GEOG 109-01
Geographical Research and Writing
Lecture: Four Traditions of Geography
Geographers do not share a common vision of their own discipline
There may be as many definitions of geography as there are geographers
The field is so very diverse that geographers in one subfield may find it easier
to communicate with scholars in a different discipline than with people on
some other end of the geographical discipline (e.g., geomorphologists with
geologists and GIS people with computer science people and cultural
geographers and anthropologists)
There is often a sense among many geographers that the centrifugal forces within
geography may overwhelm the centripetal forces and pull the field apart
So, every so often, someone starts the debate all over again, the quest to find
a defensible core to unite the field, the old "...but is it geography?"
argument
One of these episodes back in the 1960s resulted in Durrenberger's article, "The
Four Traditions of Geography." This lecture is based on his grouping of
the various camps in geography, though it incorporates a lot of other
information from the history of geographic thought.
The Human-Environment Tradition
Definition of geography: the study of the inter-relationships between
nature and society
One of the oldest traditions in geography
Also, the source of one of our greatest embarrassments: environmental
determinism, sometimes called geographical determinism
A variant of Social Darwinism: the appropriation of Darwin's theory of
natural selection for use directly on human societies, usually for
racist or imperialist apologia
The idea that the natural environment, especially climate, creates natural
selective conditions that either bring out the best in humans and
create "superior" cultures or the worst in people and create
"inferior" cultures
This was an example of premature theorization:
Science normally proceeds from an early era of descriptive empiricism,
gradually building up and testing generalizations, and eventually
producing theories that have survived repeated tests and are
widely accepted
Social Darwinism simply grabbed a theory from the biosciences and
applied it to social phenomena without the lengthy process of
testing and theory construction for social data
Environmental determinism was very popular around the turn of the century,
dominating American geography until about the 1920s
It increasingly came under fire to the point of discrediting:
The "ideal" climate reflected the climate producing a given author's
culture: British authors leaned to the West Coast marine climate;
Americans favored the four season humid continental climate; and the
ancient Greeks thought their Mediterranean climate (their Temperate
Zone) was the ideal
Sequent occupance: the serial occupance of a given landscape by different
cultures who create wildly different landscapes in the same
environment through time (e.g., California)
Geography retreated from environmental determinism and, indeed, much of
geography shied away from theory, period, since its first foray into it
proved so disastrous
Until very recently, an off-hand comment about the weather making you feel
blue would elicit a smart-aleck response from other geographers to the
effect you must be an environmental determinist (the ne plus
ultra of geographical epithets)
The human-environment tradition redefined itself as the study of human
impact ON Nature rather than the other way around:
It basically stood environmental determinism on its head
The cultural geography associated with UC Berkeley and Carl Sauer (the
West Coast School) pursued this theme largely in explorations of
folk livelihoods in the Third World
The cultural geography associated with the American Midwest (the
Midwestern School) pursued this theme by examining folk
artifacts, such as architecture, in North American landscapes
This created an ecological sensibility in geography that was
helped recruit a lot of geographers (including me) in
the late 1960s and 1970s and on to the present day.
The human-environment tradition in geography is relaxing its inhibitions about
theorizing the impact of Nature on society, perhaps propelled by the
successes of Gilbert White in establishing geography as one of the dominant
disciplines in the study of natural hazards
The Regional Tradition
Definition of geography: the study of areal differentiation
Implied tasks: the definition and description of regions in order to
differentiate them from other regions and areas
Implied function of a geographer: to become a walking encyclopaedia about
everything going on in a given area (example in class: what you'd need to
know to be a regional geographer of California)
The regional tradition was perhaps the dominant one in American geography from
about the 1920s to about the mid-1950s
To a certain extent, this reflected the real-world concern with sorting out
boundaries between countries (cultural regions) after the two World
Wars
It also expressed the great movement in geography away from theory in the
wake of the environmental determinism debacle: the regional tradition
is nothing if not atheoretical and descriptive in character
Some parallels were drawn between geography and the-then atheoretical
discipline of history, saying that, while history organized facts
chronologically, geography organized facts chorologically, that is,
across space or regionally (Richard Hartshorne particularly expounded
this argument)
This tradition died a sudden death as a research tradition in the mid-1950s, in
the form of the single Annals article published by a German working-
class self-taught scholar, Fred Schaeffer, entitled, "Exceptionalism in
Geography."
He argued that the regional tradition in geography was unscientific in the
sense that it encouraged dilettantism, the general dabbling and
patching together of knowledge created by others
The key function of science is the construction and testing of new
knowledge
To be in a position to create and test new knowledge requires
specialization, and the regional tradition eschews that kind of
concentration
He argued that the regional tradition implied the study of inherently
unique or exceptional objects, regions, and science is about the
construction of generalizations that cover groups of objects
He then pointed out that the object of such geographical study, the region,
is an inherently unspecifiable thing
All of us can construct different boundaries to any region, such as
the Great Central Valley (e.g., fluvially, structurally, and
politically) and justify our choices logically, and there's no
way universally to choose one set of boundaries over another
In other words, by pursuing the region as the object of study,
regional geographers were like mediaeval scholastics who wasted
time debating how many angels could dance on the head of a pin
While this tradition died out as a research tradition, American culture went
overboard, as usual, and, over a couple of decades, removed it from the K-
12 teaching curriculum, essentially tossing the baby out with the bathwater
(maybe all those adminstrators who, looking for something to cut out of the
curriculum in the wake of budgetary constraints, remembered their own
boring regional geography classes throughout their K-12 education?!)
The result is an entire generation of geographically illiterate Americans
This is kind of like imagining tossing arithmetic out of the K-12 school
curriculum because the research frontier in mathematics is in
topology, not in multiplication tables
The regional tradition is making something of a comeback now
It is being incorporated in the K-12 curriculum again, as one of the 18
national geographic standards
There is even some research ferment in the form of theorizing local
responses to global economic processes, with an acceptance of the
fuzziness of the region concept (a lot of this reflects post-
modernists' and deconstructionists' attacks on the epistemological
validity of science in the first place)
The Spatial Tradition
Definition of geography: the study of the spatial distributions of
particular phenomena
This tradition encourages the kind of specialization that can get you to the
research frontier in a particular topic
In other words, it supports the scientists' job of producing and testing new
knowledge, which is why this tradition is particularly attractive to the
"Joe Science" types in geography
The particular spatial distributions can be strictly human phenomena (e.g.,
languages, religions, even the microscale spacing of people in a room or
elevator depending on their cultural norms), strictly natural phenomena
(e.g., the distribution of a particular species of Ceanothus plant,
of a vegetation association, of earthquake epicenters, of the depositional
landforms created by a retreating glacier), or some sort of relationship
between society and nature (e.g., potential deaths to earthquake hazard as
a reflection of seismology and architectural forms and socioeconomic
processes allocating particular kinds of people to particular places and
architectures)
So, in other words, you don't have to learn about everything else in a
region: just the distribution of the particular thing you're
interested in understanding
You also are not expected to relate society and nature if you're not
interested in that dynamic and yet still consider yourself a
geographer
Since the focus of this tradition is the spatiality of particular phenomena, it
has developed a huge arsenal of quantitative spatial analytic techniques,
including GIS: this is the most computerized, mathematical, and "high-
tech" tradition in the discipline
This tradition is also explicitly friendly to theory-building, but its theories
pertain to the particular phenomena of interest to a spatial geographer or
to the methods used in spatial analysis, rather than the cosmic and fuzzy
theorizing of the environmental determinists
The spatial tradition rose to dominate geography, especially much of human
geography, in the wake of the Schaeffer article, and it enjoyed this
dominance from the late 1950s to the mid-1970s and remains a very healthy
and employable tradition in the field
Its dominance has been challenged since the 1970s by various radical, post-
modern, and deconstructionist approaches, many forms of which attack the
legitimacy of science itself
It remains dominant in GIS, quantitative methods, much of economic and
urban geography, and in some parts of historical geography
Its critics, however, have helped revitalize cultural geography, social
geography, historical geography, and even the regional tradition, so
geography is a hoppin' kind of place these days
The Physical Geography Tradition
Definition of geography: the study of Planet Earth as the home of humanity
One of the oldest approaches to geography
It acknowledges the human impact on the planet to an extent not seen in most
other natural sciences, but the focus remains on the planet itself and its
physical processes
Many physical geographers suspect that geography took the wrong turn late in the
last century by starting to investigate social science questions
They may have a point in that a lot of this was driven by environmental
deteriminism
For them, the retreat from environmental determinism was deeper into
physical process, away from the hazards of premature speculation on
the natural impact on social evolution
Physical geography has lagged numerically in the US, compared to England and the
rest of Europe and Canada (my sneaking suspicion is that a lot of students
are drawn into geography by the mistaken belief that they can thereby avoid
math and this precludes them from acquiring the physical science background
necessary to do research in physical geography)
In the mid-1970s, I worked at JPL and there were quite a few geographers on-lab
and we used to joke that, in light of our presence in the space program
(space? that word again), that perhaps the physical geography tradition
needed to be expanded to the study of the solar system as the home
of humanity. On that "Final Frontier" note, adieu.
first placed on web: 08/28/98
last revised: 08/28/98
© Dr. Christine M. Rodrigue