Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
and new geographies. As European societies were forced to locate themselves
within a global map, they were increasingly confronted with “Others,” with
cultural di
erences so profound that their very existence was bewildering.
European expansions hence accentuated the West's appreciation of di
ff
erence,
and inadvertently and ironically undermined the generalized acceptance of
Euclidean space: “Adventurers and scholars had long sailed about the earth
and dug into its crust to
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find out about other societies, but they always recon-
structed them in the uniform space of the modern Western world, never
imagining that space itself might vary from one society to another as much
as did kinship patterns and puberty rites” (Kern 1983:137). The “voyages of
discovery,” for example, posed severe intellectual challenges in the wake of
Europe's confrontation with people of enormously di
fi
erent languages, reli-
gions, and cultural practices, including the intriguing questions that gave
birth to the human sciences:
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Was human nature everywhere the same? Why were human organiza-
tional systems so di
erent geographically? Geographical encounters with
human diversity threw up these and other questions that centered not
just on human origins and social progress over time but also on distribu-
tions over space. Why were the di
ff
erent peoples encountered located
where they were? Could social and cultural di
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ff
erences, and, notably, phy-
sical di
erences in human types (skin color, hair, beardlessness, stature,
even fertility) be geographically explained? Was there a correlation among
geographical location, physical di
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ff
erence, and moral capacity?
(Withers 2007:139)
Europe's intellectual and discursive responses to these predicaments
included the doctrines of Eurocentrism, Orientalism, and attendant discourses
of racism. As Said (1978) famously argued, Europe's cosmologies portrayed
it as the motor of history, a model for all to follow, ascribing to the West an
inherent superiority and rationality. The Western geographical imagination
was, therefore, part and parcel of the Western project of organizing and con-
quering global space, even if Europe's varied representations of Asia bore
little resemblance to the real thing but instead revealed much about how
Europeans viewed themselves. The European construction of non-Westerners
as irrational Others was a necessary precondition for Europe's discovery of
itself as rational; after all, there can be no identity without di
erence. This
conception was central to the self-identity of European modernity: in dis-
covering their Other, Europeans discovered themselves. “East” and “West”
thus emerge historically at precisely the moment in which they became
mutually entangled. It is vital to stress the degree to which this division was
arbitrary, politically motivated, and contingent rather than some “natural”
cultural divide: as Giddens (1984:168) observes, “if the complex of societies
stretching across Afro-Eurasia were to be divided into two, a cleavage
between Europe as one portion (the 'West') and the rest as the 'East' would
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