Livingstone, Sauer and French Regional Geography - Essay Example

Livingstone, Sauer and French regional geography While Carl Sauer and David Livingstone each contributed to geography, they represent very different modes of thought. Livingstone traveled at the end of the nineteenth century, an age of intense exploration. Sauer was head of the geography department at Berkeley in 1923, when geography was recognized as an established discipline (Bruman 1996). Thus, given the different expectations of their time periods, the initial purposes and methodologies of the two men differed. Livingstone, initially a missionary, explored Africa during the new imperial age of exploration opening new paths for European ideals. Coming into close contact with Africa’s slave trade, he intended to replace the slave trade with Christianity and commerce as carriers of the “civilisation” he felt Africa needed, but he was not successful as a missionary and made numerous geographical errors (Sykes 1996). His miscalculations nearly sacrificed his Zambezi expedition and he thought he had found the source of the Nile only to realize later that it was the upper Congo (Sykes 1996). Sauer is considered one of the founding fathers of American geography marking the initial separation of physical geography from human or cultural geography. His predominate concern was the relationship between people and their environment and he stressed the importance of anthropology. Coming from a scientific background, his purpose was scientific observation of other traditions and religions. In his presidential address delivered to the Association of American Geographers in 1940, Sauer explains his academic three-point underpinning to the study of geography including the studies of the history of geography, physical geography, and anthropology (Sauer 1997). The main difference between Livingstone and Sauer can be found in anthropology, which stresses the importance of avoiding ethnocentricity. Livingstone, an example of the contrary, considered the Africans “wild” and described them as “humans of a lower form” (Crawfurd 2005). Sauer was a follower of human geography feeling “human geography... is a science that has nothing to do with individuals but only with human institutions, or cultures” (Sauer 1997) and remained interested in how the environment is managed. “The design of science that Montesquieu, Herder, and Buckle forecast, failed because we know that natural law does not apply to social groups … We have come to know that environment is a term of cultural appraisal which is itself a ‘value’ in culture history” (Sauer 1997). Social Darwinism supported Livingstone’s perspective, which today would be considered racist. It is to this idea that Sauer refers when he explains natural law does not apply to social groups. Thus, Sauer was concerned about the relationship between people and their surroundings, while Livingstone was concerned with leaving a mark. Livingstone was greatly influenced by the importance that Christianity and commercialism held for European society in a time when Social Darwinism was generally accepted. Sauer was the product of the natural sciences and anthropology allowed him to become well versed in participant observation and cultural relativity (Entrikin 1984). Despite all of these differences, both men contributed greatly to geography. Sauer led the impressive field of cultural geography, connecting the areas of physical and human geography with historical geography by using the all-important historical methodology. He advocated ‘humane’ use of environment and argued that ecological geography should be given higher importance pointing to rural cultures as examples. He said cultural ecology, physical and human geography all work by adapting themselves to their environments and needs. Under his influence, this field developed as the main branch of geography. “Sauer was explicitly concerned to counter an environmental determinism which had dominated the American geography of the previous generation, within which human agency was given scant autonomy in the shaping of the visible landscape,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_landscape He coined the phrase ‘human cultural action’ referring to the idea that culture is the main force in shaping visible features of physical environment by provoking action, responses and adaptation by humans. He also indicates cultural traits imposed by Europeans during colonization on pre-existing cultures shaped these cultures in a different way. “Culture is the agent, the natural area is the medium, the cultural landscape is the result. Under the influence of a given culture, itself changing through time, the landscape undergoes development, passing through phases, and probably reaching ultimately the end of its cycle of development. With the introduction of a different – that is an alien – culture, a rejuvenation of the cultural landscape sets in, or a new landscape is superimposed on remnants of an older one,” Sauer (1925), The Morphology of Landscape.” University of California Publications. French regional geography was a model of what Sauer propagated. The French school of geography was highly influential. It ‘…became known for its descriptive regional monographs presented in a lucid and flowing manner, human and historical geography were its forte.’ There is no denial that French regional geography reflected the historical and military developments of the country. Talking about hundred years’ war between France and Britain, Sauer says (Northern Mists) that France lost most of her ports and her north and southwest regions were ravaged. Unending political rivalry with Britain, Napoleon’s wars and the French revolution influenced French landscape, its geography and culture. Fresh rivalry in newly found lands had begun with England, Spain and Portugal. Use of tobacco spread rapidly in France and immigration, especially to America, was continuing with gusto. Due to the above historical background and climatic changes, vegetation was not considerable in France. European agriculture did not originate in Europe and did not advance much over the centuries. “Fields were plowed and planted principally in order to raise grain, which supplied the starch and a good deal of the protein in the diet of the people,” Sauer (1981, p. 31). Many plant foods came from colonies as the French were good with animal husbandry. “Dairying is the foundation of north European husbandry, not only the cattle, but largely as well as sheep and goats. Fresh and sour milk, curds, butter and cheese provided, together with grain a cheap and sufficiently balanced basic diet,” (ibid, p. 36). Woodlands and community lands were vigorously maintained, meadowlands were protected. Fields remained important grazing lands, and fallowing was in practice. There existed a good balance between climate, man, livestock and vegetation. “The difference between the deserts and their margins in the Old and the New Worlds may be explained by the different histories of occupation by man. The Old World lands were lived in much longer by more people and by people who turned flocks and herds out to graze and browse. The people of the New World had neither herd animals nor plow.” P.102, Sauer (1969). French regional geography changed according to the political and trading fields of the country. It showed the imperialistic ambitions of French society, its desires to win far away colonies and its competition with other European powers. These paradigms included new inventions and discoveries of new continents. Darwin’s determinism was also an immense contribution to cultural geography. Environmental determinism, also known as Climatic Determinism is the view that physical environment, rather than the social culture, determines culture. With a slight difference, Darwin and Sauer are speaking the same language. It also argues that these peculiarities determined the nature of the people themselves. Even though determinism was later rejected, environmental determinism found a new life under Sauer’s influence. Sauer used ‘landscape as theatre’ and his ideas and theories were largely appreciated. He said ‘culture area is a region of world shared by people with similar cultural traits. Single cultural trait like maize agriculture, forcing the communities together, can group other communities because of common cultural complex, culture area analysis has been used widely in both anthropology and cultural geography ‘because it facilitates comparisons between regions, assists in the historical reconstruction of cultural development, and lends itself to questions about the impact of the natural environment on the form of human culture’ http://www.csiss.org/classics/content/15 Sauer undoubtedly “…reinvigorated the culture area concept within the field of geography by synthesizing the ideas of the European Kulturkreise school with the anthropological approaches to culture area …Sauer argued that the diffusion of ideas from a few “cultural hearths,” or cultural centeres, had been the driving force in human history,” http://www.csiss.org/classics/content/15 It interested him to find out the meaning and distribution of arts and artefacts of man and how they materialised at particular places and moulded the physical experiments. “I like that expression, the meeting of natural and cultural history, partly because I prefer natural history with its sense of real, non-duplicated time and place to ecology, and culture history for the same reason to sociology or social science,” (p.2, Sauer, 1969). In the meantime, quest of cultural geography continues with particular emphasis on ecology and environment. “We remain a part of the organic world, and as we intervene more and more decisively to change the balance and nature of life, we have also more need to know, by retrospective study, the responsibilities and hazards of our present and our prospects as lords of creation,” Sauer (1954, p.104). Read More