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Homo Viator: Knowledge of the Earth and Theory of the World in the Age of the First Transatlantic Voyages: Being in Transit
Abstract
Geography, the writing of the earth and the seas, is also inextricably human geography, a form of relating to our living-on-the-earth in which the physical and the cultural are not so easily disjoined, and where the politics of place plays a determining role. This paper examines how the travelers (explorers mostly) motivated their yearning for unknown lands (terra incognita), acted on that impulse, finally saw, recorded and reported objects and facts about the unknown as primary information that needed to be translated into usable knowledge to be circulated in various communities. This process required not just challenging established modes of knowing, but rethinking how humans theorize about the “world/s” that is/are built upon the earth. It required a paradigm shift that would have epochal consequences. The haunting conclusion is that perhaps humanity is, in some deep ontological sense, characterized by the language devised to explain these contingent encounters of roaming beings.
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A characteristic of the 1960s in English-speaking countries was the conflict between the new wave of radical geographers, who sought to make their discipline socially relevant above all else, and the traditionalists. This paper seeks to avoid the vicious circle of the two extremes and considers the argument as a dialectical opposition leading to synthesis. A section of the problems of knowledge and formal language in geography is followed by an introduction to Hegelian dialectics. Further sections describe how modern industrial society has tried to deny dialectics but, in so doing, has ensured the re-emergence of dialectical thought. -J.Welford
During the 1960’s, geography in English speaking countries enjoyed a period of development and enthusiasm without precedent: with new generations flooding the universities and dissent shaking the campuses, old structures seemed ready to crumble and even among academic geographers, new ideas were welcome, sometimes hungrily looked for. Then, the middle-class, in western Europe and North America, became frightened by its own boldness and, moved by changes in the economy, contradicted itself and looked back with nostalgia to the 1950’s. A new generation of graduate students started refusing mathematical methods and, in strong defiance of what it called ‘reason’, advocated personal contacts, ’empathy’ and socially ‘relevant’ issues: a ‘radical’ geography, often strongly colored by Christian ideology, appeared, at the antipodes — or so it seemed — of mathematical modelling. It seems as if a pendulum was endlessly moving from technology to mysticism and back, with little hope to break the vicious cycle.
Because of its powerful socializing effects, the school has always been a site of cultural, political, and academic conflict. In an age where terms such as 'hard-to-teach,' and 'at-risk' beset our pedagogical discourses, where students have grown up in systems plagued by anti-immigrant, anti-welfare, 'zero-tolerance' rhetoric, how we frame and understand the dynamics of classrooms has serious ethical implications and powerful consequences. Using theatre and drama education as a special window into school life in four urban secondary schools in Toronto and New York City, The Theatre of Urban examines the ways in which these schools reflect the cultural and political shifts in big city North American schooling policies, politics, and practices of the early twenty-first century. The Theatre of Urban not only explores the very notion of performance in a novel and interesting way, it also provides new insights into the conflicts that often erupt in these highly charged school spaces.
An increasing desire for more complete levels of understanding of the relationship between man and environment led, in the later nineteen-sixties and early seventies, to a variety of research efforts focussing on the difference between form and process oriented approaches in human geography (e.g., Olsson (1969); Olsson and Gale (1968); King (1969); Golledge (1970); Olsson (1971) and Eichenbaum and Gale (1971)). Most of these papers discussed in some way the relative contribution of spatial form and spatial processes to our understanding of human behavior, and some specifically argued that more attention should be paid to human behavioral processes such as learning, perception, and attitude formation as part of the geographer’s explanatory schema. Concurrently there existed a growing concern for discovering what man knew of the various environments in which he existed (Lynch, 1960; Gould, 1965; Golledge, Briggs, and Demko, 1969; Appleyard, 1970; Downs, 1970). This latter research began uncovering various properties of ‘known’ environments that appeared to be somewhat different from the world of substance and fact which is experienced by our senses and which is usually described in terms of atomistic facts and mechanistic forces (Russell, 1918; Whitehead, 1933).
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