* Chapter 10 Emphases and Biases
It's useful for academic survival to learn to detect
one's instructor's quirks as quickly as possible, as well as
to sense the biases of the authors to whom one is introduced.
This is not only a matter of scheming for better marks. One
such peculiar perspective or another may well become plausible
enough to be adopted as a guideline for future work.
Instructors -- and authors -- on the other hand, may consider
it in their interest to squirrel their biases away as best
they can, or at least try not to be too transparent too soon.
That is also a survival mechanism. In this concluding chapter
we will neglect the second need in favor of the first,
explicitly recapitulating emphases and admitting biases. In
the process it may be possible to characterize the discipline
out of which this book emerged and to clarify its subtitle.
Most of the discussion of the Americas in the preceding
pages has been substantive; theoretical issues have been
referred to sparingly. Often they have been indicated
indirectly. This approach comes, I suppose, of many a
journey, much stopping at viewpoints, and a great deal of
reconnaissance flying in light planes. It also reflects a
strategy for introducing people to the geographic perspective:
by involving them in the questions that arise in any normally
curious person's mind when confronted with scenery. Geography
teachers of a less mobile and perhaps more energetic time used
to say that you learned it through your bootsoles, meaning the
same thing.
And looking out over a landscape is a source of
satisfaction. Our free time is often enriched by it. Many
people, for example, visit the Mayan ruins at Tikal in
Guatemala every year. With a special permit it is possible to
remain among the ruins after dark, and most evenings there are
little groups up on the temple platforms watching the light
change over a ruined city center in a tropical forest setting.
Sunset and moonrise, the noisy socializing of animals in the
trees below, a seamless forest out to a flat and distant
horizon -- all these help one to sense the nature and appeal
of this particular habitat. It once sustained a high
civilization but is now sparsely occupied. What happened
here? As these ruminations proceed, perhaps to become
systematic, as one comes down from the temple platform,
something like geography may take shape.
It is not just the travel-poster landscape, of course,
that elicits the thought about place. We are also curious
about our own surroundings, if for no other reason than that
understanding them is essential for coping. The primitive
hunter and his family seated on the edge of a rock shelter,
surveying the terrain before them and keeping a wary lookout
for intruders, will have had that urge too. Unfortunately
our sensitivity to place is dulled by the encapsulated way we
live and the rapidity with which we move about. In our
adaptive tuning-out of stimuli in order to remain sane, we
lose a great many of the subtler messages from our
surroundings.
Looking about in a strange place for the first time, or a
familiar place for the hundredth time -- or trying to get some
comprehension of a place from written materials, for that
matter -- it is useful to get together some information:
Mexico is rich in minerals and timber. It is one of
the top two producers of silver; also important are
gold, copper, lead, zinc, antimony, mercury,
arsenic, amorphous graphite, molybdenum, sulphur,
coal and opal.... Principal export crops are cotton,
coffee, cane sugar, tomatoes, cattle, fresh and
frozen meats [9, p. 542].
This is fine, but it bores most of us pretty quickly. We
need something more imaginative to go with it, something
poetic:
There is a little smell of carnations, because they
are the nearest thing. And there is a resinous
smell of ocote wood, and a smell of coffee, and a
faint smell of leaves, and of Morning, and even of
Mexico. Because when all is said and done, Mexico
has a faint, physical scent of her own, as each
human being has. And this is a curious,
inexplicable scent, in which there are resin and
perspiration and sunburned earth and urine among
other things [5, p. 9].
Whether the data are prosaic or inspired or something in
between, we soon attempt to put them into perspective.
Directly or indirectly we ask questions, and the drift of the
questions is very important.
The geographical bias of this book lies mainly in the
types of questions repeatedly asked, the issues raised again
and again. What is man-made in the landscape before us and
what must be attributed to other agents? What constraints
does nature set and what opportunities are offered? Are there
any peculiarities in the way people have perceived these given
circumstances and reacted to them? Can one identify a
characteristic relationship between humans and their
environment, like that of the shifting cultivator and the
cowboy? Has there been a distinctive cultural imprint, a mark
left by some idiosyncrasy of the occupants? How was the area
occupied and how did it come to be used the way it is now?
How do we assess what has been done with it? Does it seem
irrational, pragmatic, conservational or destructive, or
something else still? What will be here in a decade's time
and how will the inhabitants like it? Why are some people so
attached to this place while others flee it? And what was it
that a famous writer once said of it? -- "a little smell of
carnations . . . of resin and perspiration and sunburned
earth...."
Reflecting briefly on how these questions were raised and
dealt with in the preceding chapters is a recapitulation of
the book's content and its conceptualization. The actual
sequence of questioning varied in ways suitable to the
emphasis required in any particular place, and the whole
process was carried out at two main regional scales.
Cities
It is not hard to differentiate the man-made from the
natural when the latter is paved over, as in Sao Paulo or
Chicago. Searching for what remains of the features of the
original sites is instructive, though, in making sense of the
patterns of nucleation and the main axes of movement. The
centrality of the two cities, their tremendous importance for
surrounding regions and their respective countries, was an
opportunity grasped. Crass entrepreneurship gave these cities
their distinctive stamp -- very different from that of the
more "cultured" Rio de Janeiro or New York. At least so goes
the folklore.
The historical development of Chicago and Sao Paulo is
dominated by phenomenal growth. On the graph presented on page
29 this is shown dramatically, but certain nuances are
apparent too, and this is the point: at which a comparison is
especially illuminating. Although there are strong general
similarities in the trend, there are differences in the timing
of the increase and the onset of central-city decline. An
assessment of current living conditions in both and a
prognosis for the next decades evokes all the ills of rapid,
massive urbanization. Yet these also remain exciting places
to live and work.
Central Valleys
In the main food-producing areas of the Americas the
differentiation of natural and man-made is perhaps more
interesting. The interaction between human beings and the
land seems more intimate. In the two western valleys we
discussed, as in the two grasslands, the environments found by
white explorers have been extensively altered, so much so that
the Mediterranean vegetation or the original grass cover is
seen only in remnants. Deciphering what's left, deducing what
was once there, appreciating the nuance and the sweep of
change, understanding what has been put in its place -- all
that is very good geography.
As habitats, the two Central Valleys have often induced
euphoria. And there are parallels in the way they were
occupied and developed. However, the two are differently
located vis-a-vis continental and world markets; they are
caught in different institutional and economic contexts. The
resulting landscapes and lifeways are vastly different. The
gracious, oppressive landed estate, the world of the "master
and the man," expresses much of the essence of the Central
Valley of Chile; it never really took hold in the Central
Valley of California, but other modern sorts of large
agricultural operations did.
These "golden lands" are not as attractive as they once
were. Urbanization nearby or within the valleys has cast its
blight. Central California must see to its water supply; the
ecology has been threatened by heavy use of chemicals; there
has been labor unrest, and illegal in-migration from Mexico
continues. Central Chile has had problems of another order.
The successive promotion and rollback of agrarian reform,
under the shadow of severe national economic and political
problems, have brought great hardship. By mid-1976, however,
there seemed to be signs of recovery [3, p. 250].
Great Plains and Pampa
The occupancy and use of the Great Plains and the Pampa
have been influenced over the centuries by changing
assessments (or we might say perceptions) of their potential.
Environmental perception affects behavior in almost any
setting, but it is strikingly exemplified in these two
grasslands. The nomadic indigenous peoples saw them as vast
hunting grounds. The early white intruders found little to
attract them and affirmed that they would remain empty --
except for the savages. Then, in roughly parallel and
dramatic transformations during the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries their potential was vastly enlarged. They
first became range lands for domesticated animals and then
were brought in large part under the plow. They had been made
into "breadbaskets"; the Great Plains are now the prime source
of cereals in the world. There are attendant ecological
problems, and the perhaps overriding concern is whether the
soils of the Great Plains can take the strain. Technology and
productivity have not kept pace on the Pampa, but there are
indications of revitalization. The problem is modernization.
With these sorts of events passing over a landscape like
summer storms it is not difficult to sense the importance of
including a careful consideration of timing and circumstance
in any analysis of the relationship of people and
land.
The cultural imprint on the interior plains of North
America is visually a grid; the family farm or ranch grading
into the agribusiness is the key socioeconomic unit. The
private estate and tenancy still characterize much of the
Pampa. In both, the mystique of the man on horseback
persists. A fanciful image of what a North American cowboy
is, does, and wears has become familiar throughout the Western
world.
Appalachia and Northeast Brazil
Nature has been miserly in Appalachia and the Brazilian
Northeast; at least so it would seem at first glance. A
closer look from an oblique perspective reveals little by
little that they are not so poorly endowed, especially
Appalachia. They are problem areas, yes, but their basic
problems are economic, institutional, and locational. They
have been misused and bypassed. But development in hill
regions has recently been increasing. Perhaps the bold lines
that were drawn in the 1960s to enclose these problem areas
are becoming less and less relevant. Thus a simple question
as to why and to what extent the two regions remain places of
disadvantage -- the kind of question a geographer might well
ask -- leads into twists and turns.
Meanwhile the mountain people, as well as the sertanejos,
nurture their love of home, carrying it with them when they
settle as aliens in some large city. Out of hardscrabble
country come the stories, accents, and songs of rootedness.
Amazement at the love of place stimulated a leading
geographer, Yi-Fu Tuan, to write an important and enjoyable
book: Topophilia [9]. It shows one direction into which a
study of man and the land can lead.
The attachment to place has less romantic significance
too. Tendencies to resist movement or change even when it
promises economic improvement must be acknowledged by the
development planner and perhaps respected.
Amazonia and the Arctic
Amazonia and the Arctic arouse still other variants in
geographic questioning. These are not problem areas, at least
not quite so chronically as Appalachia and the Northeast.
They are not food-producing areas of any great consequence,
though the Brazilian development planners do seem to expect
Amazonia to become one eventually. Instead, they may be seen
as embodiments of myths within their respective countries.
They represent imperatives.
The Arctic and Amazonia have long been regarded as
dangerous to live and move around in, an attribute that holds
its own attractions for some people. Man's marks on these
environments have seemed pretty puny until recently. Now
there is the legitimate concern that the tropical forest of
Amazonia, long considered supremely resistant to human
encroachment, may be replaced, in large part, within our
lifetime by cultivated species. The Arctic is also
threatened, particularly by the exploitation of fossil fuels.
Survey lines of amazing length already score much of what was
once a "trackless wilderness."
When we inquire into characteristic livelihood and land
use patterns in these two regions, a dichotomy is quickly
apparent between the indigenous adaptations over many
centuries and the predominantly exploitive activities of
recent in-migrants. The processes and conditions involved are
so surrounded by cliches and controversy that an understanding
is very difficult. Nevertheless, from the ethnographic
information gathered in both regions many examples of a
traditional conservational ethic emerge. From such concerns
of the native peoples one senses the precariousness of life
here. Ecological research amply confirms it. The old
lifeways, of course, are seen now only in remnants; articles
and ideas from the outside are bringing modernization and
dislocation. The in-migrant, white in North America and some
mixture of the basic three components in South America, has
come to obtain some commodity useful outside of the region.
The regions themselves have been given an extraneous meaning.
The Larger View
About two-thirds of the way through this book we changed
lenses, decreasing the scale of our discussion, increasing its
sweep. Such an adjustment of perspective can be helpful for
understanding the Americas -- and geography. The set of
questions basic to the discussion of the five sets of regions
underlies this expanded discussion too. The responses to
these questions become more general but not necessarily
superficial. They help us to make sense of continents, to go
from the simplified outline map of South America or North
America or Africa or whatever often seen on the TV screen to
something more meaningful. They are an essential context for
the close-up treatment. Careful comparison in aid of sensible
distinction is more important here than ever.
A small-scale discussion of the physical makeup of the
Americas tends to sprinkle the map with resources, the way the
fairies scattered stardust in old Walt Disney movies.
However, a map of minerals per se, or marketable forest
species, or soils, does not mean much unless some
relationships are spun, as in Figures 7.2 and 7.7. We
attempted to carve up the Americas into generalized "life
zones," which would introduce some broader thoughts about what
people have had to work with in the western hemisphere. The
emphasis was on the locational relationship of whole groups of
resources with world transportation routes as well as their
place in modern industrialization. In large parts of Latin
America these elements are disadvantageously related. There
is no St. Lawrence Seaway, no Megalopolis. At this point it
is most useful to reflect on the different set of locational
relationships in the Americas of prehistoric times. The "high
cultures" were all in what is now Latin America; the
continents had a considerably different pattern of
socioeconomic focal points. The small-scale -- and large-
scale -- geography was not at all the way it is now; man-land
relationships in the Americas have changed drastically through
time, and never so drastically as when a whole new series of
perceptions and objectives was introduced through European
conquest and settlement.
The people of the Americas need to be considered at a
similar continental scale if we are to understand something of
their imprint on the landscapes of the western hemisphere.
Geographers usually study people to discover meaning in the
marks they leave; thus they must often draw on the findings of
anthropologists, or sociologists, or even theologians.
Demographic and Cultural Considerations
The most obtrusive aspects of man in the Americas are
demographic. We have all become more or less conscious of
differences in growth rates from country to country and of the
critically high rates in developing countries. Population
movement has always been a very "American" issue. Cultural
configurations cannot be mapped at the continental scale with
anything like the same accuracy. Some people would say they
can't and needn't be mapped at all. North American culture
has, perhaps, been more successfully delineated than Latin
American culture. The fact that summary cultural designations
are frequently used, as in the travel industry, makes it
necessary to deal with them academically in one way or
another. As distasteful as it may seem, any comparative
consideration of the current "human conditions" in the
Americas or elsewhere is likely to come down to gross national
product per capita, which is something like average income per
year by country.
Historical Geography
Taking a wide-angle view of how the Americas came to be
what they are allows the identification of generally similar
epochs and themes on both sides of the culture divide along
the Rio Grande, as was developed at some length in Chapter 9.
If this sounds like history, so be it. Those who have become
particularly sensitive to geographical change through time,
and who have mastered the techniques of gathering the relevant
data, often do call themselves historical geographers.
There is in the Americas generally a pre-Columbian or
prehistoric period with a hazy beginning but a very definite
ending, precipitated by the conquest of longer or shorter
duration. A colonial period followed, which was too long
everywhere, by definition. Independence was eventually won,
in different ways and with different territorial results. In
the nineteenth century the detail increases. An industrial
revolution seems evident, but not as clearly as in European
history and with a different timing in Latin America than in
North America. Modernization seems to cover what's happening
now in the cities and in some of the favored countrysides of
Latin America. The term seems hardly applicable any longer in
a North America that is retrenching, where it is fashionable
to talk about how "small is beautiful."
When we reflect on what is and what may soon be in the
Americas, we think first, almost inevitably, about trends in
the cities. In North America there is concern about how the
deterioration of the central city might be slowed and
reversed. In Latin America one trend overshadows most others
in any look into the urban present and future: the relentless
growth of the city through in-migration and natural increase.
The North American farm has become an industry; the
sophistication we may yet see in food producing systems within
our lifetime is in the realm of science fiction. Can we --
must we -- expect something similar eventually in rural Latin
America? How desirable will it be and for what segments of
the population? Are there ways to modernize agriculture
without displacing labor? These are the sorts of issues
geographers can get involved in. The discipline is
potentially quite disturbing.
Interchange Among Specialties
To elaborate "man-land relationships," one of the major
emphases of the discipline, beyond such first statements as
have been presented throughout this book requires that several
traditionally disparate capabilities be brought together.
There must be, on the one hand, a sensitivity to and mastery
of the concept of culture. World views, myths, values,
attitudes -- all of these influence what a group does to its
habitat and how its members are affected by it. Scientific
procedures may be helpful in studying these aspects of man, as
shown in Levi-Strauss's structuralistic analyses of myths
[e.g., 6], but often intuition is instructive as well. The
specialists to whom one goes for such information would almost
certainly call themselves anthropologists.
The linking of man and land also requires an entry into
the natural sciences. This has been dramatically illustrated
in the work of scholars who are interested in the
environmental constraints felt by early man, and in the
imprint he left. Some years ago the geologist-geographer Karl
Butzer showed the relevance of Pleistocene glaciation to the
interpretation of some Old World archaeological sites and went
on to write an influential book called Environment and
Archaeology [2].
The study of the distant past now routinely leads into
the laboratory. A common dating method consists in testing
remaining organic materials for their residues of the carbon
14 and thus arriving at a rough idea of the time elapsed
since, say, a tree was cut to make the lintel in a temple
doorway. Pollen deposited by natural or cultivated vegetation
of the past can be microscopically examined for information on
climates and cropping patterns.
Such a conjunction of interests and methods around
important themes often leads one to think that the most
interesting work done at universities by students and
instructors may well be a kind of subversive activity that
goes on between and not within the disciplinary categories
into which learning is traditionally divided. Inquiries into
the ecological problems of the present as well as subsistence
systems of the prehistoric past, the interpretation of epochs
such as the medieval centuries, the evocation and explanation
of a major world region (like North America or Latin America)
-- all these certainly benefit from free-ranging
investigations, from complementary contributions out of
various specialties. In fact, they do not make much sense
unless they are handled in an interdisciplinary fashion.
However timely and lively such an exchange may be,
though, it has a curious effect. It challenges those in the
disciplines involved to fulfil their unique potential. If one
sort of contribution toward the solution of a common research
or instructional problem can be expected from a historian and
another from an anthropologist, what may be expected from a
geographer? Sooner or later there must be a clarification of
the variation in approaches.
The Various Kinds of Geography
The emphasis on man-land relationships, basic to what is
often called "human" or "cultural" or even "historical"
geography is not the only bias within the discipline. Any
geography department's curriculum presents a bewildering array
of courses that go off in other directions too. A lot of this
variety is attributable to the background of particular
instructors, the pronouncements of gurus, "in" words and
ideas, inertia, or what have you. But a good deal of it goes
beyond quibbles; the major emphases represent traditions in
analysis or interpretation of data and to some extent focus
also on different types of data.
All geographers pay some attention to the disposition of
things in space, whether the scale is that of cropping
patterns in a constricted mountain valley or the bold spread
of a religion from one continent to another. To "locational
analysts," form, position, direction, and distance -- in both
their static and their dynamic aspects -- are of special
interest. Moreover, they see these attributes in relative
rather than absolute terms [1, p. 72].
Distance, for example, may be measured in difficulty or
cost of movement as well as in miles. A map of North America
laid out in accord with the best actual measurements the
cartographer can muster is one thing; the distorted map of the
continent carried about in the mind of a New Yorker is
another. A map of the nations of the western hemisphere is
fairly familiar, whereas a map showing these entities drawn
proportional in size to their population is likely to be an
instructive surprise, as shown near the beginning of Chapter 8
(Fig. 8.3).
For the locational or spatial analyst the key geographic
question becomes "Why are spatial distributions structured the
way they are?" His task is "to explain human spatial
behavior as the product of the relative spaces which man
himself creates by his space-adjusting activities" [1, p.88].
This is one way of interpreting what is out there.
Unfortunately, the rather self-conscious language in which it
is often expressed is alien to common usage. We have dealt
with various advantageous and disadvantageous spatial
relationships in the Americas. However, these were cited as
aspects and not as the sum and substance of a distinction
between the Americas.
Some geographers devote themselves to the study of man's
physical environment. They must be adept at measurement and
experimentation; they are after "hard data": air temperature
patterns in cities, the rates of movement of glaciers, the
amount and kind of sediment transported by a stream, and a
great deal more. The geographer who is interested in such
messy things as attitudes toward environment or the historical
progress of settlement may eye wistfully the way some physical
environmental data inscribe themselves unequivocally and
neatly on automatic recorders. Of course, there are
ambiguities here as well.
We have made many physical geographical comparisons in
Chapters 2 through 7 and have referred to environmental
factors at numerous other places. In fact, physical features
often provided the first stimuli for comparison -- and nature
has been generous in the Americas. The common breathless
reaction of European visitors, from Columbus's first report of
the beauty of the Bahamas [7, p. 70] to the way the
contemporary European travel industry sells trips to the North
American West (e.g., advertisements in Der Spiegel), sometimes
reminds the jaded natives of this bounty. To enhance the
understanding of this setting we have referred repeatedly to
the conditions and opportunities available in the Americas;
the emphasis, however, has been on the human response. Nothing
like a systematic treatment of physical forms and processes
could be attempted.
There are other specialties; a venerable one that
probably once constituted most of the discipline appears as
"Regional Geography" in college and university curricula. The
courses offered usually focus on a culture realm of
continental proportions. They have often been faulted for
their uncritical collections of data and questioned as a
viable specialty. They have also been held up as the
indispensable synthesizing finale of instruction in geography.
Be that as it may, the information they present is useful when
one leaves home.
The object of a regional study is ordinarily to isolate
the diagnostic features or distinguishing characteristics. In
the preceding pages we have asked, in effect, what is behind
the sensations people have when they cross from the United
States into Mexico, when they go from one culture realm to
another? In large part, therefore, this book reflects a
regional emphasis. More accurately, perhaps, it should be
considered a preparation for regional study, which brings us
around again to the introductory chapter.
Concluding Word of Caution
Before one can properly embark on the study of a part of
the world that is relatively unfamiliar -- or travel in it,
for that matter -- it is useful on intellectual and
humanitarian grounds to appraise any perceptual problems that
may exist between the student and the area studied. This is
more than a crafty analysis of the biases of the instructor or
the authors of those books that have to be carried back and
forth from the library; it's an examination of one's own
biases, and is often neglected in geography. North Americans
tend to see Latin America as exotic, as very different and
largely unrelated to their own world. They have other
prejudices about other regions -- the communist world, for
example. Only when these are recognized and attempts are made
to set them aside, at least experimentally, can anything like
understanding occur. The comparative approach helps to do
just that.
References
1. Abler, Ronald, Adams, John S., and Gould, Peter. Spatial
Organization: The Geographer's View of the World. Englewood
Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1971.
2. Butzer, Karl W. Environment ond Archaeology. Chicago:
Aldine, 1964.
3. "Chile: Signs of Recovery." Bank of London & South
America: Review 10 (1976): 250-254.
4. Eckholm, Eric P. "The Deterioration of Mountain
Environments." Science 189 (1975): 764-770.
5. Lawrence, D. H. Mornings in Mexico. Harmondsworth,
Middlesex, England: Penguin, 1960.
6. Levi-Strauss, Claude. The Raw and the Cooked. New York:
Harper & Row, 1969.
7. Morison, Samuel Eliot. The European Discovery of America:
The Southern Voyages. New York: Oxford University Press, 1974.
8. Pattison, William D. "The Four Traditions of Geography."
Journal of Geography 62 (1964): 211-216.
9. Tuan, Yi-Fu. Topophilia: A Study of Environmental
Perception Attitudes and Values. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.:
Prentice-Hall, 1974.
10. World Almanac and Book of Facts. New York: Newspaper
Enterprise Association, 1971.
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