Geography’s evolving traditions and textual critique

I am grateful to the authors (Keighren et al., 2012) for their paper and the editor for the invitation to comment on it. I do so as someone who is avowedly textual in his approaches to and interpretations of geography’s histories and I find much to agree upon in their essay. I also want to push the authors a bit more. In commenting upon the issues they raise, my argument coheres around three related points. The first concerns the idea of the canon and of canonicity in geography as a primarily textual matter. This is undeniably true, but since it is so, we need to pay attention – more than our authors suggest – to the material and epistemological conditions that lie behind the making, shaping and consumption of texts, in geography or elsewhere. The second is to call for clarity over the purposes behind our notions of canonicity in teaching. The emphasis here upon canonicity and pedagogy is well founded. But what are the reasons why certain texts are judged canonical in our teaching of them? What purposes are adumbrated in our doing so? Finally, I invite further reflection on the responsibility we have towards geography’s textual canon, less in the sense of availability and access, online editions, works in languages other than English and so on (each important points, as they note), and more about provenance, ‘original’ textual scholarship and the importance of the contextual reading of geography’s canonical or classic works. Let me begin, however, with a few remarks about the central terms.

The term ‘canon’, in its literal definition a measuring rod, has come to mean a body of work that inscribes the conventions of a bespoke community. But there are differences between canon law and its textual codification, in (say) the context of an ecclesiastical or legal authority, and the idea of a canon in literature or in geography. The literary canon of a country or a group of people is that body of works highly valued (by scholars and others) because of its aesthetic value and because the works are taken to embody the cultural and political values of that country or group in society. The canon in this sense has become institutionalized over time by consistently being taught, usually in school, as the core curriculum for literary study: the ‘canon’ in texts thus produces ‘canonization’ in authors, a position of wordy and worldly authority.

In this context, particularly recently, the idea of ‘the canon’ has of course enjoyed a troubled historiographical life. Even as some critics have defended the idea of a canon but recognised that the Western canon (usually of great, white, dead males) has changed (they have defended, then, the idea of canonicity), others have rejected such notions tout court, since there cannot ever be an agreed-upon measuring rod against which ‘good’ canonical literature can be marked apart from ‘bad’. We might thus recognise the idea of the canon as enshrining particular notions of intellectual and literary tradition whilst being cautious about what, at any one moment, makes up that tradition and why. At stake, then, are the criteria for inclusion, criteria of worth and questions over what constitutes normativism in relation to textual works (on these issues, see Alter, 2000; Bloom, 1995; Guillory, 1993; Kermode, 2004).

‘Classics’ I take to have related yet different meaning. It speaks, for me – the idea, that is, of a work having ‘classic status’ – to the simple but enduring sense that the text has sustained yet survived repeated reading, critical and adulatory, long after the circumstances which prompted it have become the object of historical enquiry. It has, if you will, survived over time and out of place, across different audiences and out of its originating context.

The commentary here raises questions about the applicability of these notions to modern geography, in research and in teaching. There is, one might say, a discernable tradition of canonicity (or is it canonization?) in certain areas of geographical writing. Once, more strongly apparent in the past than today, there was a tradition of biographical canonicity in geography (geography’s history was the history of the textual achievements of great, dead, white males). Taking canonicity to mean the defining of a particular series or body of work which by its emphasis upon particular norms or procedures of measurement seeks to regulate the practices of its user communities, it is possible to suggest that geography has canonical texts but not straightforwardly a canon. In its several guides to laboratory practice, in handbooks over field methods, qualitative and quantitative methods and methodologies, geographical texts have sought canonical definition over operational procedure for its user community. These might not have achieved devotional status (and certainly do not enshrine exegetical perfection), but in a particular context, they approximate to geography’s canon law. There are, after all, right ways to sieve sediment, mix chemicals, interview people, encode transcripts, draw maps and undertake statistical tests. The growth in the number of methods guides of handbooks to this or that sort of geography speaks to the prevalence of this instructive canonicity within geography. But we should not equate this genre of canonical texts with classic texts sensu stricto any more than we should readily associate the culture of biographical canonization with geography’s canon.

Does geography have classic texts? Books that have sustained yet survived repeated reading, critical and adulatory, long after the circumstances which  prompted them have become an object of historical enquiry? Our answers must always be tempered by what we take geography to be – that is, our answers will always be contingent, conditional on historical and geographical circumstance. Most 18th century books of geography, for instance, were one of three sorts: gazetteers, grammars or encyclopedia-cum-dictionaries, enumerative in rhetoric , standardised in format and to modern eyes, often mind-numbingly dull. Most 18th century geographers were not as we know the term: they were hack writers and compilers, not literary ‘greats’. But much work of geographical knowledge – that is, books not of geography strictly understood but narratives of geographical exploration and so on – massively expanded our planetary consciousness.

Or should we take only the texts produced in the period since the foundation of ‘modern’ geography departments? That, perhaps, gives us insufficient time against which to appraise the quality ‘classicity’ within geography. But the longer run presents problems too. As Robert Mayhew has shown of Bernhard Varenius’s 1650 text Geographia Generalis, that oft-cited work only assumed ‘classic status’ by virtue of its historiographic treatment as ‘foundational’ after 1939 by the regionalist and areal differentiation lobby headed by Richard Hartshorne. Different editions were at work after 1650, and it was really only the Bentley edition of 1733 that canonized Varenius (Mayhew, 2010, 2011).

In any case, texts in geography (or any other subject) do not make themselves in conditions of their choosing. The words they contain cannot adequately capture the complexities of the world they purport to represent. Editors edit and redact writers’ hard won words to suit audience demand; reading is an interpretive act shaped by, and itself shaping, different communities. The authors will be familiar with these claims, of course – one has written with me to advance research on just such issues (Withers and Keighren, 2011) – but their paper here might have been richer for further attention to materialist and geographical perspectives in book history (Ogborn and Withers, 2010), and to the questions of reading, meaning and materiality (Daston, 2004; Lenoir, 1998) which lie behind the notions of canonicity and canonical texts.

Perhaps we could distinguish between books in geography that have received or been allowed to assume, however done, ‘classic status’, and books of geography so understood. It might be easier to understand ‘classic’ status then for Charles Darwin’s (1859) Origin of Species, or Adam Smith’s (1776) Wealth of Nations or the works of Karl Marx, even Clarence Glacken’s (1967) Traces on the Rhodian Shore than it might be for Peter Haggett’s (1965) purportedly paradigmatic Locational Analysis in Human Geography or David Harvey’s (1969) Explanation in Geography. As an undergraduate, I read each of these in states of reverential incomprehension. There will, of course, be other texts whose ‘enduring gravitas’, so to say, inclines us towards their inclusion in curriculum listings as ‘classics’. But it is easier to determine the genre of canonical texts in a rather more defined way than it is to identify geography’s ‘classics’. Bill Bunge, after all, described Walter Christaller’s central place theory as ‘geography’s finest intellectual product’ (Bunge, 1966: vii), but how many of us and by what criteria might define his Die Zentralen Orte in Süddeutschsland (1933) a ‘classic’? Or JK Wright’s The Geographical Lore of the Time of the Crusades (1925)? Or Derek Gregory’s Ideology, Science and Human Geography (1978)? As a postgraduate, I read each of these in a state of comprehending irreverence. Great books all, to be sure, but it may be too soon to tell – unless we are clear(er) as to our definitions of the term and of our purpose and which measuring rods we are using and why – that these are ‘classics’.

These things matter in relation to the purpose behind our recognition of canonical or classic texts, the criteria we use and their inclusion in our teaching. They matter not just because such issues force us to address the causal connections between geography and its texts, then and now, but also because they require attention to the teaching of context and of contingency – in ourselves as well as for our students. In this sense, it is not enough, ever, to get to the texts themselves, and not just for the points made above about their material writerly making and variant readerly reception. No: we must also be attentive to the ways in which (certain) texts enshrine both a dialogue down the ages (Fishelov, 2010), and produce their own canonical authority. What does it mean to be an ‘original’ work? Why were these books written then, and there? In these and other ways, we are each shaped by our canons even as we actively debate them. ¹