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KEYNOTE ADDRESS

Paradigm Shifts and the Expansion of Knowledge:

A Study of the discipline of Geography

Prof. Ali Raza Moosvi1

Let us begin by attempting to define Geography like Jacob Viner defined Economics:
Geography is what Geographers do. This is because the subject straddles social
sciences, philosophy, sociology, basic science and psychology to name a few main
fields. This has lent to it a unique quality as well as what are emerging as fatal flaws.
In the case of the former, a geographer would be well within his / her rights to
synthesize various disciplines and study their inter-play over space. In the case of
the latter, it is emerging that the Geographer is a jack of all trades and master of
none. In fact, the Geographer is seen as a ‘poacher’ who is potting around in areas
where he or she has no business to be. Geographers have been long faulted by
economists for their lack of strong numbers and econometric analysis, by the
Geologists for their summary and ‘incomplete’ interpretation and study of natural
features and forces, by cognitive psychologists for their imperviousness to complex
evidence and by academia in general for a ‘lack of focus’.

We thus have a subject that is both inter-and multi-disciplinary in its content and can
be enriched if approached this way. 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.

A paradigm is a basic assumption, a thought pattern, an example or a sample which

academia uses as a structured approach to understand and apply a subject. A shift
or change in this understanding is a change in the basic assumptions of what a
subject is and in what way it can be applied for practical understanding.2 The
paradigm, in Kuhn's view, is not simply the current theory, but the entire worldview in
which it exists, and all of the implications which come with it. It is based on features
of landscape of knowledge that scientists can identify around them. A scientific

1
Pro Vice-Chancellor, The English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad. (moosvi1@gmail.com).
2
See Kuhn, Thomas; The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), University of Chicago Press, Illinois.
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revolution occurs, according to Kuhn, when scientists encounter anomalies which

cannot be explained by the universally accepted paradigm within which scientific
progress has thereto been made and there is a resultant paradigm shift. I would like
to discuss the major paradigm shifts in Geography over recent times and attempt to
study their causes and consequences.

Traditionally, geographers have been viewed as cartographers and people who

study place names and numbers. Although many geographers are trained
in cartography, this is not their main preoccupation. Geographers study
the spatial and temporal distribution of phenomena, processes and features as well
as the interaction of humans and their environment. As space and place affect a
variety of topics such as economics, health, climate, plants and animals; geography
is naturally highly interdisciplinary. Even in the case of maps, which are basically
projected depictions on the earth, a Geographer is dealing with his or her
perceptions of reality. This reality is multi-faceted and multi-dimensional; hence it is
difficult to capture it in two dimensions. Even the earliest descriptions of the earth
were more based on philosophical logic rather than on hard scientific facts.3

The Babylonians were the earliest Cartographers and their best known work
surviving work is the Imago Mundi or the Babylonian World map dating to 600 BC
showing 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. Herodotus' in
his Histories (484 BC) which is primarily a work of history, gives a wealth of
geographic descriptions covering much of the known world like Egypt, Scythia,
Persia, and Asia Minor while descriptions of further off areas such as India are
almost wholly fanciful. He is the first to have noted the process by which large rivers,
such as the Nile, build up deltas, and is also the first recorded as observing that
winds tend to blow from colder regions to warmer ones. Homer’s works the Iliad and
the Odyssey (8 BC) are works of literature, but both contain a great deal of
geographical information.

3
Qureshi, M.H. in “Maps and Politics” in Learning Curve, Issue XV, Aug.2010
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In the Middle East, geographers such as al-Idrisi, Ibn Battuta, Ibn Khaldun, etc. (8 –
10c AD) maintained the Greek and Roman techniques and developed new ones. In
the 9th century, Alkindus was the first to introduce experimentation into the Earth
sciences. An early adherent of environmental determinism was the medieval Afro-
Arab writer al-Jahiz (860 AD) who explained how the environment can determine the
physical characteristics of the inhabitants of a certain community. Important
contributions to geodesy and geography were also made by al-Biruni who introduced
techniques to measure the earth and distances on it using triangulation (1025 AD).

During the Early Middle Ages, geographical knowledge in Europe regressed (with a
popular misconception that the world was flat), and the simple T and O map became
the standard depiction of the world. 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. From around circa 1400, the writings
of Ptolemy and his successors provided a systematic framework to tie together and
portray geographical information. The voyages of exploration in 16th and 17th
centuries revived a desire for both accurate geographic detail, and more solid
theoretical foundations. By the 18th century, geography had become recognized as
a discrete discipline and became part of a typical university curriculum in Europe
(especially Paris and Berlin).One of the great works of this time identified with the
nascent and distinct discipline of Geography was Kosmos: a sketch of a physical
description of the Universe, by Alexander von Humboldt, the first volume of which
was published in German in 1845. In 1877, Thomas Huxley published his
Physiography with the philosophy of an integrated approach in the study of the
natural environment which was evolved later in the works of Alexander von
Humboldt and Immanuel Kant. The publication of Huxley’s physiography presented a
new form of geography that analysed and classified cause and effect at the micro-
level and then applied these to the macro-scale. This approach emphasized the
empirical collection of data over the theoretical. The same approach was also used
by Mackinder in 1887.
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All these developments were shifts in the paradigm of the evolving subject and each
shift was related to the age in which the subject was being studied and in the context
of the use in which it was being studied. Initially as the desire to orient oneself, and
in the primeval instinct to know ones place in the world, Geography was map making
where a people and a civilization sought to interpret the world as they perceived it.
These maps were political, cultural and cognitive in that they sought to represent
both the centrality and the superiority of such people who made the maps. This
paradigm later shifted when new information about the reality of the earth and its
shape and size emerged and was complimented with increase in knowledge of
geometry, mensuration and arithmetic. When people travelled in quest of land and or
knowledge, they added facts to spaces that were peopled in their minds with
perceptions and imaginations. Maps became more refined tools and sources of
higher quality of information. The rise and fall of emperors and empires caused
information to be transferred from one people to another. Each added and re-
interpreted it. The use of information changed. Theories sprouted to unify information
and its collection so that it could be stored and re-applied.

The 19th century (1801–1900) was a period marked by the collapse of

the Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Holy Roman and Mughal empires and the rise of
the British, German, and other European empires which spurred military conflicts but
also advances in science and exploration. The century also saw the birth of science
as a profession.4 Advances in medicine and the understanding of human anatomy
and disease prevention took place and were partly responsible for rapidly
accelerating population growth in the western world. The introduction
of railroads provided the first major advancement in land transportation for centuries,
changing the way people lived and obtained goods, and fuelling
major urbanization movements in countries across the globe. The last remaining
undiscovered landmasses of Earth, including vast expanses of interior Africa and
Asia, were discovered during this century, and with the exception of the extreme
zones of the Arctic and Antarctic, accurate and detailed maps of the globe were

4
The term scientist was coined in 1833 by William Whewell.
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available by the 1890s. The 19th century also saw the emergence of Imperialism and
colonialism as the reigning world orders where countries like Britain had cultural,
economic and social footprints that covered most of the World.

Disciplines and knowledge changed in this time of colonialism which fuelled a great
need for more information that was accurate and reliable. Geography instantly began
to be relied upon more and more as a discipline that had the ability to gather this
knowledge in a synthesized way by providing preliminary inputs into how a people
lived and the conditions of lifestyle and culture they identified with.

In the West during the second half of the 19th and the 20th century, the discipline of
geography went through the major paradigms and phases of environmental
determinism, regional geography, the quantitative revolution, and critical geography.
Environmental determinist lost its sheen in the 1930’s and was widely repudiated as
lacking any basis and being prone to (often bigoted) generalizations. This was both
due to growing influence of liberalism and of technology that gave man more power
over environmental conditions. The Regional paradigm of the 1930’s represented a
reaffirmation that the proper topic of geography was study of places (regions) and as
a study of areal differentiation which later led to criticism of this approach as overly
descriptive and unscientific. This criticism arose with the increasing quantification
that social sciences like economics were undergoing. Theory in Geography, that was
always more a general approach being inter-disciplinary in nature, suffered a set-
back with an approach that often became a reckless and irresponsible collection of
data for its own sake. This quantitative revolution of the 1980’s laid the groundwork
for the development of geographic information systems and geo-spatial information
studies. A contemporary paradigm that emerged was grounded in multi-discipline
theories that gave rise to humanistic geography and postmodernist geography,
which employs the ideas of postmodernist and poststructuralist theorists to explore
the social construction of spatial relations.

Geographers today are at an academic cross-road. Theorists are vexed that

geography has not received attention as a discipline in its own right that has a solid
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theoretical base which is synthesized from the various disciplines that it draws upon.
Treating the subject as science, there is not much basic or pure research. If the
basic paradigm is of spatial organisation, then Geography should have an integrated
theory that explains human-space interactions is all its richness. The quantitative
revolution has started and ended with data collection, data organisation and its
representation. It has led to the production of complex models and technologically
powerful toosl that few really know how to use. Thus we have complex maps and
layers of information that confuse rather than clarify since the basic meaning of a
map seems to be lost. Geographers have always used maps as complex cognitive-
physical tools that had both information and interpretation. Due to the imbalanced
growth between theory and applications, maps today are more informative than
being interpretative.

A high resolution map of the city will show us every detail that is there to be seen. An
industrialist may use it to spot opportunity, an advertising firm to locate best places
for hoisting posters, the traffic police for identifying areas of traffic congestion but
each would see their area of fragmented concern. The lack of application of a whole
unified theory of a city and its understanding as a cultural, social and economic
organism is lost. A resource map will show us the presence of a resource and the
ways and means of extracting it for profitable gain. An environmental impact
assessment would study the consequences in isolation. But there is a lack of a
unified theory that would see the whole process as a balance between
environmental degradation, industrial growth, cultural change and social justice.
Geographers stand to make a difference here.

The present geographical paradigms of empiricism and spatial representation have a

deep connection with the market with which they transact on a daily need-basis.
More and more technological applications are being introduced in ‘geography’ only
insofar as the application of technology to space is concerned. But synthesising this
information in a spatial context needs a theory and it is here that Geography seems
to be lacking. There is thus a boom in geographic applications but this is sadly un-
connected to the growth of geography. In fact the market forces are applying a
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negative pressure that does not allow young and keen minds to study the subject. In
universities and colleges where the difficult marriage of theory and application in
geography is being attempted, the results are far from desired. The study of basic
theory, already in need of urgent redress, would collapse and the subject itself would
be anchorless to move in whichever direction as the winds of change and
opportunity blow.

This state of education is not confined to Geography alone but to higher education in
India in general. May be we should stop and ponder when we use the word ‘ higher
education’ because producing skill-sets and trained workforces is not what is part of
the ‘higher’ in higher education. Higher education is rather a synthesis, an
amalgamation and the process of training young minds to develop the capacity to
appreciate the diverse constructs and dis-contents that make up human actions and
resultant processes. Unless we do this and infuse our subjects with basic theory and
understanding, we would only be dealing with the ‘downstream’ of education which
will eventually dry up if the source is not maintained and leave us with tools and
techniques that are fragmented representations of the unified whole and do no carry
the spirit or vigor that comes from basic theory. We are reminded of Macaulay’s
Minute where he scorned Indian geography as made up of seas of treacle and seas
of butter. This is where we would come full circle if the study of this subject is only
confined and encouraged within the boundaries of applications.

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