighteenth century, a different conception of geography had developed. In his Geographie politique, Turgot (1727–1781) wished to promote new geographies much more than to explain the existing one (Turgot 1808–1811). It was one of the main features of the geographic projects of the Enlightenment. The critical tradition was represented during the nineteenth century by anarchists like Elisee Reclus and Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921), who made it illustrious, but the prevailing option for a natural science approach restricted their influence.

At the beginning of the 1970s, David Harvey (born 1935) played a decisive role in the development of a new interest for social justice (Harvey 1973). However, the break with the neo-positivist positions of the 1950s and 1960s had other correlates. If social realities are the product of human agency, it is urgent to study the ways people experience places and conceive nature and society, the dreams they have about their future, and the significance they give to their lives. Geographers can no more ignore the ways people organize their existence. The rigid division between vernacular or corporate geographies on the one side, and scientific ones on the other, fades out. Scientific geographers have to explore the geographies of lay people in order to understand the landscape they shape and the institutions they create. Ethnogeography becomes a new field of investigation.

There was an old but limited interest in people’s conceptions of place thanks to the analysis of choronyms. The development of new attitudes among geographers had not been possible without the influence of Heidegger (1889–1979). Eric Dardel (1902– 1968), in France, was well aware of the significance of his philosophy, as Yi-Fu Tuan (born 1930) or Edward Relph (born 1944) a generation later.

When societies are conceived as a product of human activity, i.e., in an historical perspective, it becomes important to understand the practices, attitudes, knowledge, and beliefs shared by social groups, the techniques they master in the fields of material activity and social life, and the significance they give to their lives. The cultural approach, which had been mainly developed by Carl Sauer in the first half of the twentieth century and had experienced a crisis in the 1960s and early 1970s, benefited from a new popularity thanks to Denis Cosgrove (born 1948), James S. Duncan (born 1945), Joel Bonnemaison (1940–1997), and Augustin Berque (born 1942). It was one of the main frontiers in human geography from 1980 onwards. Culture ceased to be considered as a collective heritage. It was analyzed as a continuous process of communication, adaptation, evaluation, and refurbishing.

The criticism of the neo-positivist conceptions of social sciences was by no means restricted to geography. The transformations of the discipline were parallel with new orientations in sociology, anthropology, and history. Geographers discovered the interest of the Clifford Geertz’s type of thick description as a tool to explore ethnogeographies and enter the complexities of cultures.

Under the aegis of French deconstructionist philosophers, Jacques Derrida (born 1930) and Michel Foucault (1926–1984) for instance, social knowledge was increasingly analyzed as a tool to legitimize the Establishment and gain support for governmental policies, whatever their content. Geographers began to scrutinize geographical narratives and look for their hidden significance. They got increasingly aware of the role of geography as an instrument to build efficient forms of social control. Thanks to Derek Gregory (born 1951), the study of geographical imaginations and of their role in social life and power situations became popular (Gregory 1994).

The new epistemologies are increasingly critical of the great narratives of the past. Geographers are reluctant to rely on macro-theories or philosophies– historical materialism for instance. They develop a growing interest in the local and privileged microor meso-theories. They explore realms that had been previously neglected: gender geography, the geography of young and aged people, the varied forms of segregation, and exclusion or sexual differences that most societies build.

Men and women do not live in a standardized, sterilized, and acclimatized space. They inhabit specific places, develop territorial identities, and use landscape markers as symbols of what unite them and provide them with a sense of shared community. Consequently, geographers are increasingly concerned with the religions, philosophies, or ideologies people create in order to give significance to their lives. They explore the moves the human mind performs in order to discover perspectives of society, nature, and collective destiny, and build values. Transcendence and immanency are wrongly considered as purely philosophical concepts. They have a spatial dimension; geographers have to explore them.

Men and women are part of nature; they live in nature, with nature (Harvey 1996). The ecological perspective has been completely recovered. Geographers are increasingly involved in the study of the energy and material relations which develop between human beings and their environment, and in the analysis of the attitudes towards nature, the significance given to natural landscape, and the management of the planet Earth.

Contemporary geography goes much deeper into the analysis of social and psychological processes than was the case in the 1970s. At the same time, it has become a more critical and modest discipline. For many of the young radicals, scholars have to refrain from building mega-narratives, as in the past. It is better to concentrate on limited problems.

3. The Coexistence Of Perspectives Instead Of The Displacement Of Paradigms

Kuhn’s interpretation of scientific revolutions was very popular among geographers in the 1970s. They interpreted the new geography of the 1960s as a new paradigm. In fact, the history of geographic thought does not fit well into the Kuhnian model. We have distinguished five traditions, but when a new one appeared, it did not displace the older ones. The interest in location and map making is less central today than in Antiquity or modern times, but it is still fundamental to the discipline. Description as an intellectual venture worth pursuing for its own sake has long ceased to be fashionable, but progress in the analytical instruments offered by other natural or social sciences allows for new readings of landscapes and maps, and the discovery of new patterns. It makes geographers aware of new problems.

Geography as a natural science and geography as a positivist social sciences are still alive. They provided geographers with many of the tools they use, the analysis of position both relative to physical factors along Ritter’s views, or social distributions according to Ullman’s conceptions, and the ecological approach to human beings milieu relationships. Many colleagues try to develop more performing models of economic or social distributions. The emphasis on communication is a new development of an old curiosity.

When building a periodization of the history of geographic thought, the development, fading out, and renewal of geographical traditions constitute only one component of the whole picture.

Greek geography was born out a Kuhnian revolution, the invention of the grid of meridians and parallels, but its successes came partly from its role as a repository of Greek culture. With the development of empires, first in Alexandria and then in Rome, it became a useful tool for the new bureaucracies because of the maps it produced and the descriptions it provided.

The decline of the Classical tradition in the Middle Ages reflected the disappearance of imperial polities in Western Europe and their displacement by feudal structures, which did not involve explicit corporate geographies. Maps were used as symbols of the monarch’s power, not as a tool for his or her action. Because of the development of trade from the eleventh century, new cartographic and geographic instruments were needed—hence the invention of Portolano charts. In the Arab world where imperial polities played an important role, the fate of medieval geography was far better.

The new phase of development of geography which started from the Renaissance was linked with the rediscovery of Ptolemy and the cartographic perspective, the voyages of discovery, the rise of the modern state with its proto-bureaucracies, and new forms of corporate economic activities. For two centuries, geography remained based on the two perspectives of cartography and regional description. The eighteenth century was as a major turning point. The cartographic limitations disappeared thanks to an easier measure of longitudes. Because of the progress of natural sciences and the birth of social sciences, geographic description improved much and ceased to be problematical. This kind of description necessarily led to an interest in explanation. The transition from pre-modern to modern forms of geography was a difficult one and lasted for about a century, since it meant a change in the institutionalization of the discipline: from state cartographic services to universities.

The naturalist orientation that was born at the beginning of the nineteenth century, prevailed until the mid-twentieth. From that time, geography became first a neo-positivist social science, and then a discipline, partly scientific, partly humanistic, or philosophical, based on human experience and the significance of the human presence on Earth. Institutionalization began once again to change. Geography is increasingly dependant on research institutions and private funding.

Geography offers the intellectual tools that are needed to understand the contemporary acceleration of globalization. It explains why technical uniformity is conducive to new forms of regional organization and does not entail the destruction of all spatial differentiation.

What will be the future of the discipline? As in the past, a part of the specialty fields it nurtured will develop as fully-fledged sciences of their own. The technicalities of contemporary physical geographies will deepen the gap between them and human geography. The future of geography as a unitary discipline is perhaps more on the reflective side than on the analytical side of human knowledge.

Bibliography:

1. Berdoulay V 1981 La Formation de l’Ecole francaise de geographie. Bibliotheque nationale, Paris
2. Capel H 1981 Filosofıa y ciencia en la Geografıa contemporanea. Una introduccion a la Geografia. Barcanova, Barcelona, Spain
3. Claval P 1998 Histoire de la geographie francaise de 1870 a nos jours. Nathan, Paris
4. Dunbar G 1991 Modern Geography. An Encyclopedic Survey. Garland, New York
5. Godlewska A 1999 Geography Unbound. French Geographic Science from Cassini to Humboldt. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago
6. Gould P 1985 The Geographer at Work. Routledge & Kegan Paul, London
7. Gregory D 1978 Ideology, Science and Human Geography. Hutchinson, London
8. Gregory D 1994 Geographical Imaginations. Blackwell, Oxford, UK
9. Hartshorne R 1939 The Nature of Geography. The Association of American Geographers, Lancaster, PA
10. Harvey D 1973 Social Justice and the City. Arnold, London
11. Harvey D 1996 Justice, Nature and the Geography of Diff Blackwell, Oxford, UK
12. Holt-Jensen A 1988 Geography. History and Concepts. Paul Chapman, London
13. Jacob C 1991 Geographie et ethnographie en Grece ancienne. A. Colin, Paris
14. James P 1972 All Possible Worlds. A History of Geographic Ideas. Bobbs-Merrill, Indianapolis, IN
15. Livingstone D N 1992 The Geographical Traditions. Blackwell, Oxford, UK
16. Schultz H D 1980 Die deutschsprachige Geographie on 1800 bis 1970. Selbstverlag des Geographischen Instituts der Freien Universitat Berlin, Berlin
17. Stoddart D R 1986 On Geography. Blackwell, Oxford, UK
18. Turgot A R 1808–1811 Sur la geographie politique. In: Dupont
19. de Nemoun P S (ed.) Plans et projets d’ou rages, Oeuvres completes, Paris
20. Ullman E L 1980 Geography as Spatial Interaction. University of Washington Press, Seattle, WA