In
The Geographical Tradition: Episodes in the History of a Contested Enterprise, David Livingstone uses an episodic structure both to trace the ideological and methodological history of the discipline and to map out the physical world as it looked through these various geographical perspectives. He argues that geography changes as society changes, and that the best way to understand the discipline is to situate it in its social and intellectual environments. A geographer and a historian of science, he takes a contextual approach to the history of geography, so he sees geographic knowledge as necessarily "partial," neither value-free nor complete; his emphasis on the "contested" nature of the discipline injects a much-needed dose of relativism and PoMo into geography.
Much of what Livingstone is doing is applying methods and concepts from the history of science to the history of geography, thus constructing the discipline as both science and contested cultural terrain. He argues for a "situated geography" whose meaning, methods, and applications vary with time and place; historians can only access the discipline by studying its internal
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