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.  

105: Price & Lewis' Reinvention of Cultural Geography (with responses)

Price & Lewis

Judging from the rather surprised and defensive responses from Denis Cosgrove, James Duncan, and Peter Jackson (below), Price and Lewis published "The Reinvention of Cultural Geography" in 1993 to start a fight.  In their article, Price and Lewis identify a new strain in cultural geography called "new cultural geography," which critiqued a "traditional cultural geography" that they associated with the Berkeley School.  While the authors commend the new cultural geographers (NCGs) in their adoption of cultural theory, they argue that they paint an unfair picture of the Berkeley School.  Against the NCGs, Price and Lewis argue that:

• the Berkeley School was not "statist, empiricist, and obsessed with relict landscapes and material artifacts;" it was, and still is, "dynamic, predominantly historicist, and interested primarily in the relationships between diverse human societies and their natural environments."
• few if any Berkeley School geographers or even "traditional" cultural geographers have ever conceptualized culture as "superorganic;" cultural geography has always been a "pluralistic endeavor ultimately oriented to empirical issues."

Optimally, the authors would like to see the "new" and "traditional" schools merge, so that cultural geography as a whole could benefit from the awesome mind meld of social theory, empirical research, and historical depth that would likely result.

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