Maphead_ Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks - Ken Jennings [22]
“So, uh, what is it you do study, then?”
And . . . scene.
It’s misleading to think of geography as a single discipline at all. Instead it’s the ultimate interdisciplinary study, because it’s made up of every other discipline viewed spatially, through the lens of place. Language, history, biology, public health, paleontology, urban planning—there are geographers studying all these subjects and aspects of geography taught in all of them. In one sense, geography’s ubiquity is an argument for its importance, but it’s also the very thing that makes it so hard to define to administrators and so easy for universities to defund and divvy up into other departments.
In fact, the little one-act play above is probably too optimistic. The real cocktail party conversation would probably go something like this:
“Actually, I have a degree in geography.”
“Geography? Wow, I’m terrible with maps. I bet you know all your state capitals, though!”
(Geographer’s smile freezes, left eye starts to twitch uncontrollably.)
Maps, see, are a huge part of geography’s ongoing identity crisis today. As late as the end of the eighteenth century, geography and cartography were synonymous—interchangeable words for the same science. The world was still being charted and explored, and geographers were the ones drawing the maps. But then geography began to grow into a holistic scholarly discipline, and a funny thing happened on the way to the symposium: it lost maps as its center.
This happened for many reasons. Most obviously, the world got pretty thoroughly mapped; making maps wasn’t at the brave frontier of anything anymore. As a result, geographers began to see cartographers as mere technicians, not scientists or scholars. Second, once digital tools like geographic information systems, or GIS, began to be used to manage spatial data, focusing on maps felt old-fashioned. Finally, there’s been an academic trend toward emphasizing the unreliability of maps: their cultural baggage, their selectivity, the agendas that drive them. “All maps distort reality” is the moral of Mark Monmonier’s 1991 classic How to Lie with Maps. They’re artifacts to be deconstructed, like literary texts. It’s not fashionable to see them as the authoritative bedrock of a science anymore.
Without maps, we lose our way, and some people have argued that in its new, less cartographic incarnation, academic geography has done exactly that. “Here’s the leading journal of American academic geography,” says David Helgren, tossing me the latest issue of Annals of the Association of American Geographers, which is sitting on his dining room table, “and it is boring. It is terrible. You can look at those titles, and they just put you to sleep.”
I flip through it. I consider myself a reasonably literate guy and a geography buff to boot. But I can’t really muster up too much enthusiasm for “Cognitively Inspired and Perceptually Salient Graphic Displays for Efficient Spatial Inference Making” or “A Top-Down Approach to the State Factor Paradigm for Use in Macroscale Soil Analysis.” Or even “Spaces of Priority: The Geography of Soviet Housing Construction in Daugavpils, Latvia.” So many choices—where to begin?
“See? You can’t even read it. They invent new words along the way. But that’s the paragon of world academic geography. I’m proud to say I’ve published in it twice, which makes me somewhat of a star. But I was never a good member of the culture. Instead of the Annals, I refer to it as the ‘anals.’ I always had a bad attitude toward some of this stuff, because it wasn’t making the world better. It wasn’t even making the world more interesting.”
Lay readers tend to be befuddled by academic writing in many subjects, of course, but geography has an additional image problem: people seek it out expecting to find out about maps. When parents tell you their child is into geography, what they mean is “she really likes looking at maps,” not “she’s oddly curious about housing construction in Soviet-era Latvia.” When a news anchor reports that American children are failing geography, all