Abstract
This response disputes the notion that geography has a collective amnesia about the contributions of its founding figures. Recent work in the discipline has indeed done much to explore the situated influence of key thinkers, encouraging re-engagement with both acknowledged ‘classics’ and lesser known texts. This response nonetheless concurs that geography could do more to explore the processes by which certain texts become identified as key influences on the trajectories of academic thought, particularly in an Anglo-American academy that remains dominated by linguistic and disciplinary traditions which can easily overlook the contributions of non-Anglophone authors and those who practised geography outside geography departments.
As one of the editors of Key Thinkers on Space and Place (Hubbard et al., 2004) and responsible for editing the biographical entries in the International Encyclopedia of Human Geography (Kitchin and Thrift, 2009), I find this piece intriguing, but ultimately a little puzzling. On the one hand, it is clear that geography is a discipline that is (rightly) keen to unpick established knowledges based on male, middle class, middle aged, white and heterosexual views of the world, but the idea that it willfully disparages the ideas of its ‘founding fathers’ (and in a few cases, ‘mothers’) appears somewhat overstated.
In essence, the authors argue that geography’s ceaseless desire to reinvent itself has come at a heavy price: an ignorance of its textual legacies. More than a simple act of cultural amnesia, the allegation here is that geography’s embrace of the latest intellectual fashions encourages its practitioners to justify the adoption of new theoretical and philosophical materials by riding roughshod over the work of previous generations. The idea that geographers do not acknowledge the legacy of the discipline’s ‘founding fathers’ is exemplified here by arch quantifier Peter Gould’s ‘demonisation’ of Richard Hartshorne, an episode that is taken as emblematic of the ‘quantitative revolution’ and the putative paradigm shift that witnessed the exaltation of nomothetic spatial analysis over idiographic regional description.
This is not a unique argument by any means. Ron Johnston – in the various editions of Geography and Geographers (see Johnston and Sidaway, 2004) – has explored the applicability of the paradigm shift model to geography, noting key episodes where certain practitioners whose work was hugely influential in one generation were hoisted as straw men by the next. Inevitably, Johnston (2006) argues that the paradigm model is not adequate for accommodating the continuity and change that has characterized its recent academic histories. Irrespective of this, there remains a dominant narrative of the discipline’s development, enshrined in many textbooks, which indeed presents a story of progress, with the work of previous generations increasingly irrelevant to a human geography that is now capable of dealing with questions of emotion, affect, materiality and non-representation in ways that previous generations could not have conceived of.
For all this, the argument constructed in this paper seems to exaggerate for effect. Do all geographers really ‘choose to forget’, as Keighren et al. (2012) argue? Certainly, many in the discipline have recently argued against any notion of proclaiming a geographical canon. For example, Sheppard (2004: 744) argued that ‘geography’s greatest strength is its lack of a canon (in the sense of an agreed way to do geography)’, noting ‘a canon undermines geography’s diversity and its distinctiveness’. But even if geographers like Sheppard are suspicious of the idea that there is one way of doing geography, their heterodox disposition does not necessarily lead them to suggest that we should never engage with the ideas of founding figures (see Kwan, 2004). Indeed, it seems to me that geographers are rather good at looking back at geography’s key texts and thinkers, and exploring why these became influential at particular moments in the discipline’s (messy) histories. Geographers may be uneasy in venerating the founding figures of the discipline – especially when they are dead, white men – yet nor are they as willing to expunge them from the contemporary landscape of geography as this paper argues. In passing, I would argue that the idea that those in other disciplines are much more enthusiastic to engage with their discipline’s founding figures is also overstated: plenty of my sociological colleagues are quite capable of bouts of eye rolling at the idea that they are going to have to read the work of Talcott Parsons, C Wright Mills or Emile Durkheim in preparation for a first year seminar.
So while I might be of a different generation from the authors of this piece, I think their reports of the death of geography’s past is greatly exaggerated. I for one was certainly encouraged (forced, perhaps) to read Ratzel, Semple, Ritter, and Sauer as an undergraduate, and while I suspect that not all of these feature quite so prominently in current curricula, the number of anthologies collating extracts from some of their key writings suggests that their work remains alive and well. For example, I am sure many still encourage students on cultural geography courses to read Sauer’s original works, not as some exercise in showing how far cultural geography has come, but to show how nuanced and original his cultural reading of landscape was.
As such, I find myself disagreeing with the authors’ prognosis that geography is a distinctly (or even uniquely) presentist discipline that has little interest in its textual legacies. Yet I would concur that we need to encourage a more thoroughgoing dialogue with geography’s histories, revisiting classics whether ancient or more modern, given that the geographies of the past – and particularly the pre-war years – should not only be the preserve of historical geographers. Indeed, the type of critical re-evaluation that this article encourages with key and canonical texts is exactly the sort of thing we sought to stimulate with Key Texts in Human Geography (Hubbard and Kitchin, 2008), which was designed to make classic and influential works more accessible to students, encouraging them to engage with the text and appreciate its ongoing relevance for geography. Boyle underlines this when he argues that: Sustained and close reading of the ideas of ‘key thinkers’ helps overcome crude and sloppy historiographies of geography which ignore and do violence to individual contributions by reading them through the lens of broad paradigms or schools. It also fosters reading practices and an academic rigour that is somewhat lacking within the student body at present (Boyle, 2005: 163).
The focus here on research monographs suggests that they have particular significance as part of geography’s textual legacy, though there is no reason why questions of canonicity cannot be approached from different perspectives. Reprinting and revisiting classic texts, especially those from non-Anglophone traditions, is important, but there might also be other ways in which we can explore the processes of constructing canonicity by returning to specific sites of knowledge production (whether a museum, laboratory, field or university classroom), and considering the coincidence of charisma and context that enables a particular individual to have particular disciplinary influence (see Agnew and Livingston, 2011). This perspective can of course be reversed, allowing us to think about why certain knowledges were marginalized or excluded (see, e.g. Cresswell, 1998, on Ben Reitman, or Sibley, 1995, on WEB Du Bois).
So while I disagree with the central thesis that geography is particularly disrespectful of its canon, the idea that we need to constantly re-evaluate what we regard as canon and question the production and institutionalisation of geographical knowledge, is well made. As is stressed here, thinking about the limits of language is also vital in a discipline where the hegemony of Anglo-American geography has been slow to unravel. I hence look forward to the authors of this piece bringing the work of Augustin Berque, Horacio Capel, Franco Farinelli, Yves Lacoste, Jacques Lévy, Claude Raffestin, Milton Santos and others to a wider Anglophone audience, allowing for a fuller and more inclusive consideration not just of where the discipline has been, but where it is now.