Carl Sauer on Culture and Landscape.pdf (2025)

“The apple of my eye”: Carl Sauer and historical geography

Journal of Historical Geography, 1983

Carl Sauer on Culture and Landscape

Edited by WILLIAM M. DENEVAN and KENT MATHEWSON louisiana state university press baton rouge Published by Louisiana State University Press

Carl Sauer, Field Exploration, and the Development of American Geographic Thought

Carl Sauer has received a great deal of attention by those geographers who respect and admire him as one of the great contributors to modern American geography, and by a younger generation who believe that too much emphasis on Sauer and his form of cultural geography has restricted the growth and development of this particular subfield. Rather than focusing on this dichotomy, or debating the relative merits of each side, it is more important to explore the ways in which Sauer developed as a geographer. From such an analysis perhaps meaningful lessons can be derived about where we have been as a discipline and how we may proceed in the future.

Sauer’s Berkeley School Legacy: Foundation for an Emergent Environmental Geography?

Over the past decade the term “environmental geography” has begun to appear as non-specific indicator and descriptor of differing demands and conditions in current disciplinary geography. Perhaps most significantly, it is being used to refer to the site or arena wherein human and physical geography can be conjoined, or ideally, integrated. In turn, this emergent field or sub-disciplinary focus is being both propelled and promoted by a range of factors. At one end of a continuum, there are the ongoing and accelerating series of global physical environmental crises that call attention to geography’s potential utility in addressing these problems in practical ways. At the other end, post-positivist and post-structuralist ways of thinking about geography’s relations to environmental issues and questions has opened up multiple micro-sites of theoretical and practical engagement that question the traditional human-physical geographic dichotomies on both epistemological and ontological grounds. Between these differing incubators, there is the middle range where one might expect an emergent environmental geography to take form. So far, however, neither the shape nor the content are very evident, though a partial outline can be projected. Recently, Bocco (n.d.) has undertaken an extensive review of the literature to map this emergence. What he found after searching literally hundreds of sources in dozens of publications, both in and outside of geography, was that there has been only sporadic reference to environmental geography to date, though several authors viewed it as a potential unifying coverlet or descriptor for overlapping sectors of human and physical geography, and a few wrote as if it were an already established subfield of geography. In this paper I will explore several questions or aspects of environmental geography’s (henceforth EG) emergence. First, I will attempt to sketch the contours of current use of the term “environmental geography.” The purpose of this will be to identify nodes of interest and activity that can be excavated to plot prior trajectories within geography’s disciplinary history. I realize that part of the current emphases on, and interest in, an EG draws on sources and impetuses outside of geography. But, to keep this study within manageable bounds, the confines of disciplinary geography provides a useful perimeter. Thus, I’m more interested in tracing EG’s paths of emergence, rather than pointing to future directions or destinations. Second, I will focus in detail on what I consider to be EG’s principle prior pathway – the so-called “man-land” tradition in human geography. Over the past century, Carl Sauer and his Berkeley school associates represents the largest and perhaps most influential component of this tradition. In turn, I argue that their collective work, the majority of which was done in Latin America, constitutes a coherent exemplar of one variety of EG, though for particular reasons discussed below, assiduously avoiding the term “environmental.” Third, I look at some contemporary work in human-environment geography that has groundings in the older Berkeley work, but reflects engagement with current issues and theoretical directions, and presents possible examples of an already emergent EG. Finally, I call attention to some of the deeper roots of an emergent EG, ones that contemporary environmental geographers should take into account, and perhaps explore.

ANNALS of the Association of American Geographers

1974

THE FOUR TRADITIONS OF GEOGRAPHY

In 1905, one year after professional geography in this country 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. 1 Davis spoke as president of the AAG. He set an example that was followed by more than one president 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. 3 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.

In Geologia Veritas Some Anthropological Remarks

matteo-meschiari.com

My contribution focuses on geology from an epistemological point of view, not as a mere "link" between sciences and humanities, but as the holistic discipline that can produce new enquiry methods and new ethical approaches to physical and cultural landscapes. The perspective sometimes adopted by geologists in resolving the dialectics between perception and representation, processing discontinuous data, learning by errors, and producing theoretical models, is -historically and hermeneutically -a hybrid practice, a transdisciplinarity in action. Using anthropological and ethnographic data, and showing that it is possible to hypothesize a landscape-oriented model of the human mind and cognitive processes, I will argue that modern geology, in a certain way of speaking, is still -and alsoa cosmographic thought about Land. 0.0 Premise: As the title of my contribution suggests, I would like to talk about geology as a model of philosophical and socio-cultural thought. I will do this point by point, each of which could be greatly developed: (1) ethnogeology in non-western societies; (2) protogeology in pre-scientific western culture; (3) geophilosophy in post-modernity. My idea is that (4) these types of geological knowledge have something in common: they are the result of universal cognitive processes. In conclusion I will mention (5) their epistemological and sociological importance for culture in general and modern geology in particular.

Spatial Histories of Radical Geography: North America and Beyond

The AAG Review of Books, 2020

The reinvention of cultural geography

Annals of the Association of American …, 1993

On “The Reinvention of Cultural Geography” by Price and Lewis

Annals of The Association of American Geographers, 1993