Geographical Texts Research Articles

Poetic Places and Real Spaces: Anthropology of Space in Crusade Literature

Space was not a neutral topic in the Middle Ages. Who you were, what your name was, if you were a noble: these were functions of land, the place with which you were identified. Nation, originally, was the place of one's birth. Yet space was, to no small extent, less an empirical concept than a literary one. For many, the Bible was the first and only authoritative geographical text in the Middle Ages-the Bible and the pilgrimage accounts it spawned. For at this time, literary texts, beginning with the Bible, became guides for real activities that from a modern perspective would seem to have been better grounded in empirical observation. Be that as it may, reading the Bible as a literal account of terrestrial topography, and then acting on this understanding by making pilgrimages, had significant consequences for all kinds of practical enterprises. One such enterprise was the crusades, and the main question I want to ask in this paper is relatively straightforward: Why were the crusades a central preoccupation of Europe for some five hundred years (from the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries) when, with the exception of the First Crusade (1099-1101 ), these expeditions were military disasters, or certainly far from a succession of glorious victories, at least for the Europeans? Muslim heroes like Saladin, and Muslim triumphs were by far more common, and yet Europe kept looking to its crusading dream. I am a literary historian, not an economic or military one, so it will come as no surprise that the two theses I will advance involve the crusade literature of the period. I first look at the link that has long been postulated between pilgrimages and crusades. In my view, the connection, while real enough, is, in reality, illogical; yet it does explain in part how the crusaders could fail to perceive what it was they were really

Space and Social Theory: Interpreting Modernity and Postmodernity

List of Plates. List of Figures. List of Contributors. Preface. Introduction: Modernity, Postmodernity and the Social Sciences (Georges Benko). Part I Reasons, Texts and Debates Around Postmodernism. Postmodern Bloodlines (Michael Dear). Social Theory, Postmodernism, and the Critique of Development (Richard Peet). Shelf Length Zero: The Disappearance of the Geographical Text (Michael Curry). Part II Writing Space, Forming Identities. Re--Presenting the Extended Moment of Danger: A Meditation on Hypermodernity, Identity and the Montage Form (Allan Pred). Identity, Space, and other Uncertainties (Wolfgang Natter and John Paul Jones). Belonging: Spaces of Meandering Desire (Ulf Strohmayer). Spatial Stress and Resistance: Social Meanings of Spatialization (Rob Shields). Lacan and Geography: the Production of Space Revisited (Derek Gregory). Part III Planning and the Postmodern . Panning in/for Postmodernity (Ed Soja). Warp, Woof and Regulation: A Tool for Social Science (Alain Lipietz). Institutional Reflexivity and the Rise of the Regional State (Phil Cooke). Part IV The Politics of Difference. Postmodern Becomings: From the Space of Form to the Space of Potentiality (Julie Kathy Gibson--Graham). Geopolitics and the Postmodern: Issues or Knowledge, Difference and North--South Relations (David Slater). Postmodern Space and Japanese Tradition (Augustin Berque). Imperfect Panopticism: Envisioning the Construction of Normal Lives (Matt Hannah). Imagining the Normad: Mobility and the Postmodern Primitive (Tim Cresswell). Conclusion. Forget the Delivery, or, What Post are We Talking about? (Ulf Strohmayer). Index

The Geopolitical Image: Imperialism, Anarchism, and the Hypothesis of Culture in the Formation of Geopolitics

The Geopolitical Image: Imperialism, Anarchism, and the Hypothesis of Culture in the Formation of Geopolitics Chris GoGwilt* (bio) A geography text should aim at literary form. It should present a standard of knowledge, a method, and a perspective. Supplementary ideas ought to be built round the map, not the printed page, for only so can we cultivate the visualizing habit of mind. —Halford John Mackinder, 1908 A philosophy of the history of the human race, worthy of its name, must begin with the heavens and descend to the earth, must be charged with the conviction that all existence is one—a single conception sustained from beginning to end upon one identical law. —Friedrich Ratzel, quoted by H. G. Wells as the epigraph to The Outline of History, 1920 [I]f you knew the threefold sorrow with which my life is barred, like those well-fortified cities one sees in Elisée Reclus’s Northern Europe volume, you would forgive me. —Marcel Proust, letter to Suzette Lemaire, 1 November 1894 Preface: The Meaning of Geopolitics Early in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man the reader encounters an auditory image of the infantile artist’s first experimentation with language: O, the wild rose blossoms On the little green place. He sang that song. That was his song. O, the green wothe botheth. 1 [End Page 49] The prototypically modernist linguistic play of “the green wothe botheth” establishes a problem of imagining to which the young Stephen will return, although the problem cannot be resolved: “you could not have a green rose. But perhaps somewhere in the world you could” (PA, 12–13). In its encoded contestation of national and poetic imagery (the Irish green, the poetic rose), Stephen’s “green wothe” is an exemplary geopolitical image. It posits a form of cultural and political identification whose difficulty Stephen later finds inscribed in and around the “picture of the earth on the first page of his geography” textbook (PA, 15). The meaning of “geopolitics” as a term used to describe global political problems is by no means easy to pinpoint. Its increasing use as a keyword in critical theory and cultural studies signals a need to theorize what Homi Bhabha has recently called “the geopolitics of the historical present.” 2 As part of that critical effort a number of studies of geopolitics have appeared, including Gearóid O Tuathail’s recent Critical Geopolitics. 3 The genealogy I offer here emphasizes two features of the formation of what O Tuathail calls “classical geopolitics” (CG, 22): the suppressed importance of anarchism in the formation of imperialist geopolitical paradigms, and the fate of nineteenth-century ideas of “culture” in the formation of twentieth-century geopolitics. The history of geopolitics may be summarized as the failure to constitute the discipline of geography as a scientific field of study, a failure on which the very success and persistence of reactionary geopolitical paradigms are premised. Most of my examples are drawn from the work of geographers, anthropologists, and social scientists, and something I emphasize is the way geopolitical paradigms took shape around disciplinary boundary crossings within the academy not unlike the interdisciplinarity that characterizes cultural studies today. 4 At issue is not only the fate of an academic field of study, but also the ensemble of residual problems and questions that come to mark the wider sense of “geopolitics.” Stephen’s problem of imagining a “green rose” is exemplary of this ensemble of questions because it offers not a definition, but a problem: “It pained him that he did not know well what politics meant and that he did not know where the universe ended” (PA, 17). In Joyce’s novel, a geography textbook precipitates Stephen’s problem of identification, and it is to geography books that I turn to examine the emergence of the geopolitical image. In particular, I am interested in the work of three geographers: Elisée Reclus (1830–1905), the French anarchist geographer; Friedrich Ratzel (1844–1904), the German geographer whose theory of “living space” (Lebensraum) and political geography generally set the terms for the later development of Geopolitik; and Halford J. Mackinder (1861–1947), the British geographer who...

Cities of Alexander the Great (review)

Reviewed by: Cities of Alexander the Great Muhammad Usman Erdosy P. M. Fraser. Cities of Alexander the Great. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. xii 1 263 pp. Cloth, $72. Fraser’s survey aims at determining “what cities [Alexander] did indeed found, how many out of the large number attributed to him by our various sources are actually historical, and in what sense” (vi). Resolving these issues requires the analysis of sources which are plagued by inconsistent geographical information on the one hand, and a general silence concerning Alexander’s motives behind his foundations on the other. Consequently, Fraser opens with a critical survey of the Alexandrias listed in Stephanus of Byzantium’s as well as in the corpus of texts preserving, or inspired by, the Western traditions of the Alexander Romance. This is followed, in chapter 2, by an analysis of lists found in the Perso-Arabic and Syriac versions of the Romance. Having disposed of the baggage of mythical foundations, Fraser then identifies those Alexandrias which are authenticated by historical and geographical texts, in chapters 3 and 4, and attempts, in chapter 5, to locate them on the ground. In conclusion, chapter 6 considers Alexander’s motives in founding cities, and the Epilogue surveys the subsequent fortunes of those few foundations which Fraser feels justified at the end of his analysis in attributing to Alexander himself. The book is also supplied with appendices detailing the formation of the Alexander Romance and the accounts of Chinese pilgrims to India, with a table summarizing references to Alexander foundations known from literature, and with detailed indices. As in his Ptolemaic Alexandria, Fraser brings an encyclopedic knowledge of sources—both primary and secondary—to the issues at hand, reserving the text for general discussion and relegating detailed argumentation to the notes. Although the material available to him had been known to previous generations, his study is the first comprehensive survey of the various Alexander foundations since Tarn’s The Greeks in Bactria and India (Cambridge 1951). Unlike Tarn, however, he prefers to dismiss (or assimilate to attested foundations) most of the Alexandrias named in Stephanus and the Romance; some because they are unsubstantiated in historical and geographical texts, and others because they represent cities actually founded by the Seleucids. In doing so, he lays strong emphasis on identifying the “pre-texts” of the Alexander Romance (in appendix 2), as well as the political motivations of their Ptolemaic authors (in chapter 1), and while he concedes that his conclusion can “only be reached by as much unverifiable argument as that of Droysen and Tarn” (viii), this part of the book is highly valuable for creating a framework with which to approach the mythical accretions to Alexander’s historical achievements. Similarly useful is the analysis of Alexander’s aims in creating a network of new cities, in chapter 6, even if it is based only partly on statements attributable to Alexander, and relies heavily on patterns observable in his foundations, on general geopolitical considerations, and, consequently, on our ability to locate [End Page 133] the historical Alexandrias. As above, there is little to quarrel with in the general conclusion that the foundations represent rather Alexander’s ambition to recreate the Achaemenid Empire under Macedonian domination than an attempt to spread Greek culture, and that even reduced to a historical scale they are of a magnitude to foreshadow the strategic thinking of the British Raj. Although Fraser considers the task of locating authentic Alexander foundations subordinate to the study of sources, his assertion (102) that the historicity of the foundations does not rest, even partly, on their precise identification on the ground is surprising, given the inability of the textual evidence to resolve many geographical and historical questions, and the difficulty, just mentioned, of establishing Alexander’s motives in founding cities without pinpointing their location. Consequently, the lengthy excursus on topography, making up chapter 5, carries considerable importance. It also testifies to the complexity of the issues, since the evidence consists of conflicting geographical data regarding cities, which remain frequently unreconcilable with the archaeological record even when supplemented by the presumed course of troop movements, in turn determined by logistics and by the presumed political motives of...

The Emergence and Development of Geographic Thought in New England

Some of the early settlers of New England brought with them the works and thought of European geographers, notably Ptolemy, Münster, Cluver, Carpenter, and Varenius. Beginning in the 1600s the work of British geographers Gordon and Salmon and Guthrie and Pinkerton was acknowledged, preceding that of Jedidiah Morse, “Father of American Geography.” Morse led the way for a large number of geography texts written by Americans, emphasizing North America and characterized by Varenius’s special geography.Early collegiate developments in New England geography were led by Harvard and Yale universities, the College of Rhode Island (later renamed Brown University), and Dartmouth College. The 20 or so normal schools throughout New England, introduced in the middle 1800s, constituted a nursery for geographic education. Also noted are more recent college and university geography departments established throughout the region, including notably Clark University. The founding of societies and associations in New England also furthered the cause of geography.

Geography in Eighteenth‐Century British Education

This article analyses the ways in which social change affected the sites and texts through which eighteenth‐century Britain facilitated a geographical education. Whilst geography was not an independent discipline at schools and universities, the wide variety of geographical texts available show that mathematical and descriptive geography were taught to a range of ages and social classes. The growth in children's literature produced several distinct types of geography book. At the school level, grammar schools continued to teach geography as part of a humanist training, while new commercial schools and public lectures educated people from less exalted backgrounds in the rudiments of mathematical geography for practical purposes. The universities taught geography, both descriptive and mathematical, as part of a continuing humanist education. In these various contexts, geography displayed a bifurcated structure: some sites developed a practical and commercial form of geography, which led to new types of geographical texts, responding to the commercialisation of society; other sites retained a traditional, humanistic conception of geography, derived via Renaissance education from Ptolemy and Strabo.

Towards a geography of heterogeneous associations

Dualisms have been a recurring feature of sociospatial analysis. Micro/macro, local/global, subject/object, particular/universal – one or more of these dualistic frameworks can be discerned in many geographical texts. Dissolving the dualisms, somehow finding a way through the gaps which open up between them, requires the development of an approach which allows the various scales of social life to be treated symmetrically so that we never have to shift to a different register when studying large-scale or ‘big’ (usually termed structural) phenomena. It is proposed in this article that a geography of associations, which traces how actions are embedded in materials and then extended through time and space, provides one means of overcoming the dualisms. Drawing upon actor-network theory it is argued that interactions are both ‘localized’ and ‘globalized’ using nonhuman entities and these permit certain actor-networks to act at a distance on others. Patterns of centrality and marginality thus emerge as particular power geometries are drawn. Tracing these power geometries by following the associations can only be undertaken in a nondualistic fashion.

初等教育地理教科書類にみる第三世界 (途上国地域) 記述の変化

The United Nations has declared 1996-2005 as the decade to root out problems of poverty all over the world. Recently in Japan, education for international understanding has became very popular. However most students are only interested in developed countries, such as those in Europe and North America. Although Japan is located in Asia, Japanese people look down on developing countries; the Third World, like Asia, Africa and Latin America.It's not good for us to add to the North-South Problem. So we need to promote and spread the idea of Development Education. Through this type of education we can learn equal aspects about people of the Third World, and they have an equal right to development.I believe that Japan's negative image of the Third World started at the begining of the Meiji era, in the late 19th century. Until the end of the Edo era, almost all Japanese had been respectful of other Asian nations, like China and Korea.FUKUZAWA Yukichi (1835-1901) one of Japan's most prominent educators and propagator of Western knowledge, wrote SEKAIKUNIZUKUSHI in 1869 (World Geography for children and women). In this book he insisted that westernization was the most important factor for Japanese development. Also the first contemptuous expressions against the Third world can be found. Since that time, percentage of Europe and North America has increased in World Geography texts, compared with Third World areas.The Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895 was the big turning point for Japanese geographical education. From the outset of this war, Japan started other invasions overseas and aquired new territories, like Taiwan, Korea, Manchuria and other areas in Asia. So in Japan's World Geography textbooks the contents regarding Asia and Oceania gradually increased until the end of World War II. Subsequently the percentage of information devoted to Europe and North America decreased.The Greater East Asia Coprosperity Sphere (Dai Toa Kyoeiken) was a slogan used by the Japanese government during World War II to express the idea of a politically and economically integrated Asia, free from western domination.This idea had great influence on geographical education throughout the period of World War II. At that time geography teachings and textbooks also supported ultra-nationalism. So geographers and geographical educators shoud reflect on this in earnest.Today internationalization regarding the Third World is very important, especially in geographical education. We need to study and truly understand the harsh realities of the Third World, in order to eradicate the problem of poverty.In spite of these situations, the contents of World Geography have decreased in recent Social Studies textbooks. It is regrettable that elementary students have no chance to study World Geography; especially about Third World countries.In effect, the students' right to study has been taken away. I therefore hope for the comeback of World Geography in elementary school textbooks, including a Development Education point of view.

What Was a Map? The Lexicographers Reply

Definitions of the word "map" are often discussed in a philosophical spirit, but they have not been previously used as a way of throwing light on cartographic history. In this study, a sample of more than three hundred such definitions has been collected from dictionaries, encyclopedias, geographical texts, and other writings of various dates from the mid-seventeenth century to the present day. The results clearly deserve statistical and historical analysis, and several examples of such analysis are offered for consideration. The most common lexicographical approach is to treat maps as representations of the surface of the earth, but for many writers this simple formula has been too general and too crude. Of the alternative definitions, few seem conformable to common usage. Instead, they reflect changing intellectual fashions among geographers and, in more recent times, cartographers. In these cases where greater lexicographical refinement is attempted, a number of motifs can be seen to emerge, those chosen for discussion being, in historical order, scientific, popular, professional, and philosophical.

Maps, Text, and Seventh-Graders: A Study of Spatial Learning

The research reported here examines the effectiveness of maps in geography text for seventh grade students by asking them to study either the text alone or the text with maps and then answer questions about the material. We also investigate the influences on students' performance of gender, time of testing (immediate or delayed), and kind of knowledge required (memorization versus inference). Results reveal a consistent advantage associated with the presence of maps but not at levels which are statistically significant. Other findings include a slight advantage of females over males (again, not significant), the fact that inference questions are more difficult to answer than those requiring simple memorization, and (not surprisingly) that students' performance declines over time. We offer possible explanations for our findings, including some related to the research design and the fact that our subjects were seventh-graders.

A sixteenth century Portuguese report concerning an early Javanese world map

In the sixteenth century, there were numerous voyages of discovery in the oceans of the world, expanding European understanding and influence. These explorations, and in particular the knowledge they created, have tended to overshadow other ventures into the unknown. Not just the Europeans, but other cultures as well, navigated the seas and accumulated geographical information, putting together their own ideas about the distribution of the lands and seas around the globe. Arab and Asian seafarers plied the oceans in trade and exploration, and created maps and geographical texts. These maps and texts, however, are not as numerous as a scholar might wish. The Asian maps, particularly early ones, are few in number, and these are virtually all Chinese and Korean creations, world maps based on traditional religious concepts of a circular landmass. There are few maps based on actual navigation. But an early sixteenth-century Portuguese document gives a brief description of a Javanese map, which apparently showed much of the world. It also depicted the routes of the navigations of the Chinese and other Pacific peoples. The map itself has been lost, but we read of it in a letter from the Portuguese admiral Afonso de Albuquerque to his king, Dom Manuel, dated 1 April 1512.

Jesse Olney's Innovative Geography Text of 1828 for Common Schools

Abstract In the late 18th century, American authors began producing geography texts for use by common school (elementary) children. First and foremost among them was Jedidiah Morse; however, another less celebrated author was Jesse Olney, whose work may have had a more lasting effect on young American minds. His text was published in 1828 and was followed in 1829 by a companion atlas. The text was unusual in that it began with an exercise on local geography rather than a description of the solar system. It was profusely illustrated and the pictures were integrated with the text, unusual for its day. Descriptions of national character, often of a very negative nature, were included. These descriptions were opinions presented as facts. The 98 editions, consisting of millions of copies, in widespread use over at least 30 years, meant that generations of school children grew to adulthood greatly influenced by Olney. A gift of a copy of his text from my daughter, Susanne, is responsible for my interest in Jess...

Jesse Olney's Innovative Geography Text of 1828 for Common Schools

Jesse Olney's Innovative Geography Text of 1828 for Common Schools

Jesse Olney's Innovative Geography Text of 1828 for Common Schools

Jesse Olney's Innovative Geography Text of 1828 for Common Schools

World maps and Easter tables: Medieval maps in context

Abstract Medieval geographical texts and world histories have long been searched for world maps. One source which merits further exploration is the computistical or calendar manuscript, which is devoted to calculating the date of Easter. Computus manuscripts include T‐O, zonal and ‘list’ maps, as well as more complex and detailed maps. Three of the complex maps are examined here, and their form and content related to their context.

Understanding performance in information systems: Blending relevance and competence

Information systems have many stakeholder groups with differing views and assessment methods of user performance. For example, users find software unfriendly, and system maintainers find users recalcitrant. Performance of information systems usually measures either the competence of the user as seen from the system's perspective or the relevance of the retrieved materials as seen from the user's perspective. This article presents brief accounts of the user-based performance measure of relevance and the information system-based performance measure of competence. Relevance and competence are shown to be complex notions that have not been studied conjointly. The article then reports the results of an experiment that used a generalized geographic information system to illustrate how collecting and analyzing data simultaneously from both a system and user views of performance can suggest improvements for information systems. The user's view of this generalized system was formed by respondents describing a recent geographic information need situation and its resolution. The system view of the user in this generalized geographic information system was described by the accuracy and time on tasks of subjects as they read and answered questions concerning geographic text and map documents. This exploratory research generated two major hypotheses: Relevance varies directly with levels of competence and experience, and relevance varies directly with the difficulty of the task. These relationships are interesting and need further investigation because their underlying cause is not easily determined. The findings also indicate that through a merged, no-fault model, information science can contribute to constructing a holistic view of system performance by illustrating relationships among factors such as competence and relevance, and by exposing new factors such as expectations. © 1995 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Development of a computer workstation for famine early warning and food security.

Beginning in 1990, the University of Arizona, Arizona Remote Sensing Center (ARSC) has been involved in a collaborative effort with the Global Information and Early Warning System (GIEWS) and the Remote Sensing Center of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations in designing and developing an integrated computer workstation for famine early warning. The goal of the project is to provide food security analysts with a set of computer tools to manage a very large and diverse set of data for predicting the onset of food security emergencies for every country on Earth. The initial stage of the project involved the conceptual definition of system elements and the development of overall system architecture. We are now developing an open, flexible, and portable system designed to significantly assist the work of the analysts. System architecture provides a task-specific and user-friendly graphic user interface (GUI) within a Windows environment that will link image processing, geographic information system (GIS), spreadsheet, text, and graphics software packages into a single operational environment. A relational database management system (RDBMS) is serving as the back-end of the workstation to facilitate data storage and retrieval and as a means to preserve analysis methodologies.

Ideological Management in Textbooks: A Study of the Changing Image of the United States in China's Geography Textbooks

An analysis of China's geography textbooks reveals an explicit ideological orientation that reflects China's policies. Because the system of textbook writing, publishing, and distribution in China is centralized, textbook content is influenced primarily by the state and specific methods of ideological alignment are exployed. This article examines the changing ideological orientation of China's perspective of the U.S. as reflected in its geography texts and also provides suggestions for future textbook development.

Language across the curriculum in an ESL context: How teachers deal with difficult texts

Abstract This article addresses the use of English to teach ‘content’ subjects across the curriculum, and the ways in which English language teachers operate in such circumstances. In particular, it examines how South African teachers, working in situations where English is a second language, approach the teaching of a ‘content’ lesson based on a Geography text. It goes on to argue that although their strategies are useful in some areas, the range and variety of their approaches could be extended, perhaps through training. This has implications for the many other contexts around the world where English is being used or introduced as a medium of instruction, and for English teachers and teacher trainers in those countries.

G.I.S. A VIEW FROM THE OTHER (DARK?) SIDE: THE PERSPECTIVE OF AN INSTRUCTOR OF INTRODUCTORY GEOGRAPHY COURSES AT UNIVERSITY LEVEL

A review of available software for geographic information systems GIS suggests that they have little current value for teaching fundamental geographic concepts. Modelling and analysis capabilities are limited; multi-media data are not well supported; pedagogic motivations or goals are not addressed; and service delivery components such as user interfaces have been addressed very infrequently. A review of introductory and advanced geography texts provides a basis for identifying concepts that could be taught with the aid of GIS. A survey of a sample of college geography teachers provides a framework for beginning to establish needs for GIS functionality for pedagogic purposes. Supply and demand characteristics are compared qualitatively; and some thoughts are offered on priorities for the future