Progress in Human Geography - Laurier

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 DOI: 10.1177/030913258100500205

1981 5: 249Prog Hum GeogrDavid Ley

Cultural/humanistic geography  

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Cultural/humanistic geographyby David Ley

If there is one feature distinguishing human geography on each side of the Atlanticthen it is surely provided by the enigma of cultural geography. In France it appearsthat the passing of the subject has been sounded (Kofman, 1980), in Britain itspopularity has been slender and its survival is uncertain (Area, 1980), but in NorthAmerica cultural geography remains a major focus of research and teaching; in 1979more than one in six members of the Association of American Geographers identi-fied themselves as a cultural geographer. Until the 1970s, the subject remainedclosely tied to Carl Sauer’s Berkeley tradition, perhaps the major research schoolthat has arisen in North American geography (Leighly, 1979; Parsons, 1979). How-ever, during the 1970s the humanistic movement added a disparate and lively con-tribution which has included both endorsement and challenge to conventional workin cultural geography. In this first review of cultural and humanistic work, we shallrange more broadly through its development and emerging themes during the1970s; subsequent commentaries will provide a narrower discussion around asmaller focus of research priorities.

I The Berkeley connection

Cultural geography as set down by Sauer continues to exert considerable influence

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in North America, particularly on the West Coast (Parsons, 1977; Spencer, 1978).However, even among its adherents there is a sense that perhaps the best years arepast, that there are important shortcomings and omissions to the perspective, thata redefinition is required (Wagner, 1975). The traits of Berkeley geography includean historical orientation, an emphasis on man’s agency on the physical environ.ment, a preoccupation with material artefacts, a rural and preindustrial bias, aheavily empirical field tradition, and a tendency to non-cumulative unique studies(Mikesell, 1978). These features bear a similar inventory of strengths and weak-nesses to French regional studies (Buttimer, 1978), which have properly beenregarded as a European counterpart to Sauer’s cultural geography.

For so empirical a subfield, the Berkeley school has recently received criticismfrom an unfamiliar quarter. Duncan (1980a) has developed a detailed argumentwhich strikes at the heart of the Sauerian tradition, claiming that its concept ofculture is theoretically and philosophically unsophisticated. Culture is regarded assuperorganic, as a conceptual a priori, rather than as the active construction of menand women, who are instead treated as its passive carriers. Thus, ironically, culturalgeography is one of the geographies without an active view of man (Ley, 1980a).Wagner (1975) implies the same criticism, adding the necessity for an expansion ofstudies to contemporary urbanized society, for an emphasis on process, for theidentification of the intents of key actors, for the specification of lines of commun-ication and the development of subcultures, and for the treatment of institutionsand their effects. All of these objectives are being pursued under the broad rubricof humanistic geography.

II The development of the humanistic movement

Despite the association of some of its major contributers, such as Yi-Fu Tuan,with the Berkeley tradition, humanistic work did not initially set out to reformcultural geography. Rather, in a classic opposition between thesis and antithesis, itrepresented a reaction against the quantitative juggernaut of spatial analysis as itgathered speed in the 1960s. The determinism, economism, and abstraction of theearly quantitative publications seemed to abolish human intentionality, culture, andman himself. At best human variability, where it entered the analysis at all, was castin the uncomplimentary guise of Brownian motion, random perturbations arounda basic pattern. Bronowski’s unflattering characterization of society ’like a streamof gas’ and the individual ’like an atom of gas’ (Haggett, 1965, 25-26) was notallayed by the reassurance that because stochastic uncertainty existed in the phy-sical sciences it might also be admitted to human geography. Not only the formbut also the logic of such a philosophy appeared profoundly dehumanizing.

In such an intellectual milieu it is not surprising that a counter current wouldemerge which would highlight the distinctively human components of mind,consciousness, values, or more briefly perception, which would seek affinities withthe humanities, including artistic and literary endeavours, and which would adduce

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.a philosophical underpinning in such philosophies of meaning as phenomenology,existentialism, and pragmatism.

These intellectual connections clustered around the relation of man, or more

accurately, mind, and landscape, and as such did indeed represent a direct extensionof Berkeley geography into the realm of environmental perception. Landscape inter-pretation or environmental appreciation, to follow Meinig’s (1971) preferredterm, raised perception to a central theoretical position and the interpretation ofmeaning to the major methodological task (Lowenthal, 1975; 1977; Butzer, 1978;Meinig, 1979). The quest for the essential character of place drew a number ofgeographers to the inspired intuition of the artist, whether regional novelist orlandscape painter, so that not only was geography becoming art, but also art wasbecoming geography (Salter and Lloyd, 1976; Rees, 1976). So too intellectualhistories of authors, poets, architects or philosophers might show a sensitivity ofmethod or insight which might assist geographers in their own interrogation ofplace (Cosgrove, 1979).

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In a less focused manner, Tuan (1974; 1977; 1979), Relph (1976) and othersexplored the sense of place of geographical settings both ancient and modern.The subjectivity of landscape was carried a stage further in the revival bf J.K.

Wright’s geosophy (Wright, 1966) by cultural and historical geographers in theirexamination of the geographic dogmas and fantasies which have influenced thecourse of geographic exploration and settlement (Lowenthal and Bowden, 1976).To evoke perception and values as major influences upon thought and action im-plied that for the analysis to be consistent it should also be directed at geographyand geographers themselves (Ley, 1977a). In an important monograph, Buttimer(1974) introduced the sociology of knowledge to human geography, asking re-flexively what were the dominant values embodied within academic geography.Were they values of self-awareness, of environmental harmony, or of technicaland managerial control?

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The inclination of geographic work toward the humanities was representedalso by the discovery of the philosophies of meaning. The potential contributionsof the phenomenologists Heidegger (Buttimer, 1976), Schutz (Ley, 1977b), andMerleau-Ponty (Seamon, 1979), the existentialists Sartre and Buber (Samuels,1971; 1978a; Kobayashi, 1980), the interactionist Mead (Duncan, 1978), and eventhe surrealists (Olsson, 1975; 1978) have been explored. This literature, thoughexperimental, is significant in that it has attempted to provide a credible philo-sophical underpinning to humanistic work which would match the positivistfoundation of spatial analysis. The potential fruitfulness of this work is suggestedby the first formal link between humanistic geography and philosophy, a workshopon ’Geography as science of the life-world’ organized by the Society for Pheno-menology and Existential Philosophy at its annual conference in 1980.

III Humanistic geography: problems and prospects

In retrospect some problems of emphasis run through much of the literature we

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have reviewed. A complete assessment is not of course possible in the constraintsof a short paper, but in general it seems as if the literature is sometimes guiltyof overstatement. In retrieving man from virtual ’oblivion in positivist science,humanists have tended to celebrate the restoration perhaps too much. As a resultvalues, meanings, consciousness, creativity, and reflection may well have beenoverstated, while context, constraint, and social stratification have been under-

developed (Cosgrove, 1978; Ley, 1978). In short there is the danger that humanisticwork errs toward voluntarism and idealism. A preoccupation with perception andmeaning rather than with contexts, both antecedents and effects, runs the risk ofa fixation upon consciousness which eclipses equally relevant preconditions andconsequences of thought and action. By way of illustration, Olsson’s (1975) majorwork has been challenged by a reviewer as ’failing to situate human thought andaction within a wider social and historical totality’, a fault which ’takes us straightto Cloud-Cuckoo-Land’ (Scott, 1976; compare Zaret, 1980), while Tuan’s mostrecent volume has been criticized as ’beyond empiricism and off into an abstract,mystical world where the &dquo;forces for chaos&dquo; do battle with the &dquo;force for order&dquo;’

(Duncan, 1980b). Whenever meanings or perceptions are free-floating and un-grounded in social or historical context, then one has engaged a thinly veiledidealism. Such idealism is rightly challenged, for it offers too restricted a basis tohumanistic social science.A second limitation concerns the methodology of aspects of the work which

was appropriately described by Entrikin (1976) as focused intuition. In its eclecticand illustrative use of facts and anecdotes its empirical contribution has an essen.tially heuristic character, and its style is a far cry from the detailed fieldwork ofthe Berkeley school. A sometimes excessive celebration of man may be accom-panied by an overly subjective methodology withdrawn from conventional empiri-cal data collection. Iliore recent research involving various forms of participantobservation (Rowles, 1978; Gibson, 1978), unobtrusive observation, interviews,and more structured survey methods are correcting this imbalance. In the futuremore formal connection with the philosophy and methodology of hermeneuticsocial science is likely to occur (Rose, 1977). -

A third issue concerns the vexed oppostion between understanding and ex-planation. Humanists have correctly criticized the instrumental approach to ex-planation by geographic positivists which blurs the distinction between predictionand explanation. But neither is the humanist quest for understanding the intentsand perceptions of decision-makers, necessary though this is, always identical withthe uncovering of causal relations. Action is a product of a set of inner and outercontexts which may well carry explanation beyond the conscious intentionalityof a single individual or group. Among humanistic geographers, Samuels (1978b;1979) has stressed as much as anyone the intentionality of a key individual inreflecting geographic change, by applying the great man of history thesis to what hecalls the biography of landscape. But even a sympathetic analyst, studying theimpact of Mao Tse-tung, the ’Great Helmsman’, upon the remaking of the Chineselandscape, has to make reference to contingency in, for example, the constraints of

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historic precedent and geographic context, as well as to the will of a powerful andself-conscious leader. Moreover, the construction of place is rarely as self-consciousas the Chinese landscape ethic; it may also be unintentional, or at least the express-ion of an individualistic or collective ideology which is not self-consciously articu-lated or understood. Even here we have not exhausted the limits to the model

of purely intentional action, for the consequences of any act may not be com-patible with the intent which brought it into being. Several studies of elite urbanand regional planning have stressed the deflection of initial aspirations by un-foreseen events, so that as a result of unanticipated contingencies the outcomeof the planning exercise is unintended and even counterintuitive - at least to theactors whose values gave the plan its substance (Ley, 1980b; Gibson, 1978).

What these empirical studies of place emphasize is the incompleteness of apurely voluntarist model of human action, which exaggerates the role of the inten-tionality of the individual or group. Methodologically what this means is that

understanding and explanation need not be synonymous. The explanation of anaction will usually need to pass beyond the intentions of the actors to include alsofactors of which they may have been unaware, as well as constraints of which theymay have had some knowledge. The nature of place and the character of socialrelations are negotiated realities, a social construction by a group of actors, whoalthough motivated by more or less well defined intentions, are neither all-knowingnor all-powerful.

Consequently current work is beginning to develop-in areas concerned with theconstraints of group interaction rather than with the voluntarism of a single groupin isolation. Illustrative is the study of Kariya (1978) on the interface betweenCanadian Indians and the federal Department of Indian Affairs, as he examines howthe identity and status of the Indian are socially constructed realities, emerging asan unforeseen consequence of the everyday practices of bureaucratic personnel. In

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a similar theoretical vein, Lowman (1979) has argued for a more contextual

approach to the geography of crime which treats law and law enforcement as in-dependent variables, commonly with unintended consequences in the incidence ofcriminal acts. The themes of intergroup conflict and power relations are more

explicit in a study of not only the meaning but also the struggle for homeowner-ship (Holdsworth, 1980), and an interpretation of locational conflict which em-phasizes sociopolitical context, as urban development is regarded as the negotiatedoutcome of competing interest group values (Ley and Mercer, 1980).

[V Research directions ’

.

Humanistic geography is a theoretical perspective, not a distinctive empirical sub-field, which emerged in a particular intellectual context as a reaction to a humangeography which had been reduced to the abstract study of space and structures.As such the humanistic perspective has revived earlier geographic traditions whichtreated human values and intentionality more seriously. In important respects it has

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fortified such traditions by giving them a more critical and philosophically andtheoretically informed orientation. The aim is to integrate the humanities and thesocial sciences, to introduce the empirical and literary strengths of Vidal’s orSauer’s geography to the scholarship of social theory and the philosophy of science,as well as to the historical context of an advanced and urbanized industrial society.

Major priorities within this work include a more penetrating analysis of cultureitself, and particularly the dominant culture of our times, the culture of consump-tion. The lack of theoretical treatment of consumption in geography has been asnotable as the overcommitment to theories of production, but there are now severaluseful starting points in social science for the development of a geography ofconsumption (Hirsch, 1977; Diggins, 1977; Leiss, 1978). Secondly, and linked tothis, will be greater attention to the semiotics of landscape, the interactions be- .tween place, identity, and social context (Godkin, 1977; Duncan, 1978; Rubin,1979; Harvey, 1979). Thirdly, the place and nature 01 theories of power within ahumanistic perspective need to be- clarified. This is a major problem within socialtheory, and is unlikely to be easily resolved within human geography. To datemuch humanistic writing has followed an implicit Weberian line, akin to the mana-gerial position in urban geography which stresses the role of institutional (espec-ially government) decision-makers (Saunders, 1979; Ley, 1980c). These connec-tions need to be examined more explicitly, and it is likely that they will be joinedby alternative materialist positions centred about the views of culture and societyfound in the eclectic writings of Raymond Williams (1977) and E.P. Thompson(1978). No doubt these developments will require detailed attention in laterreviews.

Department of Geography, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada

V References °

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1978: Charism and context: the challenge of la géographie humaine. In Ley, D.and M. Samuels, editors, Humanistic geography: prospects and problems.Chicago: Maaroufa Press, 58-76.

Butzer, K. editor 1978: Dimensions of human geography. Department of Geo-graphy, University of Chicago, Research Paper 186.

Cosgrove, D. 1978: Place, landscape and the dialectics of cultural geography.Canadian Geographer 22, 66-72.

1979: John Ruskin and the geographical imagination. Geographical Review 69,43-62.

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Diggins, J. 1977: Reification and the cultural hegemony of capitalism. Social

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Entrikin, J. 1976: Contemporary humanism in geography. Annals of the Associa-tion of American Geographers 66, 615-32.

Gibson, E. 1978: Understanding the subjective meaning of places. In Ley, D. andM. Samuels, editors, Humanistic geography: prospects and problems, Chicago:Maaroufa Press, 138-54.

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1980c: Power and the geographical lifeworld. Paper presented to the Societyfor Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, Ottawa.

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Ley, D. and Mercer, J. 1980: Locational conflict and the politics of consumption.Economic Geography 56, 89-109.

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