Progress report
Echoes of the New Geography? History and philosophy of geography I
Progress in Human Geography 36(4) 518–526 ª The Author(s) 2012 Reprints and permission: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav 10.1177/0309132511411880 phg.sagepub.com
Richard C. Powell University of Oxford, UK
Abstract Taking as its cue the debates in 2009 at the Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers) about the relative role of the institution in geographical exploration, science and pedagogy, this essay reviews recent work in the history and philosophy of geography. It argues that there is a long tradition of debates between educators and explorers within the RGS, and shows how these have been revisited in current work on Halford Mackinder and Charles Darwin. It concludes that attention to the processes of remembering and forgetting should be particularly acute at this moment in the history of geographical practices. Keywords Charles Darwin, Halford Mackinder, histories of geography, philosophies of geography, ‘New Geography’, Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers)
Freshfield saw that recognition of geography by the Universities was essential to secure a supply of competent teachers. It was his advocacy which led our Society to subsidize geographical teaching at Oxford in 1888 and at Cambridge in 1903. This cost our Society some £20,000; but there is now no University in Britain without a School of Geography. It is perhaps the greatest work we have accomplished, for exploration would have gone on somehow even had our Society never existed. (Longstaff, 1934: 259)
I Introduction Douglas Freshfield (1845–1934) was a Victorian mountaineer who, among other exploits, composed a classic account of climbing in the Caucasus, apparently ‘with no trace of self-glorification’ (Longstaff, 1934: 258). Having been elected as a Fellow in 1869, between 1881 and 1894, Freshfield served as an honorary secretary of the Royal Geographical Society. Critically, it was Freshfield who commissioned J.S. Keltie’s
1885 report, on behalf of the RGS, into the teaching of geography in schools (Keltie, 1885). The response to this by the RGS, Oxford and Cambridge instituted what became known as the ‘new Geography’ of the 1880s. Dr Tom Longstaff, the author of Freshfield’s obituary above, was himself an accomplished mountaineer in the Himalayas, Spitsbergen and west Greenland, and the pioneer of ‘‘‘travelling light’’, unencumbered by the gangs of porters and excessive baggage trains’ (Roberts, 1965: 776). Longstaff received the Gill Memorial Award in 1908, and the Founders Medal in 1928, from the RGS (Shipton, 1964), and was
Corresponding author: School of Geography and the Environment, South Parks Road, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 3QY, UK Email: [email protected]
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elected President of the Alpine Club in 1947 (Roberts, 1965). Perhaps my favourite anecdote about Longstaff is that, as the leading British authority on Mount Everest by the 1930s, he would dispense advice at the RGS to expectant novices thus: ‘The man who collapses above the North Col is a scoundrel – a scoundrel, Sir!’ (Shipton, 1964: 444, original emphasis). As the author of one of Longstaff’s obituaries complains, ‘[h]e was one of the last survivors of an age of amateur exploration which is already becoming legendary’ (Roberts, 1965: 777). So far, so obvious: exploratory praxis commemorated through nostalgia for feats of masculinity and self-reliance. But Longstaff, like Freshfield, was also committed to geographical education. During the 1930s, while serving as honorary secretary and then Vice-President of the RGS, Longstaff was able to appreciate the efforts of earlier fellows like Freshfield, as Honours Schools in Geography were finally being confirmed in universities across Britain and Ireland. Without the RGS’s funds, would anything have become of the preposterous idea of university geography? The activities of individuals like these litter the pages of dusty old geography journals. Figures many of us do not want to remember, undertaking practices that we would rather forget. Who cares? Well, Freshfield’s obituary raises all sorts of questions about remembrance, disciplinarity and social networks, but I use it for its relevance in recent debates about the histories, philosophies and purposes of geography. In short, discussions about the relative role of the RGS in geographical pedagogy and exploration have preoccupied its constituent Fellows for a very long time. It is worth saying this again now, because we geographers live in interesting times. This is an era in which many myths circulate about geography. Even Fellows of the RGS despondently ask, well, ‘what is geography?’, as Departments of Geography are merged into larger Schools of Environmental and Geosciences. Even Joanna
Lumley and Michael Palin have been called upon to debate our purpose. For some geographers, perhaps we should be grateful that anyone cares. For others, this sounds the death-knell for a certain type of geography. Welcome to the history and philosophy of geography for 2009 and 2010.
II Classical geographies? I have often thought that a striking aspect of the pedagogical tradition in geography is the rapidity with which geographers, and their writings, are elevated to the status of classics. A cursory glance at this journal’s excellent ‘Classics in Human Geography’ reveals the relatively recent date of the majority of the selected papers, as does the list of those geographers chosen to be recorded in Hubbard and Kitchin’s (2011) Key Thinkers on Space and Place. Moreover, this classic status can be lost again just as quickly. As approaches fall out of favour, so too does the reputational power of the geographer. It is geography, peculiarly among the serious social sciences, that seems to be cursed by the culture of celebrity. This means that many central figures from geography’s past are purposefully forgotten. No doubt there are many good reasons for this. Who wants to be reminded about the central role that Ritter or Haushofer played in the institutionalization of geography in Germany? Or, indeed, about Halford Mackinder’s role in the establishment of the Oxford School or the growth of a certain form of violent geopolitics? Why does this matter? Well, it does seem that the geographical community is rather distinct in this, in comparison to introductory courses in Anthropology, Sociology, History or, even, Biology and Geology. I do not think anyone would go so far as to identify a canon, but should students perhaps be required to read Mackinder, Isaiah Bowman or Ellen Semple, or other geographical thinkers such as Charles Darwin or Franz Boas? Without a sense of these texts, geographers become increasingly divorced from any sense of a community of practice or, indeed, of a shared,
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contested enterprise. Yet, over the period of this report, historians of geography have begun to recover many of these figures. Moreover, this matters because as universities in the UK and across Europe restructure into larger administrative units, the discipline is entering an epoch in which geographers, on the whole, are no longer making decisions about the institutional emplacement of geography. Consequently, myths begin to circulate about geography not being a real subject, or being an artifice of the British system, and geographers positioned in these new institutional structures often lack sufficient knowledge to speak back to this power. What has been conspicuous about the current period, then, has been the return to biographies of ‘big’ geographers.1 The previous compiler of these reports, Trevor Barnes, often discussed the importance of obituaries, and reading the vast archive that continues to mark Denis Cosgrove’s passing in 2008 indicates what can be learnt from these about the past practices of geography (Brotton, 2010; Driver, 2009). Obituaries have been produced for other influential historical geographers with important views on the history and philosophy of geography, such as Michael Williams (Baigent, 2010b) and Bob Woods (Williamson, 2011), while a historiographical essay on Jack Langton’s approach is included in a festschrift marking his retirement (Baigent and Mayhew, 2009). It should also be noted that work has continued to examine other key themes in history and philosophy of geography. The role of the space of the laboratory in scientific practice has been re-examined (Gieryn, 2008; Gooday, 2008; Kohler, 2008; Withers, 2009). A collection of essays on 20th-century exploration has been brought together by Simon Naylor and James Ryan, including discussions of exploratory praxis in the deserts of Australia (Collis, 2010; Naylor, 2010) and North Africa (Thomas and Hill, 2010), the Arctic (Baigent, 2010a; Korsmo, 2010), Antarctica (Dodds, 2010; Yusoff, 2010) and outer space (Godwin, 2010; Macdonald, 2010).
David Grann (2009) has provided a popular account of Lieutenant-Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett’s RGS expeditions to the Amazon in the 1920s. There has been a vast range of excellent work on the hidden histories of geography over the past decade or so, and this continues to be produced. Indeed, this corpus has perhaps reached its apogee in Avril Maddrell’s (2009) Complex Locations, an exhaustive prosopography of female geographers during the formative development of the discipline in UK universities. In Maddrell’s fascinating account, biographical accounts are presented that show the critical importance of various women in the spaces through which the geographical tradition has been enacted. There has also been innovative work in dissemination in histories of geography. Felix Driver and Lowri Jones, in collaboration with the RGS-IBG, held an AHRC grant on the ‘Hidden Histories of Exploration’ that produced an exhibition at the refurbished exhibition space at the RGS at the end of 2009 (Royal Geographical Society, 2009). Involving a website and podcast, this was an intriguing attempt to open up thinking about the histories and spaces of exploration (Driver and Jones, 2009).
III Ages of exploration? During 2009, debates about the proper conduct of geographical science and pedagogy have emerged again in the public arena. A number of Fellows of the Royal Geographical Society laid the blame for geography’s problems upon the RGS’s funding of certain types of research and argued that, instead, the Society should return to establishing its own expeditions. The disgruntled fellows asserted that, by diverting funding instead to many short-term projects by university geographers, the RGS was, in effect, in breach of its Royal Charter of Incorporation. In an appropriation of the sesquicentennial of the first edition of The Origin of Species and the bicentennial of Charles Darwin’s birth, this
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became known as the Beagle Campaign after the RGS-funded expedition to the Galapagos. The exploration campaigners were certainly successful in promoting their cause. Articles and opinion pieces were published in major UK newspapers (Hemming, 2009; Marozzi, 2009a, 2009b; Thomson, 2009). The Beagle Campaign recruited polar explorers (e.g. Pen Hadow), mountaineers (e.g. Chris Bonnington), and public celebrities (e.g. Joanna Lumley and Stanley Johnson). The fellows gained the required signatures to force a Special General Meeting (SGM) to debate and vote upon the resolution that, in effect, the RGS-IBG should again fund its own expeditions. Although there was absolute silence from academic geographers in the mainstream media, there was response in the blogosphere, including the Guardian blog (Reid-Henry, 2009). Avril Maddrell (2010) argues that this was directly due to the gagging of academics. Nerdy geography is the narrative to which media editors adhere, and dissenting voices were not able to access the major avenues of communication. However, the email discussion lists of human geography, such as crit-geog-forum, so often hostile to everything that the RGS-IBG represents, were flooded with ‘get-out-the-vote’ missives in support of the RGS Council. Indeed, given that crit-geog had been set up as oppositional forum for antiestablishment geographers following the merger of the Institute of British Geographers with the RGS in 1995, it perhaps indicates just how much the institutions of geography can serve different communities of practice simultaneously. The SGM was held at the RGS on 18 May 2009. All 10,500 FRGS were balloted to vote either in person, by post or by proxy. Given the issues at stake for the Society, it is perhaps surprising that only 4197 bothered to do so. In the event, the motion was defeated by 2590 (61.7%) to 1607 (38.3%) votes.2 Perhaps the Beagle Campaign underestimated just how many academic geographers, although they do not like to talk about it, still actually constitute the Fellowship of the
RGS-IBG. Moreover, given the tepid relationship between the RGS and the IBG since 1995, it is important to stress that the founding institution of critical geography became the effective tool in organizing support for the Council of the RGS. This need not detain us much longer, but there is potential for some interesting work to be done about the relationships between space, knowledge and power involved in this debate. However, there is increasing anxiety among UK and other European geographers that their geeky image is having real consequences for future student enrolments and, ultimately, for disciplinary survival. Maddrell wondered whether academic geography bore some responsibility for ‘the hackneyed and inaccurate representations of geographical work’ in popular culture, and set out a number of strategies for wider public engagement (Maddrell, 2010: 150; see also Bonnett, 2008). Nick Middleton (2010) urged university geographers to present their stories in mediafriendly ways to help combat geography’s slightly comic, if mildly endearing, public image. Even the current President of the RGS-IBG, Michael Palin, marked the end of his first year of office with a similar call, urging that ‘the Society must do its utmost to encourage teachers of today to raise similar awareness and enthusiasm in what I’m tempted to call . . . God’s Own Subject’ (Palin, 2010: 254).
IV Forgetting Darwin? Another acerbic debate about origins and ancients arose around the commemoration, or rather the lack of it, by geographers of Charles Darwin during 2009. This was sparked by an essay by Noel Castree (2009) that complained, along the same lines as David Stoddart (1966) over four decades previously, that geographers had been largely silent around these latest Darwinian anniversaries. Because so many of Darwin’s ideas were ‘deeply, deeply geographical’ (Castree, 2009: 2295; Kennedy, 2006;
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Stoddart, 1966), this was apparently a missed opportunity for geography to cash in, quite literally, on the Darwin industry.3 Biodiversity loss, species extinction and related environmental problems are constitutively geographical, so the argument goes, but geographers are still too reluctant to say so. Given Castree’s (2009) rather pessimistic tone about specialization and intradisciplinary conversation, it was refreshing that a lively debate was initiated about Darwinian legacies from across geography. As well as historical geographers, other responses to the debate came from planning (Batty, 2009), geomorphology (Summerfield, 2010), social geography (Dorling, 2010) and GIScience (Sui, 2010). What was troubling Castree, then, was lack of interest currently shown by geographers in long-term social and environmental change. For H.C. Darby, all geography was historical geography, but apparently not any more. Indeed, Castree asseverated that ‘where historical geography once seemed almost synonymous with geography tout court, today it is a fairly small subfield of diminished intellectual influence’ (Castree, 2009: 2295). It is therefore not that surprising that the majority of disciplinary responses, and their name was legion, were by historical geographers angry at Castree’s dispatch of their subdiscipline to, just about, the enormous condescension of posterity (Driver, 2010; Finnegan, 2010; Kearns, 2010a). Driver (2010) drew attention to Castree’s failure to discuss the Beagle Campaign, an obvious case of Fellows of the RGS using Darwin to draw media attention to their cause. Finnegan (2010), in an enjoyably clever response, outlined just how laden with Darwinian metaphor many of the posthumanist theories currently popular in human geography actually are, a point echoed, in a different way, by Sui (2010).
V A Mackinder for all seasons? Another contentious aspect of Castree’s piece was his emplacement of Darwin and Marx as
the ‘only two world-famous thinkers we have good reason to discuss within and without the discipline’ (Castree, 2009: 2297).4 In the early 20th century, the only geographer thought worth discussing by historians was Halford Mackinder. Despite the best efforts of the discipline, Mackinder’s presences continue to saturate geographical thinking. In a recent companion for ‘Environmental Geography’, for example, Castree et al. (2009) use ‘Scope and Methods’ to outline a new intellectual project that would straddle the ground between human and physical geography. Given the wider ramifications of the purpose of geography in the public arena, this is an apposite time for Gerry Kearns (2009a) to have published his long-awaited biographical study of Mackinder. Thirty years in the writing, this is an important study of Mackinder and his legacies. Kearns endeavours to show that the project that Mackinder outlined for geography made a connection to imperial thinking inevitable. This is accomplished by presenting a series of takes on Mackinder’s thinking about geography, political education and empire and then adjudicating these against the range of other possible geographical futures that were presented by his contemporaries, such as Mary Kingsley and Peter Kropo´tkin.5 Kearns does seem to devote rather less discussion to Mackinder’s role in the disciplinary development of Geography, instead concentrating on his later attempts on Mount Kenya in 1899 and the development of imperial interests through his political career. The discussion of Mackinder’s expedition to climb Mount Kenya is particularly good, and Kearns uses discrepancies between the original and published versions of his field notebooks to ask serious questions of Mackinder’s treatment of Swahili and Kikuyu porters. Kearns also makes some interesting links between the crisis of masculinity involved in Mackinder’s different, and often epistemically conflicting, geographical practices. Some memorable passages, for instance, concern Mackinder’s correspondence
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about his marital difficulties during his time in Kenya. For Mackinder, domesticity invaded the field. Perhaps, is Kearns’s implication, his difficulties in London and Oxford influenced Mackinder’s increasingly ruthless, and violent, behaviour in Africa. Kearns (2010b) examines the link of the new geography to the development of imperial policy. Indeed, Kearns argues that Mackinderian echoes remain so strong in the discipline that ‘engaging with Mackinder and his critics is more than a historical exercise, it is an urgent political responsibility’ (Kearns, 2010b: 198). As Kearns demonstrates convincingly, there has been a succession of intellectual recoveries of Mackinder over the past century or so. These have often been in American think-tanks and military academies. The most recent recovery of Mackinder as the father of geopolitics has been by US journalist and strategist Robert Kaplan (2009). Kaplan places Mackinder’s ‘geographical pivot’ at the centre of a revivified, or perhaps just revisited, argument about the importance of physical geography in the structuring of global politics. Again, unsurprisingly, a number of dissatisfied political geographers responded, outlining just some of the many disciplinary developments in thinking over the past century (Blouet, 2009; Dalby, 2009; Kearns, 2009b; Morrissey, 2009; Morrissey et al., 2009; Toal, 2009). What requires further consideration are the reasons behind the periodic recovery of Mackinder’s corpus. Kaplan claims that scholars ‘must revise Mackinder for our time’ (Kaplan, 2009: 100). As Brian Blouet argues, his ‘writing allows commentators to generate many interpretations, which helps explain why each generation rediscovers Mackinder’ (Blouet, 2009: 11). Moreover, each recovery angers professional geographers, because our collective accomplishments since 1887 are rarely acknowledged. It is as if our discipline, for such military strategists, might have been best served by sticking to the principles of the New Geography.
VI Conclusions In this context, it has been interesting to follow the resurgence of debates in anthropology, our sister field science, about its method and purpose. In his eponymous 2007 lecture before the British Academy, Tim Ingold (2008) attempted to recover aspects of Radcliffe-Brown for a reconstituted sense of what anthropology ought to be. For Ingold, armchair scholars and simpleton technicians have no place in anthropology’s future. Anthropology has embarked on many projects, argues Ingold, but all have resulted in directions ‘at a tangent from the world we inhabit. It is no wonder, then, that anthropologists are left feeling isolated and marginalized, and that they are routinely passed by in public discussions of the great questions of social life’ (Ingold, 2008: 90). It is here that I wonder for the legacies of Mackinder and the perennial debates about geography’s purpose at the RGS. The issues raised by the New Geography continue to be discussed today – no longer just in our lecture halls and classrooms, but also, for the first time in a long time, in the mainstream media. My immediate predecessor, Trevor Barnes, stated that the general theme for his set of (it must be said, rather ghoulish) reports would be to stress that ‘philosophies and ideas are embodied in the histories of the humans who make them, including their finitude’ (Barnes, 2008: 650). Inevitably drawn back to the writings of a succession of dead geographers, both of his generation and otherwise, Barnes finished his last report claiming, perhaps hoping, that ‘there be life in the history and philosophy of geography’ (Barnes, 2010: 674). As my former colleague, the late Bob Woods, once put it after a seminar in Liverpool, the problem with the history of geography is that it assumes that geography is a field of inquiry that deserves a history. I countered that it does and that all geographies deserve to be remembered. At the same time, the very act of remembering
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is an act of disciplining. Over the past five years or so, there has been a generational shift in the philosophies of geography, as those scholars so influential in geography’s register of ‘new’ idioms during the 1970s and 1980s move on to other spaces – Denis Cosgrove, Allan Pred, Michael Williams, Bob Woods, Les Hepple, Torsten Ha¨gerstrand. The list continues. I remember an old joke about first feeling the Grim Reaper tapping you on the shoulder when you have actually heard of the people in the obituaries. Perhaps this explains the obsession with pasts and futures that I have detailed here. Perhaps these legacies intimidate my own generation of geographers, unwilling to grasp the nettle and returning instead to the relative safety of erstwhile authorities such as Darwin, Marx and, even, Mackinder. But what seems to unite all generations with that of Mackinder and his contemporaries is the endless quest for something ‘New’ for geography – Cosgrove’s new cultural geography, Pred’s ‘new economic geography’ (Barnes, 2009: 694) or Woods’s new population geography. The question to be taken up in my next report is what this generation’s new geographies might look like, because attempts are being made. Like other generations of geographers, we still search for a philosophy to link our research and pedagogical practices with the worlds we study. And, after Ingold, let us call this new philosophy of ours geography. It is always worth remembering why this is our responsibility. Acknowledgements I dedicate this report to Professor R.I. Woods, my late mentor at Liverpool, for helping me to think properly about the point and purpose of histories of geography.
Notes 1. There have also been recent re-evaluations of the role of biography by historians (Banner, 2009; Brown, 2009; Nasaw, 2009). 2. For a fuller account of the debate and its outcomes, see Maddrell (2010) or Driver (2010).
3. That being said, historian of biology Jim Moore published his excellent lecture on Darwin at the RGSIBG Annual Conference in Manchester 2009 in this journal (Moore, 2010). 4. Castree’s definition of world-famous, it is worth noting, seems rather more stringent than that employed during RAE 2008, when rather more of the research output of UK Geography Departments was judged to have reached this threshold. 5. It is worth stating that this sort of study of a geographer within a wider political ambit marks the achievement of Vincent Berdoulay’s (1981) call, 30 years ago, for contextual histories of geography. In this, Kearns’s book has similarities with Neil Smith’s (2003) study of American geographer Isaiah Bowman.
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Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 35: 149–153. Marozzi J (2009a) Royal Geographical Society’s next expedition. Financial Times Weekend 21 March. Available at: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/bb357c6414da-11de-8cd1-0000779fd2ac.html. Marozzi J (2009b) Worlds Apart. Standpoint Magazine June. Available at: http://www.standpointmag.co.uk/ node/1582/full. Middleton N (2010) Guest editorial: Communicating geography The Geographical Journal. Available at: http:// geographicaljournal.rgs.org/index.php/home/97-guesteditorial-communicating-geography. Moore J (2010) Darwin’s progress and the problem of slavery. Progress in Human Geography 34: 555–582. Morrissey J (2009) Lessons in American geopolitik: Kaplan and the return of spatial absolutism. Human Geography 2(2): 36–39. Morrissey J, Dalby S, Kearns G, and Toal G (2009) Geography writes back: Response to Kaplan’s ‘The revenge of geography’. Human Geography 2(2): 33–35. Nasaw D (2009) Historians and biography: Introduction. The American Historical Review 114: 573–578. Naylor S (2010) Fieldwork and the geographical career: T.Griffith Taylor and the exploration of Australia. In Naylor S and Ryan JR (eds) New Spaces of Exploration: Geographies of Discovery in the Twentieth Century. London: IB Tauris, 105–124. Palin M (2010) Presidential Address: Annual General Meeting of the Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers). The Geographical Journal 176: 253–255. Reid-Henry S (2009) The age of expeditions is over. Guardian.co.uk Friday 15 May. Available at: http:// www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/may/15/ expeditions-royal-geographical-society. Roberts BB (1965) Obituary: Dr Tom George Longstaff. The Polar Record 12(81): 776–777. Royal Geographical Society (2009) Hidden Histories of Exploration – a major new exhibition at the Royal
Geographical society (with the Institute of British Geographers). Available at: http://hiddenhistories.rgs.org/ Last accessed 8 April 2011. Shipton E (1964) Obituary: Dr. T.G. Longstaff The Geographical Journal 130: 443–444. Smith N (2003) American Empire: Roosevelt’s Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization. Berkeley, LA: University of California Press. Stoddart D (1966) Darwin’s impact on geography. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 56: 683–698. Sui DZ (2010) Commentary: On Darwin, geography, and biology: Another tale of the lions and butterflies – episode 2? Environment and Planning A 42: 1775–1781. Summerfield M (2010) Commentary: Observations on Darwin and geography. Environment and Planning A 42: 262–264. Thomas NJ and Hill J (2010) Explorations in the Libyan Desert: William J. Harding King. In Naylor S and Ryan JR (eds) Naylor S and Ryan JR (eds) New Spaces of Exploration: Geographies of Discovery in the Twentieth Century. London: IB Tauris, 78–104. Thomson H (2009) There’s a whole wide world out there still waiting to be explored. The Times Online 20 May. Available at: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/ columnists/guest_contributors/article6322226.ece. Toal G (2009) B movie geopolitics. Human Geography 2(2): 48–51. Williamson P (2011) Robert I. Woods (1949–2011). Available at: http://www.liv.ac.uk/geography/staff/ woods.htm. Withers CWJ (2009) Place and the ‘spatial turn’ in geography and history. Journal of the History of Ideas 70: 637–658. Yusoff K (2010) Configuring the field: Photography in early twentieth-century Antarctic exploration. In Naylor S and Ryan JR (eds) New Spaces of Exploration: Geographies of Discovery in the Twentieth Century. London: IB Tauris, 52–77.
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Echoes of the New Geography? History and philosophy of geography I
Progress in Human Geography 36(4) 518–526 ª The Author(s) 2012 Reprints and permission: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav 10.1177/0309132511411880 phg.sagepub.com
Richard C. Powell University of Oxford, UK
Abstract Taking as its cue the debates in 2009 at the Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers) about the relative role of the institution in geographical exploration, science and pedagogy, this essay reviews recent work in the history and philosophy of geography. It argues that there is a long tradition of debates between educators and explorers within the RGS, and shows how these have been revisited in current work on Halford Mackinder and Charles Darwin. It concludes that attention to the processes of remembering and forgetting should be particularly acute at this moment in the history of geographical practices. Keywords Charles Darwin, Halford Mackinder, histories of geography, philosophies of geography, ‘New Geography’, Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers)
Freshfield saw that recognition of geography by the Universities was essential to secure a supply of competent teachers. It was his advocacy which led our Society to subsidize geographical teaching at Oxford in 1888 and at Cambridge in 1903. This cost our Society some £20,000; but there is now no University in Britain without a School of Geography. It is perhaps the greatest work we have accomplished, for exploration would have gone on somehow even had our Society never existed. (Longstaff, 1934: 259)
I Introduction Douglas Freshfield (1845–1934) was a Victorian mountaineer who, among other exploits, composed a classic account of climbing in the Caucasus, apparently ‘with no trace of self-glorification’ (Longstaff, 1934: 258). Having been elected as a Fellow in 1869, between 1881 and 1894, Freshfield served as an honorary secretary of the Royal Geographical Society. Critically, it was Freshfield who commissioned J.S. Keltie’s
1885 report, on behalf of the RGS, into the teaching of geography in schools (Keltie, 1885). The response to this by the RGS, Oxford and Cambridge instituted what became known as the ‘new Geography’ of the 1880s. Dr Tom Longstaff, the author of Freshfield’s obituary above, was himself an accomplished mountaineer in the Himalayas, Spitsbergen and west Greenland, and the pioneer of ‘‘‘travelling light’’, unencumbered by the gangs of porters and excessive baggage trains’ (Roberts, 1965: 776). Longstaff received the Gill Memorial Award in 1908, and the Founders Medal in 1928, from the RGS (Shipton, 1964), and was
Corresponding author: School of Geography and the Environment, South Parks Road, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 3QY, UK Email: [email protected]
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elected President of the Alpine Club in 1947 (Roberts, 1965). Perhaps my favourite anecdote about Longstaff is that, as the leading British authority on Mount Everest by the 1930s, he would dispense advice at the RGS to expectant novices thus: ‘The man who collapses above the North Col is a scoundrel – a scoundrel, Sir!’ (Shipton, 1964: 444, original emphasis). As the author of one of Longstaff’s obituaries complains, ‘[h]e was one of the last survivors of an age of amateur exploration which is already becoming legendary’ (Roberts, 1965: 777). So far, so obvious: exploratory praxis commemorated through nostalgia for feats of masculinity and self-reliance. But Longstaff, like Freshfield, was also committed to geographical education. During the 1930s, while serving as honorary secretary and then Vice-President of the RGS, Longstaff was able to appreciate the efforts of earlier fellows like Freshfield, as Honours Schools in Geography were finally being confirmed in universities across Britain and Ireland. Without the RGS’s funds, would anything have become of the preposterous idea of university geography? The activities of individuals like these litter the pages of dusty old geography journals. Figures many of us do not want to remember, undertaking practices that we would rather forget. Who cares? Well, Freshfield’s obituary raises all sorts of questions about remembrance, disciplinarity and social networks, but I use it for its relevance in recent debates about the histories, philosophies and purposes of geography. In short, discussions about the relative role of the RGS in geographical pedagogy and exploration have preoccupied its constituent Fellows for a very long time. It is worth saying this again now, because we geographers live in interesting times. This is an era in which many myths circulate about geography. Even Fellows of the RGS despondently ask, well, ‘what is geography?’, as Departments of Geography are merged into larger Schools of Environmental and Geosciences. Even Joanna
Lumley and Michael Palin have been called upon to debate our purpose. For some geographers, perhaps we should be grateful that anyone cares. For others, this sounds the death-knell for a certain type of geography. Welcome to the history and philosophy of geography for 2009 and 2010.
II Classical geographies? I have often thought that a striking aspect of the pedagogical tradition in geography is the rapidity with which geographers, and their writings, are elevated to the status of classics. A cursory glance at this journal’s excellent ‘Classics in Human Geography’ reveals the relatively recent date of the majority of the selected papers, as does the list of those geographers chosen to be recorded in Hubbard and Kitchin’s (2011) Key Thinkers on Space and Place. Moreover, this classic status can be lost again just as quickly. As approaches fall out of favour, so too does the reputational power of the geographer. It is geography, peculiarly among the serious social sciences, that seems to be cursed by the culture of celebrity. This means that many central figures from geography’s past are purposefully forgotten. No doubt there are many good reasons for this. Who wants to be reminded about the central role that Ritter or Haushofer played in the institutionalization of geography in Germany? Or, indeed, about Halford Mackinder’s role in the establishment of the Oxford School or the growth of a certain form of violent geopolitics? Why does this matter? Well, it does seem that the geographical community is rather distinct in this, in comparison to introductory courses in Anthropology, Sociology, History or, even, Biology and Geology. I do not think anyone would go so far as to identify a canon, but should students perhaps be required to read Mackinder, Isaiah Bowman or Ellen Semple, or other geographical thinkers such as Charles Darwin or Franz Boas? Without a sense of these texts, geographers become increasingly divorced from any sense of a community of practice or, indeed, of a shared,
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contested enterprise. Yet, over the period of this report, historians of geography have begun to recover many of these figures. Moreover, this matters because as universities in the UK and across Europe restructure into larger administrative units, the discipline is entering an epoch in which geographers, on the whole, are no longer making decisions about the institutional emplacement of geography. Consequently, myths begin to circulate about geography not being a real subject, or being an artifice of the British system, and geographers positioned in these new institutional structures often lack sufficient knowledge to speak back to this power. What has been conspicuous about the current period, then, has been the return to biographies of ‘big’ geographers.1 The previous compiler of these reports, Trevor Barnes, often discussed the importance of obituaries, and reading the vast archive that continues to mark Denis Cosgrove’s passing in 2008 indicates what can be learnt from these about the past practices of geography (Brotton, 2010; Driver, 2009). Obituaries have been produced for other influential historical geographers with important views on the history and philosophy of geography, such as Michael Williams (Baigent, 2010b) and Bob Woods (Williamson, 2011), while a historiographical essay on Jack Langton’s approach is included in a festschrift marking his retirement (Baigent and Mayhew, 2009). It should also be noted that work has continued to examine other key themes in history and philosophy of geography. The role of the space of the laboratory in scientific practice has been re-examined (Gieryn, 2008; Gooday, 2008; Kohler, 2008; Withers, 2009). A collection of essays on 20th-century exploration has been brought together by Simon Naylor and James Ryan, including discussions of exploratory praxis in the deserts of Australia (Collis, 2010; Naylor, 2010) and North Africa (Thomas and Hill, 2010), the Arctic (Baigent, 2010a; Korsmo, 2010), Antarctica (Dodds, 2010; Yusoff, 2010) and outer space (Godwin, 2010; Macdonald, 2010).
David Grann (2009) has provided a popular account of Lieutenant-Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett’s RGS expeditions to the Amazon in the 1920s. There has been a vast range of excellent work on the hidden histories of geography over the past decade or so, and this continues to be produced. Indeed, this corpus has perhaps reached its apogee in Avril Maddrell’s (2009) Complex Locations, an exhaustive prosopography of female geographers during the formative development of the discipline in UK universities. In Maddrell’s fascinating account, biographical accounts are presented that show the critical importance of various women in the spaces through which the geographical tradition has been enacted. There has also been innovative work in dissemination in histories of geography. Felix Driver and Lowri Jones, in collaboration with the RGS-IBG, held an AHRC grant on the ‘Hidden Histories of Exploration’ that produced an exhibition at the refurbished exhibition space at the RGS at the end of 2009 (Royal Geographical Society, 2009). Involving a website and podcast, this was an intriguing attempt to open up thinking about the histories and spaces of exploration (Driver and Jones, 2009).
III Ages of exploration? During 2009, debates about the proper conduct of geographical science and pedagogy have emerged again in the public arena. A number of Fellows of the Royal Geographical Society laid the blame for geography’s problems upon the RGS’s funding of certain types of research and argued that, instead, the Society should return to establishing its own expeditions. The disgruntled fellows asserted that, by diverting funding instead to many short-term projects by university geographers, the RGS was, in effect, in breach of its Royal Charter of Incorporation. In an appropriation of the sesquicentennial of the first edition of The Origin of Species and the bicentennial of Charles Darwin’s birth, this
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became known as the Beagle Campaign after the RGS-funded expedition to the Galapagos. The exploration campaigners were certainly successful in promoting their cause. Articles and opinion pieces were published in major UK newspapers (Hemming, 2009; Marozzi, 2009a, 2009b; Thomson, 2009). The Beagle Campaign recruited polar explorers (e.g. Pen Hadow), mountaineers (e.g. Chris Bonnington), and public celebrities (e.g. Joanna Lumley and Stanley Johnson). The fellows gained the required signatures to force a Special General Meeting (SGM) to debate and vote upon the resolution that, in effect, the RGS-IBG should again fund its own expeditions. Although there was absolute silence from academic geographers in the mainstream media, there was response in the blogosphere, including the Guardian blog (Reid-Henry, 2009). Avril Maddrell (2010) argues that this was directly due to the gagging of academics. Nerdy geography is the narrative to which media editors adhere, and dissenting voices were not able to access the major avenues of communication. However, the email discussion lists of human geography, such as crit-geog-forum, so often hostile to everything that the RGS-IBG represents, were flooded with ‘get-out-the-vote’ missives in support of the RGS Council. Indeed, given that crit-geog had been set up as oppositional forum for antiestablishment geographers following the merger of the Institute of British Geographers with the RGS in 1995, it perhaps indicates just how much the institutions of geography can serve different communities of practice simultaneously. The SGM was held at the RGS on 18 May 2009. All 10,500 FRGS were balloted to vote either in person, by post or by proxy. Given the issues at stake for the Society, it is perhaps surprising that only 4197 bothered to do so. In the event, the motion was defeated by 2590 (61.7%) to 1607 (38.3%) votes.2 Perhaps the Beagle Campaign underestimated just how many academic geographers, although they do not like to talk about it, still actually constitute the Fellowship of the
RGS-IBG. Moreover, given the tepid relationship between the RGS and the IBG since 1995, it is important to stress that the founding institution of critical geography became the effective tool in organizing support for the Council of the RGS. This need not detain us much longer, but there is potential for some interesting work to be done about the relationships between space, knowledge and power involved in this debate. However, there is increasing anxiety among UK and other European geographers that their geeky image is having real consequences for future student enrolments and, ultimately, for disciplinary survival. Maddrell wondered whether academic geography bore some responsibility for ‘the hackneyed and inaccurate representations of geographical work’ in popular culture, and set out a number of strategies for wider public engagement (Maddrell, 2010: 150; see also Bonnett, 2008). Nick Middleton (2010) urged university geographers to present their stories in mediafriendly ways to help combat geography’s slightly comic, if mildly endearing, public image. Even the current President of the RGS-IBG, Michael Palin, marked the end of his first year of office with a similar call, urging that ‘the Society must do its utmost to encourage teachers of today to raise similar awareness and enthusiasm in what I’m tempted to call . . . God’s Own Subject’ (Palin, 2010: 254).
IV Forgetting Darwin? Another acerbic debate about origins and ancients arose around the commemoration, or rather the lack of it, by geographers of Charles Darwin during 2009. This was sparked by an essay by Noel Castree (2009) that complained, along the same lines as David Stoddart (1966) over four decades previously, that geographers had been largely silent around these latest Darwinian anniversaries. Because so many of Darwin’s ideas were ‘deeply, deeply geographical’ (Castree, 2009: 2295; Kennedy, 2006;
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Stoddart, 1966), this was apparently a missed opportunity for geography to cash in, quite literally, on the Darwin industry.3 Biodiversity loss, species extinction and related environmental problems are constitutively geographical, so the argument goes, but geographers are still too reluctant to say so. Given Castree’s (2009) rather pessimistic tone about specialization and intradisciplinary conversation, it was refreshing that a lively debate was initiated about Darwinian legacies from across geography. As well as historical geographers, other responses to the debate came from planning (Batty, 2009), geomorphology (Summerfield, 2010), social geography (Dorling, 2010) and GIScience (Sui, 2010). What was troubling Castree, then, was lack of interest currently shown by geographers in long-term social and environmental change. For H.C. Darby, all geography was historical geography, but apparently not any more. Indeed, Castree asseverated that ‘where historical geography once seemed almost synonymous with geography tout court, today it is a fairly small subfield of diminished intellectual influence’ (Castree, 2009: 2295). It is therefore not that surprising that the majority of disciplinary responses, and their name was legion, were by historical geographers angry at Castree’s dispatch of their subdiscipline to, just about, the enormous condescension of posterity (Driver, 2010; Finnegan, 2010; Kearns, 2010a). Driver (2010) drew attention to Castree’s failure to discuss the Beagle Campaign, an obvious case of Fellows of the RGS using Darwin to draw media attention to their cause. Finnegan (2010), in an enjoyably clever response, outlined just how laden with Darwinian metaphor many of the posthumanist theories currently popular in human geography actually are, a point echoed, in a different way, by Sui (2010).
V A Mackinder for all seasons? Another contentious aspect of Castree’s piece was his emplacement of Darwin and Marx as
the ‘only two world-famous thinkers we have good reason to discuss within and without the discipline’ (Castree, 2009: 2297).4 In the early 20th century, the only geographer thought worth discussing by historians was Halford Mackinder. Despite the best efforts of the discipline, Mackinder’s presences continue to saturate geographical thinking. In a recent companion for ‘Environmental Geography’, for example, Castree et al. (2009) use ‘Scope and Methods’ to outline a new intellectual project that would straddle the ground between human and physical geography. Given the wider ramifications of the purpose of geography in the public arena, this is an apposite time for Gerry Kearns (2009a) to have published his long-awaited biographical study of Mackinder. Thirty years in the writing, this is an important study of Mackinder and his legacies. Kearns endeavours to show that the project that Mackinder outlined for geography made a connection to imperial thinking inevitable. This is accomplished by presenting a series of takes on Mackinder’s thinking about geography, political education and empire and then adjudicating these against the range of other possible geographical futures that were presented by his contemporaries, such as Mary Kingsley and Peter Kropo´tkin.5 Kearns does seem to devote rather less discussion to Mackinder’s role in the disciplinary development of Geography, instead concentrating on his later attempts on Mount Kenya in 1899 and the development of imperial interests through his political career. The discussion of Mackinder’s expedition to climb Mount Kenya is particularly good, and Kearns uses discrepancies between the original and published versions of his field notebooks to ask serious questions of Mackinder’s treatment of Swahili and Kikuyu porters. Kearns also makes some interesting links between the crisis of masculinity involved in Mackinder’s different, and often epistemically conflicting, geographical practices. Some memorable passages, for instance, concern Mackinder’s correspondence
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about his marital difficulties during his time in Kenya. For Mackinder, domesticity invaded the field. Perhaps, is Kearns’s implication, his difficulties in London and Oxford influenced Mackinder’s increasingly ruthless, and violent, behaviour in Africa. Kearns (2010b) examines the link of the new geography to the development of imperial policy. Indeed, Kearns argues that Mackinderian echoes remain so strong in the discipline that ‘engaging with Mackinder and his critics is more than a historical exercise, it is an urgent political responsibility’ (Kearns, 2010b: 198). As Kearns demonstrates convincingly, there has been a succession of intellectual recoveries of Mackinder over the past century or so. These have often been in American think-tanks and military academies. The most recent recovery of Mackinder as the father of geopolitics has been by US journalist and strategist Robert Kaplan (2009). Kaplan places Mackinder’s ‘geographical pivot’ at the centre of a revivified, or perhaps just revisited, argument about the importance of physical geography in the structuring of global politics. Again, unsurprisingly, a number of dissatisfied political geographers responded, outlining just some of the many disciplinary developments in thinking over the past century (Blouet, 2009; Dalby, 2009; Kearns, 2009b; Morrissey, 2009; Morrissey et al., 2009; Toal, 2009). What requires further consideration are the reasons behind the periodic recovery of Mackinder’s corpus. Kaplan claims that scholars ‘must revise Mackinder for our time’ (Kaplan, 2009: 100). As Brian Blouet argues, his ‘writing allows commentators to generate many interpretations, which helps explain why each generation rediscovers Mackinder’ (Blouet, 2009: 11). Moreover, each recovery angers professional geographers, because our collective accomplishments since 1887 are rarely acknowledged. It is as if our discipline, for such military strategists, might have been best served by sticking to the principles of the New Geography.
VI Conclusions In this context, it has been interesting to follow the resurgence of debates in anthropology, our sister field science, about its method and purpose. In his eponymous 2007 lecture before the British Academy, Tim Ingold (2008) attempted to recover aspects of Radcliffe-Brown for a reconstituted sense of what anthropology ought to be. For Ingold, armchair scholars and simpleton technicians have no place in anthropology’s future. Anthropology has embarked on many projects, argues Ingold, but all have resulted in directions ‘at a tangent from the world we inhabit. It is no wonder, then, that anthropologists are left feeling isolated and marginalized, and that they are routinely passed by in public discussions of the great questions of social life’ (Ingold, 2008: 90). It is here that I wonder for the legacies of Mackinder and the perennial debates about geography’s purpose at the RGS. The issues raised by the New Geography continue to be discussed today – no longer just in our lecture halls and classrooms, but also, for the first time in a long time, in the mainstream media. My immediate predecessor, Trevor Barnes, stated that the general theme for his set of (it must be said, rather ghoulish) reports would be to stress that ‘philosophies and ideas are embodied in the histories of the humans who make them, including their finitude’ (Barnes, 2008: 650). Inevitably drawn back to the writings of a succession of dead geographers, both of his generation and otherwise, Barnes finished his last report claiming, perhaps hoping, that ‘there be life in the history and philosophy of geography’ (Barnes, 2010: 674). As my former colleague, the late Bob Woods, once put it after a seminar in Liverpool, the problem with the history of geography is that it assumes that geography is a field of inquiry that deserves a history. I countered that it does and that all geographies deserve to be remembered. At the same time, the very act of remembering
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is an act of disciplining. Over the past five years or so, there has been a generational shift in the philosophies of geography, as those scholars so influential in geography’s register of ‘new’ idioms during the 1970s and 1980s move on to other spaces – Denis Cosgrove, Allan Pred, Michael Williams, Bob Woods, Les Hepple, Torsten Ha¨gerstrand. The list continues. I remember an old joke about first feeling the Grim Reaper tapping you on the shoulder when you have actually heard of the people in the obituaries. Perhaps this explains the obsession with pasts and futures that I have detailed here. Perhaps these legacies intimidate my own generation of geographers, unwilling to grasp the nettle and returning instead to the relative safety of erstwhile authorities such as Darwin, Marx and, even, Mackinder. But what seems to unite all generations with that of Mackinder and his contemporaries is the endless quest for something ‘New’ for geography – Cosgrove’s new cultural geography, Pred’s ‘new economic geography’ (Barnes, 2009: 694) or Woods’s new population geography. The question to be taken up in my next report is what this generation’s new geographies might look like, because attempts are being made. Like other generations of geographers, we still search for a philosophy to link our research and pedagogical practices with the worlds we study. And, after Ingold, let us call this new philosophy of ours geography. It is always worth remembering why this is our responsibility. Acknowledgements I dedicate this report to Professor R.I. Woods, my late mentor at Liverpool, for helping me to think properly about the point and purpose of histories of geography.
Notes 1. There have also been recent re-evaluations of the role of biography by historians (Banner, 2009; Brown, 2009; Nasaw, 2009). 2. For a fuller account of the debate and its outcomes, see Maddrell (2010) or Driver (2010).
3. That being said, historian of biology Jim Moore published his excellent lecture on Darwin at the RGSIBG Annual Conference in Manchester 2009 in this journal (Moore, 2010). 4. Castree’s definition of world-famous, it is worth noting, seems rather more stringent than that employed during RAE 2008, when rather more of the research output of UK Geography Departments was judged to have reached this threshold. 5. It is worth stating that this sort of study of a geographer within a wider political ambit marks the achievement of Vincent Berdoulay’s (1981) call, 30 years ago, for contextual histories of geography. In this, Kearns’s book has similarities with Neil Smith’s (2003) study of American geographer Isaiah Bowman.
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