Ethnogenesis and Cultural Geography

Abstract

By working largely unaware of the huge literature in anthropology and certain other social sciences on ethnogenesis, Western cultural/historical and ethnic geographers remain aside from the mainstream in this inquiry and in fact do not address the topic as often as one might expect. Anthropologists have dominated ethnogenetic research for decades in North America. We further marginalize our work on ethnogenesis by ignoring completely the work of the Russian Leo Gumilev, a fellow geographer who devoted his career to the study of this subject. I le remains virtually unknown in the West in spite of English translations of a number of his works. This neglect of the works of anthropologists and Gumilev leads Western geographers to deal with ethnogenesis infrequently and somewhat naively. Hie authors suggest that by becoming familiar with these valuable sources and by applying existing, well-developed cultural geographical themes and concepts, such as homeland, diffusion, landscape, preadaptation, and incremental change, Western cultural geographers can more abundantly and significantly join the debate on ethnogenesis, building upon Gumilev's foundation and offering a humanistic, particularistic, and holistic alternative perspective largely absent in anthropological and other nongeographical studies.