Human Geography

Human geography is a major subdiscipline within the wider subject field of geography. Traditionally, geography is considered the study of the Earth’s environments and peoples, and the interactions between them. ‘Geography’ comes from ancient Greek origins (Eratosthenes was the first to use it), literally translating as ‘to write or describe the world’. In classical and Enlightenment geography, humans and the ‘natural’ world were usually described in conjunction, often in a regional fashion, as Europeans encountered unfamiliar places in exploration and empire. Since the late nineteenth century, this conjoint understanding of geography – as describing the natural and human world, region by region – has gradually been augmented by more precise subdisciplinary pursuits and identities. The most basic of these describes geography as consisting two fundamental halves: physical and human geography. Physical geography generally means the science of the Earth’s surface, while human geography usually refers to the study of its peoples, and geographical interpretations of economies, cultural identities, political territories, and societies. Physical geographers classify and analyze landforms and ecosystems, explain hydrological, geomorphological, and coastal processes, and examine problems such as erosion, pollution, and climatic variability. Human geographers analyze population trends, theorize social and cultural change, interpret geopolitical conflict, and seek to explain the geography of human economic activities around the world. How exactly this division of labor came to be is a most pivotal story of contemporary geography. It is a story about twentieth-century scientific fragmentation, and about different theories on the status of humans visà-vis nonhuman nature. It is also a more slippery and difficult story about how academic knowledges are produced, mutate, and travel (and how this happens in particular places), how knowledges find popularity, fade away, or are challenged in time and across space. The central division of labor in geography – produced by these means over more than a hundred years – has established and defined the space within which most human geographical practice now occurs. This article is an introductory overview of contemporary human geography and the stories underlying it. An outsider could be forgiven for thinking that human geography was the study of the existence and distribution of humans on Earth – of Homo sapiens as a distinct species. Literally, human geography could be interpreted as the study of the geography of humans: when, where, and how humans evolved, developed strategies for survival, and dispersed to other parts of the world. Some within geography would indeed consider such themes important to geography. They invite analysis of how humans inhabited and related to physical environments, how humans used (and abused) resources, adapted to different climates, and developed distinct regional cultures. When prominent geographer Halfred Mackinder presented his ideas on the scope and purpose of geography to the Royal Geographical Society in 1887, this idea of geography as ‘‘trac[ing] the interaction of man [sic] in society and so much of his environment as varies locally’’ proved immensely popular and would shape future interpretations. However, for most human geographers in the current era such questions have fallen from favor because of ethical and intellectual concerns (see discussion below), while more contemporaneous themes have grown popular, firmly on the human side of geography. The science of human evolution and geographical dispersal has instead become the purview of other disciplines such as archeology, paleontology, and anthropology. Most contemporary academic geographers hold some nominal allegiance to either of geography’s ‘halves’ (human or physical), although for important intellectual and philosophical reasons (discussed below) some do resist this division and instead prefer to regard geography as a disciplinary whole, or insist on troubling the conceptual distinction between ‘the human’ and ‘nonhuman’ parts of the world. Some commentators have criticized a perceived widening of the gulf between geography’s two halves. Others see human geography as merely a convenient badge for its diverse contents, while still adhering to the principle of a wider, umbrella discipline of geography (including physical geography). Regardless, contemporary human geography has taken on a particular character. Human geographers tend to explore social, economic, cultural, political, and demographic dimensions of human existence, and situate analysis in geographical space (conceptualized across and between scales from the body to the city, nation, and globe). While diversity defines contemporary human geography, there are common questions of geographical scale, causality,