Download The historicity of human geography

The historicity of human
geography
by Felix Driver
In recent years, there have been several calls to
’bring history back in’ to the
of
human
1985:
4-6; Thrift, 1983: 31; Dodgshon, 1987:
study
geography (Taylor,
The
nature
of
this
somewhat
1).
amorphous movement towards selfconsciously
’historical’ modes of understanding requires some consideration, not least
because it implicates more general trends within the social sciences as a whole
(Corrigan and Sayer, 1988). The present demand is not simply that geographers
take the past more seriously (although that would be no bad thing); rather, it
concerns our most fundamental assumptions concerning societies, individuals
and social change. In other words, the call to approach issues historically
frequently represents a wideranging criticism of much existing theory and method
within human geography. It does not require us to champion the virtues of some
form of ’historical geography’ against those of ’contemporary geography’. On the
contrary, the ’call to history’ throws into question the status of the separation of
’historical’ geography from the rest of the discipline. Insofar as this academic
division of labour implies that historical understanding is confined to ’the past’, it
perpetuates what many regard as an unnecessary myth (Gregory, 1986; Harvey,
1985: xiv). In this paper, it will be argued that both the past and the present can
be approached historically and that this requires much more than tracing the
’effects’ of the past ’on’ the present.
The construction of historical knowledge is necessarily a contemporary
project. History writing cannot be completely divorced from the realms of politics
and ideology because, like all forms of knowledge, it is shaped in specific social
circumstances. Historical knowledge in modern Britain has become something of
a cultural battleground for contemporary political and ideological conflict
(Wright, 1985). It is within the marxist tradition, perhaps above all others, that
the significance of such conflicts is most explicitly acknowledged. There,
historical writing is frequently said to highlight the duplicity of received notions of
’progress’ and (therefore) to lay bare the mutability of contemporary social
relations (see, for example, Thompson, 1978: 234-35). Indeed, marxists frequently stress the inescapable historicity of material life in their efforts to
distinguish their own perspective from others within the social sciences. It is
therefore not surprising to find that calls to ’bring history back in’ to the study of
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498
human geography (and the social sciences in general) owe much to the influence
of marxism. The character of the British marxist tradition has been indelibly
influenced by its historians; from their writings, it has gained a sensitivity to the
concrete, a commitment to the realm of lived experience and an avowed
theoretical pluralism (Johnson et al., 1982; White, 1986). Marxism as a whole
has been rather more conceptually promiscuous than some of its present
advocates (including Harvey, 1987) appear to believe; yet for this very reason, its
influence within human geography may prove far more long-lasting than critics
such as Storper (1987) anticipate. Whatever the ultimate fate of marxism in
Britain, its peculiarly ’historical’ character has played a significant part in recent
developments within human geography.
Statements to the effect that ’all geography is historical geography’ or (more
generally) that ’the social sciences are irredemiably historical’ (Darby, 1953: 6;
Giddens, 1981; 24) are more ambiguous than they might at first appear because
the term ’historical’ is far from selfexplanatory. This paper highlights four rather
different senses in which the historical is conceived within human geography.
I
The
legacy
of the past
It is one of the central tenets of conventional regional geography that in order to
understand the present one must trace the influence of ’the past’. Given the
prominence of the physical landscape theme within this tradition, it was perhaps
understandable that human geographers should resort to geomorphological and
biological metaphors in their interpretations of geographical change. The present
landscape, human as well as physical, was frequently represented as an amalgam
of forms laid down in various historical eras; a palimpsest composed of different
features associated with different periods (Whittlesey, 1929; Darby, 1953;
Kearns, 1985: 79-80). This metaphor of ’legacy’ has recently been revived by
Massey in her influential book, Spatial divisions of labour (Massey, 1984).
Massey portrays economic change within contemporary capitalism as a series of
’rounds of investment’ deposited unevenly on the landscape. In each ’round’,
different economic activities and functions are allocated to different regions, thus
endowing them with different capacities to influence or resist the following
’round’. This process of uneven development is said to constitute (rather than
merely reflect) the dynamic of modern capitalism. Massey’s work represents a
fundamental advance over static models of industrial location and regional
economic performance. Her model allows her to insist on the significance of both
the ’logic’ of capitalist mode of production and the constitutive role of its
historical geography. However, the geomorphological metaphor per se permits a
rather limited view of processes of historical change. In this case, for example,
the historical geography of capitalism is only imperfectly compared to a series of
discrete ’rounds of investment’. In reality, capitalism is in constant flux and the
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499
of capitalist societies simply cannot be reduced to the ’effects’ of a
sequence of ’rounds’ (see also Warde, 1985).
There is a further reason for being wary of such naturalistic metaphors to the
extent that they fail to allow for the interpretative dimension of human life. The
argument here is not that such models are wholly without utility in the social
sciences; merely that their jurisdiction is inherently limited. The past does not
bequeath an immutable legacy, if only because history is continually rewritten by
its inheritors. And, as David Lowenthal remarks, ’The contingent and discontinuous facts of the past become intelligible only when woven together as stories’
(Lowenthal, 1985: 218). History is only lived once, but historical ’lessons’ are
learnt and unlearnt a thousand times. Constructions of ’the past’ are perpetually
being fashioned and mobilized as cultural resources, enabling and constraining
individuals and institutions to operate in certain ways. Recent geographical
research on the formation of regional political cultures, attitudes towards the
inner city, views of the landscape and the construction of national cultural
identities highlights the significance of views of tradition for contemporary
ideology and politics (Gilbert, 1987: Burgess, 1984; Matless, 1987; Cosgrove and
Daniels, 1988). What unites these studies is an assumption that ’the past’ is not a
given; it is forever constructed and reconstructed. Peter Taylor’s recent
discussion of voting patterns in American Presidential elections illustrates one
aspect of this point. Through factor analyses of electoral data based on varying
time periods, he shows that theories about trends in voting patterns are
essentially time-dependent; they inevitably reflect the perspective of a particular
’present’ (Taylor, 1988: 13). This is an important argument, since it shows that
history cannot be seen as an absolute datum, a given for all subsequent time. Yet
views of the past are not merely time-dependent (as Taylor observes); they are
also steeped in contemporary ideology and politics. ’Tradition’ is never an
innocent word (Hobsbawm and Ranger, 1983; Wright, 1985). It is in its
recognition of the ideological and political character of historical reference (the
’legacy of tradition’) that the recent geographical work described above
distinguishes itself from more conventional approaches to the historical ’personality’ of places or peoples.
history
II
Evolution: the motor of
history
Taken on its own, the idea of legacy provides only a limited perspective on the
historical process. In the case of Massey’s work, the geological metaphor does
not in itself illuminate the ways in which the ’rules’ of landscape formation
develop over time (Warde, 1985: 198). It is in this context that the strengths of
evolutionary schemes become apparent. In presenting history as a set of
integrated and structured processes, often revolving around a single principle or
a few principles, evolutionary models supply more substantial accounts of the
duration and transformation of geographical patterns. In their most general
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500
have been well represented in western thought and ought not
identified merely with darwinism and its offshoots. As one historian has
written, ’Evolution may be considered as a fairly straightforward metaphysical
theory with a long history which was not so much confirmed by the theory of
natural selection as embarrassed by it’ (Peckham, in Campbell and Livingstone,
1983: 288). Nevertheless, many evolutionary models in modern geography do
owe much to the natural sciences. This again raises the question of comparability
between human societies and natural systems. If these two domains differ
fundamentally, in the sense that people make choices but mountains do not, then
concepts developed in one domain cannot easily be transferred to the other. It is
significant that critics of metalanguages such as systems theory point to their
failure to incorporate the specifically human aspects of human geography.
Indeed, they insist that there is nothing automatic or necessarily progressive
about human history and, therefore, human agency cannot be modelled on the
basis of a language drawn from the physical and biological sciences (Giddens,
1981: 20-24; Gregory, 1980).
Particular varieties of evolutionary theory have attracted considerable attention in human geography. There has recently been marked criticism of developmental ’stage’ models of social and economic change which represent societies or
communities as more or less isolated units containing within themselves the
mechanisms of their own evolution. It is significant that one of the most insistent
critiques of socalled developmentalism in human geography has been pursued by
Peter Taylor, whose call to ’bring history back in’ to the subject is currently one
of the most prominent (Taylor, 1989; Wallerstein, 1979). Taylor advocates
Wallerstein’s world-systems theory as a way of placing local events in their
proper historical and geographical context - ultimately, the global system
(Taylor, 1986). He, like Wallerstein, also rejects the assumption that the
evolution of the world system is necessarily progressive. Yet Taylor does not
abandon all the characteristic features of evolutionism. In particular, worldsystems theory perpetually runs the risk of reducing complex processes of
historical change to an inbuilt (capitalist) logic which increasingly drives the
global system, thus dictating the pattern of local events.
It would be wrong to regard all evolutionary schemes in human geography as
equally susceptible to the pitfalls of evolutionism. There are important differences, for example, between those theories which find their intellectual roots in
darwinism and those iin the neolamarckian tradition; or between those insisting
on the significance of ’immanent tendencies’ within social systems and those
emphasizing the historical and geographical contingencies which influence the
direction of social change (Campbell and Livingstone, 1983; Dodgshon, 1987).
Nevertheless, the majority of evolutionary schemas are vulnerable to the charge
of reification which is frequently made against evolutionism in general. Evolutionary models - particularly those which draw on the formal language of systems
theory - characteristically reify social systems, so obscuring the structuring role of
human action. Most current objections to evolutionism in the social sciences thus
form, such models
to be
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converge upon the issue of human agency, because it is so difficult to reconcile an
emphasis on the ’logic’ of social evolution with a sense of the making of human
geographies.
III
Agency: the making of history
For some geographers, the virtues of an ’historical’ mind and the values of
humanism are intimately linked (Harris, 1978; Gregory, 1981; Daniels, 1985).
Human geography has a profoundly active dimension, as it is directly concerned
with the making of lives and landscapes. This making is necessarily a dynamic
process, involving the action, negotiation and struggle of individuals in a variety
of situations. It is for this reason that the category of experience is of such
significance for both humanistic geography and social history. The current
interest in qualitative research in human geography (Jackson, 1985; Eyles and
Smith, 1988) reflects a widespread conviction that positivist methods have shown
themselves to be inadequate in the handling of the many varieties of individual
experience. Yet the concept of experience is far from selfexplanatory. A concern
with experience and the wider problem of human agency requires from us much
more than a celebration of the creativity of the individual; it demands that we
understand the ways in which human activity is continuously implicated in the
reproduction of social structures and forms. It is in this sense that structuration
theory, in its various guises, is also intrinsically ’historical’, since (following timegeography) it represents human action as a continuous flow of conduct in time
and space (Thrift, 1983; Pred, 1981).
The ’problem’ of human agency which lies at the heart of structuration theory
has, of course, proved easier to identify than to ’solve’. The relationship between
individual actions and broader social structures will always remain problematic
in the context of concrete research, even though Giddens and his associates have
suggested new ways of conceptualizing human agency in abstract terms (Thrift,
1983). For this reason, the question of explanatory form has acquired a new
significance. The grand historical narratives of E.P. Thompson or Fernand
Braudel, for example, are frequently portrayed as exemplary engagements with
the problematic of structuring; the very texts themselves appear to mirror the
’cascade of human history’ (Gregory, 1981: 7). To those who might be daunted,
to say the least, in the face of these models of historical writing, Cole Harris
responds: ’We are not Braudels, but it is his learning we lack, not his method’
(1978: 136). Yet such a clarion call to historical narrative, even if it were
plausible 10 years ago, is no longer adequate as a response to the challenge of
contemporary theoretical advances within human geography. In the light of
compelling developments within literary and aesthetic theory, realist narrative
has for some time been robbed of its old innocence; the ’mirror’ image of
historical writing is, after all, a deceit (albeit one in which readers are willing
victims). The continuities and coherences of the traditional narrative form
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a way which obscures the manner in which historical knowledge is
textually constructed so that ’events seem to narrate themselves’ (Hutcheon,
1988: 91). More recently, within the discourses of postmodernism for example,
historical knowledge itself has been problematized, in the sense that the role of
author, audience, text and context have been highlighted rather than suppressed
(White, 1984). Questions of textual form have also come to occupy a prominent
place within contemporary human geography. Recent work suggests no easy
answers to these questions, and raises problems rather than providing simple
solutions (Daniels, 1985; Gregory, 1989). For the purposes of the present paper,
it is sufficient to observe here that ’historical’ knowledge may take many forms;
realist narrative is only one of them.
operate in
IV
Context: the
grounding of theory
The term ’context’ has become something of a buzz-word within human
geography. Geographers of all persuasions seem able to find solace in ’contextual’ approaches of one kind or another. In the following discussion, the
emphasis is upon ’historical’ context and the ways in which it is called upon within
geographical theory. Two distinct themes are examined: the place of context in
theory and the historical context of theory.
Context in theory: Contemporary geographers frequently criticize theoretical
frameworks which leave no place for the contingencies of context (Thrift, 1983;
Sayer, 1985). In a general sense, this may be seen as a reaction to the
universalizing ambitions of spatial science during the quantitative revolution. It
was with this in mind that Cole Harris insisted that the historical mind is
’contextual, not law finding’ (1978: 126). However, in more recent years, the
term has been used in rather different ways, most notably within debates over
marxist theory. In their editorial preface to Class and space (significantly
subtitled the making of urban society), Thrift and Williams observe that ’classes
do not wax and wane in a geometrical abstraction, but on the ground as concrete
situations of conflict and compromise’ (1987: xiii). It is historical context which
gives the abstract language of class its life and soul, and it is for this reason that
Thrift and Williams regard ’contextual’ research as vital to the development of
plausible theories concerning class and its geography. In this kind of research, the
specificities of context are theorized without being reduced to simple laws or
tendencies. As in theoretical realism (Sayer, 1985), the concrete (which it is the
aim of ’contextual’ research to analyse) is conceived as a synthesis of multiple
determinations. Abstractly conceived processes (such as capital accumulation or
patriarchal social relations) are said to take historically specific forms, their
precise shape depending on the particular contexts in which they are realized.
This argument does not necessarily constitute an assault on marxism, not least
because many of its terms are borrowed directly from Marx (Johnson, 1982).
a
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503
What it does signify is a recognition of the irreducibility of patterns of human
activity to simple laws of motion, abstractly conceived.
b The context of theory: It is frequently argued that knowledge itself is an
historical phenomenon, in the sense that particular theories or concepts take on
meaning only within particular historical contexts. It is now a relatively common
feature of debate within the social sciences to find supposedly universal theories
exposed as products of particular historical moments. This historicizing of
theoretical knowledge does not necessarily disqualify inherited concepts from the
domain of ’present-day’ discourse. It is certainly not a matter of policing the
boundary between those concepts which are modern (and therefore legitimate)
and those which are premodern and ineradicably tainted by their associations
with the past. But it does demand that close attention be given to the ways in
which knowledge is shaped in different historical contexts. One undoubted
inspiration for the historicizing of theoretical knowledge is provided by Karl
Marx, for whom bourgeois political economy represented an historical (and
therefore transitory) enterprise, reflecting a particular set of relations in the
history of the capitalist mode of production. Yet the status of Marx’s own work,
and its relationship to contemporary political economy in particular, has been a
matter of considerable debate. Some modern critics regard Marx’s own writings
as themselves irredeemably steeped in the nineteenth century, both in style and
substance. These complaints raise two issues which should be distinguished. The
first concerns the validity of theoretical claims. It is sometimes argued, for
example, that Marx was ’right’ for the nineteenth century but ’wrong’ for our
own. Such arguments always need qualification. In this case, it becomes
important to distinguish the necessary features of capitalism in general and the
specific features of capitalism in specific contexts. However, it is the second issue,
concerning the genealogy of theoretical claims, which concerns us here. In recent
years, there has been a considerable revival of interest in the history of
geographical knowledge. The merits of a ’contextual’ approach have received
particular attention (Berdoulay, 1981; Livingstone, 1984). Instead of portraying
the history of geographical thought in teleological terms, from the perspective of
the present day, recent historians have attempted to place concepts in their
contemporary intellectual contexts (for example, Livingstone, 1987; Kearns,
1985; Cosgrove, 1985). Adopting this approach allows us to recover conceptual
connections which are often obscured by the anachronistic application of modern
theoretical frameworks. In addition, we need to know far more about the social
and institutional contexts in which geography has been practised. Geographical
knowledge is necessarily a social construction, founded upon the activities of
professional institutions and the adoption of technical practices, as well as the
development of concepts. This does not mean that such knowledge necessarily
serves one and only one set of social interests, or fulfils one and only one social
function. But it does require us to take the social context of geographical
enterprise more seriously. Only when it is acknowledged that the history of
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reflects far more than the simple accumulation of ideas, will the fruits
’contextual’ approach be fully realized.
geography
of
V
a
Conclusion
common to see a theory or a concept labelled ’unhistorical’ in
human
geography; only rarely, however, are the implications of
contemporary
the term actually elucidated. Arguments for more ’historical’ approaches in
human geography reflect a variety of claims, not all of which are mutually
compatible. What can be said with confidence is that ’historical understanding’
involves more than simply the study of the past. Indeed, the call to ’bring history
back in’ implicates arguments which lie at the very heart of contemporary
debates within human geography. For this reason, if no other, any division
between a non-historical human geography, oriented to the present, and an
historical geography oriented to the past can no longer be sustained. As human
geography is profoundly historical (in more senses than have frequently been
acknowledged), thinking historically is no luxury; on the contrary, it is an
essential part of doing human geography.
It is
relatively
Departments of Geography and History, Royal Holloway and Bedford New
College, University of London, UK
’
Acknowledgements
I am very grateful to Roger Lee, Stuart Corbridge and three anonymous referees
for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper, which was first
read at the IBG Annual Conference, Loughborough, in January 1988.
VI
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