Of elephants and discipline: For a recursive history of geography

Abstract

This commentary suggests that the history of geography can best contribute to the future of geography through an open and recursive approach to the history of ideas about space and nature. I argue that the history of geographical ideas should develop in dialectical relation with how contemporary geography changes. To support this argument, I sketch what a recursive and anti-disciplinary history of geography might look like, as each new geographical innovation opens new paths for the history of geographical ideas to tread, and new histories of thinking to scrutinise.

Elephantes… kepeþ lore and discipline of þe sterres.

Trevisa, 1395. tr. Bartholomaeus Anglicus De Proprietatibus Rerum. II. xviii. xliv. 1195

Introduction

The Oxford English Dictionary records the earliest usages of the word ‘discipline’ in Old English around 1200. There, the word relates specifically to punishment and chastisement, and explicitly to ecclesiastical contexts. It is not until 1350 that the first uses relating to training or instruction are found, there too within monastic settings, with strong coercive and violent undertones. It is another 50 years before the word comes to denote ‘a branch of learning or knowledge; a field of study or expertise; a subject’. Professional academics are both endlessly enjoined to be interdisciplinary and incentivised to contribute to the ‘progress’ of their own discipline. Whether in moving between them, or squirrelling away knowledge inside them, disciplines are a cornerstone of contemporary academic structures and discourses. In this contribution to a special issue on the futures of geographical thought and praxis, I want to consider what the history of geography can offer, but to do so while calling into question the dynamics of disciplinarity itself. I begin from a two-part premise: on the one hand that contemporary geography is happily, weakly, and incompletely disciplined, and on the other hand that the history of geography has been (with exceptions) perhaps too focused on disciplinary histories. By recalling the origins of disciplinarity in the whip, the cloister, and the hair shirt, I want to suggest that historians of geographical ideas can go further in exploding disciplinary boundaries by studying ideas about space, place, and nature wherever they are found.

From disciplinary to recursive histories

As the work of human geography moves, its edges change and dissolve. Any number of interventions fundamentally alter what constitutes geography, whether re-theorisations of space (Massey, 1994; Santos, 2021 [1978]), nature (Smith, 1984), or race and cartography (McKittrick, 2006). As we establish new dimensions of the geographical, and new areas of enquiry emerge, so the scope of the history of geographical ideas needs to broaden. Depending on where you are inserted in the uneven hierarchies of global knowledge production, in contemporary human geography you can, in principle, study almost anything you like, however you like. Literature, art, and film jostle happily with genomics, gaols, and geology as subjects of concern for human geographers, whose research methods come from fields as various as history, statistics, and participatory action research. The old idea that geography is a discipline united by its methodology (e.g. Hartshorne, 1958) is evidently no longer true, and the ideas and practices that matter do not necessarily come from geographers, but from filmmakers, poets, social movements, social scientists, natural scientists, practitioners, and more. There is an important difference between Geography and geography (McKittrick and Peake, 2005), and the ‘geographical imagination’ is ‘by no means the exclusive preserve of the academic discipline of Geography’ (Gregory in Gregory et al., 2009: 282). This understanding of geographical ideas has a long heritage, notably, in the Anglophone context, in John K. Wright's conception of ‘geosophy’: ‘the study of geographical knowledge from any or all points of view’, ‘true or false’, from ‘all manner of people’ (1947: 12). Of course, the discipline of Geography, as David Livingstone shows in The Geographical Tradition (1992), has always been contested, stretched, and redefined. While ‘Geography exists as an academic discipline because there are people who call themselves geographers, who have geography degrees and who teach on geography degree programmes’ (Johnston and Sidaway, 2015: 9), geographical ideas also exist – and have always existed – far beyond these disciplinary contexts (e.g. Keighren, 2005). Historians of geography need to inhabit both worlds.

In this context, while historians of geography have long recognised the contested nature and frayed edges of the ‘geographical tradition’ (Livingstone, 1992), there is space to more explicitly and deliberately relinquish the notion that the history of geographical ideas is the History of Geography as an academic discipline alone. Two recent edited histories of critical geography are both limited to people-who-called-themselves-geographers (Barnes and Sheppard, 2021; Berg et al., 2021), and feminist histories of geography have for more than two decades helped to correct masculinist accounts of the development of geographical ideas by attending to women geographers of various kinds (e.g. Maddrell, 2008; Monk, 2004). A series of recent interventions (including my own) have argued that the history of geography needs to include a radically more diverse cast of geographers, working from many more places and in more languages (Craggs and Neate, 2020; Davies, 2022; Ferretti, 2022; see also recent editions of the long-running series, Geographers: Biobibliographical Studies). However, even as it undoubtedly increases the breadth of the history of geography, there is a risk that this work reifies the borders of the discipline. Such work continues and extends a discussion in Dialogues in Human Geography from a decade ago, when a group of human geographers debated the question of geography's canon and its sense of itself and its past (Keighren et al., 2012 and responses). They examined the role of its own historiography in making geography an interdisciplinary discipline. Yet all these expansive and important interventions risk leaving intact the idea that the history of geographical thinking is cognate with the history of geographers.

Trying to go beyond this, an anti-disciplinary history would start from an open and global perspective on where geographical knowledge is today and seek to deepen and expand that field. It would be recursive in the sense of a holistic interpretation which develops through a series of successive executions of a part of the whole (see OED, 2022). A recursive history of geography would adopt a mobile approach to geographical ideas, working backwards and forwards between new geographical statements, definitions, interpretations, and concepts as well as the intellectual histories from which they emerge, which enable them, and which can help extend them. This will require a much wider and more unwieldy scope of intellectual work to understand the history of thinking about space, place, and nature than the history of geography as it is generally formulated. Such a move would offer a way out of presentism (Keighren et al., 2012), while desacralising the canon ¹ and putting down the disciplinary whip. It would get beyond the question of whether or not geography is too interested, or not interested enough, in its own history (Hubbard, 2012), by asking not what Geography has been, but what the history of geographical ideas can do to help expand, contest, and deepen what geography is now.

The recursive vision of the history of geography which I find most productive is one which defends historical work without shying away from the injunction that such work be of value to a contemporary field (e.g. Barnett, 1995). The ‘value’ of this historical work should be understood in as open and expansive a way as possible. This would involve critiquing and deconstructing contemporary ideas as much as it might entail explaining or extending them. The history of geography should therefore develop in dialectical relation with contemporary developments in geography. Each new geographical innovation offers new routes for the history of geography. As we recognise new geographical knowledges, we need to analyse the histories of thinking that they open up. That is to say that theory, and the history of theory, has a mutually enriching quality.

Black geographies are an excellent example of this dynamic, in which conceptual innovations (themselves often historically informed) have raised a wider set of possible intellectual histories with which to strengthen and expand geography further. The necessary next step is to recognise the histories of work which these new concerns bring into view. My own work with Christen Smith and Bethânia Gomes on the Black Brazilian intellectual, militant, and artist Beatriz Nascimento offers an example of the kind of movement that I have in mind (Smith et al., 2021). Writing in Black geographies allows us to see how Nascimento was thinking about Black spatiality in the middle of the 20th century. Doing historical and translation work on Nascimento's oeuvre – which was never within Geography, was often un-disciplined, and existed beyond a self-referential disciplinarity – can, in turn, establish new dialogues in contemporary thinking about space, race, and nature.

This is just one instance, but it raises questions for other corners of the geographical field. Do innovations in geospatial science open avenues for how the history of mathematics, technology, and statistics are part of the history of geographical thought? Do new perspectives on land, property, social reproduction, and the domestic bring into view intellectual trajectories which need to be part of geography's history? This is not a question of co-opting intellectual histories but of seeing more of them as relevant to the development of geographical ideas today.

Conclusion

For Jazeel, ‘decolonising geographical knowledge…requires us to think carefully about how to de-link the production of geographical knowledge from the hegemony of our disciplinary infrastructure’ (2016: 336). A history of geographical ideas that sets itself against disciplinarity would include geographers but would not leave disciplinarity intact. In so doing, it might better serve critical, radical, anti-colonial, and emancipatory geographical futures by including a more heterogeneous and uneven scope of knowledge and practice. Un-disciplined thought is everywhere in the open field of knowledge about space, place, and nature today, and historians of geography could more actively and explicitly embrace it. This would mean continuing to do what they do best – analysing, interpreting, and theorizing the history of geographical ideas – while more actively seeking out the histories of those ideas outside of Geography itself.

Innes Keighren, reflecting on the legacies of geosophy, speculated that ‘future histories of geography…will be iterative rather than definitive; they will look outside the discipline more so than within it’ (2017: 641). I agree with this as a projection and endorse it as a project. I am seeking to add two things: firstly, a scepticism of disciplinarity itself; and, secondly, a deliberate intent to take the enormous diversity of contemporary geographical thought and praxis as our starting point. If we do so, then the history of geographical thought needs to include much more than the History of Geography. Incidentally, that first use of ‘discipline’ as a subject, in Trevisa's translation of Bartholomaeus’ On the Properties of Things, belongs not to humans, but to elephants, who ‘kepeth lore and discipline of the stars’. Remembering the self-flagellating, monkish origins of disciplining cautions us to be wary of its strictures, but if we follow the elephants, and write while gazing at the stars, there is a bright future for new histories of an old discipline.