Human geography
Human geography is a branch of geography that focuses on the study of human societies, cultures, and their relationships with the environment. Unlike physical geography, which examines natural features and processes, human geography delves into various aspects such as government, economy, population, and cultural practices, making it closely associated with cultural geography. This field has a rich history, evolving from early ideas in environmental determinism to more nuanced concepts like cultural ecology, which emphasize the interplay between humans and their physical surroundings.
Prominent figures in the development of human geography include Carl Sauer, who advocated for qualitative approaches to understanding cultural landscapes and their transformations over time. In the mid-20th century, the discipline underwent significant changes with the quantitative revolution, which introduced empirical data and statistical models to geographic research. This period also gave rise to critical geography, which critiques societal structures and emphasizes the importance of individual experience in understanding space and place.
Within human geography, cultural geography examines how cultural phenomena are spatially distributed, with contemporary studies often influenced by globalization and identity politics. The evolution of human geography reflects a complex interplay of ideas and methodologies, offering insights into how communities interact with and shape the world around them.
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Subject Terms
Human geography
Human geography is a discipline of the social sciences and one of the two major branches of geography, the other one being physical geography. Whereas physical geography is the study of the land, climate, and processes of the earth, human geography is the study of the earth’s cultures and communities in relation to place and space. For this reason, human geography is sometimes called cultural geography. The discipline takes into account a wide array of factors, including government, economy, population, settlement, health, history, development (quality of life), religion, language, music, and art.
Overview
The study of geography has been in existence since ancient times. However, geography did not exist as a formal academic discipline until the eighteenth century, and the nineteenth century saw the foundation of the first geographic societies. Distinct subfields within the realm of geography developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The roots of human geography partly stem from nineteenth-century evolutionary biology, which is the study of how the diversity of life on Earth came about. One of the earliest proponents of what would become human geography was German geographer Carl Ritter (1779–1859), who supported environmental determinism, the belief that conditions in the physical environment limit the human one. Environmental determinism was criticized in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries for its lack of methodology and was later seen as justification for imperialism and racism. One of its major critics was American geographer Carl O. Sauer (1889–1975), who instead supported cultural ecology, the study of human adaptation to physical and social environments. Sauer’s approach was largely qualitative, a style of research that tends to ask why or how a thing happens rather than relying on quantifiable names and numbers. He argued that cultures are shaped by the land in which they live while also helping to shape that land.
The study of regional geography, covering both physical and human aspects, developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. During the quantitative revolution of the 1950s and 1960s, regional geography came under fire for its lack of scientific rigor. The quantitative revolution of geography changed the nature of geographical research, causing it to shift from descriptive to empirical data, in which mathematical and statistical models are used to solve spatial problems. Another essential part of the quantitative revolution was positivism, in which sensory experience is explained through logic and mathematics. This combined spatial, statistical, and positivist approach became integral to human geography’s many branches.
Positivism was criticized by scholars of the 1970s, leading to the development of critical geography during the 1970s and 1980s. This approach applies critical theory, in which knowledge from the social sciences is used to make a critique about society. Three schools of thought developed within critical geography at this time: behavioral geography, which counters quantitative geography’s tendency to view humanity solely through statistics; radical geography, which counters quantitative methods with normative techniques drawn from Marxist theory; and humanistic geography, which uses highly qualitative analysis. The subfield of humanistic geography, pioneered by Chinese American geographer Yi-Fu Tuan (b. 1930), merges human geography with psychology, art, philosophy, and religion. In doing so, humanistic geography stresses that people’s experiences, perceptions, personal beliefs, and creativity shape how they view their surroundings. Tuan also redefined place as a part of space that may be either real or perceived (such as mental maps), occupied or unoccupied.
Cultural geography is sometimes regarded not as a synonym for human geography but as a subfield of it. Cultural geography studies the ways in which humans function spatially, that is, how cultural phenomena such as religions or economies vary or stay the same in different places. Globalization and materialism are two important areas of study within cultural geography. This subfield was revived in the late twentieth century as a type of humanistic geography called new cultural geography, which relies on theoretical models such as poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, postcolonialism, and feminism. Identity politics emerged as a major focus of new cultural geography into the early twenty-first century.
Bibliography
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