Rethinking Historical GeographyAuthor(s): Derek GregorySource: Area, Vol. 8, No. 4 (1976), pp. 295-299Published by: The Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers)Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20001146 .

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Rethinking historical geography Derek Gregory, University of Cambridge

Summary. Attempts to distinguish historical geography from the rest of the discipline, and to advance an idealist approach within it, are held to be unsatisfactory. A critical approach is proposed, which integrates historical materialist scholarship into the wider discipline, by relating individual's experiences to the deeper structures which frame their actions.

I suspect I am not alone in feeling that historical geography has been rethought rather more often than it has been redone. Many recent methodological critiques have been unsatisfactory (or at best inconclusive) because their epistemological exhortations have as yet rarely been translated into substantive contexts to see how they work out in practice. This makes me somewhat reluctant to enter the debate which Leonard Guelke has sought to continue, but I do so partly because his is the only methodological critique of which I am aware which is based on a complete ignorance of the substantive contributions which have been conducted in the terms for which it is arguing, and partly because if his contribution is allowed to pass unchallenged then it will merely serve to reinforce the profound anti-historicism which has bedevilled geography's search for intellectual maturity during the last decade or so. I should make it clear from the start, therefore, that what I have to say is derived from my experience of and commitment to practice of some kind, although-as I hope to show-my understanding of that practice is somewhat removed from that of Leonard Guelke. The difference arises because he argues for an idealist approach which ' maintains that human actions cannot be adequately explained unless one understands the thought behind them ',2 whereas I would prefer to situate the conduct of historical enquiry within a materialist critique of society.

In adopting this position, I am certainly not denying that Verstehen has played an important part in some of the most creative historical geography of recent years, and few people ought to have any difficulty in pointing to the sensitive reconstructions of social worlds which now stand as convincing testimony to the old Sauerian dictum about seeing the land 'with the eyes of its former occupants, from the standpoint of their needs and capacities '. These reconstructions are not without their difficulties, but over and above these methodological problems there is an important issue of philo sophy. It seems to me that such phenomenological excursions by themselves will inevitably make the historical geographer into what E. H. Carr described as an ' un conscious apologist for a static society '. In this paper, therefore, I will argue that it is only by relating the way in which individuals constitute and apprehend their phenomenal world to the deeper structures framing their actions and experiences that such experiences can be transcended. This is not to align historical geography with the ' problem-solving [methodology of] contemporary applied geography ',5 about which I

certainly have reservations, but it is to argue that geography as a whole would benefit from recognizing the importance of historical-materialist scholarship and relating it to can explicitly critical conception of social enquiry.6

Systems, structures, and historical geography

If this is to be achieved, we need to say something about these deeper structures, particularly in so far as they relate to ways of conceptualizing change. The positivist answer-or rather, suggestion, given what I have already said about the lack of substantive studies which have emerged to lend credibility to these affirmations of faith-is systems analysis. This takes reality as its point of departure, and reconstructs the cognitive relationships between empirically derived objects.7 It assumes that all

295

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296 Rethinking historical geography

knowledge is grounded in the experience of sensorily apprehended reality, and Leszek Kolakowski calls this the rule of phenomenalism. Hence, for example, Alfred Radcliffe-Brown regarded social structure as being made up of observed patterns of interaction among different people, so that ' when we use the term " structure " we are referring to some sort of ordered arrangement of parts or components ... The units of social structure are persons, and a person is a human being considered as occupying a position in a social structure.'9 We can recognize much the same mode of apprehending reality in those geographers who have been concerned with spatial systems 'whose elements comprise the visible objects of landscape occupance '.1'

But there is another way. For Meyer Fortes, for instance, social structure 'is not immediately visible in the concrete reality... When we describe structure we are already dealing with general principles far removed from the complicated skein of feelings, beliefs and so on that constitute the tissues of actual social life. We are, as it

were, in the realm of grammar and syntax, rather than of the spoken word. We discern structure in the concrete reality of social events only by virtue of having first estab lished the structure. . .'.l' This conception helps us to establish a rule which runs counter to that of phenomenalism: namely, structuralism. This suggests that our identification of the elements of manifest reality must be mediated by a concealed structure. Adoption of this perspective by geographers would involve accepting that the landscape does not have the key to our understanding of it within itself, that these structures ' are not self-evident and inscribed into the nature of things ',12 and that there is an important distinction to be drawn between the appearance of things (Radcliffe-Brown's structure) and the way they really are (Fortes's structure). As Marx put it, all science would be superfluous ' if the form of appearance and the essence of things directly coincided .

SURFACE EXPRESSION

/

deep ontological structure ---_ theoretical structure

PRACTICE THEORY

Figure 1. ' Both structures and theories are " objects to be constructed

Although such a structure is concealed in the sense that it is not directly apparent at the empirical level, it is taken to be real: that is, it has ontological status. Since it is hidden from our immediate consciousness, but we can discover it, then it follows that this real-world structure cannot be opposed to the theoretical structure built to repre sent it. Therefore, as Figure 1 suggests, the ontological and theoretical structures have to be isomorphic or, in Pierre Vilar's words, both structures and theories are' objects to be constructed .1 This implies that contrary to Leonard Guelke's assertions, no science

worthy of the name can take its object as given, and that these objects have to be constituted by theoretical practice. Indeed, Paul Hirst has recently argued that ' the future of the social sciences as sciences lies with those theories which do not attempt to give the phenomena of experience the form of reason but seek to explain objects not given in experience, objects constituted in knowledge '.' The intersubjective constitu tion of the social world cannot be disregarded simply because it fails to constitute a scientific object, but in any critical analysis it has to be related to such an object.

Categorical and dialectical paradigms It is difficult to characterize the structuralist school in unambiguous terms, but a distinction can be made between its categorical and dialectical versions.16 These simple

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Rethinking historical geography 297

labels inevitably paper over many differences, but they do provide a useful vantage point from which to map out the path towards a critical social science. The former is founded on what Pierre Vilar calls the ideological temptation to search for the stabilities underlying change,' 7 and the significance of his emphasis on the ideological can be most readily appreciated by considering its most obvious proponent, Claude Levi-Strauss.

To understand anything of his approach, we first have to call his three mistresses out into the open: he names them as geology, psychoanalysis and Marxism. It is his relationship with the latter which is particularly important for our present purposes. On the face of it-a telling phrase-he appears to accept the Marxist model of infra structure (or economic base) and superstructure, according to which conditions in the infrastructure determine, in the last instance, forms of consciousness in the super structure.'8 He claims that the infrastructure is primary in so far as it provides the preconditions for life and thought, but that it does no more than this. On his reading, the infrastructure ' supplies the pack of cards and deals the hands, but the rules of the game are left to the players to decide '.19 It is these rules which concern him, and it is to the theory of superstructures ' scarcely sketched by Marx' to which he wants to contribute.20 It follows that Levi-Strauss is concerned' primarily with the invented rules of the game, to a lesser extent with what happens in particular games, and ... not at all with how the pack gets assembled or dealt '21

His analysis of superstructures effectively takes him in completely opposite directions to those followed by Marx, and instead of locating his analysis in a materialist critique of society, he revolves towards a more idealist, and in some respects almost Hegelian, conception. He claims that the recurring structures which his method discovers derive from an innate structuring capacity of the human mind, and this not only

makes clear his debt to psychoanalysis, but it also explains his conception of change. Thus he says that societies ' never create absolutely; all they can do is to choose certain combinations from a repertory of ideas which it should be possible to reconstitute '.22 This in turn means that ' men have always and everywhere set themselves the same task... In the course of their becoming, only the means have changed; through succeeding millenia, man has only managed to repeat himself ',23 which is much the same as his geological mistress's view of sequences of landscape change. These succes sive repetitions are confined within quite narrow limits, so that ' social types are not isolated creations, wholly independent of each other, and each one an original entity,

but rather the result of an endless play of combination and recombination, forever seeking to solve the same problems by manipulating the same fundamental elements .24

I have several difficulties with Levi-Strauss's version of structuralism. In the first place, it identifies structures on the basis of binary oppositions between two or more terms, and this means accepting a language of fixed and precise categories, which derive from a discretely differentiated, frozen vision of the world. But Gunnar Olsson has pointed out that ' if the human condition actually is a groping kind of activity, characterized by a perpetual struggle between ambiguity and certainty, then the analytic approach which initially assumes away all ambiguity is bound to produce a false picture . In the second place, it treats changes of social structure simply as combinatorial games, as the kaleidoscopic repatterning of a limited number of invari ant units. Levi-Strauss's method is to consider the realized configuration together with the set of alternative configurations to which it belongs, so that he can interpret the actual as an instance of the possible.'6 It therefore adds very little to our knowledge of the object analysed, and it is not intended to: instead, ' it fulfills the double purpose of disqualifying the search for explanation and substituting for it fact manipulation '.27 It is on these two counts that Vilar is surely justified in regarding the categorical paradigm as ideological rather than scientific."

If we are to search for scientific explanation, we are obliged to turn to the dialectical paradigm and, I think, to a materialist conception of it. Whereas the categorical paradigm sees change as' the process of playing through all the variants in an endgame

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298 Rethinking historical geography

of chess ,29 the dialectical paradigm sees these moves not only changing the configura tions on the board but also restructuring the rules of the game within which they are played. Instead of erecting an enduring and invariant structural net to catch and hold fast all the eddies and flurries of change, therefore, the dialectic captures a world in flux without itself falling apart only by moving the net with the eddies of the world it captures. This is just another way of saying that the method can only be understood by its practice, but this implies a clear commitment to particular historical contexts, to the innermost workings of society rather than to the innermost recesses of the human

mind. It also means that we can hold out the hope of understanding how particular social worlds come to be intersubjectively constituted in the way that they do, and through this the hope of restructuring those worlds.30

Historical geography may need rethinking, but not along the apologist lines which Leonard Guelke suggests. It has to be recognized as an integral part of any adequately constituted geography, and this difficult task is made no easier by those who seek to advance or perpetuate a wholly spurious methodological distinctiveness. I have sug gested here that an historical-materialist conception is the most appropriate way of achieving this vital fusion. If it is any consolation to Leonard Guelke, it is also ' widely accepted by historians .

Notes

1. L. Guelke, ' On rethinking historical geography ', Area 7 (1975), 135-8 2. Ibid. 137 3. C. Sauer, ' Foreword to Historical Geography', in Land and life, ed. by J. Leighly (Berkeley

and Los Angeles, 1963), 362; see also G. R. Lowther, ' Idealist history and historical geography', Canadian Geographer 14 (1959), 31-6, and D. C. Mercer and J. M. Powell, ' Phenomenology and related non-positivist viewpoints in the social sciences ', Monash

Publications in Geography 1 (1972); the many substantive contributions include R. L. Heathcote, Back of Bourke: a study of land appraisal and settlement in semi-arid Australia (Melbourne, 1965); J. M. Powell, The public lands of Australia Felix: settlement and land appraisal in Victoria, 1834-91 (Melbourne, 1970), and J. M. Powell, 'Utopia, millenium and the cooperative ideal: a behavioral matrix in the settlement process', Australian Geographer 9 (1971), 606-18

4. E. H. Carr, What is history ? (Harmondsworth, 1973), 66 5. L. Guelke, op. cit., 138 6. M. Horkheimer, Critical theory (New York, 1972); A. Wellmer, Critical theory of society

(New York, 1971); introductions will be found in R. Blackburn (ed.), Ideology in social science: readings in critical social theory (London, 1972), and B. Fay, Social theory and political practice (London, 1975)

7. J. Langton, ' Potentialities and problems of adopting a systems approach to the study of change in human geography ', Progress in Geography 4 (1972), 131.

8. L. Kolakowski, Positivist philosophy (London, 1972), 15 9. A. Radcliffe-Brown, Structure and function in primitive society (London, 1952), 10

10. P. Toyne, Organisation, location and behaviour: decision-making in economic geography (London, 1974), 13; P. Haggett, Locational analysis in human geography (London, 1965), 17

11. M. Fortes, Social structure (Oxford, 1949), 56 12. E. Gellner, ' Our current sense of history', Archives Europkenes de Sociologie 12 (1971),

165 13. K. Marx, Capital, III, 797 14. P. Vilar, ' Histoire marxiste, histoire en construction: essai de dialogue avec Althusser',

Annales E.S.C. 28 (1973), 188 15. P. Hirst, Durkheim, Bernard and epistemology (London, 1975), 7; see also G. Bachelard,

Le nouvel esprit scientifique (Paris, 1934), and D. Lecourt, Marxism and epistemolog), (London, 1975)

16. M. Albrow, 'Dialectical and categorical paradigms of a science of society', Sociological Review 22 (1974), 183-201

17. P. Vilar, op. cit. 18. This does not impute economic determinism to the Marxist theory: see L. Althusser and

E. Balibar, Reading Capital (London, 1970), 224, or B. Ollman, Alienation (Cambridge, 1971), 17-18

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Rethinking historical geography 299

19. J. A. Barnes, Three styles in the study of kinship (London, 1971), 109 20. C. Levi-Strauss, La pens&e sauvage (Paris, 1962), 173-4 21. J. A. Barnes, op. cit., 109 22. C. Levi-Strauss, Tristes tropiques (Paris, 1955) 23. Ibid., 424 24. C. Levi-Strauss, 'The bear and the barber ', Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute

93 (1963), 1-11 25. G. Olsson, The dialectics of spatial analysis, Antipode 6 (1974), 3, 50-62 26. J. Piaget, Structuralism (London, 1971), 38: this is analogous to the use of information

theory to derive the most likely configuration for a spatial system, subject to certain constraints; see A. Wilson, Entropy in urban and regional modelling (London, 1970)

27. R. Makarius, ' Structuralism-science or ideology?', Socialist Register (London) 1974, 216; see also E. Leach, ' Claude Levi-Strauss-anthropologist and philosopher ', New Left Review 34 (1965), 12-27

28. For a detailed discussion of science and ideology, see L. Althusser, For Marx (Harmonds worth, 1969), 167-75 and 180-193; M. Castells, 'Theorie et ideologie en sociologie ur baine', Sociologie et Societies 1 (1969), 171-90; a simplified version will be found in C. G. Pickvance, 'On a materialist critique of urban sociology', Sociological Review 22 (1974), 203-5

29. E. Hobsbawm, ' Karl Marx's contribution to historiography', in R. Blackburn (ed), op. cit., 277

30. For an elaboration of this, see D. Gregory, Ideology, science and human geography (London, forthcoming)

31. L. Guelke, op. cit., 138

Maximizing the nearest-neighbour statistic J. Haworth (University of Salford) and P. Vincent (University of Lancaster)

Summary. It is well known that the nearest-neighbour statistic, R, is maximized when the point distribution forms a close-packed hexagonal system, although no formal proof appears in the geographical literature. The authors present a method, based on the properties of simplicial graphs, to demonstrate this fact.

Nearest-neighbour analysis is one of the most widely used methods of point pattern analysis. The derivation of the test statistic R is dealt with in a paper by Clark and Evans (1954) and subsequently by Dacey (1960). The applicability of nearest-neighbour methods in general is described by King (1969) and practical limitations have been reviewed in Area 8 (1976), 3. In a recent review of nearest neighbour methods, De Vos indicated that the nearest neighbour statistic, R = IA/FE, is maximal if the points under consideration form a hexagonal pattern. He noted that he was unable to find a proof anywhere in the literature to substantiate this well-known observation (De Vos, 1973, 309).

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