Le point de vue culturel en géographie : réactions dermiques et épidermiques

Abstract

The cultural point of view in geography : extensive and superficial reactions. — The cultural approach in geography has a past which has been detrimental to it. Some researchers are attempting to rehabilitate it however because they have verified concretely the weight of cultural causalities in the explanation of geographical facts. With the recourse to such causalities two extreme attitudes prevail : in the line of universalising thought, to reduce the difference to a slowness in development along the same path and to deny alterity; to extricate cultural causalities from their economico -social context and to substitute other causalities for them. The observation of on-going conflicts in the contemporary world, both on the national and infranational scale, shows the persistance of the Babel symptom.