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De plain-pied dans le monde: écriture et réalisme dans la géographie française au XXe siècle
Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 36 (2010) 224e242
not the last word on Iberian Atlantic seaport cities, nor on the impact of Iberian expansion and colonial empire building on metropolitan Iberian cities. Amélia Polónia University of Porto, Portugal doi:10.1016/j.jhg.2010.02.005
Olivier Orain, De plain-pied dans le monde: écriture et réalisme dans la géographie française au XXe siècle. Paris, L'Harmattan, 2009, 432 pages, V38.50 paperback. Geography occupies an honourable place in the syllabus in French schools and continues to attract important numbers of undergraduates and advanced students in French universities. However, most members of the general public in France would be hard pressed to declare what geography is really about, or to describe what it is that geographers do. I suspect that similar uncertainties exist elsewhere across the globe. In De plain-pied dans le monde, which he translates as ‘on a level with the world’, Olivier Orain does not offer an answer for members of the general public. Rather, he presents an erudite exposition for readers who already possess a good knowledge of the personalities who peopled academic geography in France between 1910 and the 1980s, their publications, and the controversies about the nature of the discipline that arose within France, but impinged on only a tiny audience in the wider world. The text is a reworked version of his doctoral thesis that was researched between 1991 and 2003 and was defended at the Université de Paris 1. His approach is essentially that of a critical reading of a vast literature, both within geography and more widely across the domain of the social sciences, in order to determine how successive generations of geographers expressed themselves and what objectives and concepts they held in mind. Orain's chosen structure is essentially chronological, beginning with the classical expression of French geographical writing derived from Paul Vidal de la Blache and associated with his immediate disciples. At this time, geography was twinned with history (and still is French secondary education) and the Vidalians strove to give it a unique, specific identity as a university discipline that described, analysed, and explained phenomena in ‘the real world’. Two chapters focus on how they sought to present geography as the science of place, as exemplified by their doctoral monographs and the volumes of the great Géographie Universelle conceived before 1910 and largely completed between the two world wars. However, not all the Vidalians followed the orthodox route, with Camille Vallaux, who was well aware of differing perceptions of ‘the real world’, being highlighted as a deviant from the generally accepted path. During the inter-war years, the triad of regional study, physical geography, and map work continued to reign supreme in schools and universities in France. With minor revisions, it was perpetuated after 1945 through the writings and teachings of such scholars as André Cholley at the Sorbonne and André Meynier who wrote a guide about studying geography that was read by many undergraduates and school teachers. By contrast, outsider Jean Gottmann challenged their orthodox ideas from his own very wide knowledge base, his experience of teaching and researching in the USA, and his contacts with scholars working beyond the disciplines of geography and history. His lone voice went largely unheeded in the French academy and he never held a post in a university in France. In three chapters that form the central part of his book, Orain applies Thomas Kuhn's notion of the scientific revolution to the
229
practice of geography in France and then traces how a number of French scholars sought to innovate during the 1960s and 1970s in order to break away from Vidalian traditions. For example, in many books and articles, Paul Claval introduced ideas from North America, Britain, and Scandinavia, and Michel Phlipponneau argued the case for developing an ‘applied geography’ that was relevant and useful to the world of planning, business, and politics. Conversely, Pierre George fought something of a rearguard action and was scathing in his attack on quantification, raising what Orain calls ‘the spectre of the totalitarian computer’ (p. 187). From her wide experience of geographical activity across the globe, Jacqueline Beaujeu-Garnier urged her colleagues and students to innovate but was not, I suspect, convinced of the most appropriate path. In the final section of Orain's book, two chapters are devoted to the recognition by some academics and school teachers that geography in France was ‘in crisis’ in the 1970s, with many practitioners still ploughing furrows that had been abandoned across sections of the Anglo-Saxon world, if not elsewhere. Innovators, such as Roger Brunet, Yves Lacoste, and Jacques Lévy, assembled like-minded colleagues into action groups and then editorial boards to produce new journals, including L'Espace Géographique, Hérodote, and EspacesTemps. The words ‘space’ and ‘spatial’ came to replace ‘region’ in much geographical work in France and continue to be popular to this day. The associated ‘scientific revolution’ of the 1970s proved to embrace a variety of theoretical positions and could not be summarized by the single word ‘quantification’. The outcome was a healthily pluralistic approach to innovation that would broaden considerably after the 1980s as a reaction to the invasion of statistical analysis. There was no single, dogmatic route toward ‘la nouvelle géographie’; a new cohort of scholars, including Claude Raffestin and Franck Auriac, appeared on the scene, presenting their work under such banners as ‘humanist’, ‘social’, ‘cultural’, or ‘post-modern’ geography. In all these ways, the ‘realism’ at the heart of work by the Vidalians and their disciples was challenged and overturned. The present commentary is, I confess, a very pale shadow of Orain's erudite and intricate text that charts the shaping and diffusion of geographical knowledge in French universities and illuminates the outworking of those processes with reference to the writings of contemporary philosophers and sociologists. His emphasis on human geography follows current convention in France and places the discipline firmly within the social sciences, embracing environmental change and management but setting physical geography per se to one side. De plain-pied dans le monde is not an easy read, being aimed at academics and advanced students with a very good knowledge of French vocabulary as well as an inquisitiveness about how French geographical scholarship was moulded during the twentieth century, and about why it was substantially different from its counterparts in the Anglo-Saxon world during the 1970s and 1980s. With only two illustrations, the book strikes me as expensive. With his proven mastery of developments prior to the mid-1980s, Olivier Orain is well positioned to analyse the variable geometry of academic geography in France in later years and it is to be hoped that he will focus on the past quarter century in his next enquiries. Hugh Clout University College London, UK doi:10.1016/j.jhg.2010.02.006
Paul Glennie and Nigel Thrift, Shaping the Day: A History of Timekeeping in England and Wales 1300e1800. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2009, xiv þ 456 pages, £35 hardcover.
not the last word on Iberian Atlantic seaport cities, nor on the impact of Iberian expansion and colonial empire building on metropolitan Iberian cities. Amélia Polónia University of Porto, Portugal doi:10.1016/j.jhg.2010.02.005
Olivier Orain, De plain-pied dans le monde: écriture et réalisme dans la géographie française au XXe siècle. Paris, L'Harmattan, 2009, 432 pages, V38.50 paperback. Geography occupies an honourable place in the syllabus in French schools and continues to attract important numbers of undergraduates and advanced students in French universities. However, most members of the general public in France would be hard pressed to declare what geography is really about, or to describe what it is that geographers do. I suspect that similar uncertainties exist elsewhere across the globe. In De plain-pied dans le monde, which he translates as ‘on a level with the world’, Olivier Orain does not offer an answer for members of the general public. Rather, he presents an erudite exposition for readers who already possess a good knowledge of the personalities who peopled academic geography in France between 1910 and the 1980s, their publications, and the controversies about the nature of the discipline that arose within France, but impinged on only a tiny audience in the wider world. The text is a reworked version of his doctoral thesis that was researched between 1991 and 2003 and was defended at the Université de Paris 1. His approach is essentially that of a critical reading of a vast literature, both within geography and more widely across the domain of the social sciences, in order to determine how successive generations of geographers expressed themselves and what objectives and concepts they held in mind. Orain's chosen structure is essentially chronological, beginning with the classical expression of French geographical writing derived from Paul Vidal de la Blache and associated with his immediate disciples. At this time, geography was twinned with history (and still is French secondary education) and the Vidalians strove to give it a unique, specific identity as a university discipline that described, analysed, and explained phenomena in ‘the real world’. Two chapters focus on how they sought to present geography as the science of place, as exemplified by their doctoral monographs and the volumes of the great Géographie Universelle conceived before 1910 and largely completed between the two world wars. However, not all the Vidalians followed the orthodox route, with Camille Vallaux, who was well aware of differing perceptions of ‘the real world’, being highlighted as a deviant from the generally accepted path. During the inter-war years, the triad of regional study, physical geography, and map work continued to reign supreme in schools and universities in France. With minor revisions, it was perpetuated after 1945 through the writings and teachings of such scholars as André Cholley at the Sorbonne and André Meynier who wrote a guide about studying geography that was read by many undergraduates and school teachers. By contrast, outsider Jean Gottmann challenged their orthodox ideas from his own very wide knowledge base, his experience of teaching and researching in the USA, and his contacts with scholars working beyond the disciplines of geography and history. His lone voice went largely unheeded in the French academy and he never held a post in a university in France. In three chapters that form the central part of his book, Orain applies Thomas Kuhn's notion of the scientific revolution to the
229
practice of geography in France and then traces how a number of French scholars sought to innovate during the 1960s and 1970s in order to break away from Vidalian traditions. For example, in many books and articles, Paul Claval introduced ideas from North America, Britain, and Scandinavia, and Michel Phlipponneau argued the case for developing an ‘applied geography’ that was relevant and useful to the world of planning, business, and politics. Conversely, Pierre George fought something of a rearguard action and was scathing in his attack on quantification, raising what Orain calls ‘the spectre of the totalitarian computer’ (p. 187). From her wide experience of geographical activity across the globe, Jacqueline Beaujeu-Garnier urged her colleagues and students to innovate but was not, I suspect, convinced of the most appropriate path. In the final section of Orain's book, two chapters are devoted to the recognition by some academics and school teachers that geography in France was ‘in crisis’ in the 1970s, with many practitioners still ploughing furrows that had been abandoned across sections of the Anglo-Saxon world, if not elsewhere. Innovators, such as Roger Brunet, Yves Lacoste, and Jacques Lévy, assembled like-minded colleagues into action groups and then editorial boards to produce new journals, including L'Espace Géographique, Hérodote, and EspacesTemps. The words ‘space’ and ‘spatial’ came to replace ‘region’ in much geographical work in France and continue to be popular to this day. The associated ‘scientific revolution’ of the 1970s proved to embrace a variety of theoretical positions and could not be summarized by the single word ‘quantification’. The outcome was a healthily pluralistic approach to innovation that would broaden considerably after the 1980s as a reaction to the invasion of statistical analysis. There was no single, dogmatic route toward ‘la nouvelle géographie’; a new cohort of scholars, including Claude Raffestin and Franck Auriac, appeared on the scene, presenting their work under such banners as ‘humanist’, ‘social’, ‘cultural’, or ‘post-modern’ geography. In all these ways, the ‘realism’ at the heart of work by the Vidalians and their disciples was challenged and overturned. The present commentary is, I confess, a very pale shadow of Orain's erudite and intricate text that charts the shaping and diffusion of geographical knowledge in French universities and illuminates the outworking of those processes with reference to the writings of contemporary philosophers and sociologists. His emphasis on human geography follows current convention in France and places the discipline firmly within the social sciences, embracing environmental change and management but setting physical geography per se to one side. De plain-pied dans le monde is not an easy read, being aimed at academics and advanced students with a very good knowledge of French vocabulary as well as an inquisitiveness about how French geographical scholarship was moulded during the twentieth century, and about why it was substantially different from its counterparts in the Anglo-Saxon world during the 1970s and 1980s. With only two illustrations, the book strikes me as expensive. With his proven mastery of developments prior to the mid-1980s, Olivier Orain is well positioned to analyse the variable geometry of academic geography in France in later years and it is to be hoped that he will focus on the past quarter century in his next enquiries. Hugh Clout University College London, UK doi:10.1016/j.jhg.2010.02.006
Paul Glennie and Nigel Thrift, Shaping the Day: A History of Timekeeping in England and Wales 1300e1800. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2009, xiv þ 456 pages, £35 hardcover.