What is Geography?

Alastair Bonnett, Author

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9781412918695, 9781412918688
• eBook ISBN: 9781473902640
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

"I cannot imagine a better guide to the transition between school and undergraduate geography than this short, informative and confidently-argued book. Written without fuss but based on solid learning and clear thinking, it tackles head-on a question many professional academic geographers would rather avoid."
- Alisdair Rogers, University of Oxford

"A beautiful little book that helps to introduce the core concepts of geography and provides an ideal framework for relating other fields of knowledge and academia."
- Stefan Zimmermann, University of Osnabruck

What is Geography? Geography is a fundamental fascination with, and a crucial method for, understanding the way the world works.

This text offers readers a short and highly accessible account of the ideas and concepts constituting geography. Drawing out the key themes that define the subject, What is Geography? demonstrates how and why these themes - like environment and geopolitics- are of fundamental importance.

Including discussion of both the human and the natural realms, the text looks at key themes like environment, space, and place - as well as geography?s methods and the history of the discipline.

Introductory but not simplified, What is Geography? will provide students with the ability to understand the history and context of the subject without any prior knowledge. Designed as a key transitional text for students entering undergraduate courses, this book will be of interest to all readers interested in and intrigued by the "geographical imagination".

To Know the World: Order and Power

Introduction

For most of human history the ability to interpret and represent the surrounding landscape has been an urgent need and an absolute necessity. Homo sapiens have also shown a consistent desire to order their world, to find meaning in it.

The oldest literatures we have are geographies. The founding texts in what, over 2000 years later, came to be called ‘the Western canon’, are about heroes of exploration. Ulysses’s ten-year trip home to Ithaca (in Homer’s The Odyssey, compiled or written from the ninth century BC) and the – even older – tale of Jason’s search for the Golden Fleece, are part of a continuous tradition of expressing culture through narratives of voyages to distant places.

Much of the allure of Ulysses and Jason’s epic journeys relies on their encounters with fantastic creatures, such as Centaurs and the Cyclops. The thrill of the outlandish tells us that geography is rarely a simple matter of bare facts, of dusty lists. It is an imaginative leap, an attempt to intellectually claim territory far beyond one’s immediate grasp. Indeed, it appears that the more complex and settled societies become, the more they wish to reach beyond the confines of the familiar. The Greek term, Okeanoio, or Ocean, was given to the unimaginably large river that ancient Mediterranean civilisations thought circled the inhabited world (i.e., Europe, Asia and Africa). Where civilisations know geographical limits they also know the desire to cross them. Ultima Thule, a semi-mythical island (perhaps Iceland or Shetland) glimpsed in the course of circumnavigations of Britain, was an object of yearning because it was beyond the boundaries of the known.¹ Lucius Seneca, who documented many aspects of Roman society, offered just such a dissatisfied, restless geography, whose emotional charge vibrates as strongly today as when he first expressed it in the first century AD.

An age shall come, in later years,
when Ocean shall loose creation’s bonds,
when the great planet shall stand revealed,
and Tethys shall disclose new worlds,
nor shall Thule be last among lands.²

Today, dreams of ‘new worlds’ are even more pervasive. Our world is far more known and rigidly organised than Seneca’s. The thirst for exploration, for terra incognito, has turned into a generalised anxiety. The modern multitudes of roaming backpackers and weekend trippers search out new Ultima Thules of personal fulfilment and intimate discovery. And our imaginations are cast outwards as well as inwards: ever further into space, to parallel universes, into the delirious, free geographies of virtual reality.

This chapter tells the story of geography’s mission to know the world. In both Chapters 1 and 2 we are following a similar intellectual journey. In each we find the same two basic and interrelated tendencies: first, to make order from the world; and second, to grasp the world as a complex whole. These ambitions are at once practical and abstract. They help us to sustain life but also to make sense of it. In Chapter 2 I address how the world came to be understood as a creation of Nature. Chapter 1 is focused upon how the world came to be seen as the home of women and men. It is a story with ancient roots but which confronts us with the modern dilemmas of ethnocentrism and global domination.

Ordering the World

When we look at the different ways people have found meaning within the world we address traditions and practices that vary from one society and from one period to another. However, there are some geographical ideas that appear universal.³ I turn now to three such ideas: the search for a world story; the need for orientation; and the notion of centre and periphery.

Stories of the World

The desire to find order in the world is a fundamental human need. Traditionally, this impulse has been expressed through religious and spiritual beliefs. Indeed, perhaps the main function of religion is to make sense of the existence of the world. The first words of the Bible tell us that ‘In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth’. It is a religious message but also a necessary explanation: the earth is an expression of divine will.

The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork.⁴

With this information we can make sense of the seasons, the flow of the rivers, the distribution of animals and plants. The place of people in creation is also explained. In Genesis we read: ‘let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over cattle, and over the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepth the earth’.⁵ The world was made by God for us. Christianity, Islam and Judaism all share this faith. In many other traditions the act of creation is offered in even more detail: the deity literally moulds the earth, or the world is part and parcel of the creator’s body. In Chinese mythology, the originator is Pan Gu. He wakes, dispelling chaos, and forming the earth: his breath becomes the wind and clouds, his body the mountains, his blood the waters, his skin and body hair the flowers and trees.

Yet it seems that people have rarely been entirely satisfied by such explanations. Even within the most religious of eras, a searching, challenging diversity of geographical questions has been asked and answered: questions about how and why the climate varies between different places; questions about how and why the world’s peoples differ. Such questions have demanded evidence and a less mystical way of finding order in the world. Thus, within medieval Europe, rational geographical questions were pursued, often through the evaluation of observation and data. World regional geographies, the most influential of which was the encyclopaedic De imagine mundi (circa 1100), contain much that is outlandish.⁶ However, they also attempt to accurately depict the global mosaic. For example, the unknown author of De imagine mundi tells how the Caucus mountains divide the Northern from the Southern countries of Asia and relates the principal characteristics of these countries and their inhabitants. We recognise as fact some of the descriptions but others as matters of opinion or as purely fanciful. The placing and description of the Nile, of Egypt (which is said to lie in Asia) and its capital Babylon (Cairo) seem evidence based (if not necessarily accurate). But what are we to make of the description of the country north of the Caucuses ‘where mares conceive through the wind alone and give birth to foals that live only three years’?⁷ The combination of the plausible with the creative reflects a pre-modern expectation that geographical gaps could and should be ‘filled in’ in the absence of knowledge.

What John Kirtland Wright called the ‘geographical lore’ of medieval Europe represents a mixture of storytelling, faith and rational knowledge.⁸ If we accept this then we have to move away from the notion that the earth’s story was once told in purely mythical and religious terms before undergoing a secular revolution.⁹ An interest in real world processes and evidence seems to be an irrepressible component of the geographical tradition. Religious explanations of our world have never quite sufficed. But nor do meaningless lists of facts. Just as we must question the purely religious character of medieval geography, we can also query the notion that Europe moved to a post-medieval geography through ridding itself of the desire for the ‘big picture’.

The development of new, scientific, global geographies in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was not led by atheists. In most branches of geography it was initiated by those who saw in the world evidence of an overall divine plan. It is a position summed up by John Ray in his The Word of God Manifested in the Works of the Creation (published in 1691). Ray argued that the scientific method offered holy revelation. He called for the study of nature in close detail and an end to the tradition of equating scientific knowledge to familiarity with ancient texts.

Let it not suffice us to be Book-learn’d, to read what others have written, and to take things upon Trust … but let us ourselves examine Things as we have Opportunity, and converse with Nature.¹⁰

To ‘converse with Nature’ remains the modern way. But does it show us any overall ‘plan’, any wider, larger explanation by which we may make sense of our planet? It seems that if one wants to find a master plan, a transcendental purpose, then one will probably find it. And as the modern era has unfolded it has become apparent that such stories do not necessarily take a religious form. To look at the world as determined by evolution, the spirit of ‘Gaia’, or even the spirit of ‘progress’ is also to claim a greater scheme, an overarching idea.

Thus in tracing geography’s secularisation we are not necessarily following a shift away from the search for the ‘big picture’. The notion that geography can be divided into two fields of enquiry, the regional and the general (or global), has allowed geographers to be highly empiricist and descriptive at the specific scale while making claims for an overall and overarching logic at the general scale. This was a central concern for Bartholomaus Keckerman (1572–1609), the Protestant theologian who is often credited as a founding father of modern geography. His division between geographica generalis, which addressed the earth globally (most especially its climatic and physical forms), and geographica specialis, which addressed particular regions, proved to be highly influential. Another German, Bernhardus Varenius (1622–1650), developed the distinction:

Geography itself falls into two parts: one general, the other special. The former considers the earth in general, explaining its various parts and general affections. The latter, that is, special geography, observing general rules, considers, in the case of individual regions, their site, divisions, boundaries and other matters worth knowing.¹¹

Keckerman’s and Varenius’s vision for geography rested on the emergence of European intellectual assertiveness. Europeans were beginning to claim the entire world as both available for domination and available to be studied, compared and contrasted in its various parts. ‘The greatest part of Geography’, Varenius wrote, ‘is founded only upon the Experience and Observations of those who have described the several Countries’.¹²

Who has such ‘Experience’? Or, to put it another way, who makes the ‘Observations’ and who is to be the ‘Observed’? Over the last 400 years the desire to find a story, an overarching explanatory narrative, for the world, has been profoundly influenced by European colonial and neo-colonial mastery. The Biblical instruction that the progeny of Adam and Eve are to ‘have dominion’ became racialised. In his 1893 poem ‘A Song of the English’, Rudyard Kipling declared that God had ‘smote for us a pathway to the ends of all the Earth’.¹³ For Thomas Hodgkin in 1896, ‘It was the mission of the Anglo-Saxon race to penetrate into every part of the world, and to help in the great work of civilisation’.¹⁴ By the end of the nineteenth century many European intellectuals saw human life on the planet in terms of an evolutionary struggle. Benjamin Kidd, who interpreted Darwinian thought into Social Darwinism, saw in European dominion ‘the cosmic order of things’ and, hence, the application of the guiding principle that must rule all life, namely ‘energy, enterprise and social efficiency’.¹⁵ A global racial order was established, introducing a ‘Eurocentric’ way of imposing order and meaning on the world.

The late twentieth century saw the demise of overtly racist expressions of Eurocentrism. Yet the hubris captured in the titles of influential treatises such as The Ideas that Conquered the World,¹⁶Why the West Won¹⁷ and The Triumph of the West,¹⁸ is utterly contemporary. John Roberts concludes The Triumph of the West by arguing that the West’s real and final conquest is seen in its absorption of the entire planet: i.e., in its development from a local force with the power to dominate others into the global culture of the modern. ‘What seems to be clear’, says Roberts, ‘is that the story of western civilisation is now the story of mankind’.¹⁹ The notion that ‘mankind’ has a story, with a structure and direction – a beginning, a middle and, perhaps, an end – reminds us that Western supremacism offers another overarching narrative for life on earth. The story of Western power is far more materially grounded than are religious or spiritual explanations. But it too supplies answers to the kind of questions that such traditions have usually dealt with: Where are we going? (towards or through Western modernity); Who are we? (we are developed or developing peoples); What is the point of human life? (to be civilised and to be materially satisfied).

The epic journey into modernity has been talked about in utopian language, as ‘the end of history’. Francis Fukuyama, who has popularised the phrase, offers a story of Westernisation achieving a state of perfection. ‘[T]he present form of social and political organisation’ he reassures us, ‘is completely satisfying to human beings in ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter One To Know the World: Order and Power
• Chapter Two To Know the World: People and Nature
• Chapter Three Geographical Obsessions: Urbanisation and Mobility
• Chapter Four Doing Geography
• Chapter Five Institutionalising Geography
• What is Geography?
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index