Areal differentiation

Humboldt and Ritter often
are argued to be the founders of the regional approach
and scientific geography; however, they differed on
several fronts. First, Humboldt was secular, whereas
Ritter was religious. Second, Humboldt focused on
the physical environment, whereas Ritter focused on
human geographies. Third, Humboldt worked at a
fine level of areal differentiation, whereas Ritter
worked at the scale of continents.

CHOROLOGY
In the wake of the collapse of environmental determinism,
the discipline embraced a long-standing tradition
of chorology, also known as areal differentiation. In
Europe, a central figure in this vein was Paul Vidal de
la Blache (1845–1918), considered the father of
French geography and well known for his studies of
small rural areas called pays and their associated styles
of life (or genres de vies). He also played a central role
in the introduction of possibilism to the discipline. His
German counterpart was Alfred Hettner (1859–1941),
who argued in the Kantian tradition that geography
consisted of the art of regional synthesis, seeking relations
among phenomena that other disciplines ignored.
In the United States, the most famous advocate of
chorology was Richard Hartshorne (1899–1992), who
studied under Hettner and then graduated from the
University of Chicago in 1924. Chorologists maintained
that the essence of the discipline was the
description of regions in all of their glorious uniqueness
and complexity, including cultural and physical
phenomena. Hartshorne argued that the most productive
analyses focused on small, relatively homogeneous
regions, noting that any deployment of the regional
concept was inherently a subjective tool to find meaning
in the unwieldy complex of data found in the
world. Thus, regions were mental tools to impose
order on chaos. By eschewing theory, chorology
found itself mired in empiricism and the discipline’s
theoretical and philosophical progress was halted.

Chorology drew to a close during the 1950s,
beginning with a famous attack on Hartshorne’s
worldview by Frederick Schaefer in 1953. Essentially,
Schaefer claimed that the view that geography is an
integrative science concerned with the unique was
naive and arrogant because such issues were common
to many sciences. By refusing to search for explanatory
laws, geography condemned itself to what
Schaefer called an immature science. Rather than
seeking idiographic regions, geographers should seek
nomothetic regularities across regions. This critique
helped open the door to the rise of positivism and the
quantitative revolution.


IDIOGRAPHIC
The term idiographic refers to the unique aspects of
individual areas, that is, those that cannot be understood
easily on the basis of general rules of inference
or deduction. Much of geography traditionally has
been concerned with the idiographic in the context of
regions and places, long mapping the colorful and
extraordinary. However, the uniqueness of places has
also been at the center of significant philosophical
debates about how to study geography.
The tradition of chorology or areal differentiation,
which predominated during the early 20th century and
was epitomized by Richard Hartshorne, maintained
that geography is an integrative science that is concerned
exclusively with the unique. In this perspective,
regions form the highest form of understanding.
Idiographic understanding holds that each region is a
Idiographic
unique combination of physical and human elements
in the landscape. Smaller regions are more likely to be
more internally homogeneous, and broader ones can
be understood through the accretion of small units.
Upholding the idiographic in this manner essentially
disregards the need for general themes or causal properties
that transcend regions, the key point of nomothetic
(law-seeking) approaches to geography. Thus,
the idiographic has long been associated with empiricist
and inductive forms of thought in geography, that
is, generalization without explanation


AREAL DIFFERENTIATION
The American version of regional geography reached
its apex between the two world wars with the ascent
of the school variously labeled as areal differentiation,
chorology, or regional description. The ascent of
this line of thought was to be found in the aftermath
of environmental determinism, when the discipline’s
retreat from theory sharply differentiated it from other
social sciences that were making great strides. Its
embodiment is Richard Hartshorne (1899–1992) and
his definitive landmark text, The Nature of Geography
(published in 1939). Having studied under Hettner
and thus heavily Kantian in outlook, Hartshorne made
Regional Geography———405
a variety of claims regarding regional geography as
the definition of the discipline’s core and claim to
uniqueness within the academic division of labor.
Geography, like history, was synthetic, integrating the
analysis of different phenomena as they were manifested
in unique combinations in particular places.
Regions allowed the analysis of both human and
physical phenomena, transcending the growing schism
between two parts of the discipline. Because the complexity
of the world is overwhelming, Hartshorne advocated
the study of small regions with relatively little
internal variation, accreting this into a mosaic that
would encompass larger areas. This view subscribed
to a crude spatial determinism in which proximity came
to stand for causality; where things were enough to
ascertain their nature, and closer phenomena were more
likely to be related than more distant ones. He well
understood that regions are only tools and, in the vein
of Kant, maintained that regions are only mental constructs,
that is, simplifications of the world that the
mind uses to impose order on the world.
Hartshorne essentially regarded regions as static
and held little regard for the need to engage in the
study of explanatory processes; that is, regional
geography was to be only about appearances. This
approach represented a spatialized version of the philosophy
of empiricism (with its roots in the British
Enlightenment), that is, the assumption that facts and
data are true or false without appeal to theory. In contrast,
more recent approaches argue that all data are
theory laden; that is, it is theory that informs us what
facts are relevant to an issue at hand. There are no
pure facts, given that observations always are couched
in terms of a theory; observation requires interpretation,
which in turn requires theory. Hartshornian
chorology was the essence of inductive empiricism,
and its Achilles’ heel was the inability to engage in
abstraction.
American regional empiricism suffered a devastating
set of setbacks during the 1950s as it was pushed
aside by an increasingly assertive school of positivists.
A famous article by Frederick Schaefer published
in 1953 charged that Hartshorne’s claim that
geography alone studied the unique was naive, arrogant,
and immature. All sciences face the problem of
uniqueness, and explanation (as opposed to regional
description) consisted of embedding the unique within
a wider understanding of laws and causal processes.
Schaefer opened the door to a heated debate about
whether geography should be concerned primarily
with the nomothetic (i.e., law seeking) or be content
with the idiographic (i.e., the unique). The rise of positivism
saw the triumph of the nomothetic approach
and the discipline shift from the study of all aspects of
one place to the study of one aspect of many places, a
move that entailed a reorientation from the concrete to
the abstract, from induction to deduction, from a concern
with the specific to a pursuit of the universal.
Ultimately, the demise of chorology saw the discipline
change from a concern with regions without explanatory
laws to one obsessed with laws devoid of regions.
Some observers, such as John Hart, maintained that
regional geography nonetheless played an important
role in minimizing armchair theorizing and in popularizing
the discipline at large.