If the devil all too often lies in the geographical details when it comes to either the unintended consequences or the willful use of noble universal principles of freedom, justice, and liberty for nefarious purposes of localized exploitation and domination, then we should pay very careful attention to how geographical knowledges are produced and used. Their seeming banality, furthermore, makes it seem as if there is little or no point in interrogating the obvious, when it turns out that this obviousness is a mask for something far more problematic. The ruses of geographical reason are far more sophisticated and complicated than those of history. So what, then, is geographical reason all about?
I begin with what those who have called themselves geographers say about what they do and how they think geographical knowledge might best be understood. At a talk given to the U.S.–based National Council on Geographic Education in November 1963, William Pattison usefully identified what he called “The Four Traditions of Geography.” His thesis was that American geographers “had established a broad consistency” in their work by interweaving these traditions in their practices. The traditions, he pointed out, are “all of great age and have passed into American geography as parts of a general legacy of Western thought.” Furthermore, he asserted (though without advancing any evidence), these principles are “shared today by geographers of other nations.” The four traditions he identified were “(1) a spatial tradition, (2) an area studies tradition, (3) a man-land tradition and (4) an earth science tradition.”1
The spatial tradition, emphasizing the importance of location, distances, direction, and spatial patterns in the organization of political and economic life, went back at least to the Greeks. It was codified in the Geographia of Ptolemy in the second century c.e. and achieved particular historical expression in the development of cartography and mapmaking (a topic since exhaustively covered in the magnificent History of Cartography initiated by David Woodward and J. B. Harley).2 This tradition acquired additional authority from Kant’s view of geography as a specialized spatial science, dealing exclusively with spatial ordering, separate from history. Armed with geometry as a distinctive language, this kind of geography could and often did aspire to the status of a mathematically based science. Transport networks, river networks, social networks could all be brought together under the aegis of the mathematics of network analysis, for example.
The area studies tradition, traced back to Strabo’s monumental Geography (a political tract “addressed to the statesmen of Augustan Rome,” evidently as an aid to better governance), focused on the nature of places, their differentiation, and, hence, upon their unique qualities. The uniqueness derived as much from history as from location. The qualitative nature of places and their peoples (their culture or, as Kant preferred to describe it in his Anthropology, their “national or local character”) had, however to be approached nomothetically through an idiographic method seemingly at odds with the scientific pretensions of geography as a spatial science. Regional and area studies have always formed one pillar in geographical work, and in recent years the fascination with the concept of “place” has given this tradition new life.
The man-land tradition, which goes back at least to Hippocrates’ work On Airs, Waters and Places, has long sought to clarify the question (which Kant also regarded as central) of “man’s” position in the natural order. While the answers to that question have been extraordinarily diverse—varying from God’s intelligent design (apparently espoused by President Bush) through environmental determinism to a secular ideology of human mastery over nature—the tradition of “man-land” studies has long been a powerful presence within the discipline. At the time when Pattison was writing, for example, the landmark volumes of a Wennergren-financed symposium (which brought together geographers and anthropologists, as well as philosophers and historians), Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth, established a significant benchmark of reflection that has lasted until today. The early history of this tradition in Western thought is comprehensively recounted in Clarence Glacken’s monumental Traces on the Rhodian Shore.3 Lately, this tradition has strengthened and diversified significantly in response to rising concerns over environmental issues.
But the earth sciences tradition, Pattison observed, “confronts one with a paradox.” The idea of a comprehensive and distinctive discipline of physical geography, which Kant failed so miserably to construct, has faded, as specialized earth sciences have emerged, such as geology, climatology, meteorology, hydrology, oceanography, vulcanology, paleontology, geomorphology, and the like. The sciences of ecology, botany, and forestry have likewise flourished as independent specialized sciences. Physical geographers contribute to this general earth science effort, though only, it must be said, in a minor way. This tradition is not, therefore, central, and geographers themselves have sometimes sought (unsuccessfully) to exclude it. But the umbilical cord that links geographers with the earth and biological sciences is hard to cut. Not only did the discipline of geography originate in association with them (geology in particular), but it also continues to sustain its institutional position by branching out into, or being absorbed by, more broadly conceived environmental science programs. Geographers cannot, in any case, do without some aspects of earth and ecological sciences if they are to pursue their interests in “man-land” relationships and even area studies with any depth and rigor.
Pattison closed by peremptorily concluding that these four traditions, “though distinct in logic are joined in action.” He hoped, furthermore, that geography would be better able to secure both its “inner unity and outer intelligibility” through “a widened willingness to conceive of and discuss the field in terms of these traditions.”
Most geographers would, I suspect, recognize Pattison’s descriptions of the different traditions (naïvely given though they are) as a general representation of the fields of knowledge (together with overlaps) with which they and their colleagues typically engage. But the unities are not always easy to spot in the actual practices of geographers. Fragmentations are everywhere in evidence. A “discipline” that simultaneously embraces geographical information systems, paleo-ecology, and desert geomorphologies, as well as urban political economy, postmodernist and queer spatial theory, and the cultural aesthetics of landscape, obviously has an identity problem. The presumption that there is some singular and settled way of understanding a unified academic field of knowledge called “geography,” or that there is some as-yet-to-be discovered “essentialist” definition of its subject matter, has always been suspect. Whenever some group of geographers has attempted to impose such an essentialist definition (as the area studies specialists did in the United States after World War II and the spatial theorists tried to do in the 1960s in the English-speaking world), the results have been disastrous. Pattison is therefore right to insist that the plurality of perspectives within the discipline should be considered a source of strength rather than of weakness.
But Pattison’s eclectic account of the four traditions united under the magic sign of synthesis unfortunately glosses over serious difficulties. To begin with, the four traditions are not easily conjoined since they presuppose, on the surface at least, radically different epistemologies and demand very different standards of validation. In the case of the first three traditions, Pattison tacitly treats the concepts of space, place, and environment as both foundational and fundamental without subjecting them to any critical scrutiny or even attempting any systematic elaboration of their possible range of meanings (they are all, as we shall see, extremely complicated terms). The half-hearted attempt to treat the earth sciences as inherently geographical though outside the discipline per se appears particularly problematic. But it is also indicative. If we examine how the concepts of space, place, and environment function more generally in knowledge construction, we find they are by no means unique to the discipline of geography. These concepts (in some form or other) play critical roles in almost every discipline, from ecology and biology to anthropology, sociology, and political science. They are widely appealed to in the humanities also. One can argue that this is necessarily so, because foundational and universal concepts of this sort articulate, as Kant and Foucault quite properly understood, “the conditions of possibility” of all other forms of knowledge. They are omnipresent in all academic disciplines because no discipline can do without them. How professional geographers use and deploy them then becomes a relatively minor question. But an examination of how these concepts work in other disciplines suggests that they acquire quite different meanings in different settings. This is the true paradox that Pattison hints at, but fails to analyze, in the case of the environmental sciences.
But the matter has to be pressed further. There is a significant difference between geographical knowledges held in the various branches of academia and the geographical knowledges that function in different institutional settings (such as state apparatuses, the World Bank, the Vatican, the media, the CIA, the public at large, the military, NGOs, the tourist industry, multinational corporations, financial institutions). The tension between geography as a distinctive discipline and geography as a way of assembling, using, and understanding knowledge of a certain sort in a variety of institutional settings is palpable.4 Geographical knowledges are widely dispersed throughout society, and they deserve to be understood in their own right. Different institutions, furthermore, demand and themselves create radically different kinds of geographical knowledge. The tourist industry, for example, does not highlight the geography of social distress or of contagious diseases in its brochures, and in its zeal to persuade us to buy its products and services it actively produces all manner of imaginary and fantasy geographies of the mind that have nothing necessarily to do with what exists upon the ground. One important outcome of activities of this sort is that only a very small portion of the geographical knowledges available and actively in use in society is found within the discipline of geography or, for that matter, within the academy more generally. A “critical sociology” of all of these forms of knowing is therefore required if we are to understand their role in managing, sustaining, and transforming the socio-ecological order. This has to be the focus when we seek to instill a proper education in matters geographical in relation to the pursuit of distinctive cosmopolitan projects. The putative field of “critical geography” studies that arose during the 1970s and which now sees itself in alliance with critical theory more generally is one arena where such studies might be pursued. Professional geographers, by reflecting carefully upon how the “conditions of possibility” of geographical knowledge operate within their own works, may be in position to contribute (as indeed some of them have done) to the wider question of the role of geographical knowledges in sustaining or transforming a given socio-ecological order. A critical examination of how geographical knowledges were mobilized in the causes of imperialism or colonial administration, and as an adjunct to military strategy, has been a significant endeavor in recent years.5
Pattison was, I think, correct to identify the first three traditions and their foundational concepts of space, place, and environment as constituting the conceptual core of all geographical knowledges. He was also quite correct to point out that these traditions are longstanding, but wrong to confine their provenance to Western thought. There is abundant evidence from the historical, anthropological, and geographical record that the art of spatial orientation (including its symbolic uses and techniques of representation, such as cognitive if not actual mapmaking), to take just one example, has been fundamental to all forms of human social organization. We need then to ask: in what ways do these foundational geographical concepts enter in as conditions of possibility for all forms of knowing? Geographers, it must be said, have not been particularly assiduous in answering this question. Nor have they been very active in exploring the epistemological status of their foundational concepts. To be sure, there have been phases of controversy over concepts such as “region” (are they real, waiting to be discovered by scientific inquiry, or mere intellectual constructs through which we conveniently aggregate data about the world?) and “the environment” (is it a causative and determinant agent, or merely a passive condition of human action?). And there was a brief phase of intense controversy over whether the Kantian definition of geography as an exclusively spatial science was appropriate.6 But it is hard to avoid the conclusion that most practicing geographers have complacently accepted the banal and obvious view of their own academic terrain and happily worked away within its inherent limitations. Geographers have the interesting habit of asking questions of major import and trivializing the answers. Not much insight is to be gained, therefore, from any deep engagement with the history of geographical thought in the narrow sense of documenting what geographers themselves have to say—though, as Glacken shows in his monumental work on the history of environmental thought, there is much to be gained from an examination of what all manner of thinkers have to say about human action in the natural order.
There is, however, a broader way to understand the role that geographical knowledges might play, and that is to examine their historical significance in past social orders as well as in processes of social and ecological change. The long process of commercial expansion that has been with us since at least 1492 if not before (and which we now refer to as “globalization”) depended, for example, upon the accumulation of certain kinds of geographical knowledge. This was as true for the Renaissance (when mapping of the world was crucial to the project of human command over it) as it is today. Reciprocally, geographical understandings have affected the paths of political-economic development and environmental transformation (through, for example, the recognition of environmental constraints, the identification of new resources and commercial opportunities, understandings of cultural diversity, or the promotion of utopian plans for new cities and towns). Even if the knowledge is erroneous, substantial unintended consequences can follow. The Portuguese in their early explorations sought, among other things, an imagined Christian kingdom of Prester John located on the other side of Islam. The effects on global history of this erroneous geographical idea were substantial. Ebenezer Howard erroneously believed that economic and social ills could be cured by adequate town planning (a specific kind of spatial determinism), with significant consequences for processes of urbanization that sought to instantiate that belief. How, then, does this dialectical relationship between political-economic and socio-ecological change, on the one hand, and geographical knowledges, on the other, actually work?
The need to answer such a question remains as pressing as ever. The most recent phase of globalization has, as we have seen, been powered by a neoliberal, free market agenda in which privatization and the opening up of markets worldwide to entrepreneurial and multinational capitalism have become a dominant moving force backed by the military and commercial power of the United States. With the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the triumph of the free market seemed complete worldwide. Highly mobile finance capital has become more dominant, at the same time as revolutions in transport, communications, and information technologies have broken down many spatial barriers. Geographical structures and relations have been profoundly altered. The seemingly fixed geographical configuration of political-economic powers has become fluid. The result has been reterritorialization of the world and uneven geographical developments of all sorts (increasing social and geographical inequalities of wealth and power, patchwork quilts of political instability, a resurgence of local nationalisms, localized environmental stresses). Geographical differences have become more, rather than less, significant because highly mobile capital is in a position both to shape them and to take advantage of them. In addition, geopolitical stresses and tensions (even regional wars) are as widespread as ever. As a result, many of the major institutions of global capitalism (the IMF, the World Bank, the G7) have had to adjust their views and rebuild their geographical vision. But they have also encountered a rising tide of criticism (from some mainstream economists, such as Stiglitz and Sachs, as wells as from the NGOs, the churches, to say nothing of the street protesters in Seattle, Washington, Bangkok, Melbourne, and Genoa) of the soulless commercialism of multinational capitalism, its injustices, and its insensitivity to local cultural and other geographical differences. The problem of applying universal concepts of freedom, justice, need, and dignity across the variegated spaces and complex geographies of cultural and political-economic divergence has no easy solution. This brings us back to the initial question: how are we to understand the complex relationship between universal claims about rights, property, freedom, democracy, and the market, and the geographical particularities with which the world abounds? One condition of possibility of finding an answer to that question rests upon an exploration of how key geographical concepts work. And the triumvirate of concepts—space, place, and environment—that constitutes the core of geographical reason—no matter whether in a tribal council, the World Bank, a corporate boardroom, or a neighborhood association—is the place to start. Therefore, we now turn to a deeper elaboration of these concepts. In so doing we need also to be mindful of Pattison’s closing question: in what ways can these different conceptual realms, seemingly so logically different from each other, be conjoined in action?