Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
explaining human actions: the latter were presumed to fl ow
from the former. It was suggested, for example, that people
living in hot climates tended to be lazy and promiscuous and
that crimes of violence were higher in hotter parts of countries,
such as the 'violent south' in the United States. The theory was
by no means bereft of virtue but it did produce many blind alleys
and unverifi able explanations. Regional geography, or studies
of particular territories on the Earth's surface, initially followed
a similar rather mechanical pathway, but eventually led to a
stronger development of the proper understanding of human
activities, paying more attention to history and culture. Something
of the mindset and relative longevity of these early attempts at
understanding causation in human geography is revealed in the
British geographer K. G. T. Clark's paper published in 1950. He
argued that human geography was making very limited headway
because of the widespread assumption that physical geography
was
the
necessary basis for understanding the human phenomena
in question. Since that time, the pace of change has been
remarkable.
There are several defi ning characteristics of these changes that
included a major move away from the natural environment as
a primary or major source of explanation; an eventual radical
qualifi cation of objective reality as a prime focus of study and
a greater awareness of the fact that different people perceived
and experienced the world in different ways; and a search for
sources of theory and inspiration well outside the traditional
boundaries of human geography. One outcome has been an
increasingly eclectic human geography, vulnerable to the critique
that 'anything goes', described as being in wild pursuit of its
identity and as undergoing a feverish bout of deconstruction and
reconstitution.
Such changes are experienced by many academic disciplines but
seem at times to have reached extremes in human geography.
These changes are often called paradigm shifts, in which one
