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Abstract
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.
Los artículos de geografía 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 geografía cultural fuertemente antideterminista influida por Carl Sauer a mediados del siglo, y una ciencia del “espacio” apoyada en métodos cuantitativos en el período 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 metodologías 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 tardía influencia del feminismo y el antirracismo como temas principales de Annals, lo mismo que un fortalecimiento de las teorías económicas y políticas. Los discursos presidenciales de la AAG han jugado un papel importante en términos de influencia o respuesta sobre los nuevos rumbos de la geografía.
Acknowledgments
I wish to thank editorial board members Ben Forest, Nina Laurie, George Lin, Jamie Peck, and Barney Warf for their suggestions concerning important developments in the history of the Annals and Marie Price and three anonymous reviewers for their enormously 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 omissions 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 chronological order of events). This chorological approach was later developed by Hartshorne (Citation1927, 1939) and others and provided the rationale for much of regional geography. Kant's more lasting influence, however, was as philosopher of knowledge who believed that the division 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 inHumboldt'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!
5. Although the extent to which previous cultural geographers had succumbed to such an ontological error is up for debate. See Price and Lewis (Citation1993).
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.
