Geography has long been caught up in the work of nation and empire building.18 At the turn of the twentieth century, British geographers, for example, were quite forthright in their expectations for the discipline as a servant to the state: geography was, according to one, "absolutely essential for our well-being, and even for the continuance of the nation as a Power among the states of the world" (Mill 1901: 423, quoted in Livingstone 1992: 216). One way that geographers asserted their importance was by developing a robust language of what David Livingstone (1992: 188) and others have identified as "neo-Lamarckism." Neo-Lamarckism was a sophisticated argument that developed Lamarck's idea that an organism could pass acquired characteristics to its offspring. Along with this, neo-Lamarckians were convinced that "the directive force[s] of organic variation" were "will, habit, or environment" (Livingstone 1992: 188). That is, willful change on the part of an individual, or habits acquired in a particular environment could and would be passed to future generations. They would become, we would now say, part of their genetic make-up. The key point for neo-Lamarckians, especially as they sought to translate this evolutionary history into geographical explanations of cultural difference, was that the "use or disuse of organs w a s . . . crucial, contingent as they were on those altered habits, induced by environmental change, that produced different behavior
patterns" (Livingstone 1992: 188). As a neo-Lamarckian enterprise, then environmental determinism argued that the causal mechanisms for cultural behavior were to be found in the environment. Certain environmental conditions created certain
habits; and, crucially, these habits were then transmitted naturally to successive generations. Environmental determinism, a species of neo-Lamarckiasm, thus held
17 It should be noted that this second strain carried with it the seeds of a cultural relativism that is reflected in some of the definitions outlined above; this relativism, developed most fully in anthropology, but apparent clearly in the work of Sauer and his students, has in the last few decades re-entered cultural geography through the influence of cultural studies and postmodernism.
18 The relationship between geography and empire has begun to receive a great deal of attention from historians of geography. In fact, it is within the work on geography and empire, that the methodological and theoretical prescripts for telling socially contextualized histories of the discipline are best developed. Good examples of this work include Godlewska and Smith (1994); Bell et al. (1995).
that the environment - nature - caused cultural difference by providing varying conditions under which cultures "grew" and were transmitted from generation to generation.
Environmental determinism's career in geography is fascinating. Though there are other antecedents, the most influential early statements of a theory of environmental determinism come from the German geopolitical theorist, Friedrich Ratzel, who, writing in the last decades of the nineteenth century (in his influential two-volume
Anthropogeographie), collapsed society into nature through the concept of the organic
state and Lebensraum (literally: living space). While not so clearly articulating the sense of environmental determination as environmental control of human society, Ratzel (responding to both the formation of the German state and its imperialist adventures overseas) argued that the state was essentially a living thing, which, like other organic things needed to grow in order to live.19 The state was thus, to a large degree, a natural link between people and environment, the spatial expression of what became known in Nazi Germany as "blood and soil" - the spiritual, but also organic ties between people and place.20 Ratzel argued the link between environment and
people was not simple one of determinism (though he did frequently argue in that direction), but nonetheless, he was clear that the social or cultural development of the state (which, remember, was itself organic) was directly related to the state's ability to grow. This sense of Lebensraum, coupled with his more ethnographic Anthropogeo-
graphie together created what Livingstone (1992: 201) has called "a naturalistic
theodicy that justified the imperial order in the language of scientific geography."
Thus as Richard Peet (1985) has argued, such neo-Lamarckian environmental determinism - and the broader discourse of "Social Darwinism" - was not simply an exercise in scientific theorizing, or at least scientific theorizing insulated from
broader social currents. Instead, environmental determinism was a "legitimation theory" - that is, a theory that served to legitimate the social, political, and economic ambitions of certain social formations. In Peet's (1985: 310) telling, "environmental
determinism... was geography's contribution to Social Darwinist ideology, providing a naturalistic explanation of which societies were fittest in the imperial struggle for world domination." Environmental determinism, by creating a theory of natural superiority, justified European political and economic expansion - if not to those who stood in Europe's way and became grist for its expansionist political-economic mill, then to those "back home" from whom consent for genocidal imperial adventures needed continually to be secured.21 This is a point we will return to momentar-ily.
19 Ratzel's influence in geopolitics and political geography is fascinating, but a discussion along those lines is not the goal here (see Bassin 1987a). Instead, the idea is to outline Ratzel's influence on environ- mental determinism and hence, indirectly, on cultural geography.
20 Schama (1995) chapter 2, traces some of the ways in which the "blood and soil" link was archeolo- gically and anthropologically made in German history as part of the project of building the imperial German state. Mark Bassin (1987b) argues that Ratzel's work was appropriated by Nazis but that in many regards it worked against official Nazi ideology especially since it sought causation in the environment rather than in genetics. Livingstone (1992) confirms this judgment, further arguing that Ratzel believed in the fundamental biological unity of humans. For Ratzel it was the environment that made them different. 21 Kahn (1995) notes reasonably that arguments positing Social Darwinism as legitimation to those being colonized do not make sense, the colonized are not so easily fooled. Rather, legitimacy theories work to convince those in power that what they are doing is right, just, and natural.
C U L T U R E W A R S 19
First it is important to continue tracing environmental determinism's history within geography.
As in Germany, the roots of environmental determinism in the United States are deep, expressed clearly in the work of Nathaniel Southgate Shaler, the Harvard geologist, for example, or in the work of his colleague, the geographer William Morris Davis.22 It is also clearly evident in the "frontier thesis" of Frederick Jackson Turner (1920). But perhaps the clearest exponent of environmental determinism at the turn of the century was the geographer Ellen Churchill Semple, who popularized and reformulated Ratzel's ideas, giving them a decidedly stronger determinist bent. Semple's purpose was precisely to make geography scientific - that is, to show that the study of humans, and especially human groups, could be done scientifically. In her highly influential 1911 book, Influences of Geographic Environment on the Basis
of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-geography, Semple restated the longstanding "nature-
nurture" controversy - the question to what degree one's environment shapes one's being - and elevated it to the level of culture (see also Semple 1903). "In every problem of history," Semple (1911: 2) argued,
there are two main factors, variously stated as heredity and environment, man and his geographic conditions, the internal forces of race and the external forces of habit. Now the geographic element in the long history of human development has been operating strongly and operating persistently. Herein lies its importance. It is a stable force. It never sleeps. This natural environment, this physical basis of history, is for all intents and purposes immutable in comparison with the other factor in the problem - shifting, plastic, progressive, retrogressive man.
While there was still some room for human initiative, Semple (1911: 1) argued most cogently that "Man is a product of the earth's surface.. [Nature] has entered into his bone and tissue, into his mind and soul" In Peet's (1985: 321) estimation, while
popularizing geography as the science of human differentiation and culture, Semple managed to attribute "the dominance of some peoples over others... to a supra- human force - the will of Nature as expressed in varying environmental capacities, racial abilities, and mentalities." With these moves, American geography made its bid to be treated as an important - perhaps essential - science. Environmental determin- ism in its American variant thus represented "the scramble for intellectual turf in what would become the social sciences" (N. Smith 1989: 93).
This scramble was ultimately unsuccessful, and by the 1920s, environmental deter- minism had pretty much collapsed under both the weight of its own contradictions (it was no good at explaining precisely what it sought to explain: human variation across space) and its growing irrelevancy as legitimation theory. By the turn of the century, the period of active European colonial expansion was drawing to a close. As com- mentators from all manner of political perspectives - from the imperialist geographer Halford Mackinder and the progressive historian Frederick Jackson Turner on through to Marxists such as Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg - liked to note, by the fin
de siecle the space of the globe was increasingly closed. European (or other) political 22 Davis is most famous for inserting evolutionary or organicist notions into the study of geomorphol- ogy, but he was equally active in promoting neo-Lamarckian notions of inorganic control over life (including human life) as the proper realm of geographic study; Livingstone (1992), 202^1.
and economic expansion, therefore, could no longer be absolute, lapping up ever more land and peoples, but now had to be relative, constantly refiguring the relations of power in already controlled lands. To the degree that Peet is correct that the raison
d'etre of environmental determinism was to legitimate European domination in
absolute space, then it was less than useful for understanding the reconfiguration of the relative space that marked the new "postcolonial" period.23 For that, geographers began looking to other theoretical precedents. One response was to redefine geography as the "science of regions," which Richard Hartshorne accomplished most successfully in his magisterial The Nature of Geography in 1939.24 Another, led by Carl Sauer, was to turn to theories of culture as a means of explaining difference. Curiously enough, many of the culture theories American geographers turned to had their roots in the same German intellectual milieu as environmental determinism.
Carl Sauer's influence on the development of cultural geography in the United States is hard to exaggerate. For those styled as "new cultural geographers" .(see chapter 2), Sauer is best known for his highly influential 1925 essay "The Morphology of Land- scape," but his impact on the discipline is far broader than just that essay (and the numerous debates it has incited and continues to incite). Sauer grew up in the German Methodist farming community of Warrenton, Missouri, eventually attending Central Wesleyan College in that town. After receiving his degree in 1908, Sauer entered Northwestern University to pursue graduate work in petrology. After a year he transferred to the geography program at the University of Chicago. Despite this time in the city, Sauer never lost his love for small places and his "preference for the simpler economies" or rural and archaic cultures (Leighly 1976). After several years teaching at the University of Michigan, Sauer moved to the University of California at Berkeley in 1923. In part as a reaction to the rapid development of California, and in part as a result of his own curiosity for things now shrouded in the mists of time, Sauer increasingly grew to see modern industrial society as wasteful and impoverishing - unsustainable, we would now say. Over the course of his career, therefore, Sauer concerned himself especially with the destruction humans had caused to the landscape, whether in the "cut-over" lands of northern Michigan or the broader trends of global ecological destruction he outlined in his landmark essay, "The Agency of Man on Earth" (Sauer 1956). Indeed, as Sauer grew increasingly 23 In this instance I am using the term "postcolonial" merely to mark the fact that the period of actual European colonial expansion was coming to a close: there were few places left to colonize. This usage is not meant to imply either that colonial domination was coming to an end or that Europe somehow ceased to expand its influence.
24 Hartshorne was clearly reacting to the disciplinary "identity crisis" that cast a shadow over geography after the decline of environmental determinism as an organizing force. His goal was to show that environ- mental determinism was an aberration and to establish the systematic study of "areal differentiation" as the chief organizing force in geography. Hartshorne did not see the study of cultural difference as a firm ground for geography and hence argued strongly against the theories and objects of study promoted by Carl Sauer (to whom we turn in the next section).