FAULT - Maphead - page 35

Without maps, we lose our way, and some people have argued that in its new, less carto-
graphicincarnation,academicgeographyhasdoneexactlythat.“Here'stheleadingjournal
of American academic geography,” says David Helgren, tossing me the latest issue of An-
nals of the Association of American Geographers, whichissittingonhisdiningroomtable,
“and it is boring. It is terrible. You can look at those titles, and they just put you to sleep.”
Iflipthroughit.Iconsidermyselfareasonablyliterateguyandageographybufftoboot.
But I can't really muster up too much enthusiasm for “Cognitively Inspired and Perceptu-
allySalientGraphicDisplaysforEfficientSpatialInferenceMaking”or“ATop-DownAp-
proachtotheStateFactorParadigmforUseinMacroscaleSoilAnalysis.”Oreven“Spaces
of Priority: The Geography of Soviet Housing Construction in Daugavpils, Latvia.” So
many choices—where to begin?
“See? You can't even read it. They invent new words along the way. But that's the par-
agon of world academic geography. I'm proud to say I've published in it twice, which
makes me somewhat of a star. But I was never a good member of the culture. Instead of
the Annals, I refer to it as the 'anals.' I always had a bad attitude toward some of this stuff,
because it wasn't making the world better. It wasn't even making the world more interest-
ing.”
Lay readers tend to be befuddled by academic writing in many subjects, of course, but
geography has an additional image problem: people seek it out expecting to find out about
maps. When parents tell you their child is into geography, what they mean is “she really
likes looking at maps,” not “she's oddly curious about housing construction in Soviet-era
Latvia.” When a news anchor reports that American children are failing geography, all that
means is that they couldn't match place-names to locations on a map. David Helgren's ac-
count of his own media circus in the July 1983 Journal of Geography is careful never to
call his quiz a geography quiz: it's a “place-name quiz.” He never uses the phrase “geo-
graphical illiteracy,” preferring “place-name ignorance.”
This was of course intentional; geographers don't like to see their field of study reduced
to a list of facts that children can master. “If I told you I was a professor of literature, you
wouldn't ask me if I knew how to spell,” says Doug Oetter, a geography professor at Ge-
orgia College & State University. “But people find out I teach geography, and they ask,
'What's the capital of Texas?' “
It'sanunderstandable concern,andonemotivated by,frankly,acenturyofprettycrappy
geography instruction. For many years, when schoolkids were made to study geography,
they were just memorizing long lists of names: all fifty states in alphabetical order, the
world's tallest mountains. “ You think you are teaching him what the world is like; he is
only learning the map,” wrote the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his novel
Émile .“Heistaughtthenamesoftowns,countries,rivers,whichhavenoexistenceforhim
except on the paper before him. I remember seeing a geography somewhere which began
with: 'What is the world?'—'A sphere of cardboard.' That is the child's geography.” Who