Brinck Jackson in the Realm of the Everyday^*

* Considerable debts are owed Peirce Lewis, D. W. Meinig, Paul Groth, James E. Vance Jr., Gwendolyn Wright, and the parishioners of the Waioli Hui la Church, Hanalei, Kauai, Hawaii.

Abstract

Academic geography is dotted with fly‐specks from the fashion conscious who have skittered from one enthusiasm to another like aggravating bugs in midroom flight. Our disciplinary history in fact abounds in dead‐end roads entered at fatally high speed, theoretical turns not negotiated, crossroads oracles proved dismally inaccurate. By contrast, the formidable cultural geographer and landscape historian J. B. “Brinck” Jackson (1909–1996) conceived of a more slowly developing world, replete with enduring geographies. Although firmly Brahmin by origin, Jackson was chary of the fleeting fashions and power tropes of what he sometimes dubbed the Establishment. He was inclined instead to attend to the structures of the everyday, emphasizing community and connection over didactic fashion. With writing grounded in daily experience and a consummate ability to witness pattern, he urged geographers to think and envision.

• durability
• geosophy
• J. B. Jackson
• landscape
• pretentiousness
• theoretical turns

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Paul F. Starrs

Dr. Starrs is an associate professor of geography at the University of Nevada, Reno, Nevada 89557–0048.