Whose biography; whose history? A response to Driver and Baigent

Abstract

© 2007 SAGE Publications DOI: 10.1177/0309132507073557 Although Driver and Baigent (2007; henceforth DB) sympathize with many points made in my paper (Johnston, 2005), they apparently wish I had written a different one. My sole concern, clearly stated in the title, was to use the ODNB to illuminate aspects of the history of the academic discipline of geography in the UK. The core of DB’s unease with this constrained purpose is that I was apparently thereby ‘detaching the academic discipline of geography from the broader field of geographical knowledge’ by ‘showing an interest principally in those geographers who conform to a present-day version of what ‘a geographer’ should look like’; ‘Johnston assumes that geography is what geographers do’; ‘he effectively accords primacy to that kind of geography which is done by professional academic geographers’ – an ‘overly conservative view of what constitutes geography as a field’. I plead guilty to most of these charges: that is what I set out to do. I am not alone in detaching the academic discipline from ‘the broader field of geographical knowledge’ – geographers collectively have done that in a variety of ways (see Bonnett, 2003). Unlike DB, I believe that the ‘geographical contributions of university geographers . . . [have been] fundamentally different from those of people operating beyond the university sector’: the latter’s contributions are just as worthy of study – elsewhere. Clearly DB find my brief at best partial, at worst misleading. My ‘vision [sic] of the field effectively excludes not just those geographers, naturalists, surveyors, travellers, cartographers, geographical publishers and explorers whose efforts were crucial in establishing geography within the cultural and scientific life of the nation before the formal establishment of the discipline at university level’. Did they contribute to and influence that formal establishment? A few did – such as Vaughan Cornish and some RGS officers – and they are discussed. By excluding others (effectively!), I have not significantly misrepresented the emergent academic discipline: is there evidence that, over and above the academic geographers I discussed, ‘more than 1,000 men and women whose principal work Whose biography; whose history? A response to Driver and Baigent