Carl O. Sauer - Career

Career

Carl Sauer's paper "The Morphology of Landscape" was probably the most influential in developing ideas on cultural landscapes and is still cited today. However, Sauer's paper was really about his own vision for the discipline of geography, which was to establish the discipline on a phenomenological basis, rather than being specifically concerned with cultural landscapes. "Every field of knowledge is characterized by its declared preoccupation with a certain group of phenomena,” according to Sauer. Geography was assigned the study of areal knowledge or landscapes or chorology—following the thoughts of Alfred Hettner. “Within each landscape there are phenomena that are not simply there but are either associated or independent of each other.” Sauer saw the geographer’s task as being to discover the areal connection between phenomena. Thus "the task of geography is conceived as the establishment of a critical system which embraces the phenomenology of landscape, in order to grasp in all of its meaning and colour the varied terrestrial scene"

Sauer was a fierce critic of environmental determinism, which was the prevailing theory in geography when he began his career. He proposed instead an approach variously called "landscape morphology" or "cultural history." This approach involved the inductive gathering of facts about the human impact on the landscape over time. Sauer rejected positivism, preferring particularist and historicist understandings of the world. He drew on the work of anthropologist Alfred Kroeber, and later critics accused him of introducing a "superorganic" concept of culture into geography. Politically Sauer was a conservative, and expressed concern about the way that modern capitalism and centralized government were destroying the cultural diversity and environmental health of the world. He believed that agriculture, and domestication of plants and animals had an effect on the physical environment.

After his retirement, Sauer's school of human-environment geography developed into cultural ecology, political ecology, and historical ecology. Cultural ecology retained Sauer's interest in human modification of the landscape and pre-modern cultures.