EVOLUTION OF SOCIAL GEOGRAPHY

The development of social geography Studies explicitly or implicitly directed toward the exploration of social
geography can be con-sidered under two broad headings: first, the his-torical precedents, which fall roughly into
three major stages, each one characterized by a different approach; and secqnd, the works of twentieth-century
geographers. Historical precedents. Descriptive reports writ-ten by explorers and men of letters during classical
times, for example, the writings of Herodotus, Thucydides, Strabo, and others, provide the first written
recognition of world social differences. Such encyclopedic descriptions continued to appear in-termittently in the
Occident up to the seventeenth century, for example, the accounts of Marco Polo and the lettres ediflantes of
Jesuit missionaries. The twofold implication of these works was that social life takes various forms in different
parts of the world and that these differences are caused by, or at least are associated with, differences in the
physical—particularly climatic—environment. A second phase consisted of the various philo-sophical reflections
on these and later geographical discoveries. On the one hand, speculative thinkers sought normative principles
for an ideal social order from natural law, and, on the other hand, the order from natural law, and, on the other
hand, the positivists insisted that such principles should be sought in the existing and empirically observable
conditions of society. The essential message of this second phase was that there is a rational order in world
society and that this order can be discovered deductively (speculative approach) or inductively (positivistic
approach). A third and far more significant phase began in the nineteenth century, accompanied in France by the
emergence of the idea of democracy, in Ger-many by the rise of national consciousness, and elsewhere by the
slow yet effective permeation of a "scientific" approach to knowledge. Ethnographers and historians were among
the first to study world social variations in a systematic way. As early as 1725 Giambattista Vico suggested that
human de-velopment followed an identical series of stages and that the actual variations in world society at any
particular time were due to their differential positions within that series. Later in the eighteenth century. Johann
Gottfried Herder in Germany and Condorcet in France expressed similar ideas. The geographer Johann Georg Kohl
examined the social function and significance of various settlement types: later, his colleague E. Hahn (1898)
studied the evolution of livelihoods and demonstrated the religious and social origins of some economic prac-
tices. Yet this "scientific" approach to the study of mankind's social differences was also associated with
exaggerated single-factor explanations, for ex-ample, the biological interpretation first expounded by A. Schaffle
(1875-1878) and the psychological interpretation, which found its fullest expression in the Durithelmian school in
France. Friedrich Ratzel's Anthropogeographie (1882-1891) incorpo-rated both these elements: the ecological
view of society within its natural environment and*the role of human intelligence (the 'idea") in enabling man to
overcome physical barriers (1901). Unfortu-nately, the latter perspective did not emerge too clearly in his
monumental work—on which the whole tradition of anthropogeography has been pat-terned—and so his name
has been linked with the idea of society being determined by the physical environment. His Politica.•Geographic
(1897) and some articles (1876; 1901) In tact contained hypotheses that were far more relevant to social
geography than the Anthropogeographie. One of the most significant precedents to social geography in the
nineteenth century was the work of Frederic Le Play. Disdainful of the various a priori explanations of society
prevalent in his day, he set out to study the actual social conditions of worker families In France. His famous
monograph technique produced an encyclopedic inven-tory of social facts, and from a great number of studies he
deduced certain basic types, which then served as bases for comparison. Traces of Le Play's analytical formula
lieu—travail—famine, later adapt-ed by Geddes (1915) into the formula "place—work—folk," can be found in the
writings of such early British geographers as H. J. Fleure (1918). French geographers inherited important elements
from Le Play, for example, the monograph tech-nique in empirical field studies, but the most im-portant legacy of
lieu—travail—famille was the social survey movement, which flourished in Britain and America during the early
part of the century. Many geographers, such as Ritter, von Humboldt, Hassinger, Ruhl, and Hettncr in Germany,
Reclus in France, George Perkins Marsh in Amer-ica, and H. J. Mackinder in Britain, deserve recog-nition as
pioneers of social geography. However, the three major channels of thought that contained the most useful
concepts were those Initiated by Le Play (the social survey movement), Ratzel (anthropogeography), and
Durkheim (social mor-phology). Twentieth-century social geographers. The mu-tual relations of society and
environment was a subject that aroused great speculation and interest at the turn of the century. Yet there was
no dis-cipline equipped to embrace the entire question. Ratzel had made an abortive attempt to do so, and his
environmentalist disciples. exaggerated rather than corrected the deterministic premise of an-thropogeography.
Many scholars, particularly the Durlcheimian sociologists, remained unconvinced that geography had any right to
entertain such a monumental task. At this juncture came one of gecgraphy's great-est entrepreneurs, Paul Vidal
de la Blache. Society for Vidal (1896; 1902) and his school could not be explained entirely in terms of biological,
psycho-logical, or environmental interpretations. It was rather an intricate network of ideas and bonds that
provided stability and orientation to human life within particular geographical milieus. In his clas-sical studies of
the Mediterranean world and of monsoon Asia (1917-1918). Vidal demonstrated the complex, yet harmoniously
balanced, interplay between human institutions and particular natural settings. Genres de vie (literally, patterns
of living) were the concrete expressions of a society's ongoing contact with nature: sets of techniques, cemented
through tradition, whereby human groups secured the material necessities of life within a functional social order
(Vidal 1911; Sorre 1948). Repeated experiences in meeting life's common problems within a particular
geographical milieu occasioned the development of community consciousness. which made a genre de vie truly
an ecological sys-tem. Variations of this basic concept appear In the literature of other disciplines, for example,
social anthropology (Kroeber & Kluckhohn 1952; Redfield 1955), American human ecology (McKenzie 1934) and
urban sociology (Park & Burgess 1921). By means of genre de vie and other concepts, the French school of human
geography replaced the exaggerated Ratzelian notions of environmental de-terminism by the more elastic
concepts of pouf-Wham and dismissed the charges made in the Annie socioingigue between 1890 and 1910 more
by substantive works than by theoretical argu-ments. "La geographic humaine,," thus formulated, was a social
geography in the broad, integral sense: all other dimensions of the human milieu were studied from the vantage
point of society. Many British and American human geographers followed almost identical lines, while the Dutch
"sociale geografie" was the direct equivalent of the French "geographic humaine." The kernel of this orients-don,
namely, society as the source and framework for all human activity, reappears in the work of Hans Bobek (1959)
in Vienna. Lucien Febvre's famous apologia (1922) articulated the philosophi-cal and historical raison d'être of
such a discipline. To Vidal's essentially ecological approach, his disciple Jean Brunhes added the important dimen-
sion of group psychology, asking, for example, why similar environments were used in entirely differ-ent ways at
different periods in history. He defined social geography as the third level of complexity in human geography's
fourfold structure. The fourfold structure included the primary groups of family, kin, and culture; the secondary
groupings of liveli-hood and special interest; the various forms of spatial interaction within and among these
groups; and, finally, the legal systems which institutionalize a society's subdivision and access to land and prop-
erty (119101 1924, pp. 36-46). This definition, ad-mirably suited to the study of European—particu-larly French—
rural society of the early twentieth century, remained the basic framework for social geography among British,
French, and Dutch schol-ars up to World War rt. Most of the early studies in social geography were regional In
character; and their excellence consisted more in their artistic cohesion and Integrative descriptions than in their
analytical or theoretical expertise. The empirical conditions which favored the use of the regional framework by
French scholars did not exist to the same extent elsewhere; this partly explains the divergence of orientation and
method which devel-oped among the various schools of human geography.

During the 1930s, British social geographers were involved in methodological controversy. Does social geography
consist in merely mapping man-kind% social characteristics, or must it also analyze the processes involved in
relating a society to its geographical environment? What is the relation between social geography and human
ecology? Why not replace the term "human" by "soder as the generic term to signify all the nonphysical aspects
of geography? The fundamental dichotomy between a formal and functional approach expressed in this British
debate reiterated the duality that had developed in Holland since the 1920s. While at Utrecht the study of social
groups within their territorial framework (de Vooys 1950) was being pursued along the lines of the French school,
at Amsterdam Steinmetz' 'sociographyn was used to study the entire social content of space as a system.in itself
—aside from any considerations of a group's rela-tion to its natural environment. The birth of soci-ology in
Holland—particularly rural sociology as a separate discipline—has no doubt modified the original disciplinary
orientations of these two schools (van Paassen 1965). Prior to World War u little attempt was made to
systematize the elements of social geography. In general, the important associations evident in the spatial
organization of society -particularly in the United States—appeared in the literature of human ecology
(Theodorson 1961) and urban sociology (Park & Burgess 1921). One major exception, of course, was the work of
the environmentalists in examining connections between human behavior and the geographical environment
(Thomas 1925). Pierre George and Maximilien Sorre (1943-1953) were the first great systematizers of social
geography. In George's works a close link is main-tained between social and economic aspects of hu-man
behavior, the social being one facet of the economic (1946, p. 1). For Sorre (1998, pp. 13-16, 66-122) society
represented a system of tech-niques—family and kinship systems, livelihoods (genres de vie), languages, and
religions. each one having a specific Influence on the spatial organ-ization of mankind and his work. Sorre's
schema does not make clear, however, whether social ge-ography consists of a series of systematic subflelds
based on these various kinds of techniques, or whether a distinction is to be made between the "social" and
'political" techniques. In his work all forms of organization from family and kin groups to giant political blocs form
a continuum (1961, pp. 211-264). Gourou's more comprehensive con-cept of civilisation (1964) comprises both
material techniques (modes of production) and spiritual techniques (ideas, values). These three approaches at
generalization are important because they try to maintain the integral and holistic character of social geography
at the same time that they estab-lish some order and a basis for comparative work. Bobek has made a similar
attempt to construct a spatiotemporal framework for world society (1959). His work is a futile synthesis of French
and German traditions: his systematic framework Is based on a holistic approach Involving types of societies
defined in terms of their actual use of their geographical environment (1961). Several other attempts to
formulate the prob-lem of society in geography in terms of a particular systematic framework have appeared: for
example, those of Wagner (1960), Ackerman (1963), and van Paassen (1965). Yet more characteristic of postwar
work Is the development of individual sys-tematic lines of enquiry, for example, geography of rural and urban life,
population studies, and geog-raphy of religions and political behavior. Associated with this is a more lively va-et-
vient between geog-raphers and scholars in other disciplines, particu-larly concerning questions of rural and
urban life (Friedmann 1953) and regional planning (Philp-ponneau 1960). Studies are still being made within a
regional framework, but the focus has changed. Juillard in Alsace (1953) studied particular social problems from a
regional perspective, while Roche-fort in Sicily (1961) studied regional life from the perspective of the social
processes at work. Such reorientations have, of course, raised new method-ological problems and prospects.
Chatelain (1947; 1953), for example, postulates a duality between the geography of social classes (a ldnd of social
morphology ) and the geography of social life (a sociological geography ). Ciaval (1964) envisions the latter as the
most feasible future direction for the discipline, citing the work of W. Hartke at Munich as an example. It is
difficult, however, to see how these two aspects of the field can be separated. To label the research being done at
Munich as sociological geography may be misleading. Cer-tainly the perspective is social: social-geographic
differentiation (sozialgeographische Differenzie-rung) implies that social values—as expressed in the occupational
structure—are the primary agents of landscape differentiation. Thus, maps of socio-professional structure
(Sozialkartierung) for a series of periods are collated with a corresponding series of land-use patterns
(Nutzlitiehenkartle-rung ), and significant associations are sought. This basic formula has been applied successfully
both in rural and urban contexts. Gelpel's study (1952) of one German region, for example, demonstrated that
the sources of regional unity—which varied at different periods—are found essentially in the collective decision-
making mechanism of the regional community. This is quite a contrast to the sources of regional unity commonly
sought in the natural (physiographic ) or economic (agri-cultural) landscape. Hartke (1956) demonstrated that
regions where this phenomenon existed had similar geographic (regional) characteristics. As-sociations found in
urban studies are even more interesting. Hartke's intraurban corridors (Pas-sagen) suggest some qualifications to
the tra-ditional concentric zone and sector theories of urban structure, while his study of urban expansion
patterns provides new bases for the classification of cities (1961). In marked contrast to the inductive, empirical,
and microscopic approach of the Munich social geographers is the more highly developed theo-retical and
deductive approach found in Sweden. Torsten Hagerstrand (1952) and Sven Godlund (1956) have applied refined
mathematical tech-niques to the study of migration, rural—urban inter-action, circulation, and other dynamic
aspects of the field. One of the most interesting developments has been the use of simulation models for the
analysis and prediction of spatial movement. This approach has been adopted and modified in the postwar period
by a number of American geog-raphers. At Iowa spatial models have been used to study the distribution patterns
of schools, churches, and settlements, often with a view to spatial planning. Morrill's study of Swedish towns
(1963) exemplifies this approach. Yet, in general. social geography in the United States is not a uni-fied field: on
the one hand there are holistic re-gional studies, for example, Plates Saarland study (1961) and Broek's southeast
Asian study (1949 ). and, on the other hand, there am a growing num-ber of systematic studies in racial, linguistic,
re-ligious, and other spheres. Some interesting associa-tions have been elaborated, for example, between
religion, land use, and livelihood (Isaac 1959), between cultural pluralism and political integration (Lowenthal
1961), and between migration and po-litical behavior within ethnic groups (Lewis 1965). However, the exciting
developments in the actual social geography of America have been treated mainly by foreigners (Gottmann 1961)
or by scholars in other disciplines.

Resume of contemporary social geography. In general. the empirical record would seem to char-acterize social
geography as a multifaceted per-spective on the spatial organization of mankind. The implication is that some
important sources of areal differentiation emanate from society, thus reversing the premises of
anthropogeography and other deterministic explanations of social differentiation. Analysis of this social
dimension in human geography has involved two basic approaches: the examination of the formal distributions of
social phenomena as indices of areal differentiation and the interpretation of these distributions in the light of
their underlying social processes. A recent development, particularly in northwestern Europe, is the involvement
of social geographers in inter-disciplinary research and regional planning. Nevertheless, the social dimension is
one of the least studied aspects of human geography. Social geography lacks definite boundaries and has neither
a central unifying concept nor even an agreed content. Instead, there are scattered individual efforts to analyze
the changing social pat-terns of the modem world. Generalizations regard-ing the nature and potential function of
the field, therefore, can only be proffered as suggestions, based cm the substantive research directions and ideas
of contemporary experts in the field and on the current trends and technical possibilities in other social science
disciplines.

The future of social geography

The challenge. Social geography faces a set of challenges that are unprecedented. Revolutionary changes In
world social patterns have rendered past analytical techniques obsolete, while philosophical and cultural currents
within modem social life tend to increase the propensity to change of both reality itself and its social-
psychological signifi. canoe. Thus, while technological, economic, and commercial evolution tends to produce a
certain degree of standardization In society's spatial order, there is a universal tendency to emphasize social, that
is. ethnic, religious, or linguistic, differentia-tion. The philosophical problems of intersubjectivIty and coexistence
are ubiquitously discusted. "The home of contemporary man," wrote Plattel 01960) .1965, pp. 1-2) "does not lie
primarily in a localized environment, but in his fellow-man." The traditional methods and objectives of social
science are being fundamentally challenged. Analysis must some-how be broadened so as to arrive at a more
holistic vision of social reality: the classical Cartesian premises underlying accepted research method-ology led to
the discovery of systems, but mechanics and structures of systems constitute only a partial view of reality. Today
both subjective (internal) aspects of reality and objective (external) aspects of reality must be analyzed. Modern
psychology and sociology have endeavored to meet this chal-lenge by forging new analytical techniques, and
many other social science disciplines have adopted a decidedly behavioristic approach in recent years. In the light
of these developments, the spatial patterns of world society assume a new signifi-cance; the immediate challenge
for social geogra-phers would seem to be the collaboration with other scholars in the monumental task of
describing world society within its geographical setting. For such an endeavor, social geography needs a uni-fying
theme, a conceptual framework that will en-able it to contribute toward and benefit from the research efforts of
scholars in related social science disciplines. Such a unified framework seems to be emerging from the work of
some contemporary social geographers. Some of its characteristics are described below. Social space as central
theme. Claval's critique of contemporary social geography concludes that "to understand the geography of a
place means to understand the social organization of those who inhabit it, their mentality, their beliefs, their
'repre-sentations— (1964, p. 123). Watson's study of Hamilton demonstrates how "The spatial pattern is. in the
last analysis. a reflection of the moral order' (11951) 1965. p. 476). In this article I have postulated that the raison
d'être of social geography rests on the fact that the social order is distinct from (even if closely interrelated with)
the other orders of human activity in space. In order to de-scribe adequately this social dimension or order,
contemporary thought would seem to demand the use of both internal and external perspectives. Is this
possible? Sociologists, for example, Chombart de Lauwe (1956) and Gaston Bardet (1951). and human ecologists,
for example, Firey (1960). have dem-onstrated the technical possibility of exploring a society's perception of its
geographical milieu. Geographers, for example, Rochefort (1961), Bur-ton and Kates (1964), and Pataki (1965),
have also shown that space has different meanings for different societies, and thus distance and spatial
movement can no longer be considered In tra-ditional geodesic terms but must be considered in terms of those
dimensions perceived by their hu-man occupants. For example, groups of Italians, Poles. Pakistanis, and Negroes
may live side by side in one section of a city. Yet each group, be-cause of economic, historical, cultural, or other
reasons, may possess an entirely different concep-tion of space. Some groups may have a social horizon that
scarcely transcends the block In which they live or the set of stores In which they work or shop, while others may
have social contacts with relatives thousands of miles away. Whether con-