Abstract
Beginning my postgraduate studies in 1991, a book was published that aimed to provide an informed introduction to theoretical approaches in human geography. That book was Approaching Human Geography by Paul Cloke, Chris Philo and David Sadler. Given my undergraduate studies were largely unsullied by any engagement with theory (most of our modules had been of a descriptive regional type, and the only mention of Marx was in a module on Soviet urbanism), this book served as a primer to the debates that had been played out in the discipline as it retreated from idiography and embraced new philosophies of knowledge, the latest of which was a turn towards postmodernism. But what was something of a revelation was that here was a book that presented ‘live theory’: this wasn’t a book that simply presented ‘isms’ and ‘ologies’, or offered a historical narrative of the discipline’s development, but showed why theory mattered in understanding the geographies of everyday life. It was erudite, felt authoritative but was undeniably accessible – playful, even (I couldn’t recall Prince, or any pop performer for that matter, being referred to in any of the textbooks I had been required to read as an undergraduate).
Tim Cresswell’s Geographic Thought: A Critical Introduction is, in effect, the overdue follow-up to that book. While Cresswell does describe the evolution of the discipline, revisiting ‘classical’ theory via Strabo, Ptolemy as well as Darwin and Lamarck, the focus is on more recent attempts to put human geography on firmer disciplinary grounds by engaging with debates on the ontological and epistemological basis on which knowledge claims are made. While some of the debates presented here are well-rehearsed (e.g. humanistic geography as a reaction to spatial science, the uneasy relationship between feminism and Marxism), Cresswell provides an effective summary of the rise (and fall?) of post-structural geographies, the emergence of more-than human and hybrid geographies, and grapples with questions of scale in a chapter on relational geographies. What many readers will no doubt welcome is the way that Cresswell offers snippets of autobiography, sharing his feelings about encountering particular ideas for the first time. And he is not afraid to take a position and offer judgment: his enthusiasm for non-representational geographies is nicely tempered by his criticism of some of its leading proponents for their substitution of quotation from ‘usual suspect’ theorists and philosophers for their own interpretations and accounts of how the world affects us.
Quite why it has taken so long for a worthy successor to Approaching Human Geography to arrive is a moot point. Here, we might reflect on the fact that writing any book on theory and philosophy makes the author a hostage to fortune given it is inevitable that peers will object to the exclusion of particular ‘canonical’ works or feel their arguments have been misrepresented. Cresswell is clearly in a privileged position that allows him to take a wide survey of dominant and popular approaches adopted in social and cultural geography (albeit with more than a nod to economic and political geography too), but he is honest about the limitations of his own, male, white, Anglo-American worldview. This given, it is perhaps churlish to criticize Cresswell for the relative lack of attention devoted to post-colonial theories, queer theory or the dominance of ‘grounded theories’ in much contemporary human geography. This is absolutely the type of book I wish I had been given at the beginning of my own geographical education.