20th Century Geography Flashcards
What are the roots of regional geography?
Regional knowledge was useful for the imperial gaze: know your enemy, know who you want to subjugate.
How was regional geography practiced?
Idea that regions cannot be understood through universal laws but have to be studied in their uniqueness.
Such an approach necessitates the integration of physical and human geography. Regions are to the discipline of geography what time is to the discipline of history.
What are the problems with regional geography?
Regional geography branded as descriptivist and unscientific after WWII.
Regional geography seemed to merely be producing particular categorisations/ mappings of regions.
Regions are slippery concepts: are they objects of analyses (out there) or ideas (constructs of the human imagination)?
Regions are highly political categories.
Did regional geography end?
Some argued it ended after WWII. However, could be argued that it morphed into area studies.
Explain area studies.
After 1945 geography departments in the US and UK were often replaced by independent ‘area studies’ institutes that set out to study particular regions: Eastern Europe, the Middle East, South East Asia etc.
Like regional geography, area studies is Interdisciplinary: regions need to be understood in many registers.
Many influential US policy-makers were trained as Sovietologists (i.e. they studied the Soviet Union).
Was highly empirical rather than descriptive (as regional geog had been).
Regional geography today?
Higher Education Funding Council for England values area studies as ‘strategically important’ (HEFCE 2012)
‘While Middle Eastern tongues may be minority subjects in terms of demand, you have only to open a newspaper to grasp the height of strategic demand. We cannot let the UK’s expertise in them die some Isis-style death by a thousand cuts’ (Hugh Williamson, 2015 in Times Higher Education)
-> heavily involved in geopolitical narratives
X - Where is the boundary between research and ideology/propaganda?
X - Should areas be studied because they are threatening or economically useful?
X - Regions are vulnerable to changes in the geopolitical climate.
X - Thinking in terms of civilisations often means to essentialise and exoticise (Othering)
X - Eurocentrism: whose regions are we talking about?
X - How about social groups that are scattered throughout a number of areas?
YET - many geographers still have a regional specialism!
Regional Geography in a Postcolonial context?
Tessa Morris-Zuzuki (2000): Suggests an ‘anti-area studies’ whose aim is not to plot the communal trajectory of a civilisational area within the march of global progress, but to observe major global forces from a variety of positions which are as far apart as possible’
- Indigenous studies
- Social movements
- Global organisations
Van Schendel:
- Emphasis on borderlands and flows rather than heartlands and essentialised and unchanged areas
