FROM TOOLS TO THEORY:

A case for re-orienting Geography education

in India today

Ali Raza Moosvi

Aims of this course

Refresh basic knowledge of the fundamentals of

the subject
Discuss contemporary developments
Understanding the emerging areas of research
discuss the syllabi and suggest changes in light
of the above
 Geography is what geographers do

Jacob Viner’s definition of Economics

 social sciences, philosophy, sociology, basic science and psychology to
name a few main fields.
a unique quality as well as what are emerging as fatal flaws - the
Geographer is a jack of all trades and master of none
in general a ‘lack of focus’.
The basic paradigm in the case of Geography is that it is not about
‘defining or describing the earth’ alone but also to see and study spatial
organisation and the human-earth interactions in all their diversity and all
their levels.
Traditionally, geographers had been viewed primarily as cartographers

Dealing with his or her perceptions of reality and thus earliest maps were
personal and actually works of Art

The Geographer was not plotting reality, he was presenting it as he saw fit
within his social / intellectual and moral compass.
 The Imago Mundi – first known map created in Babylon in
600BC

Babylon on the Euphrates, surrounded by a circular

landmass of Assyria and several cities, in turn surrounded by
a "bitter river" (Oceanus), with seven islands arranged
around it so as to form a seven-pointed star.
 Geographic Resources

Herodotus' in his Histories (484 BC)

Homer’s works the Iliad and the Odyssey (8 BC)
 al-Idrisi, Ibn Battuta, Ibn Khaldun, etc. (8 – 10c AD)
al-Biruni who introduced techniques to measure the earth and distances on it using
triangulation (1025 AD)
The world remained flat till nearly the 12th AD
T and O maps prevailed.
(1472 Etymologia of Isidorius)
The voyages of Marco Polo, the Christian Crusades of the 12th and 13th
centuries, and the Portuguese and Spanish voyages of exploration during the
15th and 16th centuries opened up new horizons and stimulated geographic
writings.

The Renaissance and the Reformation of the 15-16th AD revolutionised human

thought and decidedly ended the view and control of the Church on thought.

A need for both accurate geographic detail, and more solid theoretical
foundations.
By the 18th century, geography had become recognized as a discipline and
became part of a university curriculum in Paris and Berlin.
Kosmos: a sketch of a physical description of the Universe, by Alexander von
Humboldt, published in German in 1845.
A generally accepted definition of Geography emerges as a descriptive subject.
 1850-1950
 Theoretical foundations
 Human-Earth interactions

Some classical fundamental Concepts of Geomorphology

 The Climate and Man
Determinism
Possibilism
Probablism
Social Darwinism
Space and region
 Regional approach
 Systemic approach
Hartshorne in ‘The Nature of Geography’ (1939)
wrote that “the most disturbing problem in
Geography is that whether it can claim to be a
science, i.e. does it have laws, principles and
general truths, a codified knowledge or will it
always be the inexhaustible description of so
many unique phenomenon of this earth.”

Reckless quantification of data when Economics

became model-worthy and predictive – growth
of econometrics
The economists have theory of man and
money how he earns and how he spends;
it thus the study of money and more
importantly of man

Economists / econometrists model human

behaviour and are moving closer to
behavioural science
John Nash’s game theory
Amartya Sen’s development economics
and human freedoms and unfreedoms
Geography has a shrinking body of organized
knowledge
Not enough study about the man-environment
interaction
 what defines the subject is ‘space’ a real, physical
entity as basic as sunlight and air
Be it real or metaphorical or cognitive or perceived
Few generalizations and thus less theory/laws
Thus the field is either hazy and unfocused in its
enquiry or is led wherever technology and its tools
may take it
 Theory vs. Tools:
The proverbial baby thrown out with the bathwater
782 Geography Departments in India’s nearly
30000 colleges
About 250 Geography departments in 1000
Universities
About 1100 theses in Geography submitted
each year in India
More than 800 are purely application-based
Do the math (assuming Ph.D. is available only in
Universities and an average of 3 theses submitted
per university per year)
 Maybe an
oversimplification
but:

Do you need a
Ph.D. to do
this???
Geography is now a thoroughly skill-based
subject like a polytechnic programme
All you need is to master a particular
software and you are a Geographer
The idea and theory of thematic mapping
makes sense not only in layering but
identifying and articulating the theme
The theme will emerge only with
theoretical understanding
The tools are killing
the subject not
because they
intend to do so

they have just run

out of ideas and
theories

It is nobody’s
argument that
GIS/RS should be
abandoned
Debunking of basic theories of climatic
determinism because
they suddenly became politically
incorrect
technology totally controls
environment??
How political correctness is killing
academia over the world is a big debate

 there seems to be no struggle in

Geography (at least in India)

it is as if it is carrying out euthanasia!

“Without an understanding of space, it is a
subject without unity, without a central theory. A
mere agglomeration of various scarps of
miscellaneous information which are
scientifically dealt with by other disciplines.”
(Hugh Robert Mill - 1904)
 Rediscovering Geography
New Relevance for Science and Society
Rediscovering Geography Committee
1997
 to identify critical issues and constraints for the
discipline of geography,
Discipline is shrinking in its attraction for fresh
students
the discipline needs to place increased emphasis
on its traditional strengths of observation, field
study and providing comprehensive perspectives

 to clarify priorities for teaching and research,

Move from applications skill alone of analysis and
display of geographic data, such as cartography,
visualization, spatial statistics, and geographic
information systems to “location matters”.
to link developments in geography as a science
with national needs
to increase the appreciation of geography
within the scientific community,
geography's intellectual foundations need to
be strengthened to ensure that its
contributions to science and society are
solidly grounded.
Major research themes and
approaches
 disequilibrium and dynamics in complex systems,
climate changes do not operate in isolation from
other environmental and social changes.
 an expanded concept of global change,
Develop the ability to understand and map the local-
global continuum
 comparative studies using longitudinal data,
Comparative studies are based on differences across
paces or latitudes; geographic phenomenon to be
understood longitudinally too (in a place over time)
 The challenge

 Despite geography's fundamentally integrative

character, increased specialization on data
representation has occurred at the expense of the
common core learning that once existed across the
field's subspecialties in both graduate and
undergraduate education.
 As a consequence, the discipline's strengths in the
integration of natural and social sciences in place,
space, and time have been lessened, and the
discipline's distinctive contributions to liberal education
and geographic competency have been
concomitantly reduced.
But now the Geographer is isolated in his own
field of displaying spatial data in micro
approaches
the availability of large quantities of data tends
to mask a broader underlying problem: namely,
that data availability is not always well matched
to data needs
Geographers must also improve the practice of
relating the ''front end" of geographic analysis
with "back-end" theory and analysis.
Without thoughtful and intellectually robust
linkages between these two elements of the
research enterprise, geographic analysis will be
inherently incomplete.
The way forward…

 Geography as a discipline should devote more attention to the

development of larger, integrative, interdisciplinary research projects
 If geography is to be an effective contributor to improving the knowledge
base it needs to undertake research on how geographic learning and
research takes place.
 Increase quality of education (sound and clear content)
 Subject matter and subject skills to be balanced
 Rediscover traditional strengths of geography (field observation / field study,
inter-disciplinary integration, basic theoretical applications over space and other
disciplines)
 Geography has limited its capacity
Enhance diversity in geography's perspectives,
Promote breadth and depth of learning that provides
coherence to the discipline.
Promote and participate in professional interactions
with other sciences.
Increased research attention should be given to core
methodological and conceptual issues in geography
that are especially relevant to society's concerns. Key
issues include complex systems and nonlinear
dynamics, relationships between physical and human
geography,