A Geographical Introduction to History

L. Febvre

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780415155625
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136192517
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Originally published between 1920-70,The History of Civilization was a landmark in early twentieth century publishing. It was published at a formative time within the social sciences, and during a period of decisive historical discovery. The aim of the general editor, C.K. Ogden, was to summarize the most up to date findings and theories of historians, anthropologists, archaeologists and sociologists. This reprinted material is available as a set or in the following groupings:
* Prehistory and Historical Ethnography
Set of 12: 0-415-15611-4: £800.00
* Greek Civilization
Set of 7: 0-415-15612-2: £450.00
* Roman Civilization
Set of 6: 0-415-15613-0: £400.00
* Eastern Civilizations
Set of 10: 0-415-15614-9: £650.00
* Judaeo-Christian Civilization
Set of 4: 0-415-15615-7: £250.00
* European Civilization
Set of 11: 0-415-15616-5: £700.00

Part I

How the Problem should be Stated

THE QUESTION OF METHOD

OF all the workers whom the Année Sociologique brought together, Émile Durkheim was the first, as we have said, who brought his critical reflection to bear on modern geography and its recent attempts at co-operation in the rational study of man. After him—with sometimes a slight difference of form—pupils and successors have manifested the same spirit. The starting-point which all adopt is very clear.

The typical and acknowledged representative of the “ human geographers” is F. Ratzel. Now Ratzel in the Anthropo-geographie, his most comprehensive work and his masterpiece, sets out to study all the influences which the soil may exercise on social life in general. Such a design is chimerical.¹

It is beyond the powers of a single man. That is obvious, and is no objection. But it is beyond the power of a single science. This needs to be stated, because it is not generally understood. For the multitude of problems which are thus set is really infinite. And, what is more serious—for after all when we have the principles established and the rules fixed, the solution of an infinite number of problems is only a matter of time and patience—these problems are heterogeneous. So absolutely heterogeneous that a wise division of labour is indispensable.

It is possible that the nature of the soil and the nature of the climate have an influence on the collective outlook of men, on the myths, the legends and the arts of different peoples. That has to be determined ; but is it not for religious sociology, or even for aesthetic sociology, to develop the study of such influences ?

There is no a priori impossibility that the nature of soil and climate have an influence even on the character of nations, on their ways of thought, on their political, legal, or moral tendencies. But is it not for collective ethology to verify this in the course of the general inquiry which it is conducting into such tendencies, all the factors and conditions of which it aims to disentangle ?

It is more than probable that soil and climate influence the distribution of men on the surface of the globe, and facilitate or hinder their concentration or dispersion. It is for demography to undertake the study both of that concentration and of that dispersion.

One sees the objection that may be raised. It is claimed that a science has been formed in order to answer the question: “ What are the influences which the geographical environment exercises on the different ways in which human societies manifest themselves ?” That is an immense question. It can be broken up into a multitude of secondary questions all of which belong to quite distinct sciences. How then could a single man, unskilled in each one of these sciences, be found, under the name of geographer, skilled in them all ? Geography regarded in this light is only an impudent interloper on ground reserved to economists and sociologists. All its conclusions belong to the domain of some special sociological science. It vanishes and ought to vanish qua distinct science. It can logically claim for itself only, so to speak, an “ appendicular” existence. The sociologist alone (sociologist as a genus, demographer, ethologist, etc., as species) has the right to consider methodically and cautiously questions geographers have hitherto rashly claimed as their own … But do they not treat of them all ? Do not geographers study, in addition to the influence of environment on societies only, its influence on man in general ? The distinction is illusory if man is only an abstraction and if there exist for the geographer, as for the sociologist, only human societies and isolated human beings. Appendicular knowledge … At the most, we can conceive that from the accumulated results obtained by the labour of sociologists a new study will spring up, a sociological study, one of those which, taken as a whole, constitute “ Sociology “ It will be Social Morphology. “ It is known,” writes M. Mauss, at the commencement of the interesting memoir already mentioned,² “ that under this name we designate the science which studies the material foundations of societies with a view not only to describing, but also to explaining them—that is to say, the form which they assume when they are establishing themselves on the land, the number and density of their population, the manner in which it is distributed and the ensemble of the things which serve as a seat of collective life.” Thus is reborn from its ashes, but under a different name, anthropogeography, previously sacrificed on the altar of confusionism. More modest, we are assured, better regulated in its aims, less rash in its methods, social morphology will occupy a favourable position. There is no risk that it will wander off into blind alleys or dissipate itself in futile endeavours, for the morphologist will follow in the wake of a science with a limited scope and well-defined aims. Its task will be precise and relatively easy. And nothing will be sacrificed with which human geography either deals, or would consider it useful to deal, or could reasonably wish to elucidate. M. Mauss assures us anew of this. Here is an example, and a very significant one. After having stated in another volume of the Année sociologique³ that H. Schurtz, in his Völkerkunde,⁴ understood by anthropogeography not so much the influence of geographical situation on man in general as “ the study of the action of terrestrial phenomena on societies considered chiefly from the point of view of habit”, M. Mauss, with the ardour of an heir-presumptive, rushes to the rescue of anthropogeographers thus reduced to a bare living. “ If Schurtz had included in his definition,” he writes, “as he might have done and as would have been logical, not only the study of the environment of peoples, of their movements and of their gradual attachment to the land and of the States (political geography), but also that of the movements of population, the formation of towns and in general the distribution of individuals over the surface of the globe—he would have arrived at the idea of social morphology which we are defending here.”

Nothing could be clearer or more illuminating than such passages. They throw full light on the keenness and reality of the rivalry. To the objection that they are purely theoretical, we may rejoin that in matters of research the instrument, the method, and the spirit are surely of no little importance.

Human geography or social morphology, geographical method or sociological method; the choice must be made. There is no question here of a quarrel of schools, or, if I may be allowed the expression, of shop—but of fundamentals. Our first duty is to proceed to the examination of these.

¹ Durkheim, XVII, Vol. III, 1898–9, p. 356.

² Mauss, CCXV, p. 39.

³ XVII, Vol. VIII, 1903–4, p. 167.

⁴ Leipzig-Vienna, 1903.

Chapter I

SOCIAL MORPHOLOGY OR HUMAN GEOGRAPHY

THE first accusation of sociologists against human geography is simple. It can be expressed in one word. It is that of ambition.

Nothing, geographers are told, is more restricted, and at the same time nothing is more ambitious, than their conceptions. Whether they are considering a group of men or a human society, they look at the soil on which the group or society in question actually rests. That terrestrial support, that underlying basis of societies, is not for them inert and powerless matter. It acts on the men whom it supports. It “influences” them physically and morally. It “explains” them as a whole and as individuals. It explains them, and it alone can explain them. It alone acts on them. It alone influences them. Here we have the usual exclusiveness and foregone conclusion; the professional bias of the specialist shows itself only too clearly.

The geographer starts from the soil, not from the society. It would doubtless not be claimed that the soil is the “cause” of the society. Ratzel contents himself with saying that it is “the only essential bond of cohesion of each people”.¹ But it is to the soil that his attention is chiefly directed. It is the geographical factor with which he is concerned, and whose action and efficacy he means to disengage and to exhibit. “Instead of studying the material which underlies societies in all its elements and under all its aspects,” M. Mauss reproaches him,² “it is chiefly on the soil that he concentrates his attention. That is what is in the forefront of his research.” Social morphology would be very different. It also would treat of what underlies societies, but only as one of the elements which aid in an understanding of the life and destinies of those societies. It would not begin by deifying, so to speak, that privileged element by attributing to it a sort of creative power—making it the begetter and the animator of forms of society. This study, since it bears on “the mass of individuals who compose the different groups, the manner in which they are disposed on the soil, the nature and form of every sort of thing that affects their collective relations”,³ would take rank amongst those special sciences of which Sociology, in the eyes of MM. Durkheim and Fauconnet,⁴ constitutes, so to speak, the “Corpus”. But what the sociologist, as opposed to the geographer, puts in the forefront of his treatment is not “the Earth” but “the Society In other words, the problem is not the same whether one is and proclaims oneself a geographer or a morphologist. And, therefore, M. Mauss is constrained to say ⁵: “If to the word ‘anthropogeography’ we prefer ‘social morphology’ to designate the science which has been the result of this study, it is not due to a mere taste for neologism, but because this difference of label marks a difference in point of view.” We agree. We would even go further and say: the difference is in reality such that social morphology and human geography cannot be substituted for one another. But a study of the two rival schools “in action” will demonstrate this better than any theoretical discussion.

I The Objections of Social Morphology: Human Groups Without Geographical Roots

There is no human group, no human society, without a territorial basis. Such is the normal point from which geographers start in their speculations. But the formula is to a certain extent of doubtful accuracy. For there are many groups and many societies—particularly amongst those which sociologists sometimes prefer to study—over which the influence of the “geographical substratum”, so dear to Ratzel, makes itself, after all, very little felt. In spite of a remarkable lack of geographical ideas, the various researches of German, English, and American ethnologists on the uncivilized societies of the New World and of the Pacific have already shown us that primitive men are not acquainted with strictly territorial methods of grouping only. Totemism in particular is at the root of a multitude of social formations without any apparent geographical roots.

We will take as an example, the Arunta, that people of Central Australia whose very complex organization has been brought to our knowledge in all its details by careful and serious writers—an organization so complex that we notice at times, as in other cases, very important differences between the observers. Let us refer to the most trustworthy works, and in particular to those of Spencer and Gillen, which are classic in sociology. These authors fully described in 1899, one after the other, the native tribes of Central Australia— and in 1904 those of the North of the same continent.⁶ They are accurate observers and well supplied with facts, although, as M.J. Sion has pointed out,⁷ they made the serious mistake of describing religious and social phenomena among peoples whose material life they have not studied. However, their labours call our attention to three kinds of distinct elementary groups amongst the Arunta, which overlap one another, and are interlaced in the most complicated manner. In the first place groups are met with which are properly territorial, distinguished from one another by place-names, and each possessing a slice of land of known and definite limits. But side by side with these are a certain number of those matrimonial classes which E. Durkheim has described in his memoir on L’Organisation matrimoniale des sociétés australiennes,⁸ and there also are totemic groups which include natives, in this case, without any kind of localization or geographical distribution. It is not, moreover, the nonterritorial groups which play the least important part in the collective organization of the Arunta—quite the contrary. And Durkheim himself has often insisted (particularly in his interesting notice of Howitt’s book dealing with the native tribes of South-East Australia)⁹ on the extreme vagueness of the actual territorial organization of these Australian societies—at least in the eyes of contemporary white observers.

A similar state of things is found throughout the rest of the great Australian contin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Maps
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Introductory: The Problem of Geographical Influences
• Part I: How the Problem should be Stated
• Part II: Natural Limits and Human Society
• Part III: Possibilities and Different Ways of Life
• Part IV: Political Groups and Human Groups
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index