MPSC 2022 Prelims Paper-I · Question 5 of 100

Correct — option (3). Paul Vidal de la Blache, the French geographer who lived from 1845 to 1918, is the figure conventionally called the father of human geography, and the title rests on three things he did rather than on any one book. First, he made human geography a distinct field of study with a subject matter of its own: the relation between a human group and the place it occupies, examined region by region rather than as a set of general laws. His Tableau de la geographie de la France of 1903 is the demonstration piece, a regional portrait of France in which the pays, the small country with its own soil, custom and livelihood, is the unit of analysis. Second, he supplied the field with its governing ideas — the genre de vie or mode of life, the settled combination of tools, crops, dwellings and habits by which a community makes a living from its surroundings, and the milieu within which that mode of life takes shape. Third, he founded a school. He trained the generation of French geographers who followed him, launched the journal Annales de Geographie in 1891, and his Principes de geographie humaine, assembled from his work and published after his death in 1922, became the statement of the French position. That position is possibilism: nature sets limits and offers a range of possibilities, and which of them is realised depends on the culture, the technology and the choices of the people living there, so the environment conditions human life without determining it. It is the doctrine against which the environmental determinism of the German school is always contrasted, and it is why Vidal rather than any earlier writer is credited with founding the human side of the subject. Option (3) is the answer.

• (1)Herodotus — Herodotus belongs to the fifth century before Christ and to the history of the subject's origins, not to the founding of human geography. He is called the father of history, and his Histories contain a great deal of geographical and ethnographic description gathered on his travels — the account of Egypt in which the country is called the gift of the Nile is his — but description of that kind is not the systematic study of the relation between people and place that human geography became in the nineteenth century. His name is in this option set because candidates remember that a Greek is the father of something in geography and cannot recall which Greek or which branch. The way to keep them apart is by date: the classical writers stand at the beginning of geography as a whole, while human geography as a named field is a creation of the French and German schools of the late nineteenth century.
• (2)Hecataeus — Hecataeus of Miletus is the Greek usually called the father of geography, and that is precisely why he is the strongest distractor here. He wrote in the sixth and fifth centuries before Christ, produced the Ges Periodos, a description of the earth accompanied by a map dividing the known world into Europe and Asia, and stands at the head of the descriptive tradition. But the title he carries is for geography as a whole and for its earliest systematic description, not for human geography, which did not exist as a separate branch for another two thousand three hundred years. The distinction the question is testing is exactly this one: the father of geography and the father of human geography are different men from different eras, and a candidate who has learnt only the first phrase will reach for it whenever either is asked.
• (4)Brunhes — Jean Brunhes was Vidal de la Blache's own student and the most effective populariser of his teacher's ideas, which makes him a genuine figure in the field and a plausible wrong answer. His La Geographie Humaine of 1910 gave the subject an ordered scheme, grouping what he called the essential facts of human geography under the unproductive occupation of the soil in houses and roads, the conquest of the plant and animal world in cultivation and herding, and the destructive economy of mineral working and the devastation of plants and animals. He carried possibilism into a systematic treatment and taught it widely. He did not, however, found the field; he inherited it from Vidal, and the relation between the two is the ordinary one of a school to its founder. Where an option pair contains a master and his pupil, the founding title belongs to the master.

Human geography took its modern shape in the argument between two national schools at the end of the nineteenth century, and every question about its founders is really a question about that argument. The German school, associated with Friedrich Ratzel and his Anthropogeographie, and carried further by Ellen Churchill Semple and Ellsworth Huntington, held that the physical environment governs human society — that climate, relief and soil determine the character, the economy and even the vigour of a people. That is environmental determinism. The French school, founded by Vidal de la Blache and continued by Jean Brunhes, Albert Demangeon and Lucien Febvre, replied that the environment presents a set of possibilities and that human beings choose among them according to their culture and their technical means; Febvre gave the position its name, possibilism. Between the two stands the neo-determinism or stop-and-go determinism of Griffith Taylor, in which nature sets the route and the pace but not the destination, and the traffic-light analogy he used for it is the usual way the idea is remembered. The French school also supplied the working vocabulary of regional geography — the pays as the small homogeneous country, the genre de vie as the mode of life adapted to it, and the region as the proper unit of description — which is why a Vidalian regional monograph reads as a portrait of a place rather than as a search for laws.

Questions of the form who is the father of a named branch of a subject are a fixed feature of MPSC papers because they can be answered in seconds by a prepared candidate and cost several minutes of hesitation to an unprepared one. What makes this particular one difficult is that the option set is built out of neighbouring titles rather than out of unrelated names: Hecataeus really is called the father of geography, Herodotus really is called the father of history, and Brunhes really is a major human geographer, so recognition alone decides nothing and only the exact association helps. The best preparation is a short list of titles held with the branch attached and, where possible, a date — Hecataeus and geography in the sixth century before Christ, Herodotus and history in the fifth, Humboldt and Ritter and modern geography in the early nineteenth century, Ratzel and anthropogeography and determinism at its end, Vidal de la Blache and human geography and possibilism at the turn of the twentieth. The dates do most of the work, because a title claimed for a classical writer can be set aside at once when the branch in question is a nineteenth-century creation.

• Paul Vidal de la Blache, 1845 to 1918, is called the father of human geography; he founded the French school, launched the journal Annales de Geographie in 1891 and wrote the Tableau de la geographie de la France in 1903.
• His Principes de geographie humaine was published after his death, in 1922, and contains the statement of the French position; his key concepts are the genre de vie, the mode of life, and the pays as the unit of regional study.
• Possibilism, the doctrine associated with Vidal and named by Lucien Febvre, holds that nature offers a range of possibilities and that culture and technology decide which of them a society realises.
• Environmental determinism, the opposing position, belongs to the German school of Friedrich Ratzel, whose Anthropogeographie made the physical environment the governing influence on human society.
• Hecataeus of Miletus is called the father of geography and wrote the Ges Periodos; Herodotus is called the father of history; Jean Brunhes was Vidal de la Blache's pupil and wrote La Geographie Humaine in 1910.

• Confusing the father of geography, a title given to Hecataeus, with the father of human geography, a title given to Vidal de la Blache
• Choosing a classical name for a branch of the subject that did not exist before the nineteenth century, which a date attached to each title prevents
• Preferring the pupil to the master when both appear as options, as with Brunhes and Vidal de la Blache
• Attaching possibilism to the German school or determinism to the French, when the two schools are defined by their opposition on exactly this point

The history of geographical thought reaches MPSC papers as one-line attribution questions of this kind, as matching items joining geographers to their concepts or their books, and as statement questions asking what a named doctrine claims. The recurring names are few — Hecataeus, Eratosthenes, Ptolemy, Humboldt, Ritter, Ratzel, Semple, Huntington, Vidal de la Blache, Brunhes, Febvre and Griffith Taylor — and the recurring associations are the school, the doctrine and the principal work. Fill-in-the-blank phrasing, as used here, is the Commission's preferred form for the branch-founder question. A single table of name, nationality, school, doctrine and best-known book answers all the variants, and adding a date to each entry defeats the option sets built out of neighbouring titles.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The doctrine of possibilism, which holds that nature offers possibilities and that human culture decides among them, is associated with which school of geography ?

  • (a)The German school of Friedrich Ratzel
  • (b)The French school of Vidal de la Blache
  • (c)The American school of Ellen Churchill Semple
  • (d)The Australian school of Griffith Taylor

  Answer(b) The French school of Vidal de la Blache — possibilism is the French reply to the environmental determinism of Ratzel's German school, and the term itself was given currency by Lucien Febvre. Semple carried determinism into American geography, while Griffith Taylor occupies the middle ground with neo-determinism, in which nature sets the route and the pace of development but not its final extent.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The book Tableau de la geographie de la France, a regional portrait of the country published in 1903, was written by

  • (a)Jean Brunhes
  • (b)Friedrich Ratzel
  • (c)Paul Vidal de la Blache
  • (d)Lucien Febvre

  Answer(c) Paul Vidal de la Blache — the Tableau is the demonstration of his regional method, in which the pays, the small country with its own soil and mode of life, is the unit of description. Brunhes was his pupil and wrote La Geographie Humaine in 1910, Ratzel wrote Anthropogeographie for the German determinist school, and Febvre was the historian who gave possibilism its name.