Major Geographic Traditions – UGC NET – Notes

Introduction

• Geographer William D. Pattison introduced his four traditions of geography at the annual convention of the National Council for Geographic Education in 1963. With these precepts, Pattison sought to define the discipline by establishing a common vocabulary in the geographic community at large.
• His goal was to create a lexicon of basic geographical concepts so that the work of academics could be easily interpreted by laymen. The four traditions are the Spatial or Locational Tradition, the Area Studies or Regional Tradition, the Man-Land Tradition, and the Earth Science Tradition.
• Each of these traditions is interrelated, and they are often used in conjunction with one another, rather than alone.

Background

• In 1905, one year after professional geography in America achieved full social identity through the founding of the Association of American Geographers, William Morris Davis responded to a familiar suspicion that geography is simply an undisciplined “omnium-gatherum” by describing an approach that as he saw it imparts a “geographical quality” to some knowledge and accounts for the absence of the quality elsewhere.
• Davis spoke as president of the AAG. He set an example that was followed by more than one presidents of that organization. An enduring official concern led the AAG to publish, in 1939 and in 1959, monographs exclusively devoted to a critical review of definitions and their implications.
• Every one of the well-known definitions of geography advanced since the founding of the AAG has had its measure of success. Tending to displace one another by turns, each definition has said something true of geography.
• But from the vantage point of 1964, one can see that each one has also failed. All of them adopted in one way or another a monistic view, a singleness of preference, certain to omit if not to alienate numerous professionals who were in good conscience continuing to participate creatively in the broad geographic enterprise.
• There are four traditions whose identification provides an alternative to the competing monistic definitions that have been the geographer’s lot. The resulting pluralistic basis for judgement promises, by full accommodation of what geographers do and by plain-spoken representation thereof, to greatly expedite the task of maintaining an alliance between professional geography and pedagogical geography and at the same time to promote communication between geographers and laymen.
• The traditions are:
  1. Spatial/Locational tradition,
  2. Area studies/ Areal Differentiation/ Regional tradition,
  3. Man-Land/ Culture-Environment tradition and
  4. Earth Science tradition.
• All of the traditions with the exception of the Regional Approach are topical approaches.
• The regional approach breaks the earth down into areas that share certain uniform cultural and physical characteristics. Regional geographers then study the human and physical geography of that particular region. We typically break the world into the cultural regions of: North America, South America, Europe, Russia and the Slavic World, the Middle East and North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, East Asia, Southeast Asia, and Australia and Oceania.
• Geographer William D. Pattison introduced these four traditions of geography at the annual convention of the National Council for Geographic Education in 1963.
• With these precepts, Pattison sought to define the discipline by establishing a common vocabulary in the geographic community at large. His goal was to create a lexicon of basic geographical concepts so that the work of academics could be easily interpreted by laymen.
• Each of these traditions is interrelated, and they are often used in conjunction with one another, rather than alone.

Spatial or Locational Tradition

• The core concept behind the Spatial Tradition of geography relates to the in depth analysis of the particulars of a place-such as the distribution of one aspect over an area-using quantitative techniques and tools that might include such things as computerized mapping and geographic information systems, spatial analysis and patterns, aerial distribution, densities, movement, and transportation. The Locational Tradition attempts to explain the course of human settlements in terms of location, growth, and in relation to other locales.
• Entrenched in Western thought is a belief in the importance of spatial analysis, of the act of separating from the happenings of experience such aspects as distance, form, direction and position.
• It was not until the 17th century that philosophers concentrated attention on these aspects by asking whether or not they were properties of things-in-themselves.
• Later, when the 18th century writings of Immanuel Kant had become generally circulated, the notion of space as a category including all of these aspects came into widespread use. However, it is evident that particular spatial questions were the subject of highly organized answering attempts long before the time of any of these cogitations.
• To confirm this point, one need only be reminded of the compilation of elaborate records concerning the location of things in ancient Greece. These were records of sailing distances, of coastlines and of landmarks that grew until they formed the raw material for the great Geographia of Claudius Ptolemy in the 2nd century A.D.
• A review of American professional geography from the time of its formal organization shows that the spatial tradition of thought had made a deep penetration from the very beginning.A review of American professional geography from the time of its formal organization shows that the spatial tradition of thought had made a deep penetration from the very beginning.
• For Davis, for Henry Gannett and for most if not all of the 44 other men of the original AAG, the determination and display of spatial aspects of reality through mapping were of undoubted importance, whether contemporary definitions of geography happened to acknowledge this fact or not. One can go further and, by probing beneath the art of mapping, recognize in the behavior of geographers of that time an active interest in the true essentials of the spatial tradition – geometry and movement.
• One can trace a basic favoring of movement as a subject of study from the turn-of-the-century work of Emory R. Johnson, writing as professor of transportation at the University of Pennsylvania, through the highly influential theoretical and substantive work of Edward L. Ullman during the past 20 years and thence to an article by a younger geographer on railroad freight traffic on the U.S. and Canada in the Annals of the AAG for September 1963.
• One can trace a deep attachment to geometry, or positioning-and-layout, from articles on boundaries and population densities in early 20th century volumes of the Bulletin of the American Geographical Society, through a controversial pronouncement of Joseph Schaefer in 1953 that granted geographical legitimacy only to studies on spatial patterns and so onward to a recent Annals report on electronic scanning of cropland patterns in Pennsylvania.
• One might inquire, is discussion of the spatial tradition, after the manner of the remarks just made, likely to bring people within geography closer to an understanding of one another and people outside geography closer to an understanding of geographers?

There seem to be at least two reasons for being hopeful:

• Firstly, an appreciation of this tradition allows one to see a bond of fellowship uniting the elementary school teacher, who attempts the most rudimentary instruction in directions and mapping, with the contemporary research geographer, who dedicates himself to an exploration of central-place theory.
• One cannot only open the eyes of many teachers to the potentialities of their own instruction, through proper exposition of the spatial tradition, but one can also “hang a bell” on research quantifiers in geography, who are often thought to have wandered so far in their intellectual adventures as to have become lost from the rest.
• Secondly, Looking outside geography, one may anticipate benefits from the readiness of countless persons to associate the name “geography” with maps. Latent within this readiness is a willingness to recognize as geography, too, what maps are about – and that is the geometry of and the movement of what is mapped.