Early Geographies

        The course of early geography followed a roughly similar debate pattern through the centuries, based on three major lines of thought.  The first is the intersection between history and geography.  In the ancient world, Herodotus was the first to theorize humanistic elements of geography by suggesting that history depended on it (Creswell, 2013).  Kant followed this up in the 18th century by explaining how history is defined by geographical limits.  Since all history occurs in space, geography forms the bedrock of all knowledge.  History can’t be told without geography, for without a sense of space we are left with fictional stories.  The obverse is also true though; you can’t have humanistic geography without history because most human data arise from an historical record.  There would be no way to map human behavior without history.  The human element means that history and geography fundamentally rely on each other even though they describe different things (story vs. space).  Both are human constructs that can only be studied from a mutual lens.

            The second line of thought was the relationship between the natural world and humans.  Environmental determinism was advocated by many philosophers, including Herodotus and Albertus Magnus (Cresswell 2013), for the simplicity in which it described the natural world as determining human behavior.  What ran parallel with it was the relationship between humans and the environment provided by possibilism, or the way the natural world places constraints on human behavior that isn’t fully predictable.  This version of geography began with Strabo, who was the first to document a regional approach to the study by describing known locations in his Geographia.  The sheer variety of human cultures inhabiting similar environments meant that there were a number of ways humans could adapt to changing conditions, and they could all be studied regionally.

An example is the way Native Americans migrated from Siberia over the Bering land bridge 12,000 years ago.  As they migrated southward, each tribe retained the essence of the one it separated from but adopted its own culture in light of new environmental conditions, their political preferences, and spiritual beliefs.  Since many tribes lived in the same areas, it follows that it wasn’t only the environment determining new behaviors, but social changes as well.  This pattern of thinking eventually won over environmental determinism, lending strength to the study of regional geography in the 19^th & 20^th centuries.  Pioneered by Alfred Hettner, Carl Ritter, and Paul Vidal de la Blanche (Cresswell 2013), regional geography retained the human elements of determinism without fully embracing the natural one.  Environmental determinism was discredited shortly thereafter.

The third line of thought is the debate between the general and the particular.  While a study of the particular began with Strabo, it was countered by figures like Eratosthenes and Ptolemy, who pioneered the scientific side of the debate by being the first to measure distances and apply cartographic techniques, respectively (Cresswell 2013).  In the 19^th century it was Humboldt and Ritter who believed they produced universal geographies but in different ways (Creswell 2013); Humboldt by doing extensive fieldwork that left him a legacy of being the “father of modern geography”, while Ritter was more interested in humanistic techniques, helping him become the “father of regional geography” (Cresswell 2013).  In the 20^th century, the gap widened as the quantitative revolution further divided spatial science from human and regional geography, stressing the importance of logic, models, and mathematics in research methods rather than quantitative methods, hearsay, and abstract ideas.  Spatial scientists rejected the particular for the general, causing a backlash from humanistic geographers who felt it was excessive to only focus on spatial laws. 

Like the balance between history and geography and nature and humans, the balance between the particular and the general wasn’t fully realized in early geographic thought.  What emerged was a smorgasbord of differing attitudes about what geography is and how it should be growing.  Each new idea introduced something that tipped the balance in one direction, only to swing it back the other way when the next conception came along.  Until the 1980s, the whole history of geography had been a balancing act, suffering from an identity crisis due to the very strength of its nature, as a fulcrum for all the other sciences.  Perhaps the people who study it are also seeking balance in knowledge, by the beauty of its range.  I know I am.

 

References (ASA):

Cresswell, T. 2013. Geographic Thought: A Critical Introduction. West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell.