134: Carl Sauer's Morphology of Landscape

Carl Sauer's "The Morphology of Landscape" argues unambiguously that geography is the morphological study of cultural landscapes; it is the systematic study of both the ways in which humans have manipulated the physical landscape, and the ways in which physical landscape shapes the cultural landscape.  This article is one of the foundational articles for the Berkeley School, human geography, and cultural geography; Sauer wrote it partly to get the environmental determinists off his back, and partly to stake out some territory for geography.  Here are a few highlights:

• the "morphological method" involves describing the hell out of physical and cultural landscapes, and then looking for formal patterns across landscapes to determine the connections between culture and the landscape.  The goal is to create composite types, so that you can measure future landscapes against them.  

• landscape, like area, is an organic whole; unlike area, its boundaries and composition are subjectively determined by the geographer based on experience with other landscapes
• Geography is not an abstract, rational science; it accepts the subjectivity of the geographer, as long as that subjectivity is made somewhat objective by long experience with reading and writing patterns in the landscape.
• the cultural landscape is the combination of humans and nature, where the natural landscape provides the materials, culture provides the shaping force, and the "mind of man" creates culture; however, it is "man's record upon the landscape," not "the energy, customs, or beliefs of man."
• history of the landscape is important, but it's mostly just included as a "descriptive convenience"

I realize that there was a pretty fierce debate in the 1990s over whether Sauer's theory of culture was "superorganic," or a force independent of humans.  There is one paragraph in this whole essay that alludes to a superorganic theory of culture in here, but I think that the problem is more that cultural theory was a lot more complex in the 1990s than it was in the 1920s than that Sauer thought culture was an autonomous force.  He was trying to shift the geographical paradigm away from environmental determinism, not invent a spatially-informed theory of culture in the process.