Geography, Area Studies and the Study of Area BH, Farmer Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, No. 60. (Nov., 1973), pp. 1-15. Stable URL htp:/flinks.jstor-org/sicisici=( 120-2754%28197311%291%3A0%3A60%3C1%3AGASATS% 3E2.0.CO%3B2-3 Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers is currently published by The Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers). ‘Your use of the ISTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR’s Terms and Conditions of Use, available at hup:/www,jstororglabout/terms.hml. ISTOR’s Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at hutp:/wwwwjstor.org/journals/rgs.htm] ch copy of any part of'a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the sereen or printed page of such transmission, ISTOR is an independent not-for-profit organization dedicated to creating and preserving a digital archive of scholarly journals. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact support @ jstor.org. hupulwww jstor.org/ Sat Jul 10:45:54 2006Geography, Area Studies and the study of area B.H.FARMER (University of Cambridge) MS received 26 March 1973 (residential Address delivered at the Annual Conference of the Institute of British Geographers, Bemingham, 4 Janvary Ansteact. This Addres is personal statement focusing on the paradox tha, ata time of wnprecedented stvity in ‘Area Studies in this counts, Briish geographers seem relatively les concerned than at anytime inthe recent past ith ‘ediated spcialiaton by area. I reviews the history, natore and funetons of iter-discpinary Centrex of Area Studies and ofthe kindof research projet that can be based on them. Te examines the part payed by geographers and geography in uch project and in Centres of Are Stages; and seks to ally fear that Aten Studies may be seen ats subi for teogeaphy. It also draws a distinction between Centres of Arca Studies and institutions concerned with Development Studies; but points out that Centres of Area Studies, and geographers, have apart payin such Studies (though, 0 far as iseagraphers ae concerned it isa part chat is not alogecher uncontoversia), "A numberof grounds fr ertcism ofthe "New Geographers of recent years ae passed in review. The grounds most televant tothe paradox a the heart ofthe Addrest ae that the would-be universalist has no need ofan aes specilism, les of dedication tan area; and that mos recent geographical theory i manifestly based on experience in afluent wes ‘countries not in developing countries or in those areas which sre the concern of Cenees of Area Stade, The hypothesis is put forward that while some geographical theory may prove tobe universal, other bodies of such theory wil be found to be plicable to Broad types of economy (including developing economies) and yet other bodies of theory onl to cultural ‘gions ike South Asia Latin America The conclusion i finaly reached that the future in Britain of geographical theory, ‘of development geography and of a revised regional geography alle depend onthe existence of sufilent British geogrs= hers dedicated to specialization by are to supply the event culture- and aret-specfic dimensions I wanr to say at the outset of my Address how very proud and honoured I was to be elected your President, and how very glad I was to have another opportunity of serving the Institute. 1 suppose that my election recognizes that I am in some sense still a geographer; though there ‘may be those here this evening (there have certainly been those in the past) who hold that some of my work, notably Pioneer Peasant Colonization in Ceylon (B. H.. Farmer, 1957), took me in places well outside the geographical fold (and there is an even longer, less narrowly geographical, pethaps more interdisciplinary work on the way: Farmer, in the press). Still a geographer, moreover, in spite of the fact, that as I look back over the last seven or eight years, what seems to have taken most of my time and energy has been not geography, however broadly defined, but administration, itself quite broadly defined—administration, that is, in my College, the College of St John the Evangelist in the University of Cambridge, and in that University’s Centre of South Asian Studies, whose infant steps T tried to direct and whose longer and now, T hope, surer strides are tending to take me along with it ‘Not that I am really worried by my breaches, or other geographers’ breaches, of a geograpl cal fold which some would like to see cabined, cribbed, confined by hurdles as straitly set as any in the mind of a seventeenth-century sectarian (why ill geographers behave like a persecuted religious minority?). T stand with those of my French colleagues of whom Ph. Pinchemel is quoted as saying ‘The majority are little concerned with questions of precise definition [of boundaries} (R. E. Dickinson, 1969, p. 263). Or, to put the matter another way round, I believe that the Tree of Knowledge is like other trees in at least this respect: that its core (which may 12 B.H.PARMER be likened to the heart of a subject too narrowly defined) is dead wood, and that active growth. takes place in the cambium at the margins. Nor do I regret having been diverted to such a very considerable extent into the paths of administration: paths so despised by academics who cannot administer, but fail to appreciate show much they depend on those who can and do. For one of my administrative pre-occupations, my College, has more than amply rewarded me for whatever time I have spent on its affairs. It has provided me with a pleasant, yet most stimulating workplace which is by its very nature multi-disciplinary if not inter-disciplinary and was so, long before those words became fashion- able or were even coined. Above all it has helped to give me a measure of independence, and this believe to be one of the pre-requisites of true academic freedom, It has given me the example, too, of men devoted to their task and prepared to live laborious days. As for my Centre, it has given me many kinds of stimulus; and it has ensured that I have had. the encouragement and the opportunity to encounter and to think about the problem with which I shall mainly be concerned in this Address. For, with some very unstandard deviations, I shall be considering this problem, this apparent paradox: that, ata time of unprecedented activity in Area Studies in this country, British geographers seem relatively less concerned with dedicated specialization by area than at any time in at least the fairly recent past. It will already be clear that my Address is largely a personal statement; and I hope you will excuse me if the first person singular intrudes rather frequently. But I believe it to be more ‘modest, more becoming, even less egotistical to say ‘I think ...” rather than to conceal personal opinions behind a fagade of false impersonality, or to make prejudiced pronouncements appear as self-evident general truths 1 In my experience, there is some misunderstanding among geographers and others both of the nature and functions of Centres of Area Studies (which I shall call ‘Centres’ foute simple) and of Area Studies themselves. Definition is necessary, anyway, because my distinguished predecessor as President of this Institute, W. R. Mead, in fact uses ‘area studies’ to mean “geographical studies pursued in a well-defined area of the world? (W. R. Mead, 1969, pp. 248-9); this approaches the meaning I shall ascribe, not to Area Studies, but to ‘the study of area’, in the latter part of this Address, and is quite different from the usage in the Centres. Let ‘me, then, attempt a definition of ‘Area Studies’, and for that matter of ‘area’ straight away; and then illustrate and amplify the definitions by saying something of the work and problems of the Centres (particularly my own, which naturally I know best). By ‘Area Studies’ I mean the ‘multi-disciplinary or inter-disciplinary study of a defined area, such as South Asia or South-east Asia or Latin America. By ‘area’ I mean, it will be apparent, a literal area, not area asa euphe for a subject or, a8 they say (not always with justification), a discipline. The work is mul isciplinary ifthe exponents of the several subjects, be they economists, or historians, or sociolo- gists, or geographers, bring their points of view separately to bear on the area which is their focus of common interest (the geographer’s contribution may then approach Mead’s definition). ‘The work is inter-disciplinary if there is an effort to break down the hurdles, the middle wall of partition between the subjects and to take part in a genuine exchange of ideas, methods, hypo~ theses and findings (the geographer is then concerned with more than Mead’s ‘geographical work’). The distinction between the terms ‘multi-disciplinary’ and ‘inter-disciplinary’ may be ‘obvious to many; but some I know to be confused. Perhaps I should say here that on the whole I consider inter-disciplinary work to be a good thing: not because itis fashionable, for that is an insufficient ground for doing anything; but for reasons which will appear, mainly by implication, in what isto follow and which have been sum-Area studies and the study of area 3 med up by J. Gottman in the telling phrase ‘the inter-disciplinary imperatives of modern knowledge’ (J. Gottmann, 1969, p. 5) ‘There have been attempts to trace the origin of Area Studies, like the origin of everything else, back to the Greeks (B, Wood, 1968, p. 4or). But as my friend, C. . Smith, has shown in a noteworthy inaugural address on Latin America: Area Studies and Regional Perspectives (C. T. Smith, 1972) (which in some measure steals whatever thunder I may be able to summon up in this Address of mine), the modern growth in Area Studies effectively started in the United States during and after the second world war. And it was asa result principally ofthe study of American experience that Centres of Area Studies were introduced into British Universities (University Grants Committee, 1961, especially pp. 80-4; see also University Grants Committee, 1965). The growth of Centres in the United States arose partly from the need for wartime (and, indeed, post-war) intelligence reports on areas of actual or threatened conflict; for, as Milton Singer has said, there was little American pre-war work outside the western world, apart from that of anthropologists working in their ‘primitive’ enclaves (and, he might have added, from that of notable and far-ranging American geographers such as Isaiah Bowman and Derwent Whittlesey). Social scientists in particular, he says, ‘cultivated an Olympian complacency about the univer- sality of their disciplines, and ... did not feel the need to go beyond the familiar experience of Europe and the United States for illustration and proof of their universal principles’ (M. Singer, 1964): 8 remark which I propose to allow to take wing for the time being, but to bring back to roost nearer home before the evening is out. Singer goes on, however, to say that Area Studies the United States attracted institutional and intellectual resistances by the late “forties. The institutional resistances stiffened for a reason which is unfortunately not unknown in these islands: namely, the jealousies of the departments into which the groves of Academe are generally and rigidly partitioned at the sight of the infant Area Studies plantation struggling for light outside the towering departmental walls. May I say here, as I remember saying at a discussion at the Annual Conference in Sheffield in 1967, how fortunate I feel myself to be in this, as in so many other respects, to have been working in Cambridge: it is a mischievous and totally mis taken view that the Cambridge grove of academe is encrusted into rigidity. In setting up and running a Centre one must clearly seck and obtain the co-operation of scholars interested in the ara concerned, whatever their affiliation by subject, department, or faculty. Itis far easier to do this in a University which is, as mine is, still basically a community of free scholars, of scholars who are at liberty to associate themselves with the work of a Centre without entanglement in a hierarchical structure of departments under autocratic heads or bureaucratic machines. I as tor of the Centre am responsible directly to the University through a Committee of Manage- ment drawn mainly, though not entirely, from the Faculties concerned with our work and not, to the Head of the Department or to the Board of the Faculty to which my own Teaching Office is primarily assigned. True, the Committee of Management is enjoined by Ordinance to promote teaching, research and publication in South Asian subjects ‘in collaboration with the Faculty Boards concerned’ (University of Cambridge, 1970, p. 493); and Faculties and Depart- ments have been very helpful. But in practice it is the co-operation of individuals which has been so invaluable—of individuals with a commitment in some sense to South Asia (and this notion of commitment by area is another point to which I shall return). I do not wish to be ‘thought to believe that the notion of a. flexible Republic of Letters whose members are free scholars is a preserve of Cambridge. But there are places which are otherwise, notably, I have found, in South Asia itself; and I would wish them to share in the greatest of our privileges, the privilege of our liberties, even if it means also sharing in one of our burdens, the burden of self= government. But T must return to the United States, to Milton Singer and to intellectual doubts on,4 B.H.FARMER rather than institutional resistances to Area Studies, doubts already being voiced by the late “forties on a number of grounds (Singer, 1964, pp. 33-4). First, there was the notion that an area was not an important unit of study, except possibly for geographers: while different subjects, ‘were anyway concerned with area at different scales—with, for example, the area ofa tribe, or of| a culture, or of a whole civilization. The divisions by area were seen, not asa systematic classi cation of learning, but as a rough-and-ready means of delimitation (a view which has found its cecho in past debates among geographers about regions); whether arca divisions could serve the needs of research remained unproven. Further, while, Singer says, inter-disciplinary research projects are not difficult to arrange “genuine integration of concept, method and results is difficult. Finally, while anthropology, history and geography (as it then was, or as Singer ‘thought it was) had strong commitments to the particular, the social sciences were interested in theory and in universal generalization, Ido not intend here to comment in detail on these doubts, forall Francis Bacon’s aphorism. “Ifa man will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties’. Let me, however, just make one oF two points. First, that most of these doubts have presented themselves as difficulties, though not insuperable difficulties, in the organization of truly inter-disciplinary activities in our Centres: particularly, perhaps, the one which I quoted last. For the two groups whom personally have found it most difficult to integrate into these activities are, at the ideographic end of the spectrum, those historians who are narrowly focused on the very particular; and at the other end those Social scientists, particularly some economists who are only interested in theory at a high level of generalization. But, I must hasten to add, not al historians or economists are like this. My own Centre's new-born though long-gestated Project on Agrarian Change in Rice-growing Areas of Tamil Nadu (India) and Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon) has benefited arcatly in its formulation from the advice and the insights of historians (particularly on the past operation of caste and of land tenure systems, which may well lie barely concealed beneath the present agrarian surface); and from economists, who really know their India and their Sri Lanka. And this brings me to my second point, to a thought which also arises from experience with our research project. Milton Singer, it will be remembered, said that inter-disciplinary research projects are not difficult to arrange but that genuine integration of concept, method and results is difficult. With the first half ofthat statement I cannot wholly agree: partly because itis not any longer as easy as it once was to secure the co-operation of governments in countries where one wishes to do fieldwork (though we have been most fortunate in our relationship with the authorities in both India and Sri Lanka). But a further reason why the mere arrangement of an inter-disciplinary research project, is not easy is that it is of tremendous importance to try and recruit people with the right personal qualities to enable them to work together as a team, and to work with the members of whatever local teams are involved (and our Project involves the conduct of sample surveys by such teams). One has heard of inter-disciplinary research projects which, starting with brilliant ideas and a sound mix of subjects, nevertheless foundered on the rock of personal relations. Iam, Iam sure, fortunate in my colleagues, and it has been satisfying experience to see them working together, the Cambridge team with representatives from Madras and Colombo, during the very week in which I wrote these words: working and freely exchanging ideas that come from their training in their several subjects and from their varied experience; working, t00, without hierarchy as a community of equals. But to select the team took time, and to satisfy the conditions necessary to their firm recruitment took more time. It was time wel spent. But I would stand Milton Singer's dictum on its head, and say that to secure a genuine integration of concept, method and results demands great care in the initial arrangement of an inter-disciplinary research project, not least in the selection of team-members, but also in the detailed formulation of objectives and methods.Area studies and the study of area 5 ‘My Centre's Project on Agrarian Change may yet, of course, run into difficulties; it would be tempting providence to declare otherwise. But we can honestly and modestly claim to have taken care, u ‘But’, you may well say at this point, ‘this is the Institute of British Geographers, not an association of Asianists or students of development; what part does geography play in your Project, your Centre, and indeed in Area Studies in Britain’? That is a good question, and I do rot accuse you of behaving like a persecuted religious minority if you pose it. First, then, the part of geography in the Project. It will interest you to know that the Sri Lanka team, the team. ‘which will conduct sample surveys in that country, consists almost entirely of geographers, many of them with carlier valuable experience in agrarian work in the field. ‘The Cambridge team includes a Development Geographer, who will be particularly concerned with the spatial network by which inputs reach the cultivator and by which surplus paddy reaches the market. ‘The Development Sociologist himself read geography as a first-year undergraduate. There will bbe a Ceylonese geographer who will undertake hydrological work in order to try to discover whether the agricultural system, especially that in Tamil Nadu, is in an unstable relationship with its environment through using groundwater at a rate greater than the recharge rate. You ‘may care to see here two of the principal roles which, as I envisage it, geographers can play not only in our Project but in Area Studies more generally: first by work on the spatial aspects of economic and social phenomena; secondly by relating these things to that old-fashioned and often foolishly discarded reality, the physical environment. (In this connection, compare E.L. ‘Uliman’s statement on ‘Human Geography in Area Research’, admittedly written nearly twenty years ago: Ullman, 1953). As for me, I have in addition to much of the administrative work a general co-ordinating job to do. I believe that T am helped in doing this because T am a geo- grapher, schooled in a subject with many points of contact with other subjects (so that onc has some idea of their language, methods and concepts) (compare M. Lipton, 1970, p. 15); and because T have long laboured in South Asian vineyards (but to develop that point now would be to steal my own thunder, and I need that later). tis, however, important to confess here that few if any of the geographers involved in the Project would pass the test of doctrinal if not ritual purity which religious-minority-geographers like to impose. The Sri Lanka team is doing work almost identical with that being done by non= geographers in Tamil Nadu. The Development Geographer holds, in addition to a degree in geography, diploma in agricultural economics. ‘The Development Sociologist is, as I have already said, a backslider from geographical purity (though he is too inter-diseiplinary of mind to be, like the backslider in the book of The Proverbs, ‘filled with his own ways’ (Proverbs, 14, 14). The Geographer-Hydrologist is ritually clean; but as for me, I have already confessed. ‘my wanderings from the geographical fold. Indeed, as I have watched the planning team for the Project at work I have been impressed. not only by what each brings from his own subject, whether he be geographer or student of development administration or social anthropologist or economist or statistician; but also by the fusion of ideas, concepts and methods that has already taken place: again pace Singer’s dictum that ‘genuine integration’ is difficult to arrive at (Singer, 1964, p. 33) As for my Centre more generally, I think we can claim, with all modesty, that geographers associated with its work, though few in numbers compared with historians or economists, make their own contribution, notably again in terms of spatial sensitivity and relation to the physical environment; but that asthe inter-disciplinary medicine works they, like other sometime special- ists, begin to speak: rs tongues. I daresay that other Centres have had a similar experience.6 B.H.FARMER Not that the role of geography in Centres is necessarily an easy one to find. Geographers can, however, if they are so minded view the difficulties of developing Area Studies all the more sympathetically because their own subject faces many of the same intellectual problems, as C.T. Smith has perceptively pointed out (Smith, 1972, p. 10) ‘Turning to the task and role of Directors of Centres, I believe it to be significant that, as R. W. Steel and others have noticed (R. W. Steel and J. Wreford Watson, 1972, p. 142) a number of geographers have directed or still are directing these institutions. Indeed, it would seem to be true that geography has supplied more Directors than has any other subject. I have already pointed out some of the advantages that a geographer possesses in this situation; and I take it that universities have had the good sense to perceive these. ‘There is one ghost, a mourning ghost that I must lay before I move on. This ghost has it that ‘Area Studies, like Environmental Studies, Social Studies and other conflations alien to geograpl ‘al purity, are in some way an alternative, a highly undesirable alternative to geography. Geo graphers (at least, those geographers not concerned with ritual purity) need have nothing to fear, for Area Studies as I see them conceived up and down the country do not compete with ‘geography asan academic subject: nothing to fear, that is, ifthey maintain the highest of academic standards, and see that the best scholars of the rising generation are given the opportunity to train as research workers, not anywhere, but with the best of their seniors and their contem- poraries, If the best potential geographers are denied this opportunity, then geography will assuredly not compete successfully with other subjects whether inside or outside Centres of ‘Area Studies. Centres of Area Studies do not have the same functions as such institutions as the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex, oF the Overseas Development Group at the University of East Anglia (soon to become a fully-fledged School of Development Studies). Nor do Centres, gua Centres, organize such ventures as the Cambridge Course on Develop ment, which is provided by the University’s Overseas Studies Committee, financed by the Overseas Development Administration of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and pursued by administrative officers from developing countries whose duties include the administration of the process of development as locally understood. For Centres of Area Studies are academic institutions, not necessarily or wholly committed to the application of their learning to “develop- ment’, however it is defined (and its definition does cause difficulty: see, for instance, Social Science Research Council, 1972, pp. 8-9). Indeed, it may well be important for Centres to stand a little apart from ‘development’ and, amongst other things, to challenge current definitions and. concepts. Moreover, there are, and T hope will continue to be, workers associated with Centres. of Area Studies whose subjects of study and teaching are entirely divorced from development studies, or only tenuously connected with them. I think here especially, though not exclusively, of historians and historical geographers; though, as I have already hinted in connection with our Project on Agrarian Change, historical scholarship may make its own contribution in ways expected or unexpected. M. Lipton has drawn attention to the importance of what he calls “unified local histories? in development studies (Lipton, 1970, p. 0). But Area Studies, while not co-terminous with development studies, may involve the latter. So far as research in my own Centre is concerned, I would like to maintain a balance between clearly developmental work, like our Project on Agrarian Change, and the non-developmental, like our South Asian Dry Zones Project which involves archaeologists, geomorphologists and others in the reconstruction of environmental change and of human occupance in Gujarat and, now, in adjacent areas. I also hope that my Centre will continue to welcome to its seminars and. library, not only those whose interest is academic but also administrators from South Asian countries who are pursuing the Cambridge Course on Development and, for that matter, officersArea studies and the study of area 7 of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office who are serving, or are about to serve, in South Asia (6ince to help, in a modest way, to orient their thinking may have not insignificant developmental consequences). Centres of Area Studies are able to contribute to development studies partly because they are by nature inter-disciplinary. Lipton has observed that in developing countries there is a special inter-dependence between observed features and variables which are normally analysed by workers in separate subjects, so, that, as he puts it (and it is good to hear stich words from an economist) ‘other things will not stay equal’ (Lipton, 1970, pp. 708; see also B. Knall, 1972). But, I would also submit (and to this point I shall return) that Centres also contribute to work con development because each is committed to its area. Mm ‘There have, of course, long been geographers interested in development, though their definition of that phenomenon and their territorial focus has shifted over the years. Thus there have in the past been advocates of ‘colonial geography’ (R. J. H. Church, r948) and of ‘tropical geography’ on the assumption, implicit or explicit, that the Tropics constitute a proper and intelligible ficld for geographical study or that ‘tropical’ means ‘underdeveloped’ (P. Gourou, 1947 and 1971; R. W. Steel and R. M. Prothero, eds, 19643 B. W. Hodder, 1968; R. W. Steel, 1971). Here I should like to pay tribute to the life-work of Pierre Gourou. It is no adverse criticism of his work—on the contrary—to say that a comparison between successive editions of ‘Les Pays Tropicaus tells us a great deal about changing views of the meaning of “development” as well as about the changing impact of technology on the Tropics; or to say that I grow more doubrful, partly because of just that impact, of the usefulness of the Tropics generally as an intelligible field of geographical enquiry, compared with developing countries as a group, or compared with a sub-continental area like South Asia. My doubts remain in spite of the eloquent restatement of the environmental problems peculiar to the Tropics by C. A. Fisher (C. A. Fisher, 1965). ‘Contemporary British geographers are certainly active in the study of developing countries, in and out of Centres, though there ought to be many more of them, and many more studies like D. B. Grigg’s The Harsh Lands (D. B. Grigg, 1970). ‘They have this year found recognition by this Institute as a Developing Areas Study Group, whose activities I hope we shall all welcome, ‘There are geographers working wich the Institute of Development Studies and with the Overseas Development Group; and when the latter expands into a School of Development Studies, geography, with economics and sociology, will be a compulsory initial subject for undergraduates. But there has been a certain amount of healthy controversy about the role of geography in the study of development, linked to arguments about the nature of development itself. Lipton refers to geographers as being, in themselves, exponents of the inter-disciplinary studies he advocates, and mentions the potential contribution of both physical geography and locational theory; but, while praising O. H. K. Spate and A. T. A. Learmonth’s India and Pakistan (1967) castigates other ‘inter-disciplinary’ studies by geographers as ‘at worst “higher journalism” * (Lipton, 1970). To come nearer home, there have been writings in our junior journal, Area, which have made their own contribution to the argument. First, there have been those on the theme of ‘relevance’: for instance, M. Chisholm’s article called ‘Geography and the Question of “Rele~ vance”, which amongst other things pointedly asks ‘What ... is the criterion of usefulness?” (M. Chisholm, 19716); and the reports by H. Prince and D. M. Smith on the questions of social relevance raised so strongly in the United States (H. Prince, 1971; D. M. Smith, 1971). Only some of these questions are, of course, concerned with developing countries: many more of them8 B.H.FARMER centre on the crisis in American urban society and on the environmental problems associated, not with poverty, but with affluence. More specifically, there has been the debate between A Gilbert and J. Connell on the relationship between the study of geography and the study of development (A. Gilbert, 1971a and 1971b; J. Connell, 1971; see also M. Chapman, 1969) Both are concerned with a problem that concerns me, as it concerns H.C. Brookfield in a paper shortly to appear in our Transactions (HI. C. Brookfield, 1973): the appropriateness to the many widely differing countries of the ‘Third World’ of models developed on the basis of western. ‘experience, and implying western value judgements; and this in the context of the emergence of the so-called ‘New Geography’ Vv 1 do not propose in any exhaustive way to review the recent developments which go under the name of the ‘New Geography”: indeed, it would be impertinent of me to do so. There is much excellent literature from P. Haggett’s pioneer work, Locational Analysis in Human Geography and his recent Geography : a Modern Synthesis (P. Haggett, 1965 and 1972) to A. G. Wilson's critical and mind-clearing paper in a very recent number of our Transactions (A. G. Wilson, 1972). But I do wish to make one or two comments. In making them, I shall try, on the one hand, not to behave like a bemused ancient by mounting a diatribe against all things modern that I do not understand (though there is much that I do not profess to understand). On the other hand, 1 shall resist any temptation to jump on the bandwagon and to accept uncritically all that British geographers (and others) do under the banner of the ‘New Geography”: for I abhor both ban ‘wagoning and uncritical adulation of the new just because itis new; and distrust those who nail their colours firmly to the weathercock. My own position, I suppose, is briefly this. I accept fully that geography has been strengthened and made more rigorous where it has, with understanding, adopted the methods, both general and specific, of the natural and socialsciences (see D. W. Harvey, 1969): in particular, through the erection of a firmer body of theory and a wider use of models as understood in’'the sciences; through the search for regularities rather than by contentment with supposed unique instances, and through adaptation of the concepts of the behavioural sciences; and aided by the use of a wide variety of quantitative techniques, with or without the assistance of the computer. But I take Wilson's point that ‘there is often a confusion between “quantitative” and “theoretical” (Wilson, 1972, p. 31), and I am troubled about a number of matters to which I shall briefly and perhaps irrelevantly refer before returning to.my ‘main theme. First, I am troubled by the arrogance and pretentiousness of some, and only some of the ‘New Geographers’, which I believe grievously to have misled a numberof their juniors (compare RE, Dickinson, 1969, p. 282 and 1970, p. 33). I believe that, in their more extreme form, these failings are anti-intellectual, for they falsify the relationship between the new and what has been done before. True scholarship, like charity, ‘vaunteth not itself, is not pusfed up’. The impression is created by those I here have in mind that all this is the ‘New Geography’, the only ‘one there ever has been. But, as J. Gottman has rightly pointed out, it was a ‘new geography’, that Mackinder sought to develop at Oxford (J. Gottmann, 1969, p. 3; compare C. A. Fisher, 1970, p. 375 and R. W. Steel, 1970, p. 11.); and I myself, having suffered from a first geography ‘book in the capes-and-bays tradition, can testify to the revolutionary impact on my cleven-year~ old mind of J. Fairgrieve and E. Young’s Human Geographies, which first showed me that there ‘was some regularity in spatial patterns, even though their model was crude by current canons GJ. Fairgrieve and E. Young, 1922-24). The search for regularity did not, then, begin in 19603, nor did theory derived from deductive reasoning, for, as Wilson has shown, that much-maligned figure, W. M. Davis, sought to reach ‘the harbour of explanation by crossing a sea of theory”