Geography book overviews and core concepts

Geography

Livingstone's Geographical Tradition -- Should the history of geography be rated X

This is the first intellectual history of a subject that over the last five centuries has played a significant role in the development of Western civilization. The author describes the activities of the explorers and map-makers of Renaissance and early modern Europe; the role of geography during the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment and the Darwinian Revolution; and the interactions between geography and empire building in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Throughout the book the development of geographical thought and practice is portrayed against the broader social and intellectual context of the times.

Since 1945 activity in the subject has been intense: David Livingstone provides a critical account of the trends, developments and occasional revolutions by which geography has emerged as a multi-faceted discipline offering unique and revealing perspectives on a wide range of pressing social and environmental issues. Livingstone identifies three key themes run through geographic studies.

1. The need for an explicit philosophical basis for investigations in both physical and human geography.

2. The way in which apparently simple decisions about how to undertake investigations in physical and human geography can lead to very different conclusions.

3. The recognition that almost all geographical investigation is surrounded by uncertainty and debate.

As for the X-rating, any study of man, and their desires for expand and conquer new areas, civilizations, or cultures as part of their own expansion is replete with human drama, and at times severe exploitation of one group by another. The study of geography without taking into account the human desires for power and control created an incomplete understanding of the motivations contained within the geographic shifts.

D Massey's Human Geography Today -- Issues and Debates

With its concern for space, place and nature -- human geography has moved to the center of much theoretical debate in the social sciences and humanities. Moreover, the exchange has been two-way -- the study of human geography has itself increasingly welcomed the importation of work from other study disciplines. This book takes up the promise and challenge of this new-found prominence and openness and explores the future for the discipline.

Massey's book brings together a range of internationally recognized authors, all of whom have explored this new interface, and each of whom here proposes future directions for their part of the discipline. The increasingly challenged dichotomy between the social and the natural is examined at length. The meaning and significance of the geographical imagination, the increasing prominence of debates over difference and identity and their relationship to spatial issues are working together to change the way geographers evaluate the use of space, land, and ecological resources. The issues concerning recognizing the thoroughly mutual constitution of spatiality and power, and how we might in these changing times most productively re-imagine space and place themselves. Since the other Seminole books written in this area in the late 70's and 80's, Human Geography offers an assessment of the state of the study in the late 1990s and its future directions. This text explores the developments and themes that have put the discipline at the heart of a number of important debates.

Geography and Geographers -- R.J. Johnston.

According to Johnston, the study of geography and those who evaluate the principles of geography, the geographers work in cloistered communities. Within the discipline, there is a strong peer pressure for conformity because the group maintains many of the same ideas, goals, and presumptions and is working toward the same conclusions. The scientific community's paradigm is rather homogeneous, and anyone working outside that paradigm, or who would introduce a new theory is considered a heretic, or radical within the field until his work is verified by others. Working within the designed structure brings attention, recognition, patronage, status and ultimately success. Therefore, the dominant norm for academic life is one of conformity. According to Johnston, "Science is not the constant search for novel discoveries but rather the careful application of agreed procedures to the solution of minor problems in order to extend very slightly on existing well structured bodies of knowledge. Judgments are being made all the time, but they are made within an academic environment carefully structured by the training process." (p. 21)

So the process of discovery and the field f science is not designed for explorers and new thinkers, (which have made the field great over the past centuries). The field is designed for those who can:

Operate within an accepted body of knowledge, ordered and interpreted in a particular way

Consider a group of puzzles which remain to be solved

Who will follow a set procedure for puzzle solving.

Johnston's book examines geographic study since the end of the Great War. At that time, resources were directed into benefiting society that was previously focused on warfare. Geographic studies identified six specific trends of interest at that time:

1. Encyclopedic trend toward cataloging and identifying new information

2. Educational trend toward recording and cataloguing new information so it could be reproduced and taught.

3. Colonial trend toward cataloguing the influence of Britain on colonizing vast parts of the earth.

4. Generalizing trend toward identifying general principles which applied to all geographic studies.

5. Political trend toward evaluating the influence of different political structures and their influence on geographic expansion.

6. Specialization trend which recognizes that no one person or academy could identify all there is to know about a topic.

These trends spanned evolving philosophies, methodologies and ideologies in the field of geographic studies.

As these new paradigms evolved in the field of geographic studies, a change that affected the entire field was the influence of the scientific method. Because the discipline was strongly regimented against the acceptance of new beliefs these changed erupted slowly in individual papers published from different researchers. The apparent dissatisfaction with the current scientific trends which existed after the war was general and far reaching motivation toward these changes. Acceptance of the scientific method's influence was termed a growth in "systematic studies." After the desires for a more systematic approach to geographic studies took hold, geographers searched to identify a focus. Because geography is essentially a study of distance, and the means by which civilizations spanned the distances between them, the study of special systems was applied to the science. According to Haggett's schema for studying special systems, there are 6 elements: movement, channels for the movement to travel, central nodes, hierarchies of nodes, surfaces (geographic relief) and finally diffusion of movement which control the development of social organizations. (p. 95)