Soviet Union during the 1930s, where T.D.
Lysenko used Lamarckism to justify his ideas
about agricultural improvement and judged
that it fitted more comfortably with Marxist
political ideology than did classical neo-Dar-
winism.
Like Darwinism, Lamarckism also had
social implications. Indeed, many social
evolutionists drew more inspiration from
Neo-Lamarckian dogma than from standard
Darwinism. For some, it provided grounds for
looking to environment as the driving force
behind social processes; for others, who were
enthusiastic about the role it attributed to mind
and will, it reserved space for psychic elements
in evolution and thereby enabled them to es-
cape the pessimism that gripped many at the
beginning of the twentieth century. Either way,
Lamarckism could be mobilized to justify the
politics of social and political interventionism.
Given its various enthusiasms, it is not sur-
prising that a number of geographers would
find Neo-Lamarckism attractive, not least
because the environment played such a key
directive role in the scenario (Livingstone,
1992). In the USA during the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries, numerous advo-
cates of environmental determinism, such as
Nathaniel Shaler, W.M. Davis, Ellen Semple,
Albert Brigham and Ellsworth Huntington,
displayed Lamarckian sympathies and used
the theory to provide naturalistic readings of
human culture. Similarly Turner’sfrontier
thesis, which portrayed American society as
recapitulating the stages of social evolution
with each advance of frontier settlement,
drew inspiration from Lamarckian environ-
mentalism (Coleman, 1966). Griffith Taylor
in Australia found it equally attractive, though
he did not discount the significance of Men-
delian genetics (Christie, 1994).
In late-Victorian Britain, similar convictions
are discernible among those sympathetic to
Lamarckism’s emphasis on the significance of
consciousness. Patrick Geddes used it to
advocate various urban planning and educa-
tional reforms on the grounds that their bene-
fits would accumulate, by social inheritance,
in successive generations; Peter Kropotkin,
critical of the cut-throat ethics of capitalist
competitive struggle, found in Lamarckism
the grounds for a more benign social order –
amixofanarchismandhumanism– built upon
mutual aid (Todes, 1989); and Andrew
Herbertson and H.J. Fleure both mobilized
the idea in their considerations of regional geog-
raphy. Lamarckian motifs have also been dis-
cerned in Paul Vidal de la Blache’s possibilism.
More generally, Neo-Lamarckism facilitated
geography’s transition from a natural theology
framework to that of evolutionary naturalism
largely due to the ease with which it could be
given a teleological reading (Livingstone, 1984:
seeteleology). Its impact on the evolution of
geography around the time of the subject’s pro-
fessionalization was thus very considerable (see
geography, history of). dnlSuggested reading
Bowler (1983); Campbell and Livingstone
(1983); Stocking (1962).land tenure The practices through which
land is possessed. Land tenure entails both
formalpropertyrules and rights, sanctioned
by some collective, and more symbolic and
culturally coded forms of, land attachment.
Land, in particular, is both an object with use
value, and a symbol endowed with meaning.
Scholars of land tenure tend to emphasize the
latter, noting the significance of complex, ritu-
ally reproduced relations of land-holding.
Land is often spoken of as an active agent,
encompassing the interests of the living and
the dead. Rules governing access and use
rights are embedded within complex and
often highly localized lifeworlds (Hann,
1998). Land tenure should be distinguished
from housing tenure – that is, the variegated
ways in which people acquire rights in real
property – hence the distinction between rent-
ers, private owners, leasehold tenants, and so
on (seehousing class).
Scholarship has tended to emphasize
tenurial relations amongst peasant and
hunter–gatherer communities, located in the
premodern history of the West, or within
the contemporary developing world. However,
it should be noted that culturally laden and
often collectively oriented forms of land-
holding can be found within the modern
West, as noted by some of the contributions
in Abramson and Theodossopoulos (2000).
Land tenure, as a means through which a
placeis known and represented, and a social
order enacted and sustained, is clearly geo-
graphical. One interesting strain of scholarship
concernsthewaysinwhichlandscape–asboth
a material and representational resource – con-
nects to land tenure (Olwig, 2002). Another
crucial dimension concerns systematic at-
tempts at the remaking of land tenure,
of which Western colonial displacements of in-
digenousproperty(seecolonialism),statecol-
lectivization or individualization of land-
holding, the enclosure of the commons,Gregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_L Final Proof page 408 31.3.2009 2:44pmLAND TENURE