HUMAN GEOGRAPHY AND ETHNOGRAPHY IN EMMANUEL DE MARTONNE’S FIELD NOTEBOOKS: METHODS AND DISCIPLINARY BOUNDARIES

Abstract

As a historian of geography, I work on what constitutes geographical science, its object of study, its founding concepts and methodology; I analyze how geography is born and developed at the national and international levels through the circulation of knowledge. Therefore, I wondered about the apparent paradox contained in the very title of the congress (5th Congress of Slavic Geographers and Ethnographers) which closely associates geography and ethnography, in the continuity of previous congresses dating from the interwar period (Prague 1924, Poland 1927, Kingdom of Yugoslavia 1930 and Kingdom of Bulgaria 1936). In many countries, the academic world of the social sciences appears today increasingly compartmentalized; in geography in particular, there is on one side human geography and on the other physical geography, this was not the case during the interwar period, at the time of the first four congresses. What does this association with ethnography say about the evolution of geography (I speak here from the point of view of the geographer that I am) as a discipline at a time when geomorphology is predominant in geography? What are the links between ethnography, human geography and physical geography at the time of the first four congresses of Slavic geographers and ethnographers? In an attempt to shed light on this issue, I propose to study the part of human geography and ethnography in the 27 field notebooks of the French geographer Emmanuel de Martonne based on the results of a research program that I have coordinated at the Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) and entitled Corpus Emmanuel de Martonne. Given the close links between Emmanuel de Martonne and Jovan Cvijić, two great geomorphologists (but not only) internationally recognized, I will introduce some comparisons between them. After discussing the emergence of concepts related to human geography in the first half of the 20th century, the presentation will show what methodology and field tools are used by E. de Martonne and J. Cvijić to describe and explain human facts.