A recent press release by the National Research Council stated that “The discipline generically known as “Geography” has become so multidisciplinary that it no longer has a conceptual definition, and the usage of its antiquated descriptive has become both misleading and inadequate in terms of current scientific endeavor.” The article goes on to note that, while Geography was considered the “Queen of Sciences” in the middle ages, that distinction was due solely to the novelty and importance of physical exploration of the planet Earth, a challenge which no longer exists.
Sofia Pollyard, Polo Frasil, and Rolf Aplio, senior researchers for the NRC White Paper on the subject, point out that “Geography, in its attempt to define itself as the study of the Earth as the home of humanity, has become an elephantine and diaphanous umbrella of so-called ‘spatial analysis,’ encompassing everything from Anthropology, Chemistry, and Economics to Geology, Linguistics, and Psychology. Ontologically, the resulting conglomeration of physical and social sciences under the aegis of ‘spatial thinking’ has no cohesive definition on either a quantitative or a qualitative level” (source).
So, what’s to be done? Many universities have simply dropped “Geography” as a curriculum title offering, and others have changed the name of the discipline to incorporate other disciplines such as “Urban Planning” or “Development Studies” or “Geographic Information Systems.” Harvard University dropped Geography as a discipline altogether in 1948 but belatedly gave it lip service by creating “The Center for Geographic Analysis” in 2006, and Oxford University now calls the Discipline “The School of Geography and the Environment.” Even at UCSB, other “traditional” disciplines such as Geology and Psychology have faced similar challenges by renaming and reinventing themselves as the departments of “Earth Science” and “Psychological and Brain Sciences,” respectively.
Should UCSB Geography follow suit, and, if so, what should it be called? The consensus to date is that the Discipline should be split along the lines of Human Geography and Physical Geography, and that the two branches should be renamed “Humanistic Analysis” and “Geographical Physics,” respectively. One notable geographer suggested the term “Geosophy” as an alternative blanket descriptive, though this ontological offering is even less definitive.
Geosophy is a concept introduced to geography by J.K. Wright in 1947. The word is a compound of ‘ge’ (Greek for earth) and ‘sophia’ (Greek for wisdom). Wright defined it thus: Geosophy … is the study of geographical knowledge from any or all points of view. It is to geography what historiography is to history; it deals with the nature and expression of geographical knowledge both past and present—with what Whittlesey has called ‘man’s sense of [terrestrial] space’. Thus it extends far beyond the core area of scientific geographical knowledge or of geographical knowledge as otherwise systematized by geographers. Taking into account the whole peripheral realm, it covers the geographical ideas, both true and false, of all manner of people—not only geographers, but farmers and fishermen, business executives and poets, novelists and painters, Bedouins and Hottentots—and for this reason it necessarily has to do in large degree with subjective conceptions (source).
Article by Bill Norrington
