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anthropology and human geography, the
Annalistes insisted that short-term political
events must be understood in relation to
long-term structural economic, social and en-
vironmental change. The writings of Fernand
Braudel (1902–85) exemplify this approach,
which continues to be significant in both
French social science and in the (stylistically
very different) transatlantic development of
world-systems analysis. mjhSuggested reading
Baker (1984); Clark (1999b); Friedman (1996).anthropogeography A school of human
geography closely associated with the
German geographer Friedrich Ratzel (1844–
1904: see Bassin, 1987b). Ratzel had trained
in the natural sciences and, like many of his
contemporaries, was taken by the ideas ofdar-
winism(see alsolamarck(ian)ism). Following
an extended visit to the USA, however, it
was clear that his imagination had also been
captured by anthropology. On the marchlands
between the natural sciences and anthro-
pology, he now ‘sought to lay out the concep-
tual foundations of a new discipline – human
geography’ (Livingstone, 1992, p. 198). Its
central statement was in the two volumes of
hisAnthropogeographie, published in 1882 and
1891, the first subtitled ‘Geography’s applica-
tion to history’ and the second ‘The geograph-
ical distribution of mankind’. These volumes
have to be placed in the context of the
contemporary debates within the German
intellectual community over the place of the
cultural sciences and their relation to the nat-
ural sciences (Smith, 1991). Ratzel’s achieve-
ment was to put ‘the human’ back into
geography: in his view, the discipline could
not be assimilated to the natural sciences but,
on the contrary, had to explore the reciprocal
relations between ‘culture’ and ‘nature’.
It also had to set those relations in motion by
recognizing the dynamics of spatial formations
(notablydiffusionandmigration).
Ratzel’s project was thus notenvironmen-
tal determinism, as some commentators
have suggested, but it was distinguished by
the attempt to elaborate a series of nominally
scientific concepts whose significance
extended beyond the formalization of an aca-
demic discipline. For Ratzel, writing in the
middle of what Bassin (1987c) describes as
an ‘imperialist frenzy’, the development of a
statecould not be separated from its spatial
growth. Natter (2005) is thus surely right to
say that Ratzel’sAnthropogeographie ‘bleedsinto’ his Politische Geographie, published in- Indeed, Ratzel himself sawAnthropogeo-
graphie as only a preliminary stage in the
foundation of ‘the science ofpolitical geog-
raphy’. In hisPolitische Geographie, Ratzel ac-
cordingly described the state as ‘a living body
which has extended itself over a part of the
Earth and has differentiated itself from other
bodies which have similarly expanded’. The
object of these extensions and expansions
was always ‘the conquest ofspace’, and it
was this that became formalized in the concept
oflebensraum(‘living space’): ‘the geograph-
ical area within which living organisms de-
velop’. Ratzel was keenly aware of the
dangers of organicism, but even so insisted
that: ‘Just as the struggle for existence in the
plant and animal world always centres about a
matter of space, so the conflicts of nations are
in great part only struggles forterritory’ (see
alsogeopolitics).
Wanklyn (1961) treatsLebensraumas ‘a fun-
damental geographical concept’, and in her
eyes Ratzel’s writings were directed primarily
towards ‘thinking out the scope and content
of biogeography’. This is to understandbio-
geographyin a highly particular way, but there
is a more general tradition of biogeographical
reflection within human geography that sug-
gests affinities between Ratzel’sLebensraum,
Paul Vidal de la Blache’sgenre de vieand the
concept ofrum(‘room’) developed in Torsten
Ha ̈gerstrand’stime-geography. If these affin-
ities are recognized, then Dickinson’s (1969)
view of Ratzel’s original formulation, stripped
of its subsequent distortions by the Third
Reich, as ‘one of the most original and
fruitful of all concepts in modern geography’,
becomes peculiarly prescient. But such a
purely ‘scientific’ reading does scant justice
to the context in which Ratzel was working
and, in particular, ignores the fact that his
vision of human geography not only had
political implications but also rested on – and
indeed was made possible by – a series of pol-
itical assumptions (Bassin, 1987b). Crucially,
Farinelli (2000, p. 951) insists that through
Ratzel’s reformulations ‘the state takes posses-
sion of geography, and becomes its supreme
object’. dg
Suggested reading
Farinelli (2000); Natter (2005).anti-development A body of work and
practice that is fundamentally opposed to
mainstream conceptions of development.
Standard accounts of development assumeGregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_A Final Proof page 30 31.3.2009 9:44pmANTHROPOGEOGRAPHY