A Book of Migrations

This is a very nice book I am reading full of reflections on landscape, identity, migration, belonging and exile. It intertwines these musings in amongst accounts of Solnit's journey along the west coast of Ireland, in a narrative that is almost as winding and unhurried as the country tracks that this landscape itself contains. Strangely, although I was aware that Solnit is a good writer, this is one of those books that has been sat on a shelf for ages, ever since I picked it up cheap at a festival a two or three years ago. I'm glad I finally delved in. What follows, for example, is one intriguing reflection on home and attachment that she offers whilst discussing the rather ordinary and faceless suburb in which she grew up and the wild and beautiful Californian landscape that surrounded it:

All geography is homesickness

Photo by Flickr user ☻mrhappy☻ and made available under Creative Commons

We could say of the study of geography, as the German Romantic philosopher and poet Novalis once said of philosophy, that it embodies a kind of homesickness; "the urge to be at home everywhere in the world". It was observations of an escalating divorce of humans from nature, our original home, which partly accounted for the emergence of Romanticism at the turn of the nineteenth century. In a recent study of the rise of the 'geographical imagination' in this period, Tang's (2008) intriguing thesis is that the origin of modern geography as it arose in the work of Alexander von Humboldt and Carl Ritter can partly be found in the Naturphilosophie and landscape aesthetics of the early German Romantics. This rich body of thought provided much inspiration for these early geographical luminaries but most pertinent for our theme is that in their search for a "deeper, pre-reflexive unity" the Romantics "contributed, knowingly or unknowingly, to the making of the modern geographical imagination that was predicated on the fundamental unity of man and nature." (Tang, 2008, pp.12) Although theories of the close interrelationship between man and the earth can of course be found much earlier than the nineteenth century, it is arguably only in this period that such theories moved substantially beyond a rigidly deterministic stance represented in a somewhat encyclopaedic fashion. With the emergence of geographical science, this interrelationship was now seen as altogether broader and more complex. Indeed, for the most optimistic it suddenly appeared possible to

The future of geography

Photo by Flickr user United Nations Photo and made available under Creative Commons

25 years ago, Ron Johnston made an appeal for the future of geography...

"Geographers have disengaged themselves from studying and promoting the uniqueness of place, and consequently have contributed to a general ignorance of the world as a complex mosaic. This disengagement must be corrected... and geographers must once again take the lead in portraying the complex variability of peoples and environments" (Johnston, 1985)

It seems to me that in academic geography we have seen this 'correction' occur to the extent that the positivist approach to geography seen in the 60's and 70's now seems to have withdrawn into the background. In the last quarter of a century we have seen Marxist, feminist and post-structural approaches, alongside a renewed interest in phenomenology, and many more. These may all have their differences but common to them all is the commitment to recognising the variability of place (even in those cases where place is seen to to be no more than a social construction) and to penetrating the 'real mechanisms', as Johnston put it, as opposed to that tendency that positivist approaches have to generalise and observe only the surface of things.  

But has school geography followed in the wake of this diversification of approaches?