BOOK REVIEWS

De la Terre aux Hommes. La Géographie CommeVision du Monde. Le Temps des Idées.PAUL CLAVAL, Paris 2012: Armand Colin, 407 pp.ISBN: 978-2-200-27458-0, €35.

This is not a textbook, nor a monograph, nor anessay, but it has family resemblances with all ofthese in certain parts. It shares the urge toprovide an encompassing overview with the text-book, the effort to reach a singular conclusionwith the monograph and the erudition, reflec-tive nature and occasional autobiographicalnote that characterises the accomplished essay-ist. In the end it puts forward three connectedversions of what the author considers geographyto be: an ever evolving vision of the world basedon changing realities; new techniques; and shift-ing sensibilities and viewpoints.

The three versions differ in the length of thetime periods treated and the frames chosen.They all end with and try to make sense of thelast 40 years during which geography has taken‘a cultural turn’. The first version, ‘the humanearth’, sets geographic science since antiquityin a continuously shifting repertoire of gener-ally shared knowledges and practices con-cerned with human existence on the planet.The second part, ‘the geographers’ landscape’,describes the landscape in various guises as anessential subject in the application of the geog-raphers’ craft. The third part, ‘three images ofthe world’, contrasts different ways of envision-ing the world around 1900, 1960 and at thepresent time by prominent geographers.

Paul Claval is a major figure in French geog-raphy. He taught at the Sorbonne for 25 yearsfrom the early 1970s to the late 1990s. He hasbeen a prolific author before, during and afterthat time. Educated in the Vidallian tradition,he soon developed an interest in the moder-nisation of economic geography, immersedhimself in social and political geography, andcontributed to the field of urban studies.Gradually he became increasingly impressed by

the pervasive impact of culture in all its differ-ent manifestations (from representations of thesupernatural as spatial images to the ways inwhich the outlay of parks and gardens over timereflect more general cultural preferences) andalso became increasingly occupied with thehistory of the geographic discipline and its everdeveloping epistemology. This book is the fruitof immense and wide learning.

In Claval’s reading, geography arises from aset of generally available vernacular and thenalso more formal knowledges and practicesconcerned with universal needs as orientationin space, domestication of parts of it as place,structuration of social space and its pacificationor profitable expansion notably by war-making.All humans have always, necessarily, been geog-raphers. Geography as a science originatesprimarily in the fourth century before Christamong the Greeks and develops from then onto the present. New stages in the developmentof geography have often been connected withnew techniques of observation and instrumentsof measurement and they have always deeplybeen embedded in the actual social context inwhich they emerged. In Claval’s summary onpage 142, geography explains how humansorient themselves at the surface of the earthand how they make representations of thatsurface; how they use it for their livelihood andhow they appreciate it and make it their own.Geography is not a natural science of the envi-ronment – although it incorporates many ofthe results of studies done in that domain. It isfirst of all an ecology of human societies, but itis more: humans are part of nature as all otherliving beings but they also live with their dreamsand imaginations. Choices are oriented,behaviours justified and certain parts of spacevalued or even experienced as sacred based onimages that humans bear in mind concerningthe elsewhere, their inner being and the super-natural. These last two phrases add the extrasthe cultural turn has brought.

In his reconstruction of the formation of thegeographers’ landscape Claval gives full weight

Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie – 2014, DOI:10.1111/tesg.12080, Vol. 105, No. 3, pp. 366–369.© 2014 Royal Dutch Geographical Society KNAG

to the invention of the landscape as a genre inthe history of Western painting with the limita-tions imposed by a single observation spot, theframing of the image and the initially largelyhorizontal gaze of the observer. The eye of thegeographer turns out to have become evermore conditioned by professional conventions,ever more encompassing in terms of the kindsof information gathered and increasinglydominated by a vertical view that can be eitherstretched or pinpointed at will. In the course oftime material environments have increasinglybeen constructed to perform as landscapes andgeographers have occasionally played a part intheir design. Landscapes have also been readand interpreted in all sorts of way by others.Geographers in their turn have now taken theserepresentations as additional parts of theirsubject matter. Identity questions and theshaping of traditions, the setting of aestheticstandards and the symbolisations of power havebecome major points of interest. These last twophrases refer again to the cultural turn.

Finally, there are geographers’ presentationsof their visions of the world for three time-slices.They turn out to use different perspectives, putdifferent emphases and obviously reflect chang-ing realities. Around 1900 the vision of geogra-phers is still dominated by a richly varied mosaicof fairly small agricultural livelihoodsystemsandsome notion of being uprooted. Illustrative evi-dence is mainly provided by Vidal de la Blache,but also by Reclus and Demangeon. Around1960 another family of images presents geog-raphers’ world vision. Distinctive cities aremerging into extensive urban zones with newmetropolitan forms of differentiation, informa-tion becomes the major economic resource, andhomogeneous livelihood clusters dissolve intoincreasingly differentiated social roles. Largecompanies dominate the economy, nationalwelfare states are the political model to pursue.Gottmann is Claval’s primary inspiration for thisfamily portrait, but there are supplementaryroles for various authors in the tradition of the‘new’ geography’ of the 1960s (that also inspiredhis own early work).

For the most typical current image Clavalturns to the work of the Canadian geographerRodolphe de Koninck on Singapore as thequickly realised ‘paradise of globalisation’. Itdemonstrates its enormous successes but does

not turn a blind eye to the price in terms oftight control and narrowly circumscribed per-sonal autonomy outside business interactions.Globalisation results also in the counterworlds(‘antimondes’ to Roger Brunet) of huge con-centrations of uprooted rural people in provi-sional urban settlements and failed states(graphically described by Mike Davis) anddevelops against the background of increasingenvironmental question marks at the globalscale. Globalisation’s hypermobility unhingespopular cultures but also the progress inspiredideologies that have long underpinned techni-cal elite cultures. This gives rise to identitycrises and new spatial configurations.

Claval concludes with a brief reflection onPierreGeorge’s reminiscencespublishedtwentyyears ago (pp. 375–377). They move back toVidal’s world and underline its complete disap-pearance as the 1960 world dawned. There is inthe recollections of that vanished world a nostal-gia for the intimate knowledge George acquiredof one typical instance during his dissertationwork in the South of France. That intimacy gotlost as George later tried to catch the new worldof the 1960s in statistics only. Now, for Claval,geography has found a new way how to under-stand the lived reality of today’s world. The cul-tural turn has been needed to bring it withinreach.

Obviously, this book is deeply embedded inFrench geography. But it provides a broad viewof its origins and development and shows itsclose ties and affinities to geographies else-where. It takes in an enormous literature fromearlier epochs and other disciplines, but is ableto draw a pretty clear view of the vicissitudes ofa subject matter called geography through theages and particularly since its rise as an aca-demic discipline. In the end the book focuseson the most recent turn in geography’s windingroad. It puts encouraging signposts for thefuture, but it is still to my mind an open ques-tion how sharp and distinctive the turn hasreally been, not to mention the underlyingquestion how fruitful it currently is to conceivegeography as a single more or less coherentcollective intellectual enterprise that can maketurns. This, of course, is by no means a questionfor French geographers only.

University of Amsterdam Herman van der Wusten

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© 2014 Royal Dutch Geographical Society KNAG