Perspectives in Geography – UGC NET – Notes

Introduction

• Perspectives, knowledge, and skills comprise the content of geography. In general, a perspective is a framework that can be used to interpret the meanings of experiences, events, places, persons, cultures, and physical environments.
• Having a perspective means looking at our world through a lens shaped by personal experience, selective information, and subjective evaluation. The perspectives and the questions to which they lead distinguish geography from other approaches, such as historic or economic. A perspective provides a frame of reference for asking and answering questions, identifying and solving problems, and evaluating the consequences of alternative actions.
• It is essential to be aware that many different perspectives exist and that learning to understand the world from many points of view enhances our knowledge and skills. It is also essential to realize that our perspectives incorporate all life experiences and draw upon knowledge from many fields of inquiry. Therefore, people cannot be neatly boxed into specific categories based on their cultural experiences, ethnic backgrounds, age, gender, or any other life-status characteristic.
• Acquiring, understanding, and using a wide variety of perspectives are essential to becoming a geographically informed person. Such a person knows that each individual has personal points of view based in unique life experiences; accepts the existence of diverse ways of looking at the world; understands how different perspectives develop; is aware that perspectives incorporate values, attitudes, and beliefs; considers a range of perspectives when analyzing, evaluating, and solving a problem; and understands that perspectives are subject to change.
• Although the field of geography includes many different perspectives, geographers depend upon two perspectives in particular to frame their understanding of people and places in the world-the spatial perspective and the ecological perspective.

The Spatial Perspective

• A historical perspective focuses on the temporal dimension of human experience (time and chronology), while geography is concerned with the spatial dimension of human experience (space and place).
• The space of Earth’s surface is the fundamental characteristic underpinning geography. The essential issue ofwhereness-embodied in specific questions such as, “Where is it? Why is it there?” -helps humans contemplate the context of spatial relationships in which the human story is played out.
• Understanding spatial patterns and processes is essential to appreciating how people live on Earth. People who approach knowing and doing with a habit of inquiring about whereness possess a spatial perspective.

The Ecological Perspective

• Earth is composed of living and nonliving elements interacting in complex webs of ecological relationships that occur at multiple levels. Humans are part of the interactive and interdependent relationships in ecosystems and are one among many species that constitute the living part of Earth. Human actions modify physical environments and the viability of ecosystems at local to global scales.
• The survival of humans and other species requires a viable global ecosystem. Understanding Earth as a complex set of interactive living and nonliving elements is fundamental to knowing that human societies depend on diverse small and large ecosystems for food, water, and all other resources. People who regularly inquire about connections and relationships among life forms, ecosystems, and human societies possess an ecological perspective.
• Understanding and using the spatial and ecological perspectives helps geographers understand how to interpret nature and societies on Earth. Viewed together, the geographic perspective overall encompasses an understanding of spatial patterns and processes on Earth and its web of living and nonliving elements interacting in complex webs of relationships within nature and between nature and societies.
• A fully developed geographic perspective, therefore, involves an integration of both spatial and ecological points of view, as well as a consideration of other related perspectives that may be useful in understanding and interpreting the world.

Complementing the Two Geographic Perspectives

• The two primary geographic perspectives, spatial and ecological, are supplemented by many other perspectives that help frame a distinctly geographic way of looking at the world. When used appropriately, these other perspectives expand our understanding of spatial patterns and human-environment interaction.
• Historical, economic, civic, and cultural perspectives may be used collaboratively with geographic perspectives to assist in formulating and informing investigations. A geographic perspective can be integrated with other systemic perspectives and with life-status perspectives to enrich and enlarge understanding of places, regions, and environments.
• It is impossible to list, much less describe, the many types of perspectives people use to develop understandings about their own environments both near and distant from them in time and location. Still, it is useful to consider examples of systemic and life-status perspectives embraced by the geographic viewpoint. Using these perspectives in geography provides the framework for using geographic knowledge and skills to answer questions and solve problems.

Positivism

• Positivism, in Western philosophy, generally, any system that confines itself to the data of experience and excludes a priori or metaphysical speculations. More narrowly, the term designates the thought of the French philosopher Auguste Comte (1798-1857).
• As a philosophical ideology and movement, positivism first assumed its distinctive features in the work of Comte, who also named and systematized the science of sociology. It then developed through several stages known by various names, such as empiriocriticism, logical positivism, and logical empiricism, finally merging, in the mid-20th century, into the already existing tradition known as analytic philosophy.
• The basic affirmations of positivism are (1) that all knowledge regarding matters of fact is based on the “positive” data of experience and (2) that beyond the realm of fact is that of pure logic and pure mathematics.
• Those two disciplines were already recognized by the 18th-century Scottish empiricist and skeptic David Hume as concerned merely with the “relations of ideas,” and, in a later phase of positivism, they were classified as purely formal sciences.
• On the negative and critical side, the positivists became noted for their repudiation of metaphysicsi.e., of speculation regarding the nature of reality that radically goes beyond any possible evidence that could either support or refute such “transcendent” knowledge claims. In its basic ideological posture, positivism is thus worldly, secular, antitheological, and antimetaphysical. Strict adherence to the testimony of observation and experience is the all-important imperative of positivism.
• That imperative was reflected also in the contributions by positivists to ethics and moral philosophy, which were generally utilitarian to the extent that something like “the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people” was their ethical maxim. It is notable, in this connection, that Comte was the founder of a shortlived religion, in which the object of worship was not the deity of the monotheistic faiths but humanity.
• There are distinct anticipations of positivism in ancient philosophy. Although the relationship of Protagoras-a 5th-century-BCE Sophist-for example, to later positivistic thought was only a distant one, there was a much more pronounced similarity in the classical skeptic Sextus Empiricus, who lived at the turn of the 3rd century CE, and in Pierre Bayle, his 17 th-century reviver.
• Moreover, the medieval nominalist William of Ockham had clear affinities with modern positivism. An 18th-century forerunner who had much in common with the positivistic antimetaphysics of the following century was the German thinker Georg Lichtenberg.
• The proximate roots of positivism, however, clearly lie in the French Enlightenment, which stressed the clear light of reason, and in 18th-century British empiricism, particularly that of Hume and of Bishop George Berkeley, which stressed the role of sense experience.
• Comte was influenced specifically by the Enlightenment Encyclopaedists (such as Denis Diderot, Jean d’Alembert, and others) and, especially in his social thinking, was decisively influenced by the founder of French socialism, Claude-Henri, comte de Saint-Simon, whose disciple he had been in his early years and from whom the very designation positivism stems.
• Philosophers do not agree upon what is meant by science and knowledge. This means that there are differente views on the understanding of what science is. There are two traditional views: positivism and humanism
• Positivism is a set of philosophical approaches that seeks to apply scientific principles and methods, drawn from the natural and hard sciences, to social phenomena in order to explain them. So in this way it is logical system that bases knowledge on direct, systematic observation.
• The term positivism designates the thought of the French philosopher Auguste Comte (1798-1857). Comte argued that social research, until the nineteenth century, was speculative, emotive and romantic and that as a result it lacked rigour and analytical reasoning.
• Therefore Comte rejected metaphysical and normative questions as they could not be answered scientifically. Instead he posited to concentrate on facts and truths in order to explain and predict human behaviour.
• Quantitative methods are used to collect data. Researchers use law like statements and verify their statement through empirical observation, the way it is done in the natural, ‘hard’ sciences. Positivism is characterized by the importance of observation, a belief in verification or falsification, the belief that causality is nothing more than repetition, a suspicion of non-observable theoretical entities, a unity of method and the ardent denial of metaphysics.
• There are various forms of positivism. The two most discussed are logical positivism (based on verification) and critical rationalism (based on falsification). Logical positivism was further developed by the Vienna Circle in the 1920’s. In their opinion social laws can be tested by doing measurements with large sample sizes and in this way laws can be verified (Kitchen, 2003). Critical rationalism was developed in response to logical positivism by Karl popper. In his opinion the truth of a law doesn’t depend on the number of verifications but whether it can be falsified.
• In Geography, positivism was introduced in the 1950’s. Before that time Geography had very much been a descriptive science but many argued geography should be more scientific and focus on finding laws to explain processes. The Quantitative revolution (1950’s) changed Geography from an ideographic to a nomothetic science.
• In the 1980’s and 1990’s positivist methodology received more and more criticism. Critics doubted the objectivity of positivism, they did not believe in the purely objective and neutral scientist. Positivism did not take agency and structure into consideration, it assumed social systems were closed which is hardly ever the case, and many doubted whether the natural sciences approach was the appropriate methodology to study complex human relationships.
• Also, by limiting research to observable facts, positivism ignored a lot of geographical questions. Although there’s criticism positivism stays strong within the field human geography today. Many geographers agree that geography aphy is based on scientific principles and laws.

Behaviouralism

• Behaviouralism is an approach in human geography n geography that came to prominence in the human geography of the 1960s and 1970s (Aitken and Valentine, 2006, p. 338). It goes out of the idea that people are the determining factor in the explanation of space. Behaviouralism tries to give an explanation of the spatiallity of human activities. And thereby they use a complex universally applicable model.
• Dissatisfaction with the models and theories developed by the positivists, using the statistical techniques which were based on the ‘economic rationality’ of man led to the development of behavioural approach in geography.
• It was increasingly realized by the geographers that the models propounded and tested with the help of quantitative techniques, provided poor descriptions of geographic reality and man and environment relationship. Consequently, progress towards the development of geographical theory was painfully slow and its predictive powers were weak.
• Theories such as Central Place Theory, based on statistical and mathematical techniques, were found inadequate to explain the spatial organization of society. The economic rationality of decision-making was also criticized as it does not explain the behaviour of floodplain dweller, who does not leave his place despite the risk of flood.
• It was a psychological turn in human geography which emphasized the role of cognitive (subjective) and decision-making variables as mediating the relationship between environment and spatial behaviour. The axiom of ‘economic person’ who always tries to maximize his profit was challenged by Wolpert. In an important paper, Wolpert (1964) showed that, for a sample of Swedish farmers, optimal farming practices were not attainable. He concluded that the farmers were not optimizers but, in Simon’s term, satisficers.

The roots:

• The behavioural approach originally developed in the psycological field of the behaviourism and has later strongly been shaped during the cognitive turn. The rise is moreover a result of the reaction to spatial analysis, which came up in the 1950s (Cloke, Philo and Sadler, 1991, p. 66-67).
• In which mechanstic excesses of experimental psychology was the main focus. Behaviourism is an approach and theory based on the way animals and human beings can learn. In this theory the way people behave is a result of an automatic respons to stimulus from the environment. Through conditioning of stimulus it becomes possible to change behaviour. In this process of behaviour, there is no place for consiousness and perception.
• During the cognitive turn the idea that only the environment determines our behaviour changed. Cognition became an important element in explaining behaviour. It means the way information once it is observed, is organised, structured and incorporated in existing knowledge (Golledge & Timmermans, 1990). Before, the mind was seen as a ‘black box’. And the way people behave was just the outcome of stimulus-response. In the cognitive turn they try to open this ‘black box’.

Behavioural Model:

• On this basis of cognition the behavioural approach is build. It’s not only our environment that determines our behaviour, there are also internal causes that could play a rol in explaining behaviour. They open the ‘black box’ and try to investigate what happens in the mind and recognises that behaviour also depends on for instance someone’s character (Cloke, Philo and Sadler, 1991, p. 66-67).
• So consciousness becomes a source of power, there is selectivity of observation and incorporation of stimulus and there are mental processes in our brain that influence our behaviour. Through these factors people could respond different on the same stimulus and show different types of behaviour.
• Besides the room for endogenous mental activities that can be an influence, the model still, sticks to the ideas of an automatic response on stimulus, be an objective science and the possibillity to predict behaviour.
• The behavioural approach is primarily based on methods of quantification. Behavioural geography has been criticized for its adherence to positivist principles, as well as its unwillingness to explore the role of the unconscious mind, althoug it still underpins many research projects, particularly those based on survey research. (Aitken and Valentine, 2006, p. 338)

The behaviouralist turn in human geography:

• As a consequence there was a behaviouralist turn in human geography. The behaviouralist turn can be described as a critique on the spatial analysis approach. This approach was formalised, abstract and it was focused on aggregate patterns.
• In this approach there was no room for the individual. (Ernste, 2012). The behaviouralist turn can also be seen as a counter approach. The individual human being is represented.The behaviour is explained by consciousness and subjectivity (Ernste, 2012).
• In the 1970’s the behaviouralism was introduced human geography in the United States. Concrete example of behaviouralist turn in the human geography is the introduction of mental maps.

Objectives of Behavioural Approach:

1. To develop models for humanity which were alternative to the spatial location theories developed through quantitative revolution;
2. To define the cognitive (subjective) environment this determines the decision-making process of man;
3. To unfold the spatial dimensions of psychological and social theories of human decisionmaking and behaviour;
4. To explain the spatial dimensions of psychological, social and other theories of human decision-making and behaviour;
5. To change in emphasis from aggregate populations to the disaggregate scale of individuals and small groups;
6. To search for methods other than the mathematical and statistical that could uncover the latent structure in data and decision-making;
7. To emphasize on procession rather than structural explanations of human activity and physical environment;
8. To generate primary data about human behaviour and not to rely heavily on the published data; and
9. To adopt an interdisciplinary approach for theory-building and problemsolving.