and that lands not used for that purpose were
at best wasted, even empty. Viewed, rather, as
an act of colonialism or imperialism
(Meinig, 1986), frontiers mark an important
topic for comparative study. gk
Suggested reading
Fawcett (1918); Lamar and Thompson (1981).
frontier thesis The argument developed
by Frederick Jackson Turner (1861–1932)
concerning ‘The significance of the frontier
in American history’ (Turner, 1893). The US
census had been mapping the limit of
European settlement as afrontiermoving
across the land from east to west (Paulin,
1932). In 1890, the Census announced that
there was no longer a clear line separating the
areas to the east settled at greater than two
persons per square mile and those to the west
that were more sparsely settled. Instead, there
was now a patchwork of less densely settled
areas in the west, and the idea of a continuous
frontier between more and less densely settled
parts was no longer valid. Turner took this to
be the end of a distinctprocess. In 1892,
speaking to historians gathered in Chicago
on the occasion of the 400th anniversary
of European entry to the Americas, Turner
addressed the implications of the closing of the
American frontier for democracy in the USA.
Turner claimed that, at the frontier,
Europeans were forced to revert to more
primitive forms ofcivilization. In this way
they broke their links with Europe and began
to create a new and distinctlyAmericansoci-
ety. At the frontier, society passed through all
the stages from hunting up to the ultimate
form of civilization, urban–industrial society.
By passing through all these stages, Euro-
Americans re-learned for themselves the need
fordemocracy, lessons that people in Europe
took so much for granted as to have almost
forgotten. Yet this learning was at the heart of
the popular democracy that Turner cherished.
With the closing of the frontier, a new way
would have to be found to keep these lessons
alive. Universities, he argued, would now have
to act as the keepers of a truth that would
no longer be learned naturally at the frontier.
These ideas have been much criticized,
most notably by the so-called New Western
Historians (Kearns, 1998). Limerick (1987)
argues that Turner only credits Euro-
American men with historical agency, and
ignores issues ofrace,class andgender.
A historical process that consigns the native
peoples of America to a shrinking margin
makes it difficult for them to make claims
about their right to a future in this land.
Limerick also argues that rather than being
legible as a process moving from east to west,
European colonialism in North America
included significant movement of Spanish-
Americans from the south, and of other
Europeans who began not on the east coast,
but on the west. The frontier that Turner
speaks of is a farming frontier based on family
farms, and yet large parts of the USA were
taken from native peoples for large-scale ranch-
ing or mining without passing through the sort
of family farms and villages that sustained
Turner’s nascent democracies. Finally, Turner
actually misses many of the distinctive features
about the American West, including the con-
tinuous role of thestatein theeconomy. gkSuggested reading
Cronon (1987); Turner (1893).functionalism A term found across the
social sciences and used to explain variously
mental, behavioural and social phenomena by
the role that they play – which is to say, their
function – in maintaining the largersystem
of which they are part. The larger system
comes first, reaching back to determine the
functional roles of its various parts in enabling
its reproduction and development.
As an explanatory strategy, functionalism
was first systematically stated in nineteenth-
century Darwinian evolutionary biology.
Physiological characteristics were explained
by their functional role in enabling the
systemic ends of species survival and repro-
duction (seedarwinism). Not surprisingly,
when the French sociologist E ́mile Durkheim
(1858–1917) introduced the same idea into
sociology in the late nineteenth century, he
drew on a biological analogy and likened the
division of labour in society to the functional
role of organs within a body. For Durkheim,
the larger ends of stability and survival
determined how society’s constituent parts
functioned. Durkeheim’s work influenced a
group of British-based anthropologists –
Bronislaw Malinowski (1884–1942), Alfred
Radcliffe-Brown (1881–1952), Edward Evans
Pritchard (1902–73) and Meyer Fortes (1906–
83) – who developedstructural functional-
ism. While on the surface the various cultures
that they studied – the Trobianders, the Nuer,
the Tallensi – seemed quite different, they
proposed that a common functional operation
underpinned all of them: the components
of culture worked together to promote smoothGregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_F Final Proof page 265 31.3.2009 1:20pmFUNCTIONALISM