As we have seen and will continue to see, the interests of human geographers are diverse. It might seem to you, confronted by the various themes, subject matter, viewpoints, and methodologies described in this chapter, that geographers run off in all directions, lacking unity of purpose. What does a geographer who studies architecture have in common with a colleague who studies the political and cultural causes of environmental degradation? What interests do an environmental perceptionist and a student of diffusion share? Why do scholars with such apparently different interests belong in the same academic discipline? Why are they all geographers?

The answer is that regardless of the particular topic the human geographer studies, he or she necessarily touches on several or all of the five themes we have discussed. The themes are closely related segments of a whole. Spatial patterns in culture, as revealed by maps of regions, are reflected in and expressed through the cultural landscape, require an ecological interpretation, are the result of mobility, and are inextricably linked with globalization.

As an example of how the various themes of human geography overlap and intertwine, let’s look at one element of architecture that most North Americans will be familiar with: the ranch-style, single-family house (Figure 1.20). This house type is defined by its one-story height and its linear form. Ranch houses may be found throughout much of the United States and to a lesser extent in Canada, though they are rare in other countries. They are obviously part of the cultural landscape, and their spatial distribution constitutes a formal region that can be mapped.

Geographers who study such houses also need to employ the other themes of human geography to gain a complete understanding. They can use the concept of diffusion to learn when and by what routes this building style emerged and diffused, and what barriers hindered its diffusion. In this particular case, geographers would be led back to the early years of the twentieth century, when the first suburban houses were built outside of urban centers. In this case, land was relatively inexpensive, allowing for a house type that occupied a wide expanse of space. What’s more, they would learn that a dominant design motif in the United States in the early twentieth century was based on the notion that buildings should fit in with their natural surroundings instead of dominate them. As a result, low-slung housing styles like the ranch house were particularly popular. Further, the geographer would need an ecological interpretation of the ranch house. What materials were required to build such a house? Did the style vary across the different climatic and ecological regions in which such houses were built? Finally, the human geographer would want to know how the use of ranch houses was related to globalization. Did economic changes in the world raise the standard of living, leading people to accept ranch houses? Did changes in technology lead to more elaborate houses? Why did it become the quintessential house type in post-World War II America, featured in many of the popular TV shows of the time? Do these humble structures possess a symbolism related to traditional American values and virtues? Thus, the geographer interested in housing is firmly bound by the total fabric of human geography, unable to segregate a particular topic such as ranch houses from the geographical whole. Region, cultural landscape, nature-culture relationships, mobility, and globalization are interwoven.

In this manner, the human geographer passes from one theme to another, demonstrating the holistic nature of the discipline. In no small measure, it is this holism—this broad, multithematic approach—that distinguishes the human geographer from other students of culture. We believe that, by the end of the course, you will have gained a new perspective on the Earth as the home of humankind.

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DOING GEOGRAPHY

Space, Place, and Knowing Your Way Around

We started this chapter by saying that most of us are born geographers, with a sense of curiosity about the places and spaces around us. Think, for example, of the place you call home. You are probably familiar enough with its streets and buildings and greenspaces, and with the people who inhabit these spaces, to make connections among them—you know how to “read” the place. There are many other places, however, where this is not the case. Most of you have had the experience of going somewhere new, where it is difficult to find your way around, literally and metaphorically. Many of you, for example, are attending a college or university far from home, whereas others have experienced the disorienting feeling of moving from one home to another, whether across town or across continents. How did you find your way? How did the “strange” space become a familiar place?

This activity requires you to draw on your own experiences to understand two fundamental concepts in human geography: space and place. Geographers tend to use the term space in a much more abstract way than place—as a term that describes a two-dimensional location on a map. Place, however, is a less dry term, one used to describe a location that has meaning. Your college campus, for example, may have been simply an abstract space located on a map when you applied to the school, yet now it is a place because you have filled it with your own meanings. Here are the four steps in your activity.

Steps to Understanding Space, Place, and Knowing Your Way Around

Use your experiences to answer the following questions:

Do you have to live in a place to really “know” it?

Do you have to experience a space for it to become a place?

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As the title indicates, this is a stick chart traditionally used by Micronesian mariners to navigate the Marshall Islands in the North Pacific Ocean. Like all maps, it is a two-dimensional rendering of three-dimensional space. In other words, it is an attempt to represent surface features and location on a flat plane. All cultures devise certain symbols that allow for these representations to be understood. On United States Geological Survey (USGS) maps, for example, a standardized set of symbols represent such things as roads, rivers, and cities. Similarly, this map is filled with symbols that represent such features as wave patterns (bent sticks), ocean currents (straight sticks), and islands (the cowry shells).

As we’ve learned throughout this chapter, different cultures create and experience landscapes differently. Here, we can see that different cultures also represent their landscapes differently. This image is part of a long tradition of Micronesian peoples’ representations that reflect their particular culture and their views of the seascapes and landscapes they occupy. In general, these representations demonstrate that there is no universal system for finding one’s way across the Earth’s surface. Unlike Western sailors who navigated using the relative positions of celestial bodies, Micronesian sailors navigated by sensing the movement of the ocean’s surface. Hence, these charts do not represent standardized measurements such as degrees of longitude and latitude or miles and kilometers. Instead, they use patterns of ocean swells and currents to help navigators position themselves on the Earth’s surface.

To most Western eyes, then, this image does not look like a map because we neither recognize the symbols that Micronesian mariners used to translate three-dimensional spaces into two dimensions, nor think of maps as meaningful in and of themselves. Most likely, Western maps would have looked very odd to Micronesian eyes. One of the goals of studying human geography, as we will see throughout this book, is to appreciate this diversity of relationships between peoples and the places they inhabit, shape, and represent.

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Match each of the terms on the left with its definition on the right. Click on the term first and then click on the matching definition. As you match them correctly they will move to the bottom of the activity.

Question

Match each of the terms on the left with its definition on the right. Click on the term first and then click on the matching definition. As you match them correctly they will move to the bottom of the activity.

Question

You can learn more about the discipline of geography and the subdiscipline of human geography on the Internet at the following web sites:

Anderson, Kay, and Fay Gale. 1999. Cultural Geographies. Melbourne: Pearson Education.

Blaut, James M. 1977. “Two Views of Diffusion.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 67: 343-349.

Foster, Jeremy. 2008. Washed with Sun: Landscape and the Making of White South Africa. Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press.

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Gould, Peter. 1993. The Slow Plague: A Geography of the AIDS Pandemic. Cambridge, U.K.: Blackwell.

Griffin, Ernst, and Larry Ford. 1980. “A Model of Latin American City Structure.” Geographical Review 70: 397-422.

Hägerstrand, Torsten. 1967. Innovation Diffusion as a Spatial Process. Allan Pred (trans.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Johnston, R. J., Peter Taylor, and Michael Watts (eds.). 2002. Geographies of Global Change: Remapping the World. 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell.

Lewis, Peirce. 1983. “Learning from Looking: Geographic and Other Writing About the American Cultural Landscape.” American Quarterly 35: 242-261.

Norwine, Jim, and Thomas D. Anderson. 1980. Geography as Human Ecology? Lanham, Md.: University Press of America.

Ormrod, Richard K. 1990. “Local Context and Innovation Diffusion in a Well-Connected World.” Economic Geography 66: 109-122.

Relph, Edward. 1981. Rational Landscapes and Humanistic Geography. New York: Barnes & Noble.

Sparke, Matthew. 2013. Introducing Globalization: Ties, Tensions, and Uneven Integration. Oxford: John Wiley & Sons.

Staudt, Amanda, Nancy Huddleston, and Sandi Rudenstein. 2006. Understanding and Responding to Climate Change, a Report Prepared by the National Research Council based on National Academies Reports. Washington, D.C.: National Academy of Science.

Tuan, Yi-Fu. 1974. Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall.

Warren, Karen J. (ed.). 1997. Ecofeminism: Women, Culture, Nature. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

(For additional suggested readings, see the Contemporary Human Geography LaunchPad at: http://www.macmillanhighered.com/launchpad/DomoshCHG1e.)

Anderson, Kay, Mona Domosh, Steve Pile, and Nigel Thrift (eds.). 2003. Handbook of Cultural Geography. London: SAGE. An edited collection of essays that push the boundaries of cultural geography into such sub-disciplines as economic, social, and political geography.

Blunt, Alison, Pyrs Gruffudd, Jon May, Miles Ogborn, and David Pinder (eds.). 2003. Cultural Geography in Practice. London: Arnold. An edited collection of essays that take a very practical view of what it means to actually conduct research in the field of cultural geography.

Cosgrove, Denis. 1998. Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. The landmark study that outlines the relationships between the idea of landscape and social and class formation in such places as Italy, England, and the United States.

Cosgrove, Denis, and Stephen Daniels (eds.). 1990. The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the Symbolic Representation, Design and Use of Past Environments. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press. An important collection of essays that lay the foundation for an ideological reading of landscape.

Foote, Kenneth E., Peter J. Hugill, Kent Mathewson, and Jonathan M. Smith (eds.). 1994. Re-Reading Cultural Geography. Austin: University of Texas Press. A beautifully compiled representative collection of some of the best works in American cultural geography at the end of the twentieth century, and a useful companion to the book edited by Wagner and Mikesell.

Mitchell, Don. 1999. Cultural Geography: A Critical Introduction. New York: Blackwell. An introductory text on cultural geography that emphasizes the material and political elements of the discipline.

Oakes, Timothy, and Patricia Price (eds.). 2008. The Cultural Geography Reader. New York: Routledge. A set of landmark statements on cultural geography introduced by the editors’ explanatory and contextualizing essays.

Radcliffe, Sarah (ed.). 2006. Culture and Development in a Globalizing World: Geographies, Actors, and Paradigms. London: Routledge. A series of essays that provide case studies from around the world showing the various ways in which culture and economic development are integrally related.

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Tuan, Yi-Fu. 1974. Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. A Chineseborn geographer’s innovative and imaginative look at people’s attachment to place, a central concern of the cultural approach to human geography.

Wagner, Philip L., and Marvin W. Mikesell (eds.). 1962. Readings in Cultural Geography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. A classic collection, edited by two distinguished Berkeley-trained cultural geographers, presenting the subdiscipline as it existed in the mid-twentieth century and developing the device of five themes.

Annals of the Association of American Geographers. Volume 1 was published in 1911. The leading scholarly journal of American geographers.

Cultural Geographies (formerly known as Ecumene). Volume I was published in 1994.

Geographical Review. Published by the American Geographical Society. Volume 1 was published in 1916.

Journal of Cultural Geography. Published semiannually by the Department of Geography, Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, Oklahoma. Volume 1 was published in 1980.

Progress in Human Geography. A quarterly journal providing critical appraisal of developments and trends in the discipline. Volume 1 was published in 1977.

Social and Cultural Geography. Volume 1 was published in 2000 by Routledge, Taylor, & Francis in Great Britain.