The Dictionary of Human Geography

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empire of merchantcapitalismcentred on the

Dutch Republic and the city of Amsterdam.

And both were haunted by their epistemo-

logical other: by the mathematical–locational

corpus of Ptolemy’s Geography and Varenius’

own ‘General Geography’. All three features

reappear in the subsequent history of regional

geography in Europe and North America:

the production and circulation of regional

descriptions for public audiences, the strategic

application of regional intelligence, and the

formalization of a spatial scientific dual to

regional geography.

In the eighteenth century, a European

geographical imaginarytreated ‘europe’as

the master-architect of an intellectual grid, a

sort of semiotic square (see table), in which

‘africa’, ‘asia’ and ‘america’ were placed in

distinctive and subordinate positions within a

matrix of difference (Gregory, 1998b). These

four cardinal orientations structured the pro-

duction of regional stereotypes. These were in

the main the products of European projects of

exploration, whose results were circulated to

a wider public through exhibitions, illustra-

tions and published accounts of travel. In fact,

travel-writinghas been a vital source for

the production of regions as bounded spaces

possessing some sort of unity that makes them

distinctive, ‘special’ or unique. Within this

genre, regions are typically represented as dis-

tinctive zones set off from other regions, whose

essential nature – at once a matter of ‘identity’

and ‘authenticity’ – is conveyed through both

a narrativization of space (plotting the author’s

tracks) and an aestheticization oflandscape

(producing a word-picture). Theirimagina-

tive geographiesbecome sedimented over

time, so much so that many contemporary

travel writings by European and North

American authors continue to sustain an

elaborate textualization of regions as zones

that re-inscribe eighteenth- and nineteenth-

century stereotypes: ‘the tropics’ as a zone of

excess, of primeval nature and humanabjec-

tionor plenitude and freedom (seetropical-

ity); ‘the Orient’ as a liminal zone of mystery

and danger, eroticism andtransgression(see

orientalism); and ‘the Arctic’ as a limit-zone

of solitude, silence and extremity (Lutz and

Collins, 1993; Holland and Huggan, 1999).

These are not (and never were) innocent rep-

resentations, and similar ways of dividing up

the world into regions and identifying their

supposedly characteristic natures are activated

within other public discourses, including

the signature images associated by travel com-

panies with places such as ‘India’ or ‘China’,

the stereotypes of ‘themiddle east’ invoked

by European and American media organiza-

tions, and the partitional vocabularies of

‘balkanization’, enclaves and dominoes

(seedomino theory) mobilized by contem-

porarygeopolitics.

In the course of the nineteenth and early

twentieth centuries, the academic discipline

ofgeographywas drawn to theregionas its

central object of study. ‘Object’ is exactly the

word: the region was seen as one of the basic

‘building-blocks’ of geographical enquiry.

Thismetaphorclearly conveys the common

sense of regionalization as bothpartitional(the

world can be exhaustively divided into

bounded spaces) andaggregative(these spaces

can be fitted together to form a larger totality).

This sensibility applied both to traditional

regional geography and to the successor pro-

jects ofspatial science. In the regional mono-

graphs written by French geographer Paul

Vidal de le Blache at the turn of the nineteenth

and twentieth centuries, for example, the

regions (pays) of France owed their identity

(or‘personality’)to the localculturesthat

impressed themselves on the local landscapes

(differentiation) and to their connections with

other places within the system of the French

nation(circulation; see alsoareal differenti-

ation). In the austere lexicon oflocational

analysis, regions were seen as cells within

spatial grids. Thus Grigg (1965) argued that

‘regionalization is similar to classification’, and

his account of the logic of regional taxonomy

provided the basis for a series of formal

region-buildingalgorithmsin which regions

were treated as combinatorial, assignment or

districting problems: in effect, as the product

of purely technical procedures. To Haggett,

Cliff and Frey (1977), therefore, the region

was simply ‘one of the most logical and

satisfactory ways of organizing geographical

information’ (see also classification and

regionalization).

The regional-descriptive and the mathemat-

ical–locational impulses were both channelled

into the production of regional knowledges

during and after the Second World War.

Indeed, one geographer claimed that ‘World

EUROPE ASIA

‘a space of opposition’

AMERICA AFRICA

‘the space of the future’ ‘a space of contradiction’

Gregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_R-new Final Proof page 633 2.4.2009 9:12pm

REGIONAL GEOGRAPHY