Nature - autonomous learning

64 the ‘nature’ of geographyand little more. Description matters of course, especially when it involvesrepresenting unknown things or familiar things cast in a new light. Butexplanation matters too and yet the explanations offered by geographersoften did not convince.Of course, there was still a possibility of making geography a convincinglycausal subject, not such much by narrowing the focus ofgeography but by narrowing that of individual geographers. As alreadynoted, Davis’s denudation chronology and Chisholm and Smith’s economicgeography, showed that a division of labour was possible within thediscipline. Physical geographers could focus on the different elementsof the natural environment and their interconnections, leaving othergeographers to focus on the human dimension.The sum of these individualspecialisms would still, perhaps, make good on geography’s holist ambitions.But founding ‘half’ the discipline on the study of the environmentalone opened the door for geologists, botanists, zoologists and others tocolonise the physical geographers’ desired intellectual territory. Likewise,creating a human ‘half’ of geography begged the question of how that halfwas to distinguish itself from the social-sciences and humanities disciplines.This was pre-war geography’s third internal problem – one, again, inheritedfrom the subject’s early history.Externally, what all this meant was that other disciplines often had twonegative views of geography by the 1930s. As Herbst (1961: 541) laternoted, geographers ‘suffered from the dubious reputation of beinginterlopers and second-rate performers in the fields of geology, meteorology,geophysics and plants and animal ecology . . . and pseudosociologists,pseudo-political scientists, economists and historians’.Second, the breadth of regional geographers’ interests and their oftenimpressionistic accounts of regions gave the discipline ‘a dilettantish imageamong the practitioners of ever more specialising sciences’ (Livingstone1992: 311). As R.J. Russell reflected in 1949: ‘I could not escape theconclusion that the position of geographers is not one of high esteem.I found the field criticised sharply on all sides’. In a retrospective, PeterGould (1979: 140–1) even went as far as to say that ‘it was practicallyimpossible to find a book in [pre-1940s geography] . . . that one could putin the hands of a scholar in another discipline without feeling ashamed’.This dual image problem had especially dire consequences in the USA.In 1948 the President of Harvard, James Conant, opined that ‘geographyis not a university subject’ (Smith 1987: 159) and the university’s geog-