1 geography: an introduction the changing practices of human...the changing practices of human 1...

Practisinghuman geography?

Let us begin by imagining two differenthuman geographers, one we will call Carl andthe other Linda. Both these are human geo-graphers who believe that at least part of whathuman geography entails is the actual ‘practis-ing’ of human geography: the practical ‘doing’of it in the sense of leaving the office, thelibrary and the lecture hall for the far less cosy‘real world’ beyond and, in seeking toencounter this world in all its complexity, tofind out new things about the many peoplesand places found there, to make sense of whatmay be going on in the lives of these peoplesand places and, subsequently, to develop waysof representing their findings back to otheraudiences who may not have enjoyed thesame first-hand experience. Both of them areenthralled, albeit sometimes also a littledaunted, by everything that is involved in thispractical activity. Both of them are convincedthere is an important purpose in such activity,both because it enriches their own accountsand because it can produce new ‘knowledge’which will be eye-opening, thought-provokingand perhaps useful to other people and agen-cies (whether these be other academics,students, policy-makers or the wider public).For both of them, too, this practical activity

is something they usually find enjoyable,fun even, and both of them would wish tocommunicate this importance and enjoymentof practising human geography to others.YetCarl and Linda go about things in rather dif-ferent ways, and it is instructive at the outsetof our book to consider something of thesedifferences.

For Carl, the approach is one which doesvery much involve packing his bags, leavinghis home, locking the office door and headingout into the ‘wilds’ of regions probably atsome distance from where he normally livesand works. In so doing he tries, for the mostpart, to forget about all the aspects of his lifeand work tied up with the home and theoffice: to forget about his social and institu-tional status as a respected member of thecommunity and senior academic, to forgetabout his relationships with family, friends andcolleagues, to forget about the books, reportsand newspapers which he has been reading,and to forget about the concerns, troubles,opinions, politics, beliefs and the like whichusually nag at him on a day-to-day basis. Inaddition, he is determined to leave with anopen mind, with as few expectations as pos-sible, and even with no specified questions toask other than some highly generalizednotions about what ought to interest geogra-phers on their travels. Instead, his ambition is

The Changing Practices of HumanGeography: An Introduction1

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to become immersed in a whole new collectionof peoples and places, and to spend timesimply wandering around, gazing upon andparticipating in the scenes of unfamiliarenvironments and landscapes. He mightoccasionally be a little more proactive in chat-ting to people, perhaps farmers in the fields ashe passes, and sometimes he might even countand measure things (counting up the numbersof houses in a settlement or fields of terracedcultivation, measuring the lengths of streets orthe dimensions of fields). From this engage-ment, as Carl might himself say, the regionsvisited begin to ‘get into his bones’: he startsto develop a sense of what the peoples andplaces concerned ‘are all about’, a feel whichis very much intuitive about how everythinghere ‘fits together’ (notably about how theaspects of the natural world shape the rhythmsof its cultural counterpart or overlay), and anunderstanding of how the local environmentswork and of why the local landscapes end uplooking like they do.The impression is almostof a ‘magical’ translation whereby, for Carl,meaningful geographical knowledge aboutthese regions is conjured from simply being inthe places concerned, formulated by him asthe receptive human geographer from activi-ties which are often no more active than astroll, the drawing of a sketch, the taking of aphotograph and the pencilling of a few notes.And the magical translation then continues,perhaps on return to his office, when Carlbegins to convert his thoughts into writtentexts for the edification and education ofothers, and through which his particular feelfor the given peoples and places is laid outeither quite factually or more evocatively.Taken as whole, this is Carl’s practising ofhuman geography.

For Linda, the approach is arguably rathermore complicated. She is much less certainabout being able to manage a clean breakfrom her everyday world as anchored in her

home, her office and her own social roles andresponsibilities, nor from her prior academicreading, and nor from the accumulated bag-gage of assumptions,motivations, commitmentsand formalized intellectual ideas which swirlaround in her head. Moreover, her researchpractice, her fieldwork, may not take herphysically all that far away from the home orher office: she might end up researching peo-ples and places that are almost literally justnext door, or at least located in the estates,shopping centres, business premises and so on,in a nearby city. The separation of everydaylife from the field, the regions under study,which Carl can achieve, is not possible forLinda: indeed, it is also a separation aboutwhich she might be critical. And, whereasCarl aims to go into the field as a kind of‘blank sheet’, Linda’s approach depends onhaving a much more defined research agendain advance, not one that entirely prefiguresher findings but one that will incorporate def-inite research questions based around a num-ber of key issues (perhaps connected to priortheoretical reading). Like Carl, though, shedoes wish to become deeply involved withparticular peoples and particular places(which might be very specific sites such as ‘theCity’, London’s financial centre and its com-ponent buildings, rather than the much largerregions visited by Carl). She does want to getto know the goings-on in these micro-worlds,to become acquainted with many of the indi-viduals found in these worlds and to try ashard as possible to tease out the actions, expe-riences and self-understandings of these indi-viduals in the course of her research. Theimplication is that what she does is very much‘hard graft’ research, since she has to beextremely proactive in deploying specificresearch tools – perhaps questionnaires, butmore likely a mixture of documentary work,interviewing and participant observation (allof which will be covered in our book) – so as

Practising human geography

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This term describes the overall process of investigation which is undertaken on particu-lar objects, issues, problems and so on. To talk of someone conducting research inhuman geography is to say he or she is ‘practising’ or ‘doing’ his or her discipline, butit also carries with it the more specific sense of a sustained ‘course of critical investiga-tion’ (POD, 1969: 703) designed to answer specific research questions through thedeployment of appropriate methods. The ambition is to generate findings which canbe evaluated to provide conclusions, and usually for the whole exercise to be reportedto interested audiences both verbally and in writing. It contains, too, the suggestionthat the exercise will be conducted in a manner critical of its own objectives, achieve-ments and limitations, although we will argue that, by and large, human geographershave been insufficiently self-critical in this respect. The term ‘research’ is now verywidely used in the discipline (e.g. Eyles, 1988a), and its relative absence from earliergeographical writing suggests that geographers prior to c. the 1950s and 1960s wereless attuned to the notion of producing geographical knowledge through premedi-tated and structured procedures.

Box 1.1: Research

to generate a wealth of data which will enableher to arrive at specific interpretations per-taining to the issues (or, to put in another way,at clear answers to her initial research ques-tions).There is perhaps less the magical qual-ity of Carl’s approach, therefore, in that thelabour allowing Linda to complete herresearch is much more evident and probablyrather more bothersome, wearisome and evenupsetting. The labour also continues to beapparent at the writing-up stage in that Lindareckons it vital to include sections explicitlyon the methodology of the research, includingnotes on its pitfalls as well as its advantages,alongside debating at various points the extentto which someone like her – given just whoshe is, her social being and academic status –can ever genuinely find out about, let alonearrive at legitimate conclusions regarding, theissues, peoples and places under study.Taken asa whole, this is Linda’s practising of humangeography: it differs enormously from Carl’s.

You should notice that several terms in thelast paragraph are italicized, and Boxes 1.1–1.4define and expand upon the meanings ofthese terms.They are crucial to the book, and

you should ensure that you understand thembefore proceeding. They are also crucial toour introduction, which will now continueby making Carl and Linda more real.We havetalked about them so far as fictional charactersthrough which we could illustrate differentapproaches to the practising of human geo-graphy, but we should also admit to having inmind two real human geographers, one pastand one living, who are Carl Sauer and LindaMcDowell. Carl Sauer (see Figure 1.1) was ageographer based for virtually all his career inthe Berkeley Department in California, andhis chief interests lay in the ‘cultural history’ oflong-term inter-relationships between whathe termed the ‘natural landscape’ and the ‘cul-tural landscape’, and in teasing out distinctivepatternings of human culture as revealed inthe mosaic of different material landscapesproduced by different human activities (agri-cultural practices, settlement planning, reli-gious propensities).1 For the most part, Sauerdisliked statements about both theory andmethodology (although see Sauer, 1956), andhe tended to regard the practising of humangeography (and indeed of geography more

CHANGING PRACTICES OF HUMAN GEOGRAPHY

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This deceptively simple term – the field – normally refers to the particular locationwhere research is undertaken, which could be a named region, settlement, neigh-bourhood or even a building, although it can also reference what is sometimes calledthe ‘expanded field’ (as accessed in a few studies) comprising many different locationsspread across the world (see also Driver, 2000a; Powell, 2002). We would include here,too, the libraries and archives wherein some researchers consult documentary sources,which means that we are also prepared to speak of historical geographers researching‘in the field’. In addition, we suggest that the field should be taken to include not onlythe material attributes of a location, its topography, buildings, transport links and thelike, but also the people occupying and utilizing these locations (who will often be theresearch subjects of a project). As such, the human geographer’s field is not only a‘physical assignation’, but it is also a thoroughly ‘social terrain’ (Nast, 1994: 56–7), andsome feminist geographers (e.g. Katz, 1994) have extended this reasoning to insist thata clean break should not be seen between the sites of active research and the othersites within the researcher’s world (a claim elaborated at the close of this chapter). Thisbeing said, we do wish to retain some notion of the field as where research is practi-cally undertaken, but we fully agree that fieldwork must now be regarded as muchmore than just a matter of logistics. Instead, fieldwork should be thought of as encom-passing the whole range of human encounters occurring within the uneven social ter-rain of the field, in which case it is marked as much by social ‘work’ as by thepracticalities of getting there, setting up and travelling around.

Box 1.2: Field


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‘Data are the materials from which academic work is built. As such they are ubiquitous.From passenger counts on transport systems to the constructs used in the most abstractdiscussion, data always have a place’ (Lindsay, 1997: 21). Data (in the plural) hencecomprise numberless ‘bits’ of information which can be distilled from the worldaround us and, in this book, we tend to think of data, or perhaps ‘raw data’, as thischaos of information which we come by in our research projects (whether from thephysical locations before us, the words and pictures of documentary sources, the state-ments made in interviews and recorded in transcripts, the observations and anecdotespenned in field diaries, or whatever). As we will argue, a process of constructionnecessarily occurs as these data are extracted from the field through active research,ready for a further process of interpretation designed to ‘make sense’ of these data (tosubstitute their ‘rawness’ with a more finished quality). Various kinds of distinction aremade between different types of data (see also Chapter 7), the most common of whichis that between primary and secondary data. The former is usually taken as data gen-erated by the researcher, while the latter is usually taken as data generated by anotherperson or agency, but we restate this particular distinction in terms of self-constructedand preconstructed data (see also the Preface and below). For us, therefore, primarydata should be taken to include everything which forms a ‘primary’ input from thefield into a researcher’s project (i.e. anything which he or she has not him- or herselfyet interpreted). These data can include highly developed claims made in a govern-ment report or well-thought-out opinions expressed by an interviewee, in effect inter-pretations provided by others, but they remain primary data for us because theresearcher has not yet begun to interpret them. We do not really operate with a notionof secondary data, therefore, except in so far as we might reserve this term for theinterpretations of primary data contained in the scholarly writings of other academics.

Box 1.3: Data

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‘In the narrowest sense, [methodology is] the study or description of the methods orprocedures used in some activity. The word is normally used in a wider sense to includea general investigation of the aims, concepts and principles of reasoning of some dis-cipline’ (Sloman, 1988: 525). On the one hand, then, there are the specific methodswhich a discipline such as human geography deploys in both the construction and theinterpretation phases of research (including such specific techniques as measuring,interviewing, statistical testing and coding). On the other hand, there is the method-ology of a discipline such as human geography that entails the broader reflections anddebates concerning the overall ‘principles of reasoning’ which specify both how ques-tions are to be posed (linking into the concepts of the discipline) and answers are tobe determined (pertaining to how specific methods can be mobilized to provide find-ings which can meaningfully relate back to prior concepts). For some writers (includinggeographers: e.g. Schaefer, 1953; Harvey, 1969) there is little distinction betweenmethodological discussion and what we might term ‘philosophizing’ about the basicspirit and purpose of disciplinary endeavour, but we prefer to regard methodology inthe sense just noted, and hence as a standing back from the details of specific meth-ods in order to see how they might ‘fit together’ and do the job required of them. Inthis sense, our book is most definitely a treatise on methodology.

Box 1.4: Methodology

generally) as something fairly obvious,coming ‘naturally’ to those who happened tobe gifted in this respect. Linda McDowell (seeFigure 1.2) is a geographer presently based atUniversity College London, and her chiefinterests lie in the insights that feminist geo-graphy can bring to studies of ‘gender divisionsof labour’ as these both influence the spatialstructure of the city and enter into the day-to-day gendered routines of paid employment,in the latter connection paying specific atten-tion to senior women employed in the London-based financial sector.2 While McDowell hasnot written extensively about methodology,she has contributed significantly to thedebates currently arising in this connection(see 1988; 1992a; 1999: ch. 9), and it is appar-ent that for her the practising of human geo-graphy is something necessitating considerable‘blood, sweat and tears’.

Our reasons for now fleshing out thehuman geographers who are ‘Carl’ Sauer and‘Linda’ McDowell are various and, at onelevel, simply emerge from a wish to emphasize

that human geography is always produced byindividual, flesh-and-blood nameable peoplewhom you can see and perhaps meet. Theycould be you! But at another level, the differ-ences between ‘Carl’ Sauer and ‘Linda’McDowell are highly relevant to the broaderarguments which we are developing in thisintroductory chapter. Indeed, in what followswe take Sauer and McDowell as exemplars oftwo very different ways of practising humangeography which ‘map’ on to, respectively,older and newer versions of human geo-graphical endeavour that can be identifiedwithin the history of the discipline.We mustbe circumspect about such a mapping: aSauer-esque approach is still very much withus today, partly in the continuing works ofregional synthesis and description carried outby many who regard this as the highest expres-sion of the ‘geographer’s art’ (Hart,1982;Meinig,1983; Lewis, 1985); while a McDowell-esqueapproach does have its historical antecedentsin the use of certain clearly defined methods,such as questionnaires and interviews, long


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before the current eruption of interest inputting such methods at the heart of humangeographical research (see below). Yet, webelieve that there is still some truth in theproposed mapping, and that a profoundchange has occurred in how human geogra-phers envisage and proceed with their practis-ing of academic research: a change which canbe indexed by contrasting the likes of Sauer

and McDowell. By the same token, we wishto resist the impression that older approachesare bad whereas newer approaches are good,an impression readily conveyed by ‘presentist’accounts which project a narrative of thingssteadily improving, progressing even, from aworse state before to a better state now.Thismeans that we still find there is much of valuein an older Sauer-esque orientation, in the


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Figure 1.1 Carl Ortwin Sauer

Source: From Leighley (1963: frontispiece)

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ideal of suspending one’s everyday and acade-mic concerns in the process of becomingimmersed in the worlds of very differentpeoples and places, and in no sense are weseeking to encourage an ‘armchair geography’unaffected by the wonderment, hunches andideas which strike the human geographer inthe field. Yet it would be wrong to deny thatwe are more persuaded by McDowell than weare by Sauer, and that the basic purpose of ourbook is very much inspired by the likes ofMcDowell – complete with her insistence onthe labour, messiness and myriad implicationsof actual research practices, all of which mustbe carefully planned, monitored, evaluatedand perhaps openly reported – than it is bythe more intuitive, magical,‘just let it happen’stance adopted by the likes of Sauer.

A thumbnail historyof practisinghuman geography

Leading from the above, and to frame whatfollows in our book, we now want to chart

something of the history of changes in thepractising of human geography. It is onlyrecently that serious attention has been paidto ‘aspects of disciplinary practice that tend tobe portrayed as mundane or localised, but thatrepresent the very routines of what we do’(Lorimer and Spedding, 2002: 227, emphasisin original). Various authors are now claimingthat we fail to appreciate much about our dis-cipline without recognizing that ‘geographicalknowledge [is] constituted through a range ofembodied practices – practices of travelling,dwelling, seeing, collecting, recording andnarrating’ (Driver, 2000a: 267). They furtherworry that many of our ‘knowledge-producing activities’, old and new, remainlargely absent from how we represent ourresearch, suggesting that ‘our products ofknowledge (our texts and even our emphasesin conversations of recollection) could domore to make available this tension of thepresent tense of the world’ (Dewsbury andNaylor, 2002: 254): meaning precisely thefraughtness of our actual practices as we dothem. It is in the spirit of trying to make morevisible such practices, and in so doing to assessthem critically, that we now turn to ourthumbnail history.

The history relayed here is not intended tobe a comprehensive one, particularly sincemore historiographic research is required toclarify the details of how human geography(and also geography more generally) has beenpractised by different practitioners duringdifferent periods and in different places. (Andnote that active research is required to findout about this history, even if it be researchwhose ‘field’ is the archive and whose ‘data’chiefly comprise the yellowing pages of writings,maps and diagrams produced by past adven-turers, explorers and academic geographers:see Boxes 1.2 and 1.3.) Our history shouldalso be read in conjunction with other worksmore specifically concerned with the historyof geographical inquiry (Cloke et al., 1991;


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Figure 1.2 Linda McDowell

Source: Courtesy of Linda McDowell

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Livingstone, 1992; Peet, 1998). The historythat we tell will be somewhat arbitrarily sep-arated into three different, roughly chrono-logical, phases: we focus chiefly on the first ofthese, for which Sauer is an exemplar in hispreference for immersed observation; andthen on the third of these, for whichMcDowell is an exemplar in her preferencefor what we will term reflexive practice basedas much on listening as on looking.Reference will also be made to a ‘middle’phase in which the practising of humangeography did begin to be problematized,rather than regarded as intuitively given, andhere we will mention the rise of a ‘survey’impulse which ended up being hitched to aparticular (and we will argue narrowly)scientific orientation. For each phase, we willoutline the basic details of what the geogra-phers involved were doing and arguing,before switching to offer some more evalua-tive comments about pluses and minuses thatwe perceive in their practices.

‘Being there’ and‘an eye for country’

Probably the most longstanding traditionwithin the practising of (human) geography,albeit one rarely considered all that explicitly,has been one which makes a virtue out of thegeographer being personally present in agiven place and thereby able to observe itdirectly through his or her own eyes. Thereare two interlocking dimensions to this tradi-tion: the travelling to places within whichthe geographer can become immersed, sur-rounded by the sights, smells and other sensa-tions of the places involved; and then theactual act of observation, the gazing uponthese places and their many components, thepeoples included.

Taking the first dimension of ‘being there’,few would dispute that the very origins of

something called ‘geography’ lie in the earliesttravels which people from particular localitiesbegan to make to visit other places andpeoples further away, and in how such peoplesubsequently returned to convey their ‘geo-graphical’ discoveries of these distant placesand people to their own kinsfolk. H.F. Tozer(1897) duly suggests that the origins of‘ancient geography’ must be found here, andhe stresses the impetus for particular societies –notably Ancient Greece – to ‘trace theincrease of the knowledge which they pos-sessed of various countries – of their outlineand surface, their mountains and rivers, theirproducts and commodities’ (Tozer, 1897: 1–2).Although it is unlikely that the ancient geo-graphers such as Strabo would have reportedentirely on the basis of what they ‘saw takingplace before their eyes’ (Tozer, 1897: 2), theyprobably aimed to witness as much as possibleand then to base the rest of their work on thefirst-hand observations of other travellers.Indeed, it is probably not too fanciful to pro-pose that a fairly direct lineage can be tracedfrom these earliest geographers, many ofwhom must have been intrepid adventurers,through to the vaguely ‘heroic’ figure – almosta kind of ‘Indiana Jones’ character constantlyjourneying to distant lands – which may stillbe associated with the role of the geographerin the popular imagination.

Even in more academic circles such anotion is not entirely absent, most notably inthe powerful motif of the geographer as‘explorer-scientist’ which many (especiallyStoddart, 1986; 1987) see as capturing theessence of academic geography’s origins andcontinuing purpose. Leading from the ‘Ageof Reconnaissance’ (c. 1400–1800) whenvoyages of discovery were attended by a grad-ual recovery of the lost navigational skills ofthe ancients, an academic ‘geographicalscience’ or ‘scientific geography’ began totake shape (Kimble, 1938; Bowen, 1981;


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Livingstone,1992:chs 2 and 3).By the eighteenthand nineteenth centuries, European explorerssuch as Captain Cook were regularly takingscientists who talked of ‘geography’ on theirexcursions, while ‘geographers’ such asHumboldt were themselves mounting remark-able expeditions to the likes of Middle andSouth America. Through the endeavours ofsuch individuals, specifically their attempts ataccurate scientific description, measurementand specimen collection, the field-based pro-duction of geographical knowledge becamemore systematized, rigorous and the herald ofa formally instituted academic discipline(taught in universities and boasting its ownsocieties and journals: see Bowen, 1981;Capel, 1981; Stoddart, 1986: chs 2, 7–10;Livingstone, 1992: chs 4–7). Furthermore,organizations such as Britain’s RGS (RoyalGeographical Society) began to providedetailed guidance to explorer-geographers,offering more than just ‘hints to travellers’ inspecifying procedures of description, mea-surement and mapping which would enablereliable geographical findings to be procuredfrom their sojourns overseas (Driver, 1998;2000b). Many controversies attached to thisphase in geography’s history, however, andconsiderable debate surrounded the extentto which geographical knowledge derivedfrom the explorations could be trusted.Arguments duly raged both then and morerecently over issues such as the value ofwritings by ‘lady-travellers’ (Domosh,1991a; 1991b; Stoddart, 1991) and as to howto regard the bellicose activities of explorerssuch as Stanley who appeared to be moreagents of empire (and European conquest)than exponents of geographical science(Driver, 1991; 1992; Godlewska and Smith,1994). None the less, the undisputed core ofthis growing body of knowledge which wasincreasingly identified as academic geogra-phy remained the simple fact of ‘being

there’, of being present in the places, oftenfar-flung, under examination.

Such a notion has continued to be central toacademic geography, and to give one instanceit is interesting to read Robert Platt’s 1930sespousal of a ‘field approach to regions’ whichwilfully set its face against those in NorthAmerican geography who were then propos-ing some system to the practising of geography(see below). Sparked by a strong feeling thatone should ‘[g]o to the field when the oppor-tunity arises without worrying over lack ofpreparation’ (Platt, 1935: 170), he recounted anexpedition with students to the regions betweenJames Bay and Lake Ontario in Canada whichyielded impressionistic senses of these regionsrather than guaranteed accurate findings. Hethereby produced a species of regional geogra-phy organized as a narrative of the journey,reporting on what had been encountered enroute as a window on phenomena such asforestry and trading patterns, and in so doinghe offered an almost anecdotal evocationclearly spurred by personal experience of thesites and sights encountered:

There were no signs of human occupancenor animals of respectable size. The air wasbright and warm, and the scene pleasantexcept for one item which spoiled anotherwise agreeable environment: swarmsof insects from which we had no means ofescape, a few mosquitos and innumerablevicious flies. (1935: 153–4)

In this context it is appropriate to return toSauer, since he too evidently supposed that‘being there’ was essential for the good geo-grapher, a claim that surfaced in an early piecewhen declaring that ‘less trustworthy’ aresources ‘which have not been scrutinised geo-graphically at first hand’ (1924: 20). HereSauer’s favouring of field-based study, onepredicated on being immersed in the peoplesand places under study, was loudly exhorted,and precisely the same sentiments resurfaced


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In 1945 Charlotte Simpson published a paper entitled ‘A venture in field geography’,summarizing ten years of ‘local geography’ fieldwork undertaken by school childrenand undergraduate students in one particular Gloucestershire village. She stressed therole of ‘observational work’, based on a field walk taking in a ‘viewpoint commandinga … larger area’ (1945: 35), and she outlined her sense of the discipline as ‘an intenselypractical subject, dealing with realities which can be experienced at first hand’ (1945: 43).This paper indexed a whole tradition of running locally based fieldwork for youngergeographers, and the mid-century British geographical literature is awash with notesand guides regarding fieldwork in schools.3 The establishment in 1943 of somethingcalled the Field Studies Council (Jensen, 1946) was important here in promoting theability of ‘reading a landscape’ (Morgan, 1967: 145), initially publishing a series ofcountryside Field Study Books (Ennion, 1949–52) and from 1959 sponsoring a specialistjournal called Field Studies (wherein geographers have often published papers). Whilesomeone like Coleman was seemingly obsessed by the need to make small childrentake long walks in the countryside, other writers had a clear sense akin to that of aSauer or a Wooldridge about why such activity keyed into the core concerns of thediscipline: ‘the landscape is our subject matter, so we must look at it first hand as wellas through the media of books, films and maps … The need is simple and should notbe expressed in quasi-philosophical terms’ (E.M.Y., 1967: 228).

Box 1.5: ‘Field geography’ and ‘local geography’

over 30 years later when he stressed the needto be ‘intimate’ with regions being researched‘in the course of walking, seeing andexchange of observation’ (1956: 296).

We will revisit the point about observationshortly, but for the moment it is revealing toadd that Sauer echoed Platt in proposing amore informal engagement with places freefrom too many of the trappings of formalregional ‘surveying’ (see below):

To some, such see-what-you-can-find field-work is irritating and disorderly since onemay not know beforehand all that one willfind. The more energy goes into recordingpredetermined categories the less likelihoodis there of exploration. I like to think of anyyoung field group as on a journey of discov-ery, not as a surveying party. (1956: 296)

The ideal, he added, was to be in the fieldachieving ‘a peripatetic form of Socraticdialogue about qualities of and in thelandscape’ (Sauer, 1956: 296). It is also

intriguing that, while noting the traditionwhereby the geographer ‘goes forth alone tofar and strange places to become a participantobserver of an unknown land and life’ (1956:296), he insisted as well on ‘the dignity ofstudy in the superficially familiar scene’(1924: 32) much closer to home.This line ofreasoning, which found a wonderfully Britishinflection in the stress on student studies of‘field geography’ and ‘local geography’ (seeBox 1.5), has since led to the emphasis inmany undergraduate geography courses onrunning field classes and field days within animmediate region or country (while overseasfield trips may be seen as inheriting the more‘global’ aspects of claims made by Sauer andhis like).Another result has been papers con-sidering the different forms of locomotionthat geographers might employ when onactive fieldwork, as in Salter’s (1969)neglected note about the value of ‘thebicycle as a field aid’!


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The second dimension mentioned above,to do with observation, is obviously tightlylinked to the theme of ‘being there’. It, too,has certainly been a feature of geographicalinquiry down the ages, given that the wholestress on the witnessing of distant lands whichbecame codified in the RGS’s ‘how toobserve’ field manuals (Driver, 1998; 2000b)hinges upon the expectation that the individ-uals involved – whether lay folk, professionalvoyagers or academic geographers – will beable to see, to look, to gaze upon the peoplesand places visited. Most of the more method-ological remarks which can be found in theearlier literature of academic geographyhence concentrate on the observation issue,and it is telling to recall Platt’s simple state-ment that, once in the field near James Bay,‘we opened our eyes and looked around’(1935: 153). Sauer is again a sure litmus for theprevailing wisdom: ‘Geographic knowledgerests upon disciplined observation and it is abody of inferences drawn from classified andproperly correlated observations … We areconcerned here simply with the relevance ofthe observations and the manner in whichthey are made’ (1924: 19).

We will shortly review Sauer’s reference toboth classification and ‘properly correlatedobservations’, but at this point let us move tosimilar statements in his 1950s paper pivotingaround the remark that the ‘morphologic eye’allows the geographer to evince ‘a sponta-neous and critical attention to form andpattern’ (1956: 290):

The geographic bent rests on seeing andthinking about what is in the landscape,what has technically been called the con-tent of the earth’s surface. By this we donot limit ourselves to what is visually con-spicuous, but we do try to register both ondetail and composition of scene, findingin it questions, confirmations, items orelements that are new and such as aremissing. (1956: 289)

Underlying what I am trying to say is theconviction that geography is first of allknowledge gained by observation, that oneorders by reflection and reinspection thethings one has been looking at, and thatfrom what one has experienced by intimatesight comes comparison and synthesis.(1956: 295–6)

Sauer also described the propensity for geog-raphers ‘to start by observing the near scenes’(1956: 296), before making the above-mentioned comment about going forth ‘tobecome a participant observer of an unknownland and life’ (1956: 296). More recently, andquoting one of the passages above from Sauer,C.L. Salter and P. Meserve have advocatedgeographers compiling ‘life lists’ of their accu-mulated field visits and the like, concluding inthe process that:

To be a real geographer, one must observe.There is great power in observation. For ageographer, there are few skills moreimportant in intellectual growth than thedevelopment of the ability to ‘see what’sthere’. The act sounds so very innocent, yetbeing able to discern patterns on the hori-zons, what components make up the whole,significance in details, and whole from itsparts, represents a critical geographic skill.(1991: 522–3)

We will also return to Salter and Meserve ina moment.

The British literature is full of similarclaims advocating the centrality of observa-tion to the geographer’s craft, notably in thewriting of Sidney Wooldridge, where hecelebrates what he describes as ‘an eye forcountry’, which should be encouraged ingeographers from an early age:

I submit that the object of field teaching, atleast in the elementary stage, is to develop‘an eye for country’ – ie. to build up thepower to read a piece of country. This isdistinct from, though plainly not unrelatedto, ‘map-reading’. The fundamental princi-ple is that the ground not the map is the


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primary document, in the sense in whichhistorians use that term. From this first prin-ciple I pass to a second, that the essence oftraining in geographical fieldwork is thecomparison of the ground with the map,recognising that the latter, at its best, is avery partial and imperfect picture of theground, leaving it as our chief stimulus toobserve the wide range of phenomenawhich the map ignores or at which it barelyhints. (1955: 78–9)

A class of young geographers, taken to aviewpoint in the field, should not be made topore over a map ‘instead of concentrating onthe work of looking and seeing’ (Wooldridge,1955: 79), and the unequivocal message wasthat ‘eye and mind must … be trained byfieldwork of laboratory intensity’ (1955: 82).In arguing this way, Wooldridge also insistedthat it was vital for refined powers of observa-tion to be inculcated in young geographersthrough fieldwork in the ‘little lands’ close tohome, and that the transmission of coregeographical skills ‘lies in the development ofthe laboratory spirit and the careful, indeedminute, study of limited areas’ (1955: 80).Such beliefs clearly urged the value of ‘beingthere’, and provided an even more forcefulassertion than did Sauer of the need forobservation-based fieldwork in the geogra-pher’s immediate locality.These were dominantthemes in mid-century British geography,informing the ‘field’ and ‘local geography’ ini-tiatives which emerged in schools (see Box 1.5),and they also featured in the efforts of some-thing called the ‘Le Play Society’, alongside itsinitially student offshoot called the ‘Geogra-phical Field Group’, which sought to encour-age British professional geographers in theconduct of rigorous fieldwork (Beaver, 1962;Wheeler, 1967). One ambition of the lattersociety was to get geographers out oflibraries, to curtail the practice of many whichinvolved little more than synthesizing factsabout regions from second-hand librarysources, and to foster in them an imitation of

geologists and botanists in achieving ‘thehighest qualities of observation and faithfulrecording in the field’ (Beaver, 1962: 226).Moreover, much was made of the role ofobserving landscapes in the field by an indi-vidual called G.E. Hutchings, who wished toblend into geography the skills of the ‘fieldnaturalist’, and also sought to provide somerigour to geographers in the oft-promotedbut rarely discussed art of landscape drawing(Hutchings, 1949; 1960; 1962: see Box 1.6).

Having laid out something of this highly per-vasive emphasis on ‘being there’ and its associ-ated ‘eye for country’, we should nowacknowledge that we see many problems withsuch a stance on the practising of humangeography (our criticisms would not neces-sarily apply to such a stance on the practisingof physical geography). This being said, weshould emphasize again that in no way wouldwe wish to deny the importance of spendingtime in the field, immersed in the worlds ofparticular peoples and places, and neitherwould we want to underplay the importanceof careful observation. Indeed, at variouspoints in the book we will have much to sayabout such matters, albeit expanding on themin ways which Sauer,Wooldridge and the likeprobably would not recognize.There are sig-nificant criticisms to be made, however, inpart to anticipate the alternative proposals of amore recent turn in the practising of humangeography.

Thinking first about ‘being there’ and,while not wishing to commit us to staying inour armchairs, there is perhaps a certain arro-gance in the assumptions of many older geo-graphers about their supposed right to be ableto travel widely, to visit wherever they wantedand to do their geographical research wher-ever they alighted. Such an arrogance alsoarises when the likes of Stoddart (1986)contemptously dismiss the likes of Wooldridgefor suggesting that much fieldwork should


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G.E. Hutchings (1962: 1) once declared that he sought ‘to relieve the bookishness ofeducation with practice in observation and exploring out of doors’, thereby explaininghis preference for combining geography and natural science through the medium ofboots-on field study. He emphasized the importance of landscape as ‘something thathas to be viewed, whether scientifically or aesthetically’, and insisted that ‘it is verynecessary for the geographer to acquire by training in the field what Prof. Wooldridgecalls the “eye for country’’’ (1949: 34). And again, he stated that geography ‘is a kindof learning arising in the first place from curiosity about the visible and tangible world,and requiring a capacity for looking beyond the superficial appearance of things’(1962: 2). Revealingly, given Hutchings’s clear belief in geography as an observationalpursuit, he published a book on landscape drawing which was directed particularly atthe needs of geographers, in the course of which he gave technical hints about howto produce a sketch which ‘is an honest picture of a piece of country, drawn with closeattention to the form of its parts and the appearance of the various objects in itaccording to the effects of light and perspective’ (1960: 1).

A redrawn field sketch of the Conway Valley and the Afon Llugwy

Source: Hutchings (1960: 18–19)

Box 1.6: Field studies and landscape drawing

take place near to home, asserting instead thatthe wider world should be the geographer’sprovince. For many geographers the beliefthat the world is their ‘oyster’ has never beenquestioned, and the possibility that large por-tions of it are really somebody else’s world isnot one that is often addressed.We are not somuch talking here about the complicationgiven by national borders or legal ‘ownership’of land, although these can both be pertinentin some human geographical research, but,rather,we are talking about how the field – thespecific places to be visited, including thehuman settlements, homes, workplaces andsites of recreation – is somewhere that weshould perhaps be more hesitant to enter than

we have often been in the past. These areplaces where other people do live, striving toscrape a living and to make a life, and thesepeople may pursue all sorts of activities whichthey would want to keep private from theprying intrusions of outsiders (and a host ofconsiderations duly arise about the preserva-tion of cultural difference, the guarding ofspiritual and religious mores, the keepingsecret of illegalities and so on). In addition, theplaces involved might be ones which holddeep meanings for those people who occupyand make use of them, and the presence thereof outsiders, particularly intrusive ones takingphotographs and writing notes, could begreatly resented.


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Objections on these counts to the geogra-pher as intrusive alien are increasingly comingfrom development geographers, persuaded inpart by the criticism that geographers work-ing in Africa, Asia, South America and else-where effectively reproduce the samestructural relationship with ‘native’ peoples ashad arisen in the expeditions of the colonialexplorer-geographers from earlier centuries: arelationship in which power, influence andassumptions of superiority lie with the whitegeographers appropriating knowledge, labourand skills from the peoples of colour in theseplaces (e.g. Sidaway, 1992; Madge, 1993;Powell, 2002).The relationship in question isneatly illustrated in Figure 1.3, which shows awhite explorer-geographer, perhaps Stanley,being carried across a river on the shoulders ofblack bearers. We guess that nothing like thishappens in the research of today’s develop-ment geographers, but is the presence of (say)Anglo-American researchers in the places oftheir black research subjects so completely freeof all the inequalities and embedded assump-tions which are coded into this illustration?

The seeming innocence of just ‘being there’can also be questioned in situations where geo-graphers are researching closer to home, sincethe activity of strolling into (say) a Cornishfishing village or an Alpine skiing resort to com-mence the work of immersed observation is

surely one that many people in these places –whether local villagers or people on holiday –might regard as an unwanted imposition.Moreover, while some human geographershave now started to study marginal groupingssuch as ethnic minorities, children and theelderly,‘Gypsies’ and other travellers and so on,it is certainly not obvious that the researcherarriving in the places of such groupings is agood thing for them. It does comprise anintrusion and an imposition, one that may bedeeply disturbing to the individuals and fami-lies involved, and one which could have direconsequences if reseachers made public certaininformation about their precise locations,movements and place-related activities (a con-cern constantly expressed by David Sibley inhis research on travellers: 1981a;1985).We real-ize that human geographers will want to con-tinue doing engaged work that requires themto be present in the situations of other peoplesand places, and we fully support this importantaspect of research, but we note too that –following the examples of critical developmentgeographers, McDowell, Sibley and manyothers – the apparent rightness of such researchpractice can no longer be straightforwardlyassumed. Rather, the picture must become oneof researchers negotiating access to peoples andtheir places, both by formally liaising with thepeoples concerned and by thinking much


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Figure 1.3 White ‘explorer-geographers’ being carried across a river by black ‘native’bearers

Source: From Brice and Bain (no date, c. 1918: 34)

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more carefully than hitherto about the politicsof ‘being there’ as bound up with the differingorigins, backgrounds, attributes and socialstandings of the human geographer relative tothese peoples and places.We will return to suchaccess issues again in this chapter, and thenagain later in the book.

Turning now to the issue of ‘an eye forcountry’, it should be explained that thereis now a sustained critique of the pervasive‘occularcentricism’ of much conventionalgeographical inquiry. Acknowledging thiscritique forces a thorough-going reappraisalof the obsessive advocacy of observationwhich figures in many of the statementsquoted above.There are various strands of thiscritique, but all of them converge on what isentailed in geographers setting themselves upas privileged observers able to gaze upon –and, more dubiously, to gaze down upon –peoples and places laid out before their eyeslike so many exhibition entries. Several histo-rians of the discipline have begun to examinethe observational technologies which geogra-phers have deployed, highlighting the extentto which visual images of landscapes arethemselves not so much innocent factualrecords as fabricated or ‘staged’ representa-tions. David Livingstone (1992: 130–3)assesses the ‘artistic vision’ which served tocompose many of the observations taken byeighteenth-century explorer-geographers,discussing the tensions which existed for bothscientific illustrators on the voyages andengravers back in Europe when trying tobalance the need for a faithful (empirical)rendition with the prevailing aesthetic tastesof the age:

Banks always felt a tension between the callof taste and that of pictorial reproduction,and so his painters did devote some of theirenergies to romantic topics like grottoes,exotic rituals and so on because thesesuited the then fashionable rococo style.Moreover, even when accurate depictions ofnative peoples … were provided, it just was

very hard to bring an objective account ofthem before the British public. Engraverswould dress up the original paintings tokeep them in line with their own philosophi-cal predilections. (1992: 131, emphasis inoriginal)

Tackling the role of photography in the ‘imag-inative geography’ of the British Empire, andas linked to the production of geographicalknowledge by nineteenth-century Britishexplorer-geographers (many of whom wereassociated with the RGS), James Ryan (1997:17) exposes the limits to the Victorian (and stillprevailing) assumption that photographycomprises ‘a mechanical means of allowingnature to copy herself with total accuracyand intricate exactitude’. Alternatively, Ryanfinds a suite of cultural constructions runningthroughout the photographic observations of‘distant places’ throughout this period, teasingout the ‘symbolic codes’ which structured thecomposing and the framing of the images, andalso hinting at the effects of these images ontheir audiences:

Through various rhetorical and pictorialdevices, from ideas of the picturesque toschemes of scientific classification, and dif-ferent visual themes, from landscape to‘racial types’, photographers representedthe imaginative geographies of Empire.Indeed, as a practice, photography did morethan merely familiarise Victorians withforeign views: it enabled them symbolicallyto travel through, explore and even possessthose spaces. (1997: 214)

The reference here to ‘possessing’ spacesthrough observation will be recalled in amoment, and it also suggests a key claim thatmight be pursued in critical accounts ofwhat is entailed in the much more recent useby geographers of technologies such asremote sensing (with its self-evident linksto military and commercial uses of suchtechnologies).

A second but related dimension of thecritique centres on the more metaphorical sense


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in which many geographers have configuredthe world as an ‘exhibition’ for them to wanderaround, as it were, gazing upon the exhibits(the diverse collections of peoples and placesthere displayed) and making judgementsabout them. Indeed, Derek Gregory (1994;see also Mitchell, 1989) borrows the phrase‘world-as-exhibition’ when tracing thistendency through different phases andapproaches to geographical study, relating it aswell to the ‘cartographic’ impulse which hasled many geographers to conceive of them-selves flying over landscapes of nature andsociety laid out below them. Revealingly,some writers have even drawn connectionshere to the strangely detached sensationwhich arises when looking down from anaeroplane, and (more worryingly) from thebasket of a World War One balloon or thecockpit of a World War Two bomber (Bayliss-Smith and Owens, 1990). Gillian Rose(1993b; 1995), meanwhile, has developed apowerful argument that this version of an aca-demic gaze reflects a distinctively ‘masculinist’way of looking at the world, one predicatedon an assumed mastery which allows theviewer to see into all corners of the world –all of which are reckoned to be available andamenable to the gaze, transparent to the piercingintellectual eye – and one which also carrieswith it an inherent desire to possess, to sub-due, the phenomena under the gaze. Rose’sargument is difficult, hinging on a combiningof psychoanalytic ideas with a historicalaccount of how male intellectuals haveeffectively constructed science (geographyincluded) in their own (presumed) self-image.More simply, though, she outlines the mas-culinist propensities of fieldwork: both theheroic encounter of rugged individuals with achallenging field which is coded into the‘being there’ approach, notably of someonelike Stoddart (1986), and the associated figureof the male researcher observing, describing,

measuring and thereby capturing this field forhimself (see also Sparke, 1996; Powell, 2002:esp. 263).

Central to the objections raised by Gregory,Rose and others to the prominence of obser-vation is the suggestion that the faculty ofsight should not be accorded such a masterstatus in geographical work, whether in actualpractices or in how we conceptualize thewider projects of the discipline. One implica-tion is that other senses through which theworld is knowable by us, notably hearing andmore particularly still the practice of listeningclosely to what people say, should be broughtmore fully into our practice as human geogra-phers (see also Rodaway, 1994).4 A secondimplication is that we should resist thetoo glib deployment of terms saturated withassumptions about observation and sight inour thinking about the discipline, and in theprocess to resist a general orientation whichconceives of the discipline as trying to maketransparently visible all facets of the subject-matters under study.This is not the occasionto expand further upon such lines of criti-cism, nor upon their implications, althoughwe hope that readers will be able to appreci-ate how the third approach to practisinghuman geography described below does takethem on board.

Surveys andscientific detachment

It should not be thought that the practising ofhuman geography prior to recent years hasonly been about immersed observation, how-ever, and it is actually the case that efforts toprovide a more systematic basis for geographi-cal research – one going beyond intuitivefieldwork to develop a definite technique of‘survey’ – did figure in the history of thediscipline earlier in the century. Sauer himselfwas instrumental in starting this ball rolling


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This distinction has become rather sedimented in the thinking of many geographers,perhaps to the point where it becomes unhelpful and overloaded with misunder-standing and prejudice (see Philo et al., 1998; see also Demeritt and Dyer, 2002).Qualitative data are data that reveal the ‘qualities’ of certain phenomena, events andaspects of the world under study, chiefly through the medium of verbal descriptionswhich try to convey in words what are the characteristics of those data. These can bethe words of the researcher, describing a given people and place in his or her fielddiary, or they can be the words found in a planning document, a historical report, aninterview transcript or whatever (in which case the words are in effect themselves thequalitative data). Sometimes these data can be visual, as in the appearance of a land-scape observed in the field (see Box 1.6), or as in paintings, photographs, videos andfilms. Quantitative data are data that express the ‘quantities’ of those phenomena,events and aspects of the world amenable to being counted, measured and therebygiven numerical values, and the suggestion is that things which are so amenable willtend to be ones which are immediately tangible, distinguishable and hence readilycounted (1, 2, 3, …) or measured (an area of 200 m2; a population of 20 000 people livethere; a per capita earning of £100 000). It should be underlined that such counts andmeasurements are still only descriptions of the things concerned, albeit descriptionswhich are arguably more accurate and certain than are qualitative attributions (chieflybecause they allow a common standard of comparing different items of data, and alsothe possibility of repeating this form of describing data: i.e. other researchers wouldcount the same number of things or measure the same areas, population levels, percapita incomes, etc.). The use of quantitative data is hence commonly reckoned to bemore objective (allowing researchers to deal with data in an accurate, certain andtherefore unbiased manner), while qualitative data are commonly reckoned to bemore subjective (leaving researchers prone to injecting too much of their own ‘biases’in their dealings with data). As should be evident from much of this chapter, and of therest of the book, we do not agree with such a conclusion because it forgets about thecountless other issues which militate against the possibility of complete objectivity(which means that being quantitative is no convincing guarantee of objectivity).

Box 1.7: Qualitative and quantitative

with his 1924 paper (see also Jones and Sauer,1915) which was entitled ‘The survey methodin geography and its objectives’, in the courseof which he urged geographers to developregimented and replicable methods of geo-graphical inquiry. The similarities betweenthis paper and his later writings notwithstand-ing, there are also key differences whichreflect the enthusiasm of the younger Sauerfor developing systematic principles of areallybased ‘geographic survey’ incorporating not

only qualitative materials but also quantitativeinformation, the latter being derived fromboth ‘statistical tables of state and nationalagencies’ (Sauer, 1924: 20) and ‘local statisticalarchives’ (1924: 30). (See Box 1.7 for a pre-liminary note on the distinction betweenqualitative and quantiative data: this distinc-tion, and its limitations, will be explored fur-ther in later chapters, especially Chapter 8.) Itis perhaps surprising to hear the youngerSauer’s own words in this regard:


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The purpose … is not to make fieldworkmechanical, but to increase its precision.The choice of things to be observed mustremain a matter of individual judgement asto the significant relationship between areaand population. Out of such field measure-ments will come the … ideal of statisticalcoefficients. From them the geographer willdetermine ultimately the extent to whichthe theory of mathematical correlation is tobe introduced into geography. (1924: 31)

It is telling that Sauer linked this version offield survey to the possibility of a more statis-tically minded geography, one which by the1960s was regarded as the province of a fullyscientific discipline, and we will return to thislinkage shortly. The thrust of his reasoninghere was echoed and extended a year later inD.H. Davis’s (1926: esp. 102–3) rejection of‘superficial observations’ when calling insteadfor geographers to evolve a ‘mechanical qual-ity’ to their ‘system of recording essential dataaccurately’, one suitable for ‘establishing cor-relations’, which would then lead ‘geography …to be entitled to rank as a science’. Similar dis-cussions of survey as a scientific methodologyfor geographers can be found elsewhere inthe early- to mid-century literature, and it wasthese discussions, with their thinly veiled criti-cism of those who favoured a more impres-sionistic field style, that prompted both Platt’s(1935) reactions and certain reservations fromthe older Sauer (1956), as already mentioned.

More practically, several papers (e.g. Jones,1931; 1934) appeared in the North Americanliterature which began to itemize the kinds ofthings which needed to be recorded in acomprehensive field-based geographical sur-vey, the forms and functions of land uses to bemapped, as well as specifying the specific sur-vey methods which might be employed tocreate this record (field walks and drive-bys,complete with their counting and mapping ofphenomena, along with collecting statisticaldata from ‘local depositories’).A review of ‘fieldtechniques’ available for use by geographers in

their surveys of areal units was provided byC.M. Davis (1954), and a feel for the groundcovered by this remarkably thorough earlystatement of survey methodology can begained from these claims in the paper’s open-ing paragraph:

There are four sources of factual informa-tion: 1) documents such as maps, groundphotographs, statistics and written materials;2) air photographs; 3) direct observation;and 4) interviews with informants. Andthere are four ways of analysing factualinformation for the purpose of identifyingand measuring areal, functional or causalrelations, each requiring the use of symbols:1) analysis by expository methods, usingword symbols; 2) analysis by statistical meth-ods, using mathematical symbols; 3) analysisby cartographic methods, using map sym-bols; and 4) analysis by photo-interpretationmethods, using photo-interpretation keys.(1954: 497)

Davis began to suggest a distinction betweenthe data to be collected (constructed in ourterms: see below) and the procedures throughwhich those data can be analysed (interpretedin our terms), and he also indicated that thedata collected could be qualitative or quanti-tative, with implications for the sorts of ana-lytical techniques to be deployed on thesedata from the field. Equivalent practical state-ments also appeared in the British literature,many of which effectively hovered betweenthe celebration of an unsystematized ‘beingthere’ stance and providing systematic guid-ance about what should be found out inlocally based field surveys (see Box 1.5).Theemerging ‘field studies’ movement whichhooked into academic geography in variousways (e.g. Hutchings, 1962; Morgan, 1967;Yates and Robertson, 1968) articulated avision not far from the survey orientation ofsome North American geographers, and theGeographical Field Group (descended fromthe Le Play Society) was expressly committedto ensuring that ‘[o]bservation, direct inquiryand documentation, including statistical


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material, all contribute to the data-collectingprocess’ (Edwards, 1970: 314; and note thatthis group conducted a ‘series of “regionalsurvey” type excursions’ described inWheeler, 1967: 188). In an edited collectionon the geography of Greater London, A.E.Smailes described ‘urban survey’ as thedetailed recording of information about townsites from field-based observation (‘reconnais-sance survey’) gleaned from ‘traversing thestreets’ (1964: 221).Additionally, in a manoeuvreparalleling the survey cataloguing recom-mended somewhat earlier in North Americaby Wellington Jones (1931; 1934), Smailesproposed a specific ‘urban survey notation’which produced a pseudo-quantitative formof data logging ready, presumably, for moresophisticated statistical analysis (see Figure 1.4).Whatever the precise details of the survey sys-tems developed by these scholars, however,what we would immediately emphasize istheir list-like, box-filling, counting and map-ping ambitions: ones reflecting the primaryambition of the geographers concerned toaccumulate data through which they couldcharacterize the areas and sub-areas understudy.

It is true that there were some qualitativeelements here, as in the significance occasion-ally placed on talking to field ‘informants’ (seeChapter 5), but the basic trajectory of thesurvey approach was none the less towards aself-proclaimed scientific orientation. Theprime ambition was to conduct systematicsurveys which would produce comprehensiveand reliable quantitative data representativeof areal units (whether these be regions aslarge say, the Paris Basin or as small as, say,Glasgow’s West End). There was also thebeginning of suggestions about being able toconduct statistical analyses on these quantita-tive data, perhaps by using standard statisticaltests to establish the strength of correlationsbetween different sets of data (i.e. to showthat certain areas are marked by high values

on different variables, say income levels,occupancy rates and car ownership).We havealready noted D.H. Davis’s (1926) explicitlinking of such surveys to a version of geo-graphy which could claim the name of‘science’, while James Anderson (1961) playedup the role of survey work in the context ofland-use classifications as enhanced by ‘statis-tical probability sampling procedures’ and theuse of computers. In such a vision surveywork would contribute to providing the dataon spatial patterns, chiefly data which mightthen be deployed in the process known as‘regionalization’, the supposedly scientificdelimitation of regions or areas fundamentallydifferent from one another, and then in aprocess of classifying different types of regionsaccording to certain distinctive clusters ofattributes (e.g. Philbrick, 1957; Grigg, 1965;1967; see also Chapter 7).

There is a complicated story to tell in thisregard, but at bottom a continuity can bedetected from the quantitative impulse in thissurvey work and the rise of geography as spa-tial science from the 1950s onwards (seeLivingstone, 1992: chs 8 and 9; see alsoBarnes,2001a).Spatial science,as is well known,entailed a fusion of quantitative techniques


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Roof material

PeriodWall material

Function No. of floors

Detail of function

N U M ERAT O R

DENO MIN ATOR

Figure 1.4 A.E. Smailes’s pseudo-scientific‘urban survey’ notation

Source: From Smailes (1964: Figure 41, 204)

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with a form of locational analysis aiming toexplicate the basic ‘spatial laws’ governing theorganization of phenomena (human behav-iour and productions included) across theearth’s surface.5 In Chapter 8 we say muchmore about enumeration in geography, butfor the moment it is sufficient to emphasize theextent to which quantification became thefavoured way of going about things in geogra-phy as spatial science, linked into a particularmodel of how statistical tests (and then moreformalized mathematical modelling) could allaid in the explanation of revealed spatial pat-terns (and see also Chapter 9).

All manner of claims were made for thesuperior merits of spatial science, completewith its quantitative sophistication, and at thenub of such claims was the assertion that aproperly ‘scientific’ approach to research wasone which overcame the potential ‘bias’ ofresearchers in ensuring the completelydetached (and hence certain, accurate andtrustworthy) cast of the research undertaken.In particular, the use of numerical values asmeasures of quantity, distance, position andthe like was reckoned to provide an objectiverepresentation of what was actually happeningin the ‘real world’, in contradistinction to themuch less reliable data obtained throughthe subjective understandings integral to boththe intuitive stance of a Sauer or the conver-sational elements of some survey work. (SeeBox 1.7 for a summary of the tangled debatesabout objectivity and subjectivity.) Such werethe assumed advantages of a spatial-scientificpractising of human geography, one whichgrew out of the above-mentioned surveytradition, but which came to embrace amuch wider set of procedural, technical andexplanatory goals. As a coda, and anticipatingsome of our arguments in Chapters 7 and 8,this version of human geography continuestoday, notably in the development and appli-cation of geographical information systems(GIS) and various forms of geocomputation.

Arguably, there is a level of sophisticationabout these more recent approaches to quan-titative geography that was absent in the earlydays of spatial science.

Having laid out something of this scientificand survey approach to practising humangeography, we should acknowledge that heretoo we see many drawbacks with what wasbeing proposed. Many of these drawbackswere bound up with the overall philosophicaldifficulties attaching to spatial science, parti-cularly as have been rehearsed throughexposing the somewhat narrow ‘positivist’philosophical assumptions which can be said –certainly in retrospect (Gregory, D., 1978a;Hill, 1981; Barnes, 2001a; 2001b) – to haveframed this scientific turn within the disci-pline. At various points in our book we willengage with these problems, demonstratingthe ways in which they arguably hamper thepractising of human geography, although – aswith the ‘being there’ and ‘eye for country’stances – we are not denying that someaspects of the scientific and quantitative turnsstill have much to offer in the doing of humangeography (and in a similar vein, see Sayer,1984; Philo et al., 1998). None the less, we areconcerned at the extent to which method-ological treatises in human geography con-tinue to be dominated by an exposition ofspatial-scientific techniques (e.g. Lindsay,1997; Robinson, 1998): a reduction ofmethodology to matters of technique.6

Similarly,we are concerned about a rather nar-row sense of what ‘geographical enumeration’can entail which fails to look much beyondstandard parametric tests. Such considerationsremain pertinent to the practising of humangeography, to be sure, but what concerns us isthe lack of serious engagement with moreconceptual questions about the limitations ofwhat a self-professed scientific and quantitativehuman geography can and cannot achieve.Such questions are raised throughout this


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book, even if not always being convenientlylabelled as such (to reiterate: Chapters 7–9 alldebate these questions in one way or another).

What we will specifically underline now,since it is so relevant to the third phase in thehistory being recounted, is that we are deeplysuspicious of the claims about the detachmentof the researcher which are celebrated in theliteratures of scientific, quantitative andsurvey-based human geography. We are per-turbed by the determined erasure of the ‘I’,the researching individual or group, whichserves (in our minds) only to occlude the reali-ties of the active research progress throughwhich flesh-and-blood geographers such as‘Carl’ and ‘Linda’ actually get their feet, heartsand minds muddied in the places and peopleunder study. Spatial science, along with bothits antecedents and its derivatives, thus closesoff the possibility of debating the practising ofhuman geography in the fashion of this book.As just remarked, spatial scientists tend toreduce methodology to technique, beingbothered about the correct running of anappropriate statistical test but less about any-thing entailed in the deriving of the data onwhich the test is conducted (unless relevant todeciding on which particular test is suitable),nor about anything following conceptually,politically, ethically or otherwise from choos-ing to tackle the data statistically rather thanin some other way.There is a further and pos-sibly simpler objection to raise in relation tothe appearance of spatial science, moreover, inthat it evidently led many human geographersto lose interest in field-based primary data,given that they rapidly became far moreinterested in the enticing array of statistical-mathematical techniques available (and beingrefined) for analysing secondary data (see Box 1.3).As Robert Rundstrom and Martin Kenzerneatly put it:

Although quantitative human geographerswere primarily concerned with abstract theorydevelopment [specifying the spatial laws of

location theory], many of the early spatialanalysis papers … were based on fieldwork.The pattern changed by the middle of the1970s. Continuing progress in spatial analy-sis was marked by theoretical developmentsrelying on pre-existing data. Primary databecame superfluous. Ackerman (1965)already considered fieldwork a mere chore,only occasionally necessary to validate theanalytic, theoretical work of spatial science.James and Mather (1977) noted that somehuman geographers questioned whetherfieldwork was still a necessary part of thediscipline. (1989: 296)

Instead of going out into the field to collectdata, many spatial-scientific human geogra-phers started to spend the bulk of their timesitting in their offices and laboratories, punch-ing in data found in library sources (e.g.Census surveys), reworking their own olderdata or even inventing data sets, as a preludeto the real work (for them) of using computerfacilities to effect statistical-mathematicalinterrogations, simulations and model-building.To put it another way, ‘economic geography[and human geography more widely] movedfrom a field-based, craft form of inquiry to adesk-bound technical one in which placeswere often analysed from afar’ (Barnes, 2001b:553). The practising dimension of theirinquiries therefore collapsed into the tech-niques, reinforcing our previous argument,with a loss of concern for nuances of data, thecomposition of the field or the overallresearch process. In the terms of this book (seethe Preface), this meant a loss of interest in theconstruction of data in preference for focusing,albeit very narrowly, on the interpretation of(quantitative) data. It is an exaggeration, butperhaps not too great a one, to state that thisversion of human geographical inquiry ceasedto practise human geography except in themost minimal of senses. Neither a Sauer nor aMcDowell would find much here to satisfythem, and the same is probably true ofmany human geographers today who con-tinue to use numerical data and sophisticated


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statistical-mathematical procedures but alwayswith an alertness to the origins, meanings andlimits of the numbers and their manipulation(e.g. Dorling, 1998).

‘Being reflexive’and ‘listening to voices’

From about 1970 onwards, many humangeographers, unhappy about both olderapproaches to the discipline and the spatial-scientific version, began to seek for new pos-sibilities.There were numerous bases to theirquarrel with how human geography wasbeing practised at the time, centring chieflyon the limited conception of how humanbeings entered into the ‘making’ of their ownworlds, but also on the almost completeabsence of what might be termed a ‘political’vision of why research was undertaken in thefirst place (who was it supposed to benefit andwhy?). While somewhat oversimplifying thepicture, it can be argued that these twinobjections to previous approaches, and mostespecially to spatial science, fed into tworather different alternative varieties of humangeography – to be referred to here respec-tively as ‘humanistic geography’ and ‘radicalgeography’ (see Cloke et al., 1991;Peet, 1998) –which both demanded new ways of practisinghuman geography. Indeed, their emergenceand subsequent elaboration, particularly whenmixed in with the insights from ‘feministgeography’ from the mid-1980s onwards, haveeffectively called forward a sensibility almostwholly unheard of before in the discipline. Inshort, this sensibility can be described as‘being reflexive’, which means that humangeographers are now called upon to reflectmuch more explicitly upon their own researchendeavours than hitherto, giving careful con-sideration to precisely what it is that they aredoing in their own projects: the conceptual,practical, political and ethical implicationsarising for these projects, for themselves, for

the people and places under study, and perhapseven for society more generally.

We would argue that, while not often giventhis credit, humanistic geography was decisivein prompting the developments leading to thenew sensibility just mentioned. Humanisticgeography was an umbrella term which arosein the 1970s (esp. Entrikin, 1976;Tuan, 1976a;Ley and Samuels, 1978) to denote a range ofperspectives highly critical of how mosthuman geographers, but most obviously spa-tial scientists, tended to conceptualize humanbeings. Extending an earlier ‘behavioural’ turnin the discipline and drawing upon variousso-called ‘philosophies of meaning’ (Ley,1981a; for summary details, see Cloke et al.,1991: ch. 3), the humanistic geographers com-plained bitterly about the ‘pallid’ view ofhuman beings present in existing scholarship(Ley, 1980): one that portrayed human beingsas little more than mere objects or at bestrobots with no interior sense of themselves,no intentions, no hopes or fears and no cre-ative role to play in shaping their surround-ings. Instead, so they insisted, the disciplineneeded to be dramatically reforged around avery different conception of humanity, avision which recognized humans in all theirflawed ambiguities as experiencing, perceiv-ing, feeling, thinking and acting beings. Sucha vision sought to enlarge the ‘space’ forhuman beings within the discipline, to grantthem a measure of dignity, to ‘people’ humangeography; in fact, to foster a new emphasison the human part of human geography.Theintellectual terrain here was uneven, but oneover-riding outcome leading from thisexpanded conception of the human beingwas the need to find ways of accessing thehuman qualities, the sheer humanness, nowreckoned to be central to disciplinary con-cerns. Spurred by a changed appreciation ofwhat is important in the world under study –people and their inner lives, rather than spatialpatterns and supposed spatial laws – the


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humanistic geographers had to consider freshresearch practices, novel stances before theirsubject-matters and unfamiliar methods forgetting close to people and their everydayapprehensions, understandings, routines andactivities. It meant starting to use methodswhich provided some structure to the tasks ofmeeting with people, perhaps interacting withthem on an everyday basis, perhaps talkingwith them in depth and certainly ‘listening totheir voices’. It meant rediscovering the ques-tionnairing and interviewing techniques ofthe earlier survey tradition but, more signifi-cantly, it meant bringing into human geo-graphical research the ‘ethnographic’ practicesof in-depth interviewing, participant observa-tion and the excavation of meaning whichwere much more the province of other acad-emics such as anthropologists and sociologists.It meant returning to a measure of immersedobservation in the vein of Sauer, but it alsomeant a much more sustained encounter withthe peoples in the places visited. It requiredthe thoroughly involved people-centred field-work which led the likes of John Eyles(1985), Michael Godkin (1980) and GrahamRowles (1978a; 1978b; 1980) to spend days,weeks and months in the company of indi-viduals, witnessing the grain of their livedworlds, discussing with them the meaningsattached to places, environments and land-scapes comprising the spatial contexts of thesesmall worlds.

A key figure in all this was undoubtedlyDavid Ley, whose famous exploration ofinner-city Philadelphia, including an attemptto recover the existential meanings of placeand ‘turf ’ held by black street gangs, blendedthe ideas of a humanistic geographer, theinterests of a social geographer and the prac-tices of an ‘urban ethnographer’ (Ley, 1974).Following in part the example of ethnogra-phers associated with the Chicago School ofurban sociology (Jackson, 1985), but growingas well from his response to ‘the relentless barrage

of everyday pressures in the inner city’ (Ley,1988: 132), Ley created his own distinctiveversion of what he later came to term ‘inter-pret(at)ive social research’:

With limited experience to fall back on,aside from the intuition gained froma British field tradition [presumablyWooldridge’s ‘eye for country’] and knowl-edge derived from a number of ethnogra-phies, devising a method was in part amatter of learning on the job. The principalmethod was participant observation. Theperiod from January to July was set out asthe length of continuous residence in theneighbourhood … It is essential to establisha systematic procedure for recording fielddata in any ethnographic research, and mypractice was to write up field notes eachevening, ranging in size from a paragraphto (occasionally) 1000 words [see alsoChapter 6]. These notes were records ofimpressions, events and conversations,sometimes reconstructed from brief phrasesor sentences scribbled down during thecourse of the day. (1988: 130)

The ‘unstructured, everyday encounters’which generated this data were then supple-mented with more formal face-to-face ‘ques-tionnaire interviews’, some taping of publicmeetings and some reading of ‘agency dataand documents from police, planning andschool board authorities’, as well as extensivefield observation on phenomena such as ‘graf-fiti, vandalised cars or abandoned properties’(Ley, 1988: 130–1).The result was an eclecticmix of data sources and methods of both datacollection (construction) and analysis (interpreta-tion), containing both quantitative and quali-tative moments, and it broke new ground increating a model for practising human geo-graphy which has since been widely emulated.The majority of later researchers would prob-ably not call themselves humanistic geogra-phers, preferring instead labels such as socialor cultural geographer (see Jackson andSmith, 1984, or the various studies reported inJackson, 1989; Anderson and Gale, 1992), butthe basic procedures deployed by them did


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arrive in the discipline with the humanisticexperiments of someone like Ley (and notethat participant observation was explicitlyclaimed as a prime method for humanisticgeography by Smith, S.J., 1981; 1984; see alsoJackson, 1983). It might be added that the ver-sion of inquiry being progressively refined inthis vein has since also been termed ‘interpre-tative geography’ (Eyles, 1988b) or ‘interpre-tative human geography’ (Smith, D.M.,1988b), and several fine examples of practicehave been collected together in books editedby John Eyles and David Smith (1988) andmore recently by Melanie Limb and ClaireDwyer (2001).

Ley has remarked that ‘[e]thical issues arefar more conspicuous in ethnographicresearch because of the close relationshipbetween the researcher and the community’(1988: 132), thereby indicating that the newforms of research initiated by humanisticgeography have forced into the open ques-tions about the researcher’s personal involve-ment with a project, people and place. Whatare the ‘biases’ of the researcher? How dothese influence how he or she conducts theresearch, how he or she represents the peoplesand places studied in a write-up, and theinformal ‘contract’ which he or she strikes upwith a community about what is done, saidand finally given back? All these questionsstart to concern the researcher in a mannerwhich had never been the case for previousgenerations of geographers, and certainly notfor spatial scientists, and the ‘ethics and values’of doing geography thus become a subject fordebate as never before (Mitchell and Draper,1983a; 1983b). On an operational level, anextreme instance is reported in Rowles’s(1978b: esp. 179) study of the geographicalexperiences of elderly people, and entailedhim sitting at the deathbed of one of his agedrespondents, Stan. Here, as the only ‘friend’whom Stan had left in the world, the onlyperson remaining who cared enough to sit in

that hospital room, Rowles found himselfurging Stan not to die because the researchwas still incomplete. But he hated himself forthinking in this way: was this all that it hadbeen about, getting the research done, andhow hollow, how intrusive but meaninglesshad been his ‘befriending’ of Stan for the pur-poses of academic research? The ethics – theturmoil, stress and guilt – attendant upon sucha moment were light-years away from any-thing experienced by, say, spatial scientistsworking on impersonal numerical data sets atthe computer terminal.This is not to suggestthat there are any simple guidelines for howresearchers should pick their way through theethical minefield which can confront them inresearch of this character. As Ley (1988: 133)acknowledges, ‘[t]here are no set pieces inanswering those questions, and indeedanswers will vary according to the circum-stances of the community’, but what can beinsisted is that in specific studies ‘the questionsmust be asked and answered in good faith’.This is not to demand that researchers alwaysput down in writing their thoughts, worriesand responses on this count, but it is to pro-pose that they should be able to offer somerelevant reflections if ever challenged to do so.

The researcher’s presence as an ‘I’, a creativeand reflexive figure in the research processwho is not erased as a non-issue (as might aSauer) or cloaked behind a veil of claimedobjectivity (as might a spatial scientist), istherefore as much a part of this approach tohuman geography as are theories, data,methodsand so on. On the still deeper level of theresearcher’s underlying interests, convictionsand motivations, furthermore, the appearanceof humanistic geography was also crucial inforegrounding such values in a fashion rarelyif ever seen before in the discipline. To putthings another way, humanistic geographyprompted attention not just to the subjectivityof the researched but also to the subjectivityof the researcher. Writing in a determinedly


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scientific manifesto for human geography,Ronald Abler et al. (1971: 24) had declaredthat the scientific ‘way of life’ should be ‘total’,and that it should be completely divorcedfrom how scientists might ‘let their hair downemotionally and theologically … during theiroff hours’.The latter aspects of their lives, ofwho they are and of what they feel or believe,should hence be roped off from their efforts asprofessional human geographers.

But writing only three years later, AnneButtimer, a humanistic geographer who wasalso then in religious orders, advocated some-thing entirely different when insisting thatsuch a compartmentalization of the humangeographer’s personal and professional faces ismischievous because it just cannot happen,since personal values can never be systemati-cally erased from the framing, conduct andwrite-up of research. And for Buttimer suchan erasure should never be attempted anyway,being unnecessarily restrictive because itdenies many of the well-springs of genuinehuman concern and creativity, and alsodepriving us of crucial grounds for sensibleethical judgement. Science alone cannot pro-vide those grounds, so she argued, and thedangers of a science without ethics nowbecome increasingly obvious. Her alternativeproposal was quite clear:

Each reader [each human geographer]should endeavour to explore the valueswhich guide/influence his [or her] mode ofbeing in the world, for it is the contentionof this paper that one’s geography cannotbe considered a separate domain of one’slife but is influenced by many personal, cul-tural and political ‘values’ surrounding thatwork. (1974: 5)

Buttimer duly reflected upon many of thevalues which shaped her own geography,pointing out that they were ‘strongly influ-enced by Christian, and especially existentialthought’ (1974: 5), and she thereby counteredAbler et al.’s (1971: 24) pronouncement that‘God … is not permitted’ as a ‘concept’

informing human geographical research. Shesupposed that all human geographers wouldentertain different, idiosyncratic assemblagesof values, making generalizations difficult, butshe also recognized the importance of supra-individual intellectual, ‘cultural and political’values which can themselves become the focusof careful ‘sociological’ scrutiny (1974: Part II).While many have disagreed with the specificsof her arguments here (e.g. see the four com-mentaries appended to Buttimer, 1974), ourview is that her insistence on human geogra-phers being reflexive about the diverse valuesshaping their own work is one which contin-ues to resonate loudly with more recent effortsat practising human geography.

Alongside humanistic geography, a self-professed radical geography emerged duringthe 1970s (Peet, 1977; 1978), anchored ini-tially in the pages of Antipode: A RadicalJournal of Geography, and subsequently diffusingto become a wide-ranging critical windowon social and spatial inequalities of manydifferent shades. Taking as its focus environ-mental and social problems with a clear geo-graphical expression, from the devastation ofrainforests to poverty, deprivation and dis-advantage, a radical-geographical perspectivearose which sought to expose the systematicstructuring of injustice which leads to a worldfragmented into spaces of plenty (occupied by‘the haves’) and spaces of deficit (occupied bythe ‘have-nots’). Starting with approacheswhich did little more than document, tableand map this polarity at various scales fromthe international to the intra-urban, radicalgeographers gradually evolved a conceptualbasis for explaining these inequalities whichincluded (sometimes contradictory) inputsfrom welfare economics, anarchist theory anddifferent strands of Marxism.7 Some of theresearch undertaken in this vein retained asurvey feel, albeit utilizing survey techniquesto expose inequalities in phenomena suchas income levels, housing conditions and


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ill-health indicators (this was particularly trueof something called ‘welfare geography’:Smith, D.M., 1977; 1979; 1988b). Indeed,much of the research continued in a fashionnot wholly different from the more scientificand quantitative cast of previous work, even ifputting the data and techniques to a radicaluse critical of the social status quo, and even iffuelled by a commitment to radical (evenrevolutionary) social change wholly absentfrom the more ‘establishment’, often policy-orientated studies of previous generations,notably of spatial scientists.We will return toexamine this commitment presently.

It may be claimed, then, that radical geogra-phy did not usher in as dramatic a change inthe routine practices of human geographers asdid humanistic geography. Its immediatemethodological implications were not sogreat, even if conceptually and politically itwas probably more unnerving to establishedmodes of inquiry. None the less, mentionmight be made of the ‘advocacy geography’experiment associated with William Bunge’sattempt to shift the orbit of professionalgeographical research out of the universitycampus – together with the geographersthemselves, and also their students – and intothe streets of the inner city, chiefly the blackinner city of Detroit, where the aims ofstudies should be directed by the articulatedneeds of poor inner-city residents themselves(see Colenutt, 1971; Horvarth, 1971; Bunge,1971; 1975; Merrifield, 1995). Rather thanoffering yet another calibration of a ‘centralplace model’, for instance, advocacy geogra-phers should be uncovering the geographiesof slum processes, traffic accidents affectingchildren, diseases of babies and the like, andacting as advocates able to demonstrate thecontours of problems to city authorities whomight be sufficiently convinced by academicevidence to respond positively. Failing that, thegeographers involved should be themselvesinvolved in grassroots projects like building a

children’s playground. This species of radicalgeography thus urged an action-basedresearch, predicated on full involvement in aresearch activity designed to achieve highlypractical ends: a policy-orientated researchfrom below,on behalf of those who might withjustification be referred to as ‘the oppressed’.

Intriguingly, such research did have things incommon with humanistic geography in that itdepended upon a sustained participation inthe lives and struggles of certain inner-citycommunities – Amaral and Wisner (1970)spoke of ‘participant immersion’ instead of aless involved ‘participant observation’ – andalso because it forced researchers to deal withconcrete ethical issues rooted in their respon-sibilities towards the relatively powerlesspeople whom they were supposed to be serving.David Campbell expressly reflected upon ‘rolerelationships in advocacy geography’, underlin-ing the virtues of a thoroughly democraticpractice resistant to the ‘elitism’ common inmost other work by human geographers, andstriving instead to empower the researchsubjects who should ‘become problematisers oftheir [own] situations and … active creators oftheir [own] environment’ (1974:103).Moreover,and echoing still further the ethical charge ofhumanistic geography:

Constant self-criticism and re-evaluation inan attitude of humility and respect forothers is … a vital and healthy componentof advocacy activity … ‘Humanising socialchange’ [to borrow a phrase from Harvey] isdependent … upon the ability of advocatesand academics to create humanising rela-tionships with those whom they work …Radical science must be based upon a per-sonal commitment to genuine communica-tion with others in an attitude of mutualrespect. (Campbell, 1974: 104–5)

The radical, politicized overtones of theseremarks must have been anathema to themore ‘conservative’ geographers of the era,but they are ones with which many humangeographers today would have great sympathy,


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and the notion of democratic, empoweringand respectful research practice will certainlyreappear at various points in the chapters thatfollow.

More generally, the rise of radical geogra-phy, particularly in a guise which turned toMarxist critiques of the inequalities integral toa globalizing capitalist economic order, carriedwith it explicit commitments to a coherentpolitical programme: one which oscillatedbetween a reformist line, supposing that theexisting state of society can be improvedthrough the standard democratic process, anda revolutionary call for complete social trans-formation (at its crudest a call for the workersto seize control of the ‘means of production’from the capitalists). David Harvey (1973) ledthe way when self-consciously shifting from abasically reformist line, associated with a wel-fare position, to an assertively revolutionaryline convinced that the only way to create true‘social justice in the city’ would require anoverturning of capitalist forms of urbanism.This latter way forward would also necessitatean input from, if not necessarily a Leninistintellectual vanguard, then certainly a corpusof Marxist academics, geographers included,prepared to undertake the theoretical andpractical work of planning revolutionarychange. Radical geographers ever since havebeen wrestling with this tension betweenreformist and revolutionary ambitions, as isclear from recent debates played out in thepages of the journal Society and Space (Blomley,1994; Chouinard, 1994; Tickell, 1995), and afurther feature of debate has been the seeminggulf between radical theorizing in the acad-emy and radical activism on the streets (seealso Routledge, 1996; Farrow et al., 1997;Kitchin and Hubbard, 1999).

The principal point for us here, though, isthat – just as Buttimer insisted on humanisticgeographers incorporating explicit reflectionson their basic values – radical geographershave often entertained some self-interrogation

about political values, objectives andinvolvements. Perhaps the most rigorousformulations in this respect have emergedfrom Jürgen Habermas (esp. 1972), a famousGerman Marxist intellectual, who has pro-posed the refining of an explicitly criticalscience or theory fitted to achieve ‘the realisationof a[n] … emancipatory interest’ (Gregory, D.,1994: 107, emphasis in original) which wouldfree all peoples of the world from the yoke of(capitalist) oppression. Habermas’s visionexplains how all varieties of intellectuallabour are determined by ‘cognitive interests’which turn their practices of knowledge pro-duction to particular ends, usually ‘technical’or ‘practical’ ones functional to the main-tenance of the social status quo (and an exten-sion of his argument would include allvarieties of human geography, including bothspatial science and humanistic geography, asessentially ‘reactionary’ in this sense: seeGregory, D., 1978a). Following from such arecognition, however, the argument is that itshould then be possible to frame a new ver-sion of intellectual endeavour predicated onan emancipatory cognitive interest whichwould be at once critical (of an inherentlyunjust world) and self-critical (constantly eval-uating the extent to which the academic’sown practices are emancipatory in both over-all design and specific interventions). Whilerarely presented in such obviously Habermasianterms, except in Gregory’s (1978a) statementsabout ‘committed explanation in geography’,it is arguably the case that this notion of beingsimultaneously critical and self-critical hasenergized the efforts of most radical geogra-phers over the last two decades or so.We willpick up on the arguments about the politicsof human geography, returning to some of thematerials just outlined, in our final chapter(Chapter 12).

It would be possible to say more here aboutthe burgeoning twists and turns in humangeography which have, more recently, built


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upon the twin pillars of humanistic and radicalgeography to forge further dimensions forpractising human geography. But for the sakeof brevity, and yet to cover what have beenpivotal new claims relevant to our practisingtheme, it will suffice now to mention certainaspects of the interlocking contributionsmade by both ‘feminist geography’ and ‘post-colonial geography’. Feminist geographyinitially arose to provide an explicit examina-tion of the specific spatial experiences, con-straints and worlds of women, that ‘other half ’of humanity almost never considered by pre-vious generations of male geographers(Tivers, 1978), and it quickly developed as amore fundamental critique of how unequalgender relations shape countless sociospatialstructures endemic to a diversity of ‘patri-archal’ human societies past and present(McDowell, 1983; Foord and Gregson, 1986;WGSG, 1984; 1997).

In the process questions of how to do fem-inist geography inevitably came to the fore,particularly in the matter of thinking abouthow research could be carried out whichwould enable the voices of women to beheard, notably when recounting their experi-ences of an everyday male superiority, harass-ment and even abuse accepted by many ofthem as sadly ‘natural’. The task also becameone of finding methods which would besufficiently sensitive to tease out often verysubtle dimensions to how women’s perceptionand use of space differs from that of men,whether in terms of a phenomenon like the‘gender division of urban space’ (McDowell,1983) or something like women’s fear ofpublic spaces such as parks and subways(Valentine, 1989). It has been argued bothwithin (esp. Rose, 1993b) and beyond thediscipline that conventional models of academicinquiry, with their scientific and quantitativeemphases, display an inherent ‘masculinism’which militates against the kind of groundedresearch which is probably essential in this

context. The debates are tricky, but we canallow McDowell to be our guide in a passagewhich also signals the character of the specificmethods that feminist academics, geographersincluded, have tended to favour in their ownresearch:

Certain feminists … not only reject thequantitative, ‘scientific’ approach toresearch, but argue that it is specifically apatriarchal model as it denies the signifi-cance of women’s experience of oppression,classifies their concerns as private ratherthan shared, and embodies the values oftraditional views of women’s and men’sexpected positions in society. They haveargued that feminist research should recog-nise and challenge the everyday experiencesof women. In order to excavate women’sexperiences, feminist methods should valuesubjectivity, personal involvement, the qual-itative and unquantifiable, complexity anduniqueness, and an awareness of the con-text within which the specific [issue] underinvestigation takes place. (1988: 166–7)

The onus shifts towards being a highly person-alized research encounter, in which the mostqualitative of methods such as in-depth inter-viewing and the taking of ‘oral histories’ of ‘lifestories’ (see Chapter 5) are pursued in a man-ner which necessarily entails a sustainedexchange – potentially one dealing with emo-tional materials – wherein the personalities ofboth researcher and researched cannot be arbi-trarily suspended. For both parties involved,such an exchange is potentially draining, aswell as being fraught with the dangers atten-dant upon the release of emotions, oftenresentments and angers, which will usually dofar more to illuminate the realities of a givenissue than could any other data source.8 Wemay be stressing the more extreme end of suchfeminist research here, and we acknowledge(and hope) that research encounters will not allbe of this intensity, but we do wish to under-score just how much the researcher as a wholeperson – as an embodied individual with his orher own worries and frailties9 – enters into


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the feminist research frame.We have thereforetravelled a very long way from the mostlyfact-finding questions asked of, say, local farmersby a Sauer-esque geographer strolling oneevening through a pleasant valley.

Feminist geographers do not only deploysuch intensive methods, of course, asMcDowell (1988) makes clear and as Hodgeet al. (1995) also insist when assessing the pos-sible use of quantitative techniques by femi-nists conducting geographical research.Yet wewill stick with this picture of intense inter-subjective research encounters – ones demand-ing an intimate meeting of two or moresubjectivities: that of the researcher and thoseof the researched (see also Cook and Crang,1995; see Chapter 10) – since such a pictureis helpful in clarifying an additional set ofclaims. And what will also be useful in thisrespect is briefly to acknowledge the influ-ence of postcolonial geography.10 If feministgeography confronts the axis of gender,problematizing its constitution as well as itseffects, postcolonial geography confronts theaxis of ‘race’, problematizing the inequalitiesbetween white people and people of colourwhich feature today in so many differentsituations under study by geographers (fromthe relations between ‘developed’ and ‘lessdeveloped’ countries to the circumstances ofracial minorities in predominantly whiteWestern cities). Given their acute sensitivityto axes of social difference, it is feminist andpostcolonial geographers who have donemost to reflect upon the problematic powerrelations which can arise in the researchencounter, most starkly when men areresearching their ‘other’ (women) or whenwhite people are researching their ‘other’(people of colour), but also in many otherways when differences of class, education, sex-uality, age, (dis)ability and so on potentiallydrive a wedge between the world of theresearcher and that of the researched. Thereare many thorny considerations here, but we

would suggest that the consensus emergingfrom recent texts such as Jackson (1993), Nastet al. (1994) and Cook and Crang (1995) isone insisting upon a ‘reflexive notion ofknowledge’ (McDowell, 1992a: 399), the cruxof which necessitates researchers reflectingcritically upon their own ‘position(ality)’ –their own backgrounds, attributes and values,as bound up with their own personal geogra-phies (the sites, localities and networks oftheir own biographies) – in relation to the‘position(alitie)s’ of those peoples and placesunder study. Such a stance on the doing ofqualitative human geography underlinesmuch of the recent Limb and Dwyer (2001)collection, where four chapters explicitlydebate matters of ‘positionality’.11 We try tovisualize this emerging model of intersectingpositions in Figure 1.5, the implication beingthat the researcher should aim to clarify his orher own position in a wider societal hierarchy ofpower, status and influence, thereby ascertainingthe different sorts of relationships – completewith the many differing roles, responsibilitiesand possible limitations to what can and shouldbe ‘exposed’ about the researched – which maysurface in a given research project.

From such a model it becomes apparent whyit is impossible for a geographer like McDowellto leave behind her personal world in the samefashion as can a Sauer: this is not only becauseshe has personal duties which she cannot forsakeas easily as can most male academics,but it is alsobecause she firmly believes that it is wrong inresearch terms to do so, since who she is (all thebaggage of her own position) is so very perti-nent to what she can achieve in her research. Itshapes her gaining of access to particularresearch situations rather than others; it shapesher ability (and willingness) to build ‘researchalliances’of empathy, trust and dialogue betweenher and the people whom she researches (seealso Pile, 1991); it shapes what findings she canobtain, the ways in which she will interpretthese findings,and her sense of what is and is not


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appropriate to reveal in final write-ups of pro-jects undertaken.More particularly, it means thateverything which she does in this regard cannothelp but be influenced by her feminist experi-ences, values and politics, but she is reflexivelyaware of these feminist influences on herresearch and is self-critical about what theyenable to be seen and what they might alsoocclude. She is thereby arguably more objectiveabout the determinants of her research practicesthan are the likes of a Sauer or a spatial scien-tist.12 While recognizing drawbacks with a visu-alization such as that provided in Figure 1.5, wedo regard it as one which usefully pulls together

many of the themes which first surfaced in bothhumanistic and radical geography, but whichhave now been recast most effectively in thelight of both feminist and postcolonial geogra-phy.This visualization is also one which readersmight find useful to revisit at various points inthe chapters which follow.

We should acknowledge that some humangeographers may be unhappy about our nar-rative above, particularly given that we attachpriority to ‘being reflexive’ and ‘listening tovoices’ as the key recent developments in thepractising of human geography, and in so


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*Conventional, if contestable, senses of the relative positions of the individuals concerned in a status hierarchy

• personal• cultural• political• professional, etc. ...

• gender• race• class• age• education, etc. ...

• suburban home• university• libraries• theatres• foreign holidays

‘Positions’

Values

‘Old boys network’,power, status,money, respect (?)...

A judgeWhat are hisvalues, ‘positions’ and‘geographies’?...

Soup kitchen andshelters and parks;no power, no status,no money, norespect?...

A ‘bag-lady’What are hervalues, ‘positions’ and‘geographies’ ?...

‘Geographies’ (indicative)

RESEARCHER

RESEARCHED

‘Inferior’*

‘Superior’*

Figure 1.5 Our visualization of the encounter between the differing‘position(alitie)s’ of researcher and researched (the ‘research subjects’)

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doing put less store by more technicalinnovations such as GIS or computationalapproaches. None the less, and as should beapparent from what we said above, we do feelthat the latter innovations – while undoubt-edly of great utility in certain projects – areless significant as contributions to a genuinelyhuman geography than is the emergence of aself-critical reflexivity which begins ‘toquestion … what we know,how we know it andwhat difference this makes both to the type ofresearch that we do and who participates in itwith us as either colleagues or researchsubjects’ (McDowell, 1992a: 399–400). Thisbeing said, we appreciate that there are stillcriticisms to be levelled at a reflexive humangeography which claims to be good at listen-ing to the voices of others, and which therebysets itself up as (striving to be) both ethicallysound and politically empowering in relationto (less privileged) peoples and places understudy. In particular, Clive Barnett (1997) hassuggested that there may be problems withthe notion of ‘giving voice’ to others, in thatthere are many others in the world for whomsilence may actually be a preferred, even moreempowering, strategy. Similarly, Gillian Rose(1997a) has suggested that there are problemswith the impression of ‘transparent reflexivity’which is conveyed by the debate about posi-tion(ality) – the assumption that researcherscan somehow lay bare the many dimensionswhich comprise their position(ality) –because, as a psychoanalytic perspectiveindicates, many of the impulses, desires andpassions which feed through into our academicwork are ultimately lodged in realms of theunconscious inaccessible to conscious reflec-tion. Additionally, Rose criticizes notions ofempowerment which operate with a ‘map’ ofpower such as that implied in Figure 1.5,given that it hints at the possibility ofresearchers being able to redistribute stores ofpower from position to position (from thepowerful to the powerless, from themselves to

the people under study).As she rightly pointsout, the notion of power here is perhaps toosimplistic, in that power arguably operatesmore relationally than both the map andclaims about redistribution imply, as indeedhas been claimed in various recent texts onthe messy geographies of power (e.g. Hannah,1997; Sharp et al., 2000). The arguments byBarnett and Rose are very much set withinthe horizons of thinking previously rehearsedin this subsection, however, and they comprisea gloss (albeit an important gloss) on recentdebates about practising rather than the criticaldemolitions with which we concluded thetwo previous subsections of the chapter.

Conclusion

In this chapter we have introduced many ofthe themes relevant to the practising ofhuman geography, initially by contrasting twoextreme examples of how different humangeographers (‘Carl’ and ‘Linda’) go about theresearch process, and then by providing amore sustained review of changing ways inwhich human geography has been practisedover the years.While wishing to suggest thatthere are still things of value to take from thefirst two approaches assessed here, in that theirrespective attributes of immersed observationand systematic rigour do contain much ofmerit, we are more firmly persuaded by theclaims integral to the ‘being reflexive’ and ‘lis-tening to voices’ orientation. Indeed, thislatter orientation is now highlighting all mannerof complications with the practising ofhuman geography, countless issues whichwere either ignored in the past or were notcalled into play because different (arguablysimpler) research questions were being asked,and in the course of this chapter we havesought gradually to draw out these complica-tions for closer inspection. They are all oneswhich feature at various points in the book.


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To conclude this chapter, though, we willprovide a summary listing of the major themesgrowing out of the above narrative. In terms ofthe construction of data, we have shown how pastgenerations of human geographers have tendedto regard the construction of data as a fairlyunproblematic matter, something that ‘simplyhappens’ in the field or occurs as packets of sta-tistics are sent to you in the post. Instead, it isnow argued that much more attention reallydoes need to be paid to precisely how thesedata are come by. Although this has not reallybeen a theme above, consideration must begiven to the composition of preconstructed data, asderived from sources other than theresearcher’s own primary research (seeChapters 2–4). Rather more has been said hereabout self-constructed data, those that have beenpieced together through the researcher’s ownendeavours (see Chapters 5 and 6), and henceabout the precise methods which need to bedeployed. Rather than simply ‘being there’,having an intuitive ‘eye for country’, conduct-ing list-like surveys or seeking out suitablelarge-scale numerical data sets, it has becomevital to ponder more carefully than hithertothe researcher’s methods. In particular, thenecessity for formalizing and extending qualita-tive methods has become increasingly evidentwith the heightened concern for what peopleunder study think, feel and do in their everydaylives. Questionnaires and, more especially, inter-views and participant observation have thusbecome popular, with humanistic and feministgeographers being at the forefront of this sus-tained qualitative turn. Moreover, and particu-larly as these geographers have made plain, theresearcher’s own underlying values and ethicalviews cannot be discounted as an influence onhow data are constructed,notably in the contextof the uneven power relations running between(the positions of ) the researcher and the resear-ched. The many implications of this researchrelationship can never again be regarded asunimportant.

In terms of the interpretation of data, we haveshown how past generations of human geo-graphers have tended to regard the interpretationof data as equally unproblematic, somethingthat involves gifted intuition or batteries ofquantitative analysis. Instead, it is argued thata broader span of attention is now required tothe overall interpretation of data, demandingmuch more than just the learning and refine-ment of new statistical-mathematical procedures.No longer is it assumed self-evident howresearchers move from data to conclusions,with the whole terrain of interpretationbecoming something requiring consideration,and different possibilities for interpretationneeding to be explicitly weighed up byresearchers (see Chapters 7–11). Moreover,and particularly as the humanistic, radical andfeminist geographers have made plain, theresearcher’s own underlying values and politi-cal commitments cannot be discounted as aninfluence on how data are interpreted, and theclear message from such geographers is thatwe should be fully aware of – and prepared toreflect explicitly on – how the whole cast ofour research is shaped by such values andcommitments (and see also our Chapter 12).

Notes

1 Some of Sauer’s key writings are collected inLeighley (1963).

2 Key writings by McDowell include (1983),(1989), (1999); and, for the women in theCity work, see McDowell and Court (1994;McDowell, 1997).

3 See, for example, French (1940), Coleman(1954), Dilke (1965), Wheeler and Harding(1967), Archer and Dalton (1968), Yates andRobertson (1968) and Coleman and Lukehurst(1974).

4 A related issue is that the unthinking occu-larcentricism of the discipline is insensitive togeographers who are visually impaired, andit is rare to come across a proposal such asKingman’s (1969) regarding ‘field study forthe non-sighted’. More generally, those whocelebrate the being there of fieldwork tend


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to assume the able-bodied status of allgeographers, another aspect of neglectingthe inaccessibility of many fieldwork sites tomany individuals who are differently abled:see Hall et al. (2002).

5 Prime statements at the time about this vari-ety of geography included Bunge (1962),Burton (1963), Harvey (1969), Abler et al.(!971) and Amedeo and Golledge (1975).

6 In passing, it is worth repeating Barnes’s(2001b: 552) point about the extent to whichthe early spatial scientists were fixated ontheir new ‘machines’, IBM mainframe com-puters and the like, and on the numericalanalyses of large quantitative data sets nowmade possible by such technology.

7 Key texts included Peet (1978), Smith, D.M.(1977; 1979), Harvey (1973; 1982); for sum-mary details, see Cloke et al. (1991: ch. 2).

8 See also recent claims about taking seriouslythe emotional registers of the researcher:Widdowfield (2000), Anderson and Smith(2001).

9 See, for example, Pile (1991), Nast (1998), Parr(1998a), Dewsbury and Naylor (2002: esp. 256–7).

10 See Crush (1994), Radcliffe (1994), Jacobs(1996) and Nash (2003).

11 Butler; Ley and Mountz; Mohammad;Skelton.

12 See also the claims in Philip (1998) drawingin part on Wright’s (1947) notion of ‘objec-tive subjectivity’; see, too, Box 1.7.


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