Geography

[Apologies; these were ready to go at 10am along with Eric's definitions, but were thwarted due to computer issues]

Under the most prosaic consideration, geography is the study of the earth, its physical forms, contours, shapes—i.e. the natural topography of the earth, both above, below, and including the crust of planet earth. As the Greek mathematician Ptolemy is quoted in David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity, “the task of geography is to survey the whole in its just proportion” (p246), which imbricates geography with cartography, or the mapping of the world and superimposing a grid on top of it so as to render it intelligible to human understanding. Geography is therefore understood as a project of enlightenment philosophy; this understanding, seemingly transparent according to that enlightenment perspective where an increase in the store of the world’s knowledge is an absolute good, is of course laden with power dynamics and structural import vis a vis societal relations. “The conquest and control of space…first requires that it can be conceived of as something useable, malleable, and therefore capable of domination through human action,” writes Harvey, and continues that “merchants and landowners” used the mapping of space “for their own class purposes” (i.e. establishing the boundaries of their property, etc.) while “the absolutist state (with its concern for taxation of land and the definition of its own domain of domination and social control likewise relished the capacity to define and produce spaces with fixed spatial co-ordinates” (p254). As such, geography moves from having a purely empiricist inflection—geography as purely counting, for example the number of peaks in the Alps, or the length of the river Nile—to one that has a bearing on the social life of human beings. This is the main reason why Harvey argues for a more broader understanding of “space,” because geography, under the Ptolemaic definition, presents an unfortunately reductionist physical understanding of space without reckoning the more social aspects of how the planet’s geographical contours inflect the people who inhabit them. This has led to a divide of geographical study into two main branches: physical geography, and social geography. The former can be understood as that reckoning, that counting; the latter how the space alters the parameters of human interaction and social function. In this same vein, William Hughes, quoted in The History of Geography, wrote

mere names of places...are not geography... know by heart a whole gazetteer full of them would not, in itself, constitute anyone a geographer. Geography has higher aims than this: it seeks to classify phenomena (alike of the natural and of the political world, in so far as it treats of the latter), to compare, to generalize, to ascend from effects to causes, and, in doing so, to trace out the great laws of nature and to mark their influences upon man. This is “a description of the world”—that is Geography. In a word Geography is a Science—a thing not of mere names but of argument and reason, of cause and effect. (p66; shamelessly cribbed from wikipedia)

Hughes’ intervention is sympathetic with Harvey’s broader conception of geography, but, he would argue, doesn’t go far enough—“argument and reason,” yes, but not merely “cause and effect” because doing so presents a deterministic view reducing the human to mere reactionary force against nature, and not one that is able to carve out complex interactions with geographical terrain, and create, for instance, “places,” or sites of being. Harvey would argue that while geography influences social being, it does not determine it out of whole cloth. Human interaction with the terrain is subject to subversion, reification, identification, and negotiation, or a dialectic that creates social being. Soja writes in sympathy with this notion, lamenting the fact that in theoretical discourse “any kind of spatial analysis triggered fears of a recrudescence of geographical determinism” (p95). The purpose of our first week’s discussion, one could argue, was an attempt to move away from so-called geographical determinism to an understanding of geography that is not merely a “container” (p79), or as Marx would put it, an “unnecessary complication” (quoted in Soja, p32) in the study of the flux of historical time. We are exploring the ways in which geography is an intelligible, contributing factor to social being, but neither a contingent fact nor overwhelmingly determinant force.