graphy

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-graphy The remains of a British
discipline Graham Chapman Lancaster University
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A party of 25 final year Geography students
going to Ghana. Because of fog we had an
unscheduled overnight stop in Amsterdam. As we
walked through the streets, one of the group said
to me Professor Chapman, weve been having a
discussion. Which country is Amsterdam in?
Who was Napoleon? No-one in the group of eight
2nd year honours students knew
(Mandela?).
nor even Wellington, or Nelson
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World awareness Causes of ignorance Struggles
wtihin academe Conclusions
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A formal test of 2nd year students taking an
optional course in Political geography And the
same test of first year social science students
in Denmark for comparative purposes
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The facts round which the questions were based
are arbitrary and eclectic though the basic
themes are clear -
knowing something about European expansion
overseas knowing something about the
political alignments of the 20th C knowing
something about languages, religions and
cultures
something about mountains, seas, rivers, capes
and bays something about economic commodities
and economic inequalities knowing something
about international organisations and knowing
a little of the basic cosmology of the earth.
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Out of Judaism, Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism,
Christianity, Zoroastrianism and Rastafarianism
90 of UK students believed Islam to be the
oldest religion.
A majority of the British students
do not know that India is mostly Hindu believe
that Serbia is Islamic
and 27 even believed that Israel was Islamic.
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Asked to identify on a world outline
map Ukraine, Alaska, Angola, Iran, Mongolia,
Uruguay, South Korea, and Colombia
The only territory that more than 50 got right
was Alaska
Countries named by UK students instead of Ukraine
were - Austria, Bulgaria, Estonia, Georgia,
Iran, Latvia, Pakistan, Serbia, Yugoslavia,
Croatia, Poland, Turkey, Czech R., Russia, and
Romania
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The Danes AND the UK students both thought that
Ghana and Angola had been colonised by the
French.
The question about which of the following
countries was last colonised by a European power
Cambodia, Congo, Japan, Turkey, Uruguay
The modal value for both the UK students and the
Danes was for Japan 36 and 30 respectively.
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A majority do not know that most plastics come
from oil
Hardly anyone knows where rivers run only 6
could say the Danube flowed to the Black Sea
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The Cosmos
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65) What are the doldrums? The area to north and
south of the equator where there are very light
or no winds, and sailing boats used to get stuck
sometimes for weeks.
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One enterprising answer was a small Pakistani
pancake.
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NATO. 45 think it means the North American
Treaty Organization as against 43 thinking it
is the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
It is then logical that the UK students think it
is headquartered in Washington (23) and not
Brussels (7).
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All medical students have to learn the hills and
valleys, capes and bays of the human body.
Unless they knew the anatomy of the human body,
theoretical debate is irrelevant.
I have found virtually nothing written in or
about university geography in the last fifty
years which says what facts should be known. I
consulted Peter Goulds (1999)What is worth
teaching in Geography ? The answer was the
opposite of what I was looking for. facts are
not worth teaching. Not for their own sake
certainly. They clutter up the memory, they get
out of date, and they can be read about in books.
You can collect them out of antiquarian
interestthey will never be referred to again
for intellectual refreshment. Geography used to
be like that. Perhaps in certain places it still
is? (1999239).
I challenge this view I subscribe to the
anatomist metaphor.
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Geography as the world discipline connecting
popular and academic geographical
traditions Academic geography is what is taught
in universities and Bonnett contends that it
is that it is mostly about concepts and
techniques stressing spatial analysis and
about the 6 per cent or so of the worlds
population who happen to live in white and
English-language dominated societies. (Bonnett,
2003 55).
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He suggests that one of the reasons for this bias
is a reaction against the tradition of academic
geography as both master and servant of empire.
Academic geography has therefore lost its status
as discipline of the world, and in doing so
reduced its status To put it crudely, we take
themes framed and defined in terms of
Euro-centric social science and add space.(p59).
If sociology is anthropology done at home, so
the new graphy is geo-graphy done at
home. Geography without the other Bonnett is
adamant that academic geography has to re-engage
with school geography and with popular geography.
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TV News 1990
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TV News 1990
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What facts are students of Geography
taught? Two books as comparators. Both are
standard geography text books pitched at the
end-of-sixth/university-first-year level. Both
have a whole-earth title.
The first is written by perhaps the pre-eminent
British geographer of the first half of the 20th
C. Dudley Stamp The World a General Geography
(1934)
The second by arguably the most pre-eminent of
the second half of the 20th C. It is Peter
Haggett Geography a Global Synthesis (2001) I
have coded the 500 figures and boxes of Haggetts
book, and the 412 figures of Stamps book, using
a methodology for content analysis based on
Chapman, Kumar, Frazer and Gaber (1997) and
Gould, Johnson and Chapman (1984).
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Backcloth and Traffic. Backcloth is taken to
be geographical places. Traffic is taken to be
whatever is the theme of what the figure
attributes to that place(s).
For example, Haggetts Figure 8.2 Changing Form
of World Cities, has backcloth Carcassone and
Bristol, and the traffic urbanization.
Stamps Figure 101 An Industrial Town from the
Air, has backcloth UK and traffic
urbanization and communications. The
approach is not partitional, and is also
multi-dimensional
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When Stamps book was added there was a need for
a new word physical background (phys),
Stamps regional descriptions follow the then
established pattern of starting with rocks and
relief.
In Haggetts book, since he is not concerned with
any global regional geography per se, and since
physical geography has new concerns, and because
dynamic environmental linkages are now a more
important focus, this conceptual convention is
not applicable, and I was not pushed into
defining such a word.
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Stamp Starts with the global physical
background atmosphere, hydrosphere,
lithosphere Continues with man on the earth
which is essentially about different
agricultural and industrial systems, world
communications (oceanic sea routes), and human
occupations, differentiated between civilised and
primitive people.
From then on the book is written world region by
world region elaborating first on the physical
background and then production agriculture and
industry.
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Haggett starts at the individual scale, of people
on a beach, to introduce ideas on spatial
modelling, and on dynamical physical processes.
But it is evident there, and throughout the
book, that the linkages between the physical
material and the human material are weak, and
often not explicit some kind of osmotic
process of integration is left to the reader.
Because there is no systematic regional
geography, a là Stamp, a continuing integrative
focus is absent.
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the Traffic frequencies mostly show what Stamp
lacks rectifying policy, culture,
demographics, disease and health, an ecological
perspective, awareness of malfunction, a focus on
urbanisation and above all, an absence of
theories and techniques.
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Stamp picks out agriculture with respect to the
OEE (English speaking developed world.) This
reflects a concern with North American and
Australian food production for the UK.
The term ben for beneficial (putting something
right) is associated with Haggett and the OEE.
Things going wrong is also more a Haggett word,
but distributed more widely across world regions.
For Stamp, regions have climates for Haggett the
world does. Stamp is globally interested in
communications Haggett within the OEE. Since the
OEE represents overwhelmingly the example region
for Haggett, this pattern is repeated.
The multi-regional examples are nearly all from
Haggett. General ideas about urbanisation or
demography can of course be illustrated with
material from several regions. This will
inevitably mean selective use of evidence.
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Excellent and useful though it is in teaching the
practice of the modern academic discipline of
geography Haggetts book is neither
a synthesis ( especially not between physical
and human geography)
nor global, despite the claims of its title.
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Geography and Area Studies Farmer (1973)
discussed the issue at some length. At a time of
unprecedented activity in Area Studies
British geographers seem relatively less
concerned with dedicated specialization by area
than at any time in at least the fairly recent
past."
Farmer took the New Geography (the positivist
quantitative revolution) to task for ignoring the
historical roots of the subject. His ideal was
that it was important that geographers were not
just intellectual tourists, choosing different
overseas places for different intellectual
projects at different times, but that they were
dedicated specialists.
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What can Geography do that Area Studies do not
do? It is all a matter of academic tradition,
and the intellectual division of labour.
Area Studies are more associated with languages,
politics, and cultures. The monsoon is
celebrated in Bengali poetry, Bollywood films,
and the folklore of farming. In Geographical
studies, the monsoon is more likely to be studied
in statistical and spatial form, and related to
cropping patterns, water management and flooding.
Few British Geographers of India start off
as Sanskritists, though in time they may learn
one of the modern languages and scripts of India.
Though Area Studies within the UK is sometimes
thought of restrictively as more akin to
language, culture, history and politics than
anything else, it can be more eclectic even than
Geography, and a course in area-specific
geography can be a component of an Area Studies
program.
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Unfortunately, eclecticism can make Area Studies
a hostage to fortune. Ludden (2000) reviews the
last fifty years and the current state of Area
Studies in the USA. In the US, area studies
came into being to serve national interests that
became more global after 1945. . Specifically
American national interests propelled an American
style of area studies and American globalisation
at the same time.
But since the end of the Cold War, put at 1989,
Area Studies have had to fight increasingly hard
for their existence A big shift in the
nation-state system would necessarily destabilize
area studies, so closely had the two been linked
and after 1989, such a destabilization did occur.
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However, this shift continued a process of
globalisation that actually began long before and
whose pace has actually been faster at various
times in the past than it is today .. What is
new today is not the fact of globalisation, but
rather its recognition as a central historical
process and utilization as a theoretical basis
for efforts to reorganize knowledge and power in
the world.
He also believes that There is no theory of
area studies or of area-specific knowledge there
is only a set of institutional, personal, and
fragmented disciplinary, market, and professional
interests that converge primarily on funding.
The organizations that should have taken the
lead in forming a broad theoretical basis for
area studies are the area studies associations --
the African Studies Association, Association of
Asian Studies, Latin American Studies
Association, and Middle East Studies Association
-- which have done little except tout the
importance of their own world area
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The failure of the Area Studies Associations in
the USA to defend themselves collectively means
that the disciplinary model of social science
again dominates
The new post-1989 critique of area studies
initially came from the SSRC president, David
Featherman who argued that disciplinary social
sciences were more universally applicable,
globally useful, and more worthy of support than
area studies. His argument against area studies
favored "hard" social sciences like economics,
political science, and sociology, which use
statistical data, formal models (often
mathematical), and positivist, explanatory
theory.
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In abandoning area specialisation, and going for
a global systematic geography, we can interpret
the shift from Stamp to Haggett as symptomatic
of such examples of the power of disciplinary
structures in academia
regardless of the consequences for our
understanding of the world around us.
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Just as Huntington(1999) observed that
Westernisation is not synonymous with
modernization, and that Westernisation is neither
universal nor universalising, so western social
science is not universal. Yet, as Milton Singer
said Social scientists in particular cultivated
an Olympian complacency about the universality of
their disciplines, and... did not feel the need
to go beyond the familiar experience of Europe
and United States for illustration and proof of
their universal principles" (M. Singer, 1964, in
Farmer, 19733)
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Winding Up introduction The most famous and
influential paper ever written by a geographer
(described by Farmer as a New Geographer of his
own day) is beyond a shadow of doubt
Mackinders (1904) The Geographical Pivot of
History.
Its foundation was an understanding of the
specific the idiosyncratic - form of our earth,
the huge environmental variation across space,
and an embracing sense of world history at the
end of the 500 years of the globalising Colombian
epoch. This is Geo-graphy writ large. A more
recent example of this scale of thinking is Jared
Diamonds Guns, and Germs, and Steel.
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Conclusions Academia may study
globalization but it is not absolved from the
effects of globalization we need to recognise
the damage being done to regionally specific
knowledge-in-context. Geography above all other
subjects should recognise this, and respond to
its obligations. Let us re-introduce students to
atlases, for a start. They should know basic
facts of world geography and history. The
re-integration of physical and human geography is
best achieved within the context of specific
regional understanding. (The modern form of this
integration may well be associated with
sustainability.) This will necessarily mean a
change in professional yardsticks for some
physical and some human geographers both need to
reach out to each other more. This geography
needs and is needed by Area Studies.
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Foreshadowing Bonnetts discussion of school and
popular geography, Farmer also observed
Whatever else school geography does or does
not do, in relation to physical geography, or
geographical theory, or geographical technique,
it seems to me essential that it must form part
of an education in citizenship, in world
citizenship. (197312) What happens at school
follows what happens in the universities.