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pessimistic about the future of modern civilization, he turned his attention more and more towards the historical and anthropological roots of human cultures, seeking to understand the "paleogeography of man," through studies of agricultural origins, transformations of ancient family structure, and speculations on the early hearths of human development (see Leighly 1976). As important as Sauer's own research was (and this cannot be doubted), his lasting impact on American cultural geography was also felt through the work of his numerous students. Over the course of his career, Sauer supervised more than 40 PhD dissertations in geography. The authors of many of these became prominent cultural geographers in their own right, both reinforcing and advancing the various agendas for the discipline Sauer established. As Marvin Mikesell remarks (1987: 145), it is too limiting to force Sauer's legacy and influence into the confining boundaries of "cultural geography." "Was the enterprise founded and led by Sauer for more than thirty years a school of cultural geography, as is often supposed," Mikesell asks, "or one of biogeography, historical geography, Latin- American geography, or indeed a geography that defies definition?"
Whatever the best description of Sauer's work, as cultural geography reinvented itself in the last two decades of the twentieth century, with British geographers taking a particular lead (see chapter 2), Sauer's legacy has been an important touchstone of reaction. The traditions of cultural geography Sauer initiated have proved exception- ally durable, and new developments in cultural geography continually have had to come to terms with them. In Sauer's work we can trace many of the prominent themes that dominated cultural geography in the twentieth century: a concern with the material landscape; an interest in cultural ecology and the often deleterious effects of humans on the environment; a desire to trace the origins and diffusion of revolu- tionary cultural practices such as plant and animal domestication and the use of fire. We can also see in Sauer and the work of those in the traditions he instigated an anti- urban, anti-modern bias with which cultural geography is still trying to come to terms (Entrikin 1984).25 But Sauer's ideas were not born in isolation, emerging Athena-like out of the head of a god. Rather, they were (and are) a part of important intellectual and political contexts, contexts that shaped, if not determined, the development of cultural geography as a coherent field of inquiry.
When Carl Sauer published his methodological broadside, "The Morphology of Landscape" in 1925 - a work that sought to place culture right at" the center of geography's project he did so in large parf as a reaction to what he saw as the errors of environmental determinism. He was concerned to correct the course of academic geography at a time when it was struggling to find firm intellectual grounding in the wake of environmental determinism's failure. Sauer's main purpose was to show that environmental determinism had pretty much got it backwards. lt wasn't nature that caused culture, but rather culture, working with and on nature, created the
contexts of life. Sauer was especially concerned with material aspects of culture, Particularly the landscape, which he saw as manifestations of culture's traffic with nature. The evidence of this cultural variation, to Sauer, was most clearly right there
in the landscape: the landscape was a manifestation of the culture that made it. Reading a landscape, therefore, provided the geographer with a window on particular cultures themselves. Sauer's ideas along these lines were enormously influential,
launching a longstanding and still quite vibrant tradition of landscape studies in cultural geography. We will look at this tradition of landscape studies much more fully in chapters 4 and 5, and we will see there and in a number of other places (including later in this chapter) that Sauer's notions launched a quite problematic understanding of what culture is. But to understand why it is problematic, we need first to look at the roots of his cultural theory.
As I said above, Sauer drew on much of the same German intellectual tradition as did the environmental determinists. Not much enamored with the Ratzel translated in Semple's environmental determinism, Sauer nonetheless found much to admire in the more ethnological studies Ratzel published in his second volume of Anthropogeogra-
phie, entitled The History of Mankind (1896; see Mathewson 1996: 104). But perhaps
more influential, if only indirectly or by "affinity," was the work of Herder, himself a student of the philosopher Immanuel Kant (see Speth 1987). Writing in the last part of the eighteenth-century, Herder's main project was to develop what could be called an "expressivist" critique of the sort of instrumentalism26 associated with the Enlight- enment. That is, Herder sought to contest understandings of the world that high- lighted "utilitarian ethics, atomistic politics of social engineering, and ultimately a mechanistic science" of humans (Taylor 1975: 539, quoted in Kahn 1995: 24). Rather than instrumentality and individualism, expressivism is concerned with the search for meanings, and for understanding how individuals are bounded within cultures, within times, and within places. Expressivism thus brought to the fore numerous notions associated with Romanticism, but it also stressed two key ideas: "first, what we might call the meaning of human cultural life and, second, the diversity of human g r o u p s . . . " (Kahn 1995: 28). Hence Herder added the crucial "s" to the end of "culture," providing a clear foundation for cultural relativism.
As Livingstone (1992: 123) argues, however, Herder's recognition of cultural plurality and relativism sprang largely from "his concern to vindicate the legitimacy of his own cultural traditions" - that is to find support, in the cultural traditions of the "folk" of Germany, a sense of the German cultural self that was even then being expressed in the creation of Germany as a state. Herder's project, according to the historian Simon Schama, was most clearly designed to "root German culture... in its native soil" by arguing "for a culture organically rooted in the topography, customs, and communities of the local native tradition." The authentic roots of any nation "had to be sought in the unapologetically vernacular arts: folklore, ballads, fairy tales, and popular poetry" (Schama 1995: 102-3).27
Yet rooting German distinctiveness in an organic relation with the soil required Herder to turn to cultural relativism and to search for cultural diversity. For if what 26 "Instrumentalism" refers to the desire to establish full technical control over the environment - both "natural" and "cultural." Some see instrumentalism as the defining impulse of modernism. Perhaps more accurately, such instrumentalism should be seen as a species of "heroic" modernism, in which the technical feats of humankind are sufficient justification in and of themselves for their pursuit. For one example of heroic modernism at work - and how it was countered by an equally modernist, but quite different philosophy of science, in a struggle over large-scale environmental transformation - see Kirsch and Mitchell (1998).
27 Gerhard Sandner (1994) has shown that German cultural geographers (like their counterparts else- where) were deeply concerned with indigenous pasts as a means of supporting and aiding the German nation- and empire-building projects.
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made Germany distinct was both the uniqueness of place and the long cultural history that developed within that place, then so too must other cultures be a product of their relationship with place. Unlike environmentalists, though, Herder traced this distinc- s tiveness not to some environmental factor itself but rather to the long history of local I interaction with environment and within locally rooted societies. Hence, for Herder, throughout the world the "understanding of culture was thus to be achieved not by natural laws, or classificatory devices, but by Einfiihlen (empathy) and therefore with the qualities of the artist rather than the logician or the scientist. Imagination, reconstructive imagination - not analysis - was the key to grasping the life-world of an entire society" (Livingstone 1992: 123).
We see here, then, the roots of what we now would call "multiculturalism." As Livingstone (1992: 124) concludes,
a profound respect for community, for difference, for locale thus characterized what might be called the Herdian vision, with the result that, as Isaiah Berlin puts it, "all regionalists, all defenders of the local against the universal, all champions of deeply rooted forms of life... owe something, whether they know it or not, to the doctrines which H e r d e r . . . introduced into European thought."2 8
If that serves as a good description of contemporary multiculturalism, it is also a fair picture of exactly the sorts of concerns that animated Carl Sauer throughout his long career as America's pre-eminent cultural geographer.29 There is little evidence that Sauer drew directly on Herder for his understandings of cultural particularism, the need for culture history (as both method and object of study), or to understand cultural development and advancement as a process rooted in the autonomous self- development of a people; but there is plenty of evidence that the expressivist tradition instigated by Herder was deeply influential - just as it remains influential in con- temporary multiculturalism (see Mathewson 1996: 100; Speth 1987; Sauer 1941).
While Sauer borrowed the idea of a culture area - that is, a region specific to a particular culture - from Ratzel, he also argued that "I don't think one can have a community [that] is a real social organism without cultural particularism" (quoted in Leighly 1978: 121). And at the risk of oversimplification, it is just this sense of cultural particularism that many of those opposed to multiculturalism in the con- temporary culture wars find particularly galling. Where Herder found such part- icularism necessary to support the construction of a firmly grounded German nation, 28 Livingstone is also at pains to point out that Herder's vision was quite teleological, that despite his interest in the particular and the variable, he saw history as having direction, as leading toward a particular end. Unlike contemporary postmodernism and multiculturalism, there is little in Herder's ontology that precludes the modern notion of history with an end.
29 And this may begin to explain why there was something of a renaissance of interest in his work outside geography during the 1970s and 1980s when several of his works were republished (together with a collection of his essays) by the Turtle Island Foundation, an environmental organization in the San Francisco Bay Area. See Sauer (1975 [1939]; 1976 [1968]; 1980 [1971]; and 1981). Sauer was clearly concerned to explore the link between environmental knowledge and transformation by indigenous peo- ples, continuing precisely the sort of "expressivist" critique of instrumentalism that Kahn attributes to Herder. The lasting memorial to this critique was the 1955 Princeton conference on "Man's Role in Changing the Face of the Earth," that Sauer was so central in organizing and guiding. The proceedings of this remarkable conference are in Thomas (1956).
and where he saw it as a universal means for understanding cultural difference around the globe, contemporary critics of multiculturalism fear that such particularism threatens to swamp the universalist, rationalist ambitions of "Western Culture" as the true beacon of enlightenment in the world. And that is a notion Carl Sauer specifically hoped to deny, seeing in rational "Western Culture" instead the seeds of environmental disaster continually sowed by believers in instrumental, technical, rationality (see especially Sauer 1956). A focus on grounded cultural particularity, for Sauer, insured the maintenance of a bulwark against modern, Western hubris.
Yet in Sauer's work the contours of this "culture," this "cultural particularism," this "stay against [the] confusion" of modernity, are hard to ascertain (Wyatt 1986: 209). The ethnographic, "multicultural" sensibility is clear enough in both his meth- odological statements and in his empirical research, as is his concern to vanquish ethnocentrism from geography by replacing it with a developed empathy for the peoples and places of the world. Far less clear is what, for Sauer, actually constitutes "culture" beyond some vague sense of historically, geographically derived "differ- ence." Culture seems to him a "whole" - simply an unproblematic "way of life" of a people.30 Or perhaps, in a formula we will examine in more detail in a moment, culture is something larger and greater than the people who compose it. It is, in this sense, "superorganic," as it both is larger than life and has a life of its own. And as "superorganic," it is determining in the lives of the people who are part of it.31 It is "culture" rather than "nature" that determines social life, for Sauer, but the exact nature of that culture remains a mystery (and, as it turns out, quite an important mystery for the development of cultural geography as a subdiscipline right up to the present time). To understand why "culture" remained so undertheorized in geogra- phy - especially since a theory of culture would seem so essential to Sauer's anti- ethnocentric project - we need to turn for a moment to more direct influences on Sauer's thinking than that provided by Herder.
If the non-ethnocentric "Herdian vision" flourished most fully and was most influential in the consolidating fields of anthropology and geography in the time between the world wars (as Joel Kahn [1995] among others argues), if, that is, that was the Zeitgeist within which Sauer was working as he formulated his geography- cum-culture history, then it is also the case that the more direct influences on Sauer's developing ideas about the relationship between culture and landscape were them- selves part of this same Zeitgeist. Chief among these influences was the work of the "founding figure of American anthropology," Franz Boas (Mathewson 1996: 104). Boas had cut his teeth in the 1890s by vigorously "attacking the theories of leading 'social Darwinists'" (Kahn 1995: 117),32 just as Sauer sought similarly to undermine 30 For a brief discussion of Sauer's changing ideas about the meaning of "culture" see Leighly (1976), 339-40.
31 The degree to which Sauer espoused a superorganic notion of culture is contested by cultural geographers and historians of geography. This is an important debate (especially since the contours of it say a lot about contemporary culture wars) and we will explore it fully below. Whether Sauer was a dyed-in- the-wool superorganicist or not, it is incontrovertible that one of his most influential students, Wilbur Zelinsky, was. See especially Zelinsky (1973); see also Duncan (1980).
32 By the mid-1920s, precisely the time Sauer was formulating his culture-history, anti-ethnocentric approach to human geography, Boas was making his anti-racist cultural theories public, publishing in such outlets as the left-leaning weekly The Nation and in the popularizing Current History.
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Social Darwinism through his own methodological pronouncements three decades later. In addition to thoroughly eschewing the racist implications of determinism, Boas sought to explore the particular ways in which the natural and social environ- ment both conditioned and was conditioned by cultural interaction in a bounded society. More explicitly Boas argued that to understand other cultures, the scholar had to take care to eliminate her or his own cultural values: " . . . it seems to me necessary to eliminate the peculiar combination of the development of cultural forms and the intrusion of the idea of our estimate of their value, which has nothing to do with these forms," Boas wrote to the arch-environmental determinist Ellsworth Huntington (quoted in Livingstone 1992: 226).33 Boas thus imbibed what Livingstone (1992: 294) calls a "mild cultural relativism that insisted that cultures could only be understood in their own terms and therefore that ranking on a hierarchical scale was impossible."
Two of Boas's most prominent students were Alfred Kroeber (1876-1960) and Robert Lowie (1883-1957), both of whom, as members of the anthropology faculty at the University of California, seem to have had a direct influence on Carl Sauer's thinking about cultural particularism and relativism.34 Kroeber's affinity to Sauer is perhaps clearest in the former's interest in the development and distribution of "culture areas," which he defined as geographical regions sharing particular distribu- tions of culture traits (cf. Kroeber 1904). But it is also clear in his desire to understand culture holistically; that is, like Sauer, Kroeber was keen to explore the ways that particular associations of culture traits not only mapped what was distinctive about a particular people, but also how those traits interacted to map a total way of life, whether of a tribe of California Indians, or the first peoples to domesticate plants. Kroeber (1936: 1) put it this way: "The concept of a culture area is a means to an end. The end may be the understanding of culture processes as such, or of the historic events of cultures." A few years later, Sauer (1952: 1) echoed these words precisely: a geographer "is interested in discovering related and different patterns of living as they are found over the world - culture areas. These patterns have interest and meaning as we learn how they came into being. The geographer, therefore, properly is engaged in charting the distributions over the earth of the arts and artifacts of man, to learn whence they came and how they spread, what their contexts are in cultural and physical environments."
Robert Lowie (1947: 434) focused much of his work on understanding the import- ance of diffusion to cultural development and change, arguing that while diffusion "creat[ed] nothing" itself, it "nevertheless makes all other agencies taper almost into 33 Clearly this is a sentiment that would appall the current crop of cultural conservatives who strive so diligently to always array other cultural values against their own (presumably superior) values.
34 There are those in geography, concerned to protect Sauer's reputation as a solitary and fully original genius (as if there could be such a thing), who seek to deny the influence of anthropologists such as Kroeber (see Kenzer 1987). Yet Sauer (1925) made direct reference to Kroeber in his important "Morphology of Landscape," precisely to demolish environmental determinism and elevate the importance of cultural particularism. In his obituary of Sauer, John Leighly (1976: 338-40), who moved to Berkeley from Michigan to continue studying with him, makes it clear that Sauer "quickly established cordial relations with [Kroeber and Lowie], especially with Kroeber." For a hint at the range of interaction between Sauer and Kroeber, see the correspondence excerpted as part of Macpherson (1987); see also Livingstone (1992), 296-7, note 135.
nothingness beside it in its effect on the total growth of human civilization." But beyond this Sauer's affinity for Lowie probably resided in their shared skepticism about the nature of "progress." Sauer saw little in modern industrial society of long- term worth, even arguing a few years after World War II that "our whole western civilization in its modern f o r m . . . is a violation of natural order which will bring about its collapse" (quoted in Martin 1987: xv). For Sauer, the evolution of modern society had ripped civilization from its roots in the natural world. Similarly, Lowie argued that cultural evolution was not necessarily "progressive." As one biographer summarizes, Lowie argued that "particular races, languages, or cultures may either level off, retrogress or become extinct Lowie also denied the inevitability of moral progress" (Driver 1972: 482). Cultural particularity, Boas's incipient multicultural- ism, thus served to stave off hubris, and to return anthropologists and geographers alike to the study of differences, rather than hierarchies.
If cultural anthropology provided a touchstone for Sauer's ideas of cultural parti- cularity, it was a more directly geographical tradition that allowed him to show that the relationship between culture and environment was far more complex than envir- onmental determinism had ever allowed. Sauer coupled his readings in American anthropology with German theories of Landschaft (variously translated as landscape or landscape science) associated with Passarge, "chorology" (the science of regions)