President’s Plenary Session: Revisiting Regional Geography: State of the Art in APCG

President’s Plenary Session: Revisiting Regional Geography: State of the Art in APCG D a n iel D . A rreo la Past President, APCG Arizona State University Session held Saturday, October 17, 1998, at Flagstaff, Arizona ADECADE AGO, Clifford Geertz declared in his Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author that “the illusion that ethnography is a matter of sorting strange and irregular facts into familiar and orderly categories— this is magic and that is technology— has long since been exploded...What it is instead, however, is less clear.” W hat Geertz questioned about ethnography then might be said of regional geog­ raphy today. Since 1994 a practice and privilege of APCG Presidency has been the organization of a plenary session to the annual meeting. Exercis­ ing this right, I invited three distinguished APCG colleagues to address the membership at the 1998 Flagstaff, Arizona gathering. Their simple yet challenging charge: to reflect upon and share thoughts about the practice of regional geography. The invitees generously obliged my request and on the morning of October 17, a full complement of APCG 158 President’s Plenary Session: Revisiting Regional Geography 159 annual meeting attendees circled round tables in the ballroom of the du Bois Center on the campus of Northern Arizona University. Pre­ senters presented, and a rich discussion ensued. Following the encouragement of Darrick Danta, editor of the APCG Yearbook, the presidential plenary speakers were asked to revise their papers for submission to that publication. What follows then are three exemplary takes on the craft of regional geography. Alec Murphy rightly asserts that we cease our preoccupations with a theory of regional geography and instead that we contemplate how regional geography can inform our theoretical understandings. Bill Crowley revisits the history of geography’s struggle with the regional concept and asks why regional geography persists as “the good Dracula,” especially in our classrooms. Finally, Paul Starrs reminds us that the region is, ultimately, artisanal, that the rub is in the tell as much as the place, and that we should not too easily dismiss Don Meinig’s underappreciated advo­ cacy of “Geography As an Art.” Three voices, three pulse-takings on the state of the regional ge­ ography project. ...