Cultural Geography - History

History

Though the first traces of the study of different nations and cultures on Earth can be dated back to ancient geographers such as Ptolemy or Strabo, cultural geography as academic study firstly emerged as an alternative to the environmental determinist theories of the early Twentieth century, which had believed that people and societies are controlled by the environment in which they develop. Rather than studying pre-determined regions based upon environmental classifications, cultural geography became interested in cultural landscapes. This was led by Carl O. Sauer (called the father of cultural geography), at the University of California, Berkeley. As a result, cultural geography was long dominated by American writers.

Sauer defined the landscape as the defining unit of geographic study. He saw that cultures and societies both developed out of their landscape, but also shaped them too. This interaction between the 'natural' landscape and humans creates the 'cultural landscape'. Sauer's work was highly qualitative and descriptive and was surpassed in the 1930s by the regional geography of Richard Hartshorne, followed by the quantitative revolution. Cultural geography was generally sidelined, though writers such as David Lowenthal continued to work on the concept of landscape.

In the 1970s, the critique of positivism in geography caused geographers to look beyond the quantitative geography for its ideas. One of these re-assessed areas was also cultural geography. However, as in many geographic subdisciplines, post-positivist cultural geography continues playing an important role.