ELLEN, R.

Persistence and Change in the Relationship between Anthropology and Human

Geography. Progress in Human Geography 12(2), 1988, p. 229-262.

- lista de trabalhos que procuram dar conta dessa relação. (p. 229)

- “Geography and anthropology share a protean appetite in terms of their intellectual interests and
generally defined subject matter. One consequence of this has been frequent forays into adjacent
disciplinary territory, such that virtually all geographers and anthropologists might be said to be
working at one disciplinary interface or another.” (p. 230)

- Diferenças de perspectiva: “While geography shares this unifying and colonial urge, though in
ruthless pursuit of the spatial aspect of virtually any kind of human characteristic, anthropology has
sometimes attempted to incorporate the entire subject matter of adjacent disciplines within its own
explanatory framework. Thus, economic anthropology (to cite just one example) has in its grander
moments challenged the conventional assumptions underpinning much of modern economic
theory.” (p. 230)

- antropologia procurou estabelecer um desde o século XIX programa teorético, enquanto a

geografia procurou estabelecer seu trabalho baseado, em grande medida, na empiria, sem uma teoria
ou método muito bem definidos. (p. 230-231) Revolução teorético-quantitativa procurou dar conta
deste problema entre os geógrafos.

- No início, não havia ainda uma divisão disciplinar tão clara: “In one sense then, the discourse was
a seamless web of ideas with disciplinarity as yet a poorly institutionalized division of academic
labour. The fieldworkers of these early preprofessional times were often generalized human
scientists, geography and anthropology being just two subjects which their investigations
encompassed.” (p. 232)

- conexão entre as duas disciplinas é muito forte na tradição alemã. Temas se sobrepõem, e
geógrafos e antropólogos trabalharam juntos em várias frentes. (p. 232-233):

“Karl Ritter had suggested as early as the 1850s that this organization should have an ethnographic
section, and from 1871 to 1873 its president was the celebrated ethnologist Adolf Bastian, who is
mainly remembered among contemporary social anthropologists for his assertion of the
psychological unity of humankind, and his evolutionist work on matriarchy. In the output of the
German schools, geography is frequently difficult to disentangle from anthropology. Oscar Peschel,
for example, wrote an influential work on racial types, while Friedrich Ratzel initiated a series of
research monographs for the society under the title Forschungen zur deutschen Landeskunde und
Völkskunde (Dickinson, 1969: 63). Franz Boas had worked closely with the German geographical
determinist Theobald Fischer (a disciple of Karl Ritter) before going to the United States, and his
Baffin Island work was quite explicitly geographical in character (Hallowell, 1960; Stocking, 1965;
Trindell, 1969). He clearly considered geography as a legitimate and necessary part of his
anthropology (see Boas, 1887), although he was later to reject determinism.”

- “This overlap of interests is reflected in the membership of learned societies, in the journals in
which they published, and in the organization of major scientific expeditions.”

- “In the united States the most important collaborative links between geography and anthropology
were forged at Berkeley under the guidance of Carl Sauer and Alfred Kroeber, about whom much
more will be said in what follows.”

É NESTE AMBIENTE QUE O FRANZ BOAS DEVE SER COMPREENDIDO!

- Todos esses elementos são compartilhados por uma conjuntura onde as duas ciências eram
usadas na “descoberta” de outros territórios e povos. Elas partilhavam uma conexão comum
com a empresa colonial europeia e, posteriormente, estadunidense.

- tradição também no tocante ao “trabalho de campo”, uma vez que ambas as ciências foram
orientadas para tais práticas. Todavia: “With a common historical background and a shared
interest in the production of data concerning human activities in natural settings, it is perhaps
surprising that there has been so little contact between geographers and anthropologists in terms of
discussion of fieldwork techniques, research practices, interpretation and inference. As it is, this is
presently limited to the (often uncritical) borrowing of specific (often decontextualized) techniques,
for example formal methods of spatial analysis and carrying capacity computations.” (p. 235)

- “The common notion of “the field” was early linked to a conceptual interest in the permit
comparative analysis. In geography this was the region (usually nodal), in anthropology the
ethnographic or cultural area, and more ambiguously the ethnic group (usually ’uniform’).
However, on occasions anthropologists have adopted a more geographic mode (e.g. Spoehr, 1966),
perhaps classically exemplified by Malinowski’s famous study of the kula. The last three decades
have seen a growth in regional perspectives in anthropology, ranging from the investigation of
marketing systems to religion (e.g. Werbner, 1977). These are discussed further below in as much as
they have utilized formal techniques of spatial analysis and regional theory.” (p. 235)

- mudança na abordagem do campo na antropologia redefiniu também sua noção de campo na

inscrição a um certo espaço muito claramente delimitado: “anthropology and ethnography
conceptualized their objects of study as combinations of traits (customs or objects) such an
approach was easily fostered, but once it shifted to social relations, the notion of a spatially defined
group became less tenable.” (p. 236)

- conceito de área cultural remonta a Ratzel. Todavia, ele vai ser mais usado nos EUA, com nativos
habitando locais inóspitos, e terá maiores problemas na sua aplicação no Oriente Médio, com a
dispersão das populações sendo mais fragmentada. (p. 236)

- MEU MAPA DA REGIONALIZAÇÃO DO SUBÚRBIO ENTRA AQUI: “In the

conceptualization of culture as so many traits and constellations of traits we find a common and
continuing theme in geography, anthropology, and archaeology. The key representation in this
approach is the distribution map, and the aim to first describe spatial variation in cultural attributes,
organize the data into rational regional units, and then to explain the differences and similarities.”
(p. 237)

- Uso da cartografia pelos antropólogos é, por um lado, ridículo, enquanto que, por parte dos
geógrafos, chega-se a quase uma “mapomania” vulgar. (p. 238)

- Alerta importantíssimo feito pelo autor, sobre algumas ressalvas sobre o mapa, uma vez que
ele deve ser um instrumento e não uma técnica em si: “All this is fine, but we must always ask
(as anthropologists, at least) whether all the effort is telling us something about the structure and
dynamics of the society and cultures concerned that cannot be known or illustrated in some other
way. There is a danger, and the work of Conklin should serve as a prime signal, that the
representation may become an end in itself (Ellen, 1982b).

- crítica ao “ambientalismo” na determinação do social: a sociedade só pode ser explicada em

termos sociais. Concordo. Mas o espaço ao qual me refiro aqui não são as condições ambientais do
“espaço físico”, como a crítica ao determinismo ambiental sugeriria de maneira correta.
- Ponto muito importante: “Put differently, while anthropologists derive a sophisticated view of
culture from a naive view of nature (Mikesell, 1967: 633), geographers have tended to operate with
a sophisticated interpretation of the environment but a naive construction of culture and society.
Geographers have tended to focus on detailed description and environmental change resulting from
human activity (Clarke, 1971; Nietschmann, 1973; Smole, 1976); anthropologists on social change
consequent upon environmental conditions and theory. Such geographical empiricism and
confinement to the effects of culture on environment may be explained in terms of a desire to avoid
a determinism which had earlier been repudiated.

- dimensão espacial das relações sociais e da cultura: “The idea that the location of people in space
may have a profound influence on culture and social organization is not new in anthropology (see
section IV, above), and certain classic hypotheses rest upon such correlations; for example the
attempt to explain the lineal bias of descent systems in terms of residence patterns. However, when
in 1953, L6vi-Strauss remarked that anthropologists had made ’practically no attempts ... to
correlate spatial configurations with the formal properties of social life’ (1953: 533), it must be said
that he was essentially correct. (p. 243)

- “The links between geography and anthropology have arisen from a overlap in their subject
matters, a polymorphic and wideranging conception of their respective disciplinary enterprises, a
fieldwork tradition and a common set of historical origins.” (p. 249)

- Sobre o “purismo epistemológico” da geografia: “As a social anthropologist, I have always been
impressed by the lack of such territoriality in geography and a willingness to seek explanations of
spaciality wherever these might lead; a thoroughly laudable commitment to the belief that
’traditional geographical concepts can be sharpened and new ones introduced by reference to the
postulates of some other discipline’

Ponto fundamental: “To say this much is not to abandon the movement away from the simple
dualism of space and society, to fail to recognize that space has effectively ceased to be merely a
forum in which social life is conducted and has become rather a medium through which social
relations are produced, reproduced and, we might add, cognized and expressed as well.” (p. 251)