Sub-Merged Identities: Familiar and Unfamiliar Histories

Abstract

I was prompted to write this paper by the recent debate over the merger of the Institute of British Geographers with the Royal Geographical Society. For historians of geography, what was especially striking about the debate such as it was were the divergent meanings placed on the proposed administrative union, and especially the way in which the history of geography its institutions and ideas became something of a battleground (or perhaps just a playground) for the protagonists. I concede that there is a danger of blowing this up out of proportion it might well be argued that the merger itself was a relatively insignificant, rather parochial event in the history of our discipline. Yet looking at what it threw up might help us to reflect further on the notion of a 'geographical tradition'. Perhaps it was the bureaucratic, corporate associations of the language of 'merger' (which provoked talk of 'takeovers' and 'buyouts' if not 'sellouts' in some quarters) that led one past President of the RGS to describe the new relationship between the two societies as a marriage rather than a merger. It was characterized as something less calculating and more intimate than an administrative connection; a union to be consummated, as it were, rather than approved by some academic equivalent of the Monopolies and Mergers Commission. His successor at the RGS describes the IBG as 'our sister society', which seems a rather safer (though no less pregnant) image. Meanwhile, the outgoing IBG President trumped them both by portraying the event as a reconciliation between faithful parent and an unruly child, separated in 1933 by some sort of tragic family breakdown.' What on earth is going on in this rush for familial metaphorics? So much reference to (hetero)sexual imagery to union and consummation as well as to the bonds of blood across the generations. How reassuring is it to portray this meeting of minds or rather bodies, and august ones at that as a replaying of some elemental family trauma brought o an end through the counselling skills of the Joint Working Party? Others might have their own readings especially those who have read their Freud but what is surely striking here is not just the account of our present condition ('Just Married') but the recasting of its history in terms of kinship, lineage and descent. Sir Crispin Tickell describes the 'marriage' in true diplomatic fashion as 'a bringing together of two societies with honourable and distinct traditions'.2 It