Dear all,
Not particularly critical, but quite interesting anyway. Sorry if you've
already had this.
cheers,
alan hudson
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THE NEW YORK TIMES ARTS & IDEAS (p.A15) Saturday, 21 March 1998
An Old Rationale for Disparities Returns to Favor
By PATRICIA COHEN
Pick up a geography textbook from the first half of
this century and you can discover a simple,
rule-of-thumb explanation for the varying fates of the
human race: the weather.
"As a rule, people do their best thinking and planning,
their minds are most alert and inventive, and they have
the best judgment when the thermometer out of doors
falls toward freezing at night and rises toward 50
degrees or 55 degrees by day," declares Ellsworth
Huntington in "Principles of Human Geography." "In an
invigorating climate" -- like that of Europe and the
northern United States -- "it may also be easier to be
honest and sober and self-controlled than in a more
enervating one."
Such pronouncements ultimately made geographers seem
like phrenologists who pondered the size of bumps on a
person's skull. Most serious scholars shunted geography
aside and forgot it.
Yet after decades of neglect, geography is being
rediscovered. The study of how location affects the way
people live is not only drawing in new students, but it
is also attracting the attention of scholars in other
fields.
Historians, economists and political scientists are
using it to explain everything from why some nations are
rich and others poor, to why Brazil and Nigeria are
rising as regional powers, to why Africa produces so
many superior distance runners. It's as if New York City
real-estate agents were suddenly given the job of
explaining some of the globe's most elusive questions
and chorused "Location, location, location."
The geographic renaissance, propelled in part by new
advances in science and computers, is significant,
scholars say, because it is generating a new
intellectual dialogue. "It is a wonderful bridge among
disciplines," David Landes, professor emeritus of
history and economics at Harvard University, said in an
interview. "It compels people to put together ideas they
might not otherwise."
Most unexpected, however, is that the very field that
had a racialist taint is now being used to knock down
theories that define achievement in racial terms.
Geography, once employed to justify colonialism and the
innate superiority of whites, is brought in to undermine
works like "The Bell Curve," which argues that racial
differences in intelligence are inherited and linked to
differences in performance and economic success.
The gradual eclipse of geography began 50 years ago when
Harvard University eliminated its geography department.
The decision had less to do with discomfort over
screwball theories (which weren't necessarily seen at
the time as screwball) than with academic infighting and
weak teaching. "Geography is not a university subject,"
declared James Conant, who was then the president of
Harvard..
In the next decades, other universities followed
Harvard's lead: Stanford, Yale, the University of
Michigan, Columbia, the University of Chicago. According
to a report in the Chronicle of Higher Education on the
1987 meeting of the Association of American Geographers,
department chairmen organized a seminar "to find out
what they could do to avoid finding their departments on
a university hit list."
Saul Cohen, a political geographer and former president
of the geographers' association, says: "Very few people
were exposed to geography who went to college after the
1960s. What they knew about geography goes back a
half-century."
French historians like Fernand Braudel and other members
of the Annales school did look at geography, climate and
land use. But in the United States, said Landes,
geography was "a kind of outcast among intellectual
disciplines." He continued: "More than any other field I
can think of, geography was wiped out kind of quietly. I
can't think of another discipline that suffered this
sort of erasure."
Geography was fine if you worked at Rand McNally or
played Jeopardy. (Moroni. What is the capital of
Comoros?) But when American scholars tackled persistent
questions like why industrialization first took root in
Europe instead of China or India, geography was played
down. "If you look at most works on global development,"
Landes says, "there is very little on geography."
That has been changing. Jared Diamond, a physiologist at
the University of California at Los Angeles, combines
epidemiology, sociology, zoology, anthropology and
botany to conclude that geography is the key to the pace
and timing of economic development.
In his book "Guns, Germs and Steel" (W.W. Norton, 1997,)
he goes back 13,000 years to explain how food production
is the starting point for success. Because farming
communities produce more food and domesticate animals,
they can feed nonfood producers like professional
soldiers, bureaucrats, writers and craftsmen.
Diamond argues that the east-west axis of the Eurasian
land mass created similar growing conditions along a
shared latitude and enabled one of the first
domesticated crops, einkorn wheat, to spread relatively
quickly from the Fertile Crescent to Europe; more than
twice as fast, for example, as corn and beans spread
from Mexico northward to what would become the eastern
United States.
The fact that there were few ecological barriers like
mountains also made it much easier for livestock and,
eventually, writing, the wheel and other inventions to
spread than in the Americas or Africa, which both have a
north-south axis.
For example, cattle, sheep and goats, first domesticated
in the Fertile Crescent, stopped short for 2,000 years
at the northern edge of the Serengeti Plains, with their
deadly, disease-carrying tsetse flies. Meanwhile, of the
14 large mammals that have been domesticated throughout
history, Eurasia had 13 of them, including sheep, goats,
cows and horses, which provided meat, fertilizer, wool,
leather, transport, plowing power and military assault
vehicles.
Domesticated animals also served as the petri dish for
nasty epidemics like smallpox and measles to which
Europeans over time developed immunity. So when the
diseases arrived in the New World, up to 99 percent of
the unexposed native populations were killed -- instead
of the reverse. It wasn't virtuosity but viruses that
helped paved the way for conquest.
Building on Max Weber's "The Protestant Ethic and the
Spirit of Capitalism," Landes believes that Western
culture based on Judeo-Christian and Enlightenment
values is the single most important reason for the
West's economic success.
Still, maintaining that geography is "terribly
important," he titled the first chapter of his new book,
"The Wealth and Poverty of Nations" (W.W. Norton, 1998),
"Nature's Inequalities," and he describes how a nation's
geography -- its rainfall, its suitability for food
production, its indigenous animals and the deadliness of
its pathogens -- helps set the stage for economic
success.
Europe was lucky. Landes, too, argues that the temperate
climate and relatively even rainfall, a gift from the
Gulf Stream, allowed Europeans to grow crops all year
round. In addition to the other advantages, larger and
stronger animals like the European battle steed instead
of the Mongolian pony provided richer fertilizer
compared with the human night soil used in East Asia.
James Blaut, who wrote "The Colonizer's Model of the
World: Geographic Diffusionism and Eurocentric History"
(Guilford Press, 1993), also takes a geographical tack,
but comes to a completely different conclusion.
He declares that Europeans got rich because they were
closest to the Americas and able to plunder it first. In
the 16th century, says Blaut, who teaches at the
University of Illinois at Chicago, other maritime
societies like those of "the Chinese, the Indians, and
the East Africans were at the same level of development,
but the Europeans were much, much closer to the New
World."
Through a combination of looting and mining, the amount
of gold and silver in circulation probably doubled
between the years 1500 and 1600, says Blaut, and Europe
got it all free. That tremendous windfall meant that the
emerging middle class could buy off the ruling
land-owning powers, enabling capitalism to take root and
allowing the Europeans to outcompete Asia and East
Africa. A shorter commute made all the difference.
Geography's sudden comeback is the result, in part, of
technological advances. Sophisticated mapping computers
-- known as geographical information systems -- have
generated new research areas for freshly minted
geographers and raised the discipline's profile. A
report last year by the National Research Council
estimated that the number of undergraduate geography
majors increased by 47 percent between 1986 and 1994.
At the same time, advances in molecular biology,
radiocarbon dating and archaeology provide new
information about where cultivated crops, domesticated
animals and diseases originated and where they spread.
And economists are exploring statistical correlations
between such things as poverty and distance from the
equator.
Geography also complements the turn to interdisciplinary
studies that is catching on at universities across the
country. As Blaut says, "Geography is the integrating
field par excellence."
Another trend has also coincided with geography's
comeback: using genetics to explain behavior. Geography
provides a new wrinkle to the nature-vs.-nurture, or
biology-vs.-culture, debate. Some scholars are using
geography to help provide a counterweight to what they
see as a crude biological determinism implying, for
example, that Europeans won out because of some inbred
superiority.
In his introduction, for example, Diamond offers this
one-sentence summary of his 480-page book: "History
followed different courses for different people because
of differences among peoples' environments, not because
of biological differences among people themselves." At
its publication, "Guns, Germs and Steel" was praised for
demolishing "racist theories" of history.
Historical questions aren't the only ones that have
enlisted geography to balance genetic explanations. The
Swedish physiologist Bengt Saltin, for example, has
studied Kenyan distance runners to find why so many
excel at the sport.
He found they have a muscle composition similar to that
of Nordic athletes who train in similar conditions, at
high altitudes and in hilly regions, according to a
recent article in the New Yorker. Geography may be the
critical variable, not genes.
With all the new attention to geography, some scholars
warn against crediting it with too much. "I think there
are societies in which geography is very formative and
times when it's not," says the economic historian Robert
Heilbroner. "I wouldn't make it a very high priority."
True, geography is not destiny any more than genetics or
culture is. But after years of neglect, it offers a
useful reminder: Location matters.
Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company
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