Cultural Geography

century, at the height of British colonial

nationalism, the more humanistic aspects of

Enlightenment thought were shed in favour of a

racialism based on the ‘superiority’ of the white

‘race’. Geographers came to the fore as influen-

tial authors of gazetteers that not only perpe-

trated racist notions, but also claimed dominance

as purveyors of information about the world.

Environmental determinism added scientific

credibility to geographic nationalism, by provid-

ing a plausible explanation for putative white

superiority. The geographer’s map had become a

significant visual symbol of both moral and

scholarly authority.

As the twentieth century progressed, environ-

mental determinism was not, of course univer-

sally accepted. Carl Sauer and other cultural

geographers opposed determinism by advancing

theories of culture to explain human differences

across the surface of the earth. The work of

latter-day environmentalists such as Griffith

Taylor became increasingly controversial in the

face of ‘possibilist’ arguments that supported

human agency as an explanation for human abil-

ity to modify the earth’s surface in order to over-

come environmental challenges. Indeed it might

be said that no issue was of more significance to

the discipline – and certainly none was more

vehemently debated – than that of environmental

determinism versus human agency. But none of

the geographers involved in the debate prior to

World War II took on the construction of ‘race’

per se, let alone challenged the damage to human

rights that resulted from racism and colonialism.

That project was begun in the late 1940s, when

international opposition to Adolph Hitler’s

Nazism led scholars and society in general to

begin to challenge actions based on beliefs in

racial difference. But it would be some time

before the effects of the human rights movement

would begin to infiltrate the discipline of

geography.

ABANDONING ‘RACE’: THE NEW

SCIENCE OF EQUALITY

In the several decades following World War II,

geography was contested territory. Particularly

in North American geography departments, there

was a strong push for disciplinary legitimacy, as

‘human geographers increasingly sought a clear

identity of their own within the social sciences’

(Johnston, 1991: 95). One result was a push away

from what was increasingly seen as the descriptive

but theoretically vacant approach of regionalism

to a social science in which the rules of ‘space’

would become justification for intellectual

independence. While a significant number, espe-

cially of cultural and historical geographers,

challenged the spatial approach (Harris, 1971),

as Johnston (1991: 186) points out, even such

challenges continued to be cast in a positive

rather than a normative light. Such cultural

geographers sought, therefore, to depict the rich-

ness of cultural processes without going so far as

to challenge the role of the discipline in actually

constituting culture.

By the post-war period, nonetheless, there

were few lingering traces of environmental

determinism, and geographers were no longer

involved explicitly in the project of colonialism.

The Cold War discouraged geographers from

openly advocating views that might be seen as

politically radical, while the general attitude

towards those non-aligned former colonial

nations was that their development could occur

through modernization projects whose ambitions

were a testament to possibilism.^1 A lack of direct

involvement, however, does not guarantee a lack

of intellectual complicity in the re-creation of

racialized visions.

Within this context, the lack of interest in

questions of ‘race’ and racism among geogra-

phers makes sense. The fact that they were over-

whelmingly white (and male) and therefore less

likely to recognize the ways in which their own

lives and their surroundings were racialized went

largely unnoticed. They were generally apoliti-

cal, at a time when (as they do today) discussions

of racism invariably provoked political con-

frontation. But most importantly in understand-

ing the trajectory of geographical knowledge, the

quest for disciplinary independence required a

clear delineation of the geographer’s intellectual

mandate, and investigation of human bodies was

deemed to be outside that mandate, in the realm

of the anthropologist. Finally, faith in the power

of modernity to overcome poverty and oppres-

sion encouraged, among western thinkers at

least, a complacent faith that human divisions

were increasingly meaningless. As a result most

academics, geographers included, wrote as

though ‘race’ did not exist, in direct contra-

diction to the growing gap, both internationally

and in the cities of most developed countries,

between whites and people of colour. Geographers

were thus complicit in perpetuating the contin-

ued effects of colonialism, albeit in a new form

of putative neutrality.

For present purposes, the point is that positive

(as distinct from positivist) approaches to

geography either had no interest in the pheno-

menon of ‘race’, or took it as an essential given.

If ‘race’ was considered at all, it was as a human

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