Questions on the Human Frontiers of Geography

Abstract

N reading recent literature produced by human geographers who have carried out empirical research in alien societies, mainly in the tropics, one is drawn to ask a number of questions about human geography as a whole. A difference of approach is apparent between those who have an overtly chorographic purpose, who scarcely ever seek explanations in matters such as human behavior, attitudes and beliefs, social organization, and the characteristics and interrelationships of human groups, and those whose inquiries are not primarily chorographic, and who are more inclined to undertake a search for processes as a means of reaching explanations. Within the world of Englishwriting geographers, to whose work this review is mainly confined, it seems that the former group, are widely distributed both in America and elsewhere, but few of the latter are found among the ranks of American geographers; perhaps this differentiation may be explained by reference to the guiding concepts of the so-called Berkeley School of cultural geographers, which has had so marked an influence on American human geography. The position among French and German geographers is dissimilar: in France the traditions of Bruhnes and Vidal de la Blache, and the continued relationship between French geography and French ethnography, itself rather different from or American anthropology, have led to some important differences of approach. The German tradition shares with the American its strong emphasis on areal differentiation, but recent thinking has something in common with that of some geographers. Thus Hahn's recent1 plea for the geographical study of social groups has more in common with thinking arising from mainly British or Antipodean work in Africa and the south Pacific than with American cultural geography. In order to reduce complexity, and also because of the writer's very limited acquaintance with the German language, however, recent French and German trends are not discussed in any detail in this essay. A further deliberate limitation, in the interests of clarity, is the almost total omission of the large literature on towns and of essays iil economic geography per se: nearly all the writers discussed here are concerned with regional, or agrarian problems. In surveying a selection of this literature, my main object has been a search for the kind of questions that are asked in empirical research, and for the nature of the explanations offered. There seems