1.2: Part 1- Introduction to Cultural Geography

Introduction: WHAT IS GEOGRAPHY?

Geography and Its Relationship to Other Disciplines

Geography is intricately connected to various academic disciplines, extending beyond just history. Any phenomenon that can be mapped and studied spatially falls under geography.

For instance, medical geography focuses on the spatial patterns of health aspects. Mapping the spread of a disease helps medical professionals understand its causes and transmission mechanisms. Cultural practices and environmental conditions, like the habitat for mosquito-borne diseases, also provide insight into disease processes. Economic geography examines economic activities in different places and their interactions. The location of a business, often critical to its success, can be analyzed using maps of transportation networks and customer populations.

Geography equips individuals with tools to ask questions, identify patterns, solve problems, and communicate solutions. This text aims to present geography as a dynamic discipline, encouraging students to think, question, and solve problems like geographers. By the end of the semester, students should be able to: 1) see the world through a geographer's lens, 2) ask geographical questions, 3) solve geographical problems, and 4) communicate geographical insights.

Unfortunately, geography is often misunderstood as mere trivia, perpetuated by media like the TV show Jeopardy. This misconception reduces geography to memorizing maps and capitals, similar to thinking historians only memorize dates. Geography education in K-12 curricula has historically echoed this trivial approach, leading to a lack of awareness about geography as a major and its robust analytical tools.

A geography degree offers numerous high-paying career options in various industries, nonprofits, and public agencies. Geography's diverse nature and its spatial perspective connect it to many academic disciplines. Understanding these connections and fundamental concepts is essential for delving deeper into the study of geography.

Explore more about careers in geography by visiting the Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics webpage.

Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): Geography Relationships Geography and its relationship to other disciplines.1 Author | Corey Parson Source | Original Work License | CC BY-SA 4.0

A Short History of Geography

Geography is sometimes called the “mother of all disciplines” because it has been around for so long. Although the discipline has undergone major changes in the last few decades, most people still have very old-fashioned ideas about geography. Those old-fashioned ideas dominate much K-12 instruction in Geography across the U.S and are partly a result of the tumultuous history of Geography.

Ancient Greek and Chinese scholars wrote massive “geographies” that defined the discipline for centuries. Until the 1800s, most “geographers” spent much of their time writing highly descriptive or idiographic narratives about various regions of the world. Descriptive geographies are interesting for those who have a healthy intellectual curiosity about the people, places, and cultures of the world, and descriptive geographies proved immeasurably valuable to imperialists, colonizers, and military planners. Unfortunately, in the context of schooling, descriptive geographies often tend to degenerate into an encyclopedic list of facts about a region or location.

Environmental Determinism

As the methodologies of science, and indeed social science, evolved during the 19th century, the production of mere descriptions of regions and locations fell short of what geographers (and others) thought worthy of true scholarship. Some geographers tried to make the discipline more scientific by seeking to identify and describe causal connections between group behaviors and local environmental conditions. In other words, they sought to understand the cause-and-effect relationship between culture and the physical environment. This type of geography became known as environmental determinism. Environmental determinists sought to demonstrate how local conditions like climate, topography and soil characteristics were key determinants, or causes, behind the evolution of local or regional cultural practices. Perhaps not surprisingly, many environmental determinist scholars found that their culture group (i.e. Europeans) were products of ideal environmental conditions. Environmental determinists argued that the most advanced societies developed where favorable environmental conditions existed, i.e. North America, Europe. According to their logic, locations that were too hot, too cold, too rainy, too dry, etc., produced inferior societies and inferior people. For example, Ellen Churchill Semple wrote in 1911, "among mountains as among desert peoples, robbery tends to become a virtue; environment dictates their ethical code". The bigotry implicit and explicit in environmental determinism is clearer today than it was 100 years ago. Despite an inability to scientifically prove their theories, a few geographers, like Semple and Ellsworth Huntington commanded large audiences in the early 20th century.

Although many academic geographers forcefully rejected the ideas and concepts advanced by environmental determinists, it wasn’t really until World War II that a solid majority of people understood the horrifying implications that this brand of pseudo-scientific scholarship had upon the eugenics movement and the evolution of Fascism. Geography’s deep involvement with Environmental Determinism tainted the reputation of the discipline for decades.