The father of Human Geography is ________ .

Question

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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.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) 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.  (b) 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.  (d) 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.

Concept: 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.

State PCS 2022 Q5 — Geography PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2022 Q5 — Geography PYQ with Answer