Nature - autonomous learning

the ‘nature’ of geography 81inattention Marxists have rectified only in the past fifteen years or so).Second, Harvey and other geographical Marxists mostly eschewed anytalk of ‘human nature’. For them, Marxism was a historically specific theory ofthe particular social relationships specific to capitalism. Marxist geographerswere mostly interested in the ‘structures’ (economic largely, but also socialand political) that explain why some people in some places enjoy wealthand prosperity while people in the same places and elsewhere sufferpoverty, unemployment and malnutrition. In other words, Marxists rejectedthe individualistic and small-group focus of behavioural and humanisticgeography. Instead, they paid attention to the unequal power relations betweenconnected social classes (like employers and workers).They challengedthe sociologically ‘thin’ conception of the human person offered by thehumanists and emphasised that people’s thought and action can be properlyunderstood only within a ‘thick’ conception of how any specific societyoperates.Marxist geography helped to expunge nature from human geographyduring the 1970s (human and non-human). So did behavioural andhumanistic geography, despite the abstract claims concerning human naturecharacteristic of the latter.All three approaches extended the subject matterthat geographers took a de-naturalising approach to. Everything one neededto know about individuals, groups and social structures was to be foundin habits of thought, interpersonal relationships, cultural norms andso on. People on the ground were examined contextually in these threeapproaches, not in terms of some ‘fixed’ internal or external nature to whichthey supposedly conformed. At the same time, nature in the sense ofthe environment didn’t figure topically in much of the research of thebehaviourists, humanists and Marxists.The knowledge produced by thelatter two was intended to offer an alternative conception of the ‘humans’in human geography when compared to the scientific world view.Theseknowledges – interpretative–hermeneutic and critical–emancipatoryrespectively – were a challenge to the instrumental–technical knowledgeproduced by the spatial scientists and behaviourists. Humanists and Marxistssaw people as ends in themselves, not as objects to be managed or meansto the end of others’ wealth.