Midcentury Geohumanities: J. B. Jackson and the “Magazine of Human Geography”

Abstract

This article makes the argument that J. B. Jackson’s Landscape was where the concept of the “geohumanities” was first cultivated in the transdisciplinary context of a single magazine. Specifically, during the rise of spatial science and the quantitative revolution of the 1950s and 1960s, the magazine was an incubator and refuge for the cultural and historical geographers who would help found the nascent area of humanistic geography; the magazine also served as a gathering place for a community of scholars from many different disciplines, all interested in issues of landscape, space, and place as topics and ideas with relevance that extended beyond any single intellectual perspective. In many ways the magazine itself was a metaphorical landscape: a hybrid territory where different influences—from the social sciences, sciences, and humanities—came together to create something new. Tracing this earlier history of transdisciplinary humanistic geography is important for contextualizing the current geohumanities project.

本文主张，J.B.捷克森的地景杂志，是“地理人文学科”之概念在单一杂志的超领域脉络中首度培育之处。尤其是在1950年代与1960年代空间科学与量化革命兴起之时，该杂志是文化与历史地理学者的孵化器与庇护所，而这些学者协助创立了晚近的人文地理学领域；该杂志同时提供作为来自诸多不同领域的学者社群聚集之处，这些学者皆对地景、空间与地方这些作为关乎超越任何单一知识视角的主题与概念之议题有兴趣。就诸多方面而言，该杂志本身便是一个隐喻的地景：一个各种影响——从社会科学、科学到人文——汇聚一处并创造崭新事物的混合领域。追溯此般超领域人文地理学的早期历史，对于脉络化当代地理人文学科计画而言至关重要。

Este artículo presenta la argumentación de que en el Paisaje de J. B. Jackson fue donde por primera vez se cultivó el concepto de “geohumanidades” en el contexto transdisciplinario de una sola revista de tipo magazín. Específicamente, durante el auge de la ciencia espacial y la revolución cuantitativa de los años 1950 1960, el magazín fue una incubadora y un refugio para los geógrafos culturales e históricos que habrían de ayudar a fundar la nueva área de la geografía humanística; el magazín también sirvió como sitio de reunión para una comunidad de académicos de muchas diferentes disciplinas, todas interesadas en los temas de paisaje, espacio y lugar, como tópicos e ideas relevantes que iban trascendían cualquier simplista perspectiva intelectual. De muchas maneras el magazín mimo fue un paisaje metafórico: un territorio híbrido donde diferentes influencias ––de las ciencias sociales, las ciencias y las humanidades–– se juntaban para crear algo nuevo. Es importante trazar esta historia inicial de la geografía humanística transdisciplinaria para contextualizar el actual proyecto de las geohumanidades.

Key Words:

• geohumanities
• humanistic geography, J. B. Jackson
• landscape magazine
• transdisciplinarity

• 地理人文学科
• 人文地理学
• J.B.捷克森
• 地景杂志
• 超越领域性

• geohumanidades
• geografía humanística
• J. B. Jackson
• magazin del paisaje
• transdisciplinariedad

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Many thanks to my anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions on a previous version of this article. Thanks also to Jessica Hayes-Conroy for her feedback on the manuscript and to Richard Wilkie for his guidance on the original research on which this article is based.

Notes

1. In his 1979 biographical essay on Hoskins and Jackson, D. W. Meinig stated that these initial twenty subscribers were primarily friends and acquaintances to which Jackson simply mailed the first issues (212). Groth, Horowitz, and Wilson all documented the numerous pseudonyms that Jackson used, noting that Jackson almost exclusively authored the first two issues (Groth 1998; Horowitz 1997, xxiv); possibly the first two years (Wilson 2015, 27).

2. All of these French texts were found in Jackson’s personal collection at the time of his death.

3. Beginning in the 1960s, other journals such as Geographical Review would begin to feature articles with humanistic themes; however, in the 1950s humanistic themes like those found in Landscape were rare in mainstream geography journals.

4. For example, his early provocative essays on architecture, planning, and landscape architecture were quite critical of those professions.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jeffrey D. Blankenship

JEFFREY D. BLANKENSHIP is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art and Architecture at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Geneva, NY 14456. E-mail: [email protected]. His research interests include cultural landscape studies and design history within the broader context of twentieth-century intellectual history.