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People, Place, and Region: 100 Years of Human Geography in the Annals

Audrey Kobayashi

Department of Geography, Queen’s University

Human geography articles published in the Annals of the Association of American Geographers over the past century have gone through several overlapping phases that include Darwinian environmentalist approaches during the early part of the century, a strongly antideterminist cultural geography influenced by Carl Sauer at midcentury, and a science of “space” supported by quantitative methods in the postwar period. All three approaches take a regional perspective, although with very different definitions of the region. During the 1970s, regional and quantitative methods remained strong, although humanism and Marxism became the two dominant methodologies. Since the 1980s, and the emergence of a variety of poststructuralist perspectives, these two approaches no longer run on separate tracks. The past two decades have seen the rather later influence of feminism and antiracism as major themes in the Annals, as well as strengthening of economic and political theories. Presidential addresses have played an important role in influencing, or responding to, new directions in geography. Key Words: Annals of the Association of American Geographers, human geography, methodology, place, region.

Los artı́culos de geografı́a humana publicados en Annals of the Association of American Geographers durante el pasado siglo han pasado por varias fases traslapadas que incluyen los enfoques ambientalistas darwinianos en los albores del siglo, una geografı́a cultural fuertemente antideterminista influida por Carl Sauer a mediados del siglo, y una ciencia del “espacio” apoyada en métodos cuantitativos en el perı́odo de la posguerra. Todos los tres enfoques adoptaron una perspectiva regional, aunque a partir de muy diferentes definiciones del término región. Durante los años 1970, los métodos regional y cuantitativo permanecieron fuertes, aunque el humanismo y el marxismo se convirtieron en las dos metodologı́as dominantes. Desde los años 1980 y con la emergencia de una variedad de perspectivas posestructuralistas, esos dos enfoques ya no marchan en pistas separadas. Las pasadas dos últimas décadas han presenciado la muy tardı́a influencia del feminismo y el antirracismo como temas principales de Annals, lo mismo que un fortalecimiento de las teorı́as económicas y polı́ticas. Los discursos presidenciales de la AAG han jugado un papel importante en términos de influencia o respuesta sobre los nuevos rumbos de la geografı́a. Palabras clave: Annals of the Association of American Geographers, geograf́ıa humana, metodologı́a, lugar, región.

When the three concepts of “people, place,and region” were chosen in 1999 to encom-pass a broad swath of what is widely referred to as human geography, it was with considerable and thoughtful, albeit at times contentious, debate. The ontological status of these concepts or, more correctly, geographers’ interpretations of these concepts, deserves a fuller discussion than has yet occurred either in the Annals or the wider human geography literature. I use these few pages to look back on a century of human geography in the Annals, with the clear caveat that this

account is limited to articles published in the Annals and makes no attempt to address the wider geographi- cal literature. I have attempted to convey the words and ideas of those geographers who have most influenced our discipline through their writing in the Annals.

Neutrality is difficult in a discipline where through the years there have been many normative opinions as to what we can, should, and should not study. Pres- idential addresses, many of them cited here, contain some of the most inspiring ideas and some of the most petty admonishments, ranging from environmentalism,

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to region, to spatial systems, to human interactions with one another, a circuitous progression marked with plenty of debate of the how and the why. Given the task at hand, I try to convey these debates in a descriptive, nonjudgmental manner, but I apologize in advance if by omission, complicity, or implication, my own views occasionally seep through.

Human geography, whether by design or lack of interest, was not very important in the Association of American Geographers (AAG) and its publications for at least the first two decades. I suspect that there might have been some design on the part of the first editor, Richard Elwood Dodge, because the publications of titles and abstracts of the annual meetings (published in the Annals from the first meeting in 1904 [1911] until the sixty-third meeting in 1967) contain a signifi- cant amount of human geography, whereas articles pub- lished during the first decade that might count as human geography number only six1: “The Barrier Boundary of the Mediterranean Basin and its Northern Breaches as Factors in History” (Semple 1915); “The Oasis of Tuba, Arizona,” (Gregory 1915); “Some Considerations on the Geographical Provinces of the United States” (Jefferson 1917); “Sriharikota and the Yanadis” (Cushing 1917); “The Boundaries of the New England States,” (Cushing 1920); and “Genetic Geography: The Development of the Geographic Sense and Concept” (Dryer 1920). All six are preoccupied with defining regions, include people among a range of objects found within regions, and are strongly Darwinian in approach. Gregory, Cushing, and Dryer all refer in some way to the “savage,” uncivilized character of the humans they describe. Epistemologically, all six share with other geographers of the time—who were more interested in physiographic features of regions—a view of geography as a unified science based on Kantian epistemology.2 In his presidential address of 1922, Harland Barrows val- idated this synoptic approach, although with a gentle admonition as to the dangers of overly deterministic determinism:

Geography will aim to make clear the relationships be- tween natural environments and the distribution and ac- tivities of man. Geographers will, I think, be wise to view this problem in general from the standpoint of man’s ad- justment to environment, rather than from that of envi- ronmental influence. The former approach is more likely to result in the recognition and proper valuation of all the factors involved, and especially to minimize the danger of assigning to the environmental factors a determinative influence which they do not exert. (Barrows 1923, 2)

A big upset occurred a year later. In the same volume in which Huntington (1924) published an unabashed statement of his thesis on determinism and natural se- lection, Carl Sauer (1924) challenged the discipline to cease and desist. The “bias of determinism” (18), he claimed, was unscientific, biased, dogmatic, unsystem- atic, and undisciplined. A year later, J. K. Wright went further:

Danger besets the man who would study the relation be- tween geographical environment and human thought. So complex are the factors which mold our mental processes, so imperfect our understanding of the relation between geography and the physical—let alone intellectual— activities of humanity; and so great the risk of unfounded generalization, that critical geographers have fought shy of the subject. . . . But we no longer take this sort of theo- rizing very seriously. (Wright 1925, 192)

For the next several decades, environmentalism faded slowly into the background, although it remained a strong feature of the journal at least into the 1950s. Wallace Atwood’s 1934 presidential address (Atwood 1935) cited the need for geographical analysis in adapt- ing to climate change and its problems for human settle- ment but stressed adaptability rather than determinism, calling on geographers to push the federal government out of its isolationism, to foster international peace and disarmament, and to help stamp out the “damnable practices of war” (15).

Human geography of the 1930s and 1940s took one of three general approaches. The Sauerian approach, much the dominant, maintained the concept of region as a central tenet but focused on the influence of culture in forming the characteristics of regions, with a gradual swing away from Barrows’s notion of humans adapt- ing to environment (Whitbeck 1928, 1929; see also Whittlesey 1945) to a focus on human agency (Doerr and Guernsey 1956) with many variations in between. Sauer articulated his approach most forcefully in his 1940 presidential address:

Human geography, then, unlike psychology and history, is a science that has nothing to do with individuals but only with human institutions, or cultures. It may be defined as the problem of the Standort or localization of ways of living. There are then two methods of approach, one by the study of the areal extension of individual culture traits and one by the determination of culture complexes as areas. (Sauer 1941, 7)

Years later, in another presidential address, Sauer was to change his view somewhat, as he lamented the lack of human morality in despoiling nature and urged

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geographers to address their concerns to human behav- ior (Sauer 1956).

The second approach, an attempt to understand hu- man beings from the point of view that geography is a product of human imagination, or “geosophy” as Wright (1925, 12) called it, “the geographical ideas, both true and false, of all manner of people,” received little at- tention until the humanistic movement of the 1970s, although the writings of Ralph H. Brown (1941), John Leighly (1958), and Clarence Glacken (1960) provide remarkable exceptions. I return to this approach in due course.

A third approach to human geography, also rooted in regional geography, omitted human beings per se to focus on the distribution of human products, especially products of economic activities. The first, early contri- bution in the Annals to what would become known as urban-economic geography was from Mark Jefferson, who wrote on the emergence of the American urban system as an organism responding to environmental conditions (Jefferson 1915). Over the next two decades, urban- economic geography became much more systematic in the attempt to understand location, patterns of distri- bution, and the transformation of urban landscapes into functional systems. This approach includes early works by Platt (1926, 1927, 1934) and Hartshorne (1927).

By the time of his 1945 presidential address, however, Platt (1946)—recently returned from having spent the war years in the Office of Strategic Services—had devel- oped a much more comprehensive and antideterminist view of the discipline (see also Platt 1948). In one of the most thoughtful presidential addresses of the century, he described geography as the study of “the interlocking of human lives over the whole earth” (2). He discussed the “microgeography” of a small section of Illinois in re- lation to “world unity and disunity, coherence and inco- herence, attachment and detachment, conjunction and separation, interdependence and independence” (11). Reflecting on the war, nuclear weapons, and the public role of the geographer, he concluded:

Nevertheless the problem is still with us, of dealing with individual human beings, understanding their immediate surroundings, and safeguarding the values of local life and cultural variety. . . . The problem is rooted in a permanent characteristic of human life, the social and physical local- ness of human beings in distinct and different localities. (Platt 1948, 11–12)

The postwar Annals reflected rapid social and politi- cal change. As Barnes and Farish (2006, 821) pointed out recently:

Shifting language and practice of regional geography, from catchall description to an instrumental science, provide a guide through the thickets of Cold War scholarship, and suggest a means to locate the work of a Hartshorne or an Ullman in the realm of encounter that Andrew Picker- ing (1995) calls “the mangle”—in this case the vast and complex one set messily in the [Cold War]. (a “mangle” referring to the intense entanglement of political and ide- ological issues)

The conversion of the concept of the region into a sys- tematic unit based on a science of “space,” they claimed was a deeply ideological response to Cold War priorities.

In any case, the depiction of geography as a disci- pline of peace disappears from (or is avoided) in the Annals for a couple of decades, and human geography scholarship became more starkly divided between a sys- tematic/quantitative and a descriptive/traditionalist ap- proach to the discipline. Ironically, both approaches remained strongly tied to the notion of the region, notwithstanding argument over what the term means. Fred Schaefer (1953) described the discipline as residing in two methodological camps: the systematic and the regional, the first deriving from the likes of Humboldt and Ritter and the second from Hettner. He lamented that “the present conditions of the field indicate a stage of development, well known from other social sciences, which finds most geographers still busy with classifica- tions rather than looking for laws” (Schaefer 1953, 232). A second problem for Schaefer was with exceptional- ism, which he attributed initially to Kant and later on to Hartshorne (1939) as the attitude that geography is exceptional in its synthetic approach to regions3: “Ge- ography is a name for a description of nature and the whole world. Geography and history together fill up the entire area of our perception: geography that of space and history that of time” (Kant 1892, 6–8, quoted in Schaefer 1953, 232). He concluded that geographers must join other social sciences in the search for sys- tematic laws—spatial laws—or risk the demise of the discipline.

Schaefer died before his article was published. It was read at an annual meeting of the AAG posthumously. Hartshorne, whose discussion of the nature of geog- raphy was deemed important enough to merit nearly 500 pages of the journal by editor Derwent Whittlesey (Hartshorne 1939), issued an irate rejoinder in a let- ter published in the Annals in 1954 and in an article a year later, citing “false representations and accusa- tions” that he set out to correct, laying out ten method- ological rules, to show that the accusation of excep- tionalism was baseless (Hartshorne 1955). Later still,

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he cited the consistency of all the German “fathers” of the discipline—Kant, Humboldt, Ritter, Hettner, and Schluter—in adopting a chorological approach to science, based on the areal or spatial association of things but incorporating both nomothetic and ideo- graphic principles. Geography, he claimed, “requires the use of two markedly different methods of study, the systematic examination of certain categories of re- lationships over the world or any large part of it, in general or systematic geography; and the study of the totality of interrelated phenomena in particular areas, in special or regional geography” (Hartshorne 1958, 108). Notwithstanding debate about his definition of the discipline, Hartshorne’s influence cannot be under- estimated in strengthening an empiricist approach to the discipline, even throughout the years in which many geographers sought theoretical, quantitative models.

Meanwhile, Edward Ullman warned against going too far in the search for general laws about human conditions, claiming that geography had already been “burned” by environmental determinism. Instead we should be concerned with “middle range” theories that can be mapped, according to the principles of space and spatial interaction:

By spatial interaction I mean actual, meaningful, human relations between areas on the earth’s surface, such as the reciprocal relations and flows of all kinds among industries, raw materials, markets, culture, and transportation—not static location as indicated by latitude, longitude, type of climate, etcetera, nor assumed relations based on in- adequate data and a priori assumptions. (Ullman 1953, 56)

Ullman stated a general consensus among Annals con- tributors of the decade that notwithstanding the degree of systematization, geography is fundamentally regional. But, warned Trewartha (1953, 111) in a plea for popu- lation geography, “regional analysis of a superior quality requires the highest type of mature scholarship and is not to be undertaken by amateurs.” Trewartha’s address should also be noted for its influence in establishing “population geography” as a major stream within the discipline.

In any case, the pages of the Annals during the 1950s and 1960s display what Stephen B. Jones (1954, 111) called the “current urge for theory in geography,” in advancing a “unified field theory” for political geogra- phy. Emrys Jones (1956) weighed in for understanding the laws of “cause and effect.” Others advanced “game theory” (Gould 1963), and there emerged a significant number of increasingly sophisticated economic location

theories, reflecting ideas of neoclassical economics (e.g., Harris 1954), including “central place theory” (Mayfield 1963; Morrill 1963) and stochastic processes (Harvey 1966). Brian Berry summed up this era—in which hu- man geographers seemed to forget the “human” in favor of systems—by appealing to “systems theory” and stated three principles that for him defined the discipline: (1) “Geographers are, like any other scientists, identified not so much by the phenomena they study, as by the integrat- ing concepts and processes that they stress”; (2) “The geo- graphic point of view is spatial”; and (3) “The integrating concepts and processes of the geographer relate to spatial arrangements and distributions, to spatial integration, to spatial interactions and organization, and to spatial process” (Berry 1964, 2–3; italics in original). There followed the development of increasingly complex models, us- ing analogy to depict the geographies of a “large and multivariate reality” (Chorley 1964, 127). Geographers sought explanation in “economic man” (Wolpert 1964) and “probability theory” (Clark 1965). Even the most abstract of quantitative geographers, however, could ob- serve that:

Whether history is lawful is a matter for those who write it to decide. That spatial processes occur, to which the historian could not contribute understanding but which are the very stuff of geography, appears self-evident—or at least a worthy article of faith. (Curry 1964, 146)

As the 1960s drew to a close, the Annals published sev- eral more classics based on modeling economic geogra- phy (Morrill and Pitts 1967; Clark 1968; Cox 1968; Golledge and Amedeo 1968; Huff and Jenks 1968; Brown and Longbrake 1970) during a period charac- terized by what Clyde Kohn (1970) called the “new social geography.”4

At the same time, under Joseph Spencer’s, and later John Hudson’s, editorship, cultural and historical geog- raphy advanced rich studies along the Sauerian tradi- tion, including Mikesell’s (1967) discussion of cultural geography and its relations with anthropology through cultural ecology; Kniffen’s (1965) study of house types as an exercise in moving from classification (Kniffen 1936) to a theory of cultural diffusion; Logan’s (1968) study of the boundary as an influence on landscape for- mation; Miller’s (1968) wonderfully evocative account of the relationship between folk tales and ways of life in the Ozarks; and Hilliard’s (1969) innovative study of variations in pork consumption and regional eco- nomics in the antebellum South. The city emerged as a place of dynamic social relations in David Ward’s (1968) description of immigrant settlement. Brunn and

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Hoffman (1970) showed an increasing attention to nu- anced spatial variations in human behavior, in one of the first articles to address differences between blacks and whites in the United States.

The Annals of the 1960s, during what Peter Gould (1979) called the “Augean period,” was a showcase for a new generation of human geographers: brash, curi- ous, intellectually demanding of themselves and their discipline, making strong claims for the power of sci- ence, and seeking more and more complex ways to un- derstand geography as a spatial science. As the 1970s rolled around, contributions to the Annals began to re- flect a larger concern for geography’s role in society, re- sponding to larger societal concerns about the ongoing Vietnam War, the advent of activism over environmen- tal degradation, the second-wave feminist movement, and the burgeoning human rights movement. Reflect- ing these social concerns, the new, radical journal An- tipode had started up in 1969, and it had garnered a small but dedicated following, especially among graduate stu- dents (“Past Editors’ Reflections” n.d.). Les King was to reflect on the 1970s as a period of “disillusionment and consolidation” due in large part to a growing recognition of “a symbiotic relationship between quantitative geog- raphy and the planning and control of society” (King 1979, 155). He noted that even such thinkers as Edward Taaffe, whom he described as “spokesman for those of us of the liberal establishment” (156) recognized a need for change. Taaffe’s 1973 presidential address called for a “cautious and pragmatic pluralism, maintaining the three traditions of human geography” (which he called “man–land relationships,” “areal study,” and “spatial or- ganization”), but warning:

We can no longer afford the exuberant confidence in cur- rent theories, models, and techniques which dismisses val- ues, societal utility, and the existence of alternative paths to Rome, including essentially verbal and essentially pre- scriptive paths. (Taaffe 1974, 12)

A perusal of the book review section of the Annals for the early 1970s reflects these comments in a plethora of publications about American cities. Terms such as blight and decay abounded, along with comments on contemporary issues such as health care, migration, and urban well-being and an increasing number of articles on urban poverty and housing quality (Hartshorn 1971; Meyer 1973).

Theoretically, two paths towards social relevance emerge from the 1970s’ Annals, one broadly labeled humanistic and the other Marxist. Humanistic geogra- phy was represented by a series of trendsetting articles

that began a decade earlier with David Lowenthal’s (1961) tour de force on the geographical imagination, linking apperception, memory, and epistemology. By 1974, the concept of “place” had gained increasing interest. Leonard Guelke (1974) advocated dialectical idealism as a philosophical approach to the rationality of human thought and behavior in place. Ley and Cybriwsky’s (1974) powerful ethnography of urban graffiti in Baltimore addressed the relationship between place and human attitudes, styles, and aspirations. Robert Sack (1976) used “magic” to explore the historical emergence of beliefs—and doubts—about human spatial experience. Tuan (1976, 267) laid out a sweeping mandate for humanistic geography as the study of “articulated geographical ideas.” Buttimer (1976) explored the dynamism of the phenomenolog- ical concept of the “life world” for understanding the relationship between human being and place. Entrikin (1976) pointed out that contemporary ideas of human- ism might best be understood as a form of philosophical criticism rather than as an understanding of the world:

Reaffirming the importance of the study of meaning and value in human geography, making geographers aware of their often extreme interpretations of science . . . [but] one of a number of means by which geographers can be made more self-aware and cognizant of many of the hidden as- sumptions and implications of their methods and research. (632)

In 1976, John Leighly paid tribute to two important predecessors to the new humanism and its epistemolog- ical rigor in a review of a book in tribute to John K. Wright:

In recent years American academic geographers have been paying a great deal of attention to subjective notions, in their soul-searching sometimes coming perilously close to omphaloskepsis [a.k.a. navel-gazing]. Knowledge of sub- jective notions concerning the actual or even an imaginary world, however, as the authors of Geographies of the Mind amply demonstrate without undue introspection, can con- tribute to appreciation of the real world. (Leighly 1976, 655)

Leighly wrote another piece in the same volume to commemorate Carl Sauer, who had died in 1975. He used the opportunity to describe how Sauer—and pre- sumably Leighly himself—found “distasteful” what he viewed as a narrow and economistic bent in recent ge- ographical scholarship. Leighly’s vision of geography, and his support of recent developments in humanistic geography, were thus clearly normative, as was Mike- sell’s presidential address of 1977 (Mikesell 1978), in

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which he stressed the importance of the “tradition” of cultural geography established by Sauer and others, while also lauding the “innovation” of what he termed recent studies in “environmental perception.” These commentaries by Leighly, Mikesell, and others marked an important transition in human, and especially cul- tural, geography. James Duncan (1980) summed up that transition at the end of the 1970s, responding directly to Mikesell’s call to consider more seriously how geogra- phers theorize culture, by claiming that earlier cultural geographers had separated the individual from a su- perorganic notion of culture, based on transcendental holism.5 Attention to the ontological status of both in- dividuals and their cultural products, claimed Duncan, would provide for a better analysis of social conditions.

In analyzing social conditions, the 1980s established a number of important new—or at least deepened— foci for human geographers. One important thread is in structuration theory, in which place is a “constantly becoming human product” (Pred 1984) or a basis for a philosophically pragmatic understanding of the re- lationship between place and human action (Smith 1984). Another thread addressed the power of ideology, including that of the state, to influence the character of place (Harvey 1979; Anderson 1987). All these works were significant precursors to the geographies of differ- ence that were to characterize the end of the century and to which I return momentarily.

Although it garnered far fewer pages in the Annals during the early years, Marxian geography was of no less importance. The first Annals piece written from a Marx- ist perspective was Dick Peet’s article on inequality and poverty, which argued:

the Marxist principle that inequality and poverty are inevitably produced by capitalist societies, and the social-geographic idea that inequality may be passed on from one generation to the next via the environment of opportunities and services into which each individual is implanted at birth. (Peet 1975, 564)

In the issue commemorating the seventy-fifth anniver- sary of the AAG, however, the Marxist tradition re- ceived significant coverage. James Blaut claimed that the “dissenting tradition” in geography came about be- cause of a disciplinary neglect, or the inability to address important historical issues: “The cultural geography of nationalism; . . . [and] the historical geography of colo- nialism. When these two projects have been completed, the priorities will change again. I will get back to the study of children” (Blaut 1979, 164). Blaut never did get back to the study of children. In the same volume, Peet

accounted for the rise of Marxist geography because “the practical applications of geography became increasingly irrelevant as societal contradictions intermeshed” (Peet 1979, 166). Moreover, Marxist geography represented some of the most sophisticated theorizing about the re- lationship between the social and the spatial (e.g., Soja 1980). After seventy-five years, ideology and politics had become explicit rather than implicit in the Annals.

In his 1981 presidential address, John Fraser Hart lamented the influence of “scientism” in geography. No doubt by then a majority of the discipline agreed with him about the problems of narrow, systematic spatialism, although some of the best scholarship in the Annals continued to develop increasingly com- plex analyses of exceedingly complex social issues. He called for a return to regional geography as the “high- est form of the geographer’s art” (Hart 1982). On that issue few agreed, but geographers were beginning to take seriously Les King’s (1979) call for dialogue be- tween so-called humanistic and Marxist geographies. Many were skeptical. In his 1983 presidential address, Richard Morrill (1984) warned against both and the problems inherent in allowing politics to stand in the way of truth, although he cited potential nuclear war as an example of a threat to the earth that surpassed all political consideration. Morrill’s comments were no doubt in part influenced by controversy that had erupted over the publication a year earlier of Jim Dun- can and David Ley’s (1982) critique of structural Marx- ism in geography. They cited the work of Peet, Blaut, Harvey, and others (much of this work published in Antipode, although several articles, Peet [1975, 1979]; Harvey [1979], were published in the Annals). Ruth Fincher and Vera Chouinard responded with a charge that Duncan and Ley’s interpretation was too narrow and ignored the many interpretations of Marx, includ- ing humanistic Marxism (“Comment in reply” 1983), to which Duncan and Ley replied that humanistic Marx- ism had had remarkably little presence in human ge- ography. Notwithstanding the futility of this particular debate, it signaled a serious and important conversation that has developed in the pages of the Annals over ques- tions of structuralism or, more accurately, the existence of structures, which led the way to a poststructuralist paradigm that came to dominate human geography of the 1990s and beyond.

Broadly, poststructuralism refers to a range of theoret- ical perspectives that recognize structure as a historical product; that is, a product of human action, or labor. Poststructuralists therefore refute notions of environ- mental determinism, both in its Darwinian forms and

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in explanations that locate determinants somewhere in spatial laws. They also refute notions that human beings are hard-wired, a priori, to exhibit determined characteristics. Although many variants of poststruc- turalism can be discerned in the pages of the Annals from the 1980s onward, an overall theme is a con- vergence of thinking between so-called Marxists and humanists (although I do not want to exaggerate this convergence or reduce one to the other). The most important result of poststructuralism, with its emphasis on human social outcomes, has been recognition of the importance of studying the ways that human beings, including geographers, create difference through social, cultural, political, and economic practices.6

To this point I have said almost nothing about gen- der, feminism, or women geographers. Against great odds, women had made a significant contribution to the discipline over the century, but as Jan Monk described in her presidential address of 2003 (Monk 2004), their presence was grudgingly accepted, their work marginal- ized, and their numbers—and their writings—few. We can speculate on the practices at work, but the fact is that writing by or about women was not the stuff of the Annals. There are few notable exceptions of women whose work was considered scholarly enough for pub- lication. They include Ellen Churchill Semple (e.g., Semple 1919), who published a total of five substan- tial articles in the Annals; Helen Strong (1925, 1937); Mildred Berman (1965, 1971); and Hildegard Binder Johnson (1957), all of whom believed in sound field re- search as a basis for writing the geography of the world. Jan Monk’s presidential address publicly acknowledged the extent to which women’s contributions to the dis- cipline had been underestimated.

Research about gender, however, was slow in coming. The first article to take seriously the social effects of gender differences was John Everitt’s (1976) analysis of propinquity, friendship, and cognitive spatial relationships in Los Angeles. As far as I can tell, the first words in the Annals from a feminist perspective were in two book reviews by Suzanne Mackenzie, who, with exquisite understatement, claimed that “gender studies and feminist scholarship are among the most prolific and dynamic areas of contemporary academic discourse, but are also among the most ambivalent and problematic for the academy” (Mackenzie 1985, 609). Later, she directed geographers to a book by sociologists:

Not only does it contribute to the growing body of work that recognizes the importance of studying human– environmental relations in all social sciences, it provides

some interesting ideas about how we might do such studies within geography. (Mackenzie 1987, 304)

The first full article using feminist analysis was Susan Hanson and Geraldine Pratt’s “Job Search and the Oc- cupational Segregation of Women” (Hanson and Pratt 1991). In Hanson’s 1992 presidential address, she made a strong case for the importance of feminist research to human geography:

Any attempt to make sense of the world as if it were ungendered is, in a feminist’s view . . . to risk undertaking a fundamentally flawed analysis. This particular idea has not, until recently, flourished in geography, which instead has focused on place, space, and location as key organiz- ing concepts and has dealt with each . . . as if it were com- pletely ungendered (and unclassed and unraced). (Hanson 1992, 569)

Hanson made a direct call to study the human propen- sity to create difference, strong words for a disci- pline in which—notwithstanding increasing attention to class—“race” and gender had received scant atten- tion. The main form of differentiation was areal. More recently, in her 2006 presidential address, Victoria Lawson (2007) extended the discussion of the role of feminism to emphasize that geography includes an ethics of care and responsibility.

Until the turn of the twenty-first century, there was negligible space in the Annals devoted to scholarship from a feminist or an antiracist perspective. Environ- mentalism, of course, had often clothed overt racism in science, but human geographers were slow to counter the claims of racial difference, explicit or implicit, turn- ing instead to systemic processes, including culture, as the basis for geographic explanation. It is surprising nonetheless that as late as 1968 the Annals published an article written from an avowedly racial science per- spective (de Laubenfels 1968; cf. Carlson and Armela- gos 1971). In contrast, throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the Annals published many articles on the problems cre- ated by racial segregation, especially in American inner cities. The attention to “race” differs thus substantially from the inattention to gender, but theoretical debates on the nature of “race” came much later. Peet (1985) claimed that geographers had followed social Darwin- ism rather than Marxism, thus legitimating a science of racism that spatial science had done little if any- thing to counter. It took the intersection of feminist and antiracist geographers, however, along the lines that Hanson suggested in 1991, to establish in geogra- phy a “politics of difference” that sheds essentialist no- tions of gender and race and class and extends notions

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of racism to include the cultural politics of difference (Gilbert 1998; Kobayashi and Peake 2000; Nast 2000; Pulido 2000; Hoelscher 2003).

If feminism and antiracism represent two examples of new approaches to human geography at the turn of the millennium, they occur within a wider context of geography that addresses the big ways in which the world is changing. Geographical perspectives on change are increasingly sophisticated and none could accuse this discipline of lack of relevance. Some of the best examples of scholarship from the 1990s and the early twenty-first century (and I apologize that this is more of a shopping list than a critical examination of the ideas) include Jones and Kodras’s (1990) discussion of the feminization of poverty; Don Mitchell’s (1995) path-breaking investigation of the use of “public space” in San Francisco; Denis Cosgrove’s (2003) erudite account of the emergence of cosmopolitanism; Ellis, Wright, and Parks’s (2004) sophisticated analysis of “race,” gender, and home and workplace segregation; John Agnew’s (2005) ambitious discussion of territori- ality and the state; Jason Dittmer’s (2005) creative take on popular culture, identity, and politics; and Steve Herbert’s (2005) thoughtful and challenging piece on the vaunted notion of community.

What to conclude about 100 years of human geogra- phy in the Annals? In his 2001 presidential address, Reg Golledge (2002) commented that what marks geogra- phy at the end of the twentieth century is “a change from inventory dominated activity to the creation of knowl- edge generated by emphasizing cognitive demands, such as understanding ‘why’ and ‘how’ in addition to ‘what’ and ‘where”’ (1). I have attempted here to recognize some of the articles that have advanced the “why” and “how” of human geography and the ways in which ge- ographers have used the pages of the Annals to debate the mandate and scope of our discipline. Geographers over the century have developed an increasingly com- plex understanding of economic, political, social, and cultural processes that help to explain the relationship between people and place in many different parts of the world, and current scholarship is enhanced by rig- orous economic, political, and social theories. If I have neglected here to address some of the specifics of those many places and relationships, including the actual peo- ple, their political and social boundaries, their cultural practices, their economic and physical well-being, and the ways in which relations among people in place have structured and transformed human differences, it is only because the modest scope of this overview does not al- low me that luxury.

A reading of a recent issue of the Annals will show that many of the debates are still around, that we dif- fer on the role of our discipline in politics and public policy but many of us are deeply committed to making a better world, that our philosophies reflect a disparate range of ideas on the ontological status of our concepts but that concepts of people, place, region—and indeed spatial relations—are stronger for the efforts of human geographers.

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank editorial board members Ben Forest, Nina Laurie, George Lin, Jamie Peck, and Bar- ney Warf for their suggestions concerning important developments in the history of the Annals and Marie Price and three anonymous reviewers for their enor- mously helpful suggestions. I wish also to thank all the authors, reviewers, and editors over the past 100 years for creating this remarkable legacy to the discipline. The choices and the interpretations here are entirely this editor’s, and I apologize for any significant omis- sions or errors of interpretation.

Notes 1. The Geographical Review, which began publication in

1916 and initially published six issues per year, has a much higher proportion of “human” geography.

2. Immanual Kant held the first Chair in geography at the University of Konigsberg (1755–1796), and he defined geography as the study of the spatial organization of things (as opposed to history as the study of the chrono- logical order of events). This chorological approach was later developed by Hartshorne (1927, 1939) and others and provided the rationale for much of regional geog- raphy. Kant’s more lasting influence, however, was as philosopher of knowledge who believed that the divi- sion of knowledge comes from a combination of a priori categories of knowing the world and the given qualities of the world external to human senses. He thus made a contribution to the conundrum faced by philosophers at the time over the relationship between mind and matter; variations on this conundrum and its solutions continue to this day.

3. Schaefer explained the seeming contradiction in Humboldt’s approach to geography by explaining that Humboldt distinguished between “cosmology,” which was Kantian and exceptional, and geography proper, which was systematic and law-seeking.

4. Joseph Spencer, who was Editor of the Annals at the time, told me in conversation in 1980 that he had been accused of being antiquantitative but that he was not; rather, he claimed, he only published good scholarship!

People, Place, and Region: 100 Years of Human Geography in the Annals 1103

5. Although the extent to which previous cultural geogra- phers had succumbed to such an ontological error is up for debate. See Price and Lewis (1993).

6. I am not trying to portray an untroubled or uncritical account of poststructuralism here, but space does not allow for a deservedly more troubled and critical account, something one would hope to see more of in future issues of the Annals.

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Correspondence: Department of Geography, Queen’s University, Kingston, ON, Canada K7L 3N6, e-mail: [email protected].

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