The Emergence of Cultural Geography

Thirst for a knowledge of places (regions) characterizes the most ancient tradition of geography. Perhaps the first geographic work to mention humanity in its title was Carl Ritter’s Die Erdkunde im Verhältniss zur Natur und zur Geschichte des Menschen, in 1817. The Darwinian hypothesis, misapplied to humanity, encouraged interest in the Ritterian synthesis and left the situation of geography much in doubt. After geography became established as a university discipline, programmatic statements about its purpose abounded. In 1883, Ferdinand von Richthofen crafted a widely accepted definition that claimed regional differentiation, including humanity, as the subject matter of the field. The first volume of Friedrich Ratzel’s Anthropogeographie (1882) helped stimulate the view of environmental determinism, especially in the English-speaking countries. This doctrine did not take root in Germany, where Richthofen’s formulation was much more influential, nor in France. The term Culturgeographie first appeared in 1845 in a book by Ernst Kapp. The full definition of a self conscious cultural geography did not emerge, however, until the early years of the twentieth century. By far the most important figure in formulating this definition was Otto Schlüter. In his essay “The Goals of a Geography of Man” (1906), Schlüter proposed the elements of the landscape as geography’s objects of investigation. In the 1920s, Carl Sauer took over essentially intact the terms and ideas Schlüter had set forth much earlier.