100: James Duncan's Superorganic

In "The Superorganic in American Cultural Geography," James Duncan calls out cultural geography for laboring under an outdated and undertheorized concept of culture, and argues that cultural geographers and social geographers would both benefit from interconnections between their disciplines.

According to Duncan, cultural geographers in the 1970s (the essay was published in 1980) were largely still working from Carl Sauer's "superorganic" theory of culture in his 1925 essay "The Morphology of Landscape."  Building on the work of Berkeley anthropologists Alfred Kroeber and Robert Lowie, Sauer theorized culture to be both autonomous and the determinant of individual human action.  This separation of the individual from culture causes several problems for cultural geographers because