Revisión del impacto de la obra "FILOSOFÍA Y CIENCIA EN LA GEOGRAFÍA CONTEMPORÁNEA" del geógrafo Horacio Capel en dossier "Second Look".Fil: Lois, Carla Mariana. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentina. Universidad de Buenos Aires; Argentin

Lois, Carla Mariana

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Carla Lois

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The History of Geography: Narratives to Discipline the Past and Reinvent Geography as a Modern Discipline

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generations of geographers and historians of science in Spain, Latin America, and beyond as acomprehensive and rigorous guide to the history of their chosen ﬁelds. Over thirty years later hisextensive bibliography remains relevant, and his incisive readings of the works he surveys stand tothis day as an example of the highest level of scholarship in the history of geography.2The History of Geography: Narrativesto Discipline the Past and ReinventGeography as a Modern DisciplineCarla LoisHoracio Capel, born in Málaga in 1941, is one the most inﬂuential ﬁgures in the Spanish-speaking geographical community. After obtaining the degree of licenciado in philosophyand letters at the University of Murcia in 1962, he got his Ph.D. in geography at the Universityof Barcelona; he has enjoyed a remarkable career as a professor and researcher at the Universityof Barcelona. Capel played a very active role training students and young scholars. He was es-pecially enthusiastic in advising Latin American geographers: by the end of the twentieth cen-tury, more than two generations of geographers had been deeply inﬂuenced by his ideas. Capelmaintained a close personal involvement with Latin American universities, especially inMexico,Brazil, and Argentina.His commitment to the geographical community is manifest: he organized many interna-tional conferences, he promoted international exchanges, and he created a touchstone amongIbero-American academic journals in 1976, in what could be considered one of his most impor-tant legacies: Geo Crítica, a prestigious journal that is still active today.1Capel’s Filosofía y ciencia en la geografía contemporánea was published in 1981.2 Althoughin recent years Capel has been better known for his studies in urban geography, in the 1980s heinvestigated and published a series of reﬂections on the history, historiography, and philosophy ofgeography. This book is by no means a minor contribution: geography and geographers have acomplex relationship with the past of the discipline; during the twentieth century geography hasbeen consolidated as a “science of the present,” and there seems to be little willingness within the2 Capel continued working on the history of geography in three subsequent books focused on the development of the ﬁeld inSpain. Of his numerous articles on history and geography, many were published in the journal Geo Crítica and subsequently inScripta Nova. He is Professor Emeritus at the University of Barcelona, where he worked from 1967 until 2011.Carla Lois, licenciada in geography, holds a Ph.D. in history. She is now a researcher at the Consejo Nacional de InvestigacionesCientíﬁcas y Técnicas (CONICET) and a professor at the University of Buenos Aires. She coordinates the working group“Historia y Epistemología de la Cartografía” (UBA) and is an Associate Editor for Volume 5 of “The History of CartographyProject,” under way at the University of Chicago Press.1 The journal’s website is http://www.ub.edu/geocrit/menu.htm.2 Horacio Capel, Filosofía y ciencia en la geografía contemporánea: Una introducción a la geografía (Barcelona: Barcanova,1981).112 Carla Lois Capel, Filosofía y ciencíadiscipline to look back. This book was in fact one of the few comprehensive examinations of thehistory of geography at the time.Filosofía y ciencia narrates the modern history of geography; it is a history written by a ge-ographer for geographers. Beginning with a couple of short chapters on origins, Capel tells usabout two men he called the “symbolic” fathers of the discipline, the emblematic ﬁgures Al-exander von Humboldt (1769–1859) and Carl Ritter (1779–1859).The second part (six chapters) presents a careful study of the processes of the institutionaliza-tion of geography in Europe, focused on Germany, France, Great Britain, and Russia in the lastdecades of the nineteenth century. These chapters form the core of the book’s historiographicalapproach: they explore how geography came into universities and became a modern science.The third part (ﬁve chapters) describes the “philosophy of geography”; it follows a simplisticKuhnianmodel by presenting a chronology of predominant theories, ideas, and perspectives, butwithout avoiding all the conﬂicts concerning the “dualism” of geography in every paradigm.The simplicity of the book’s structure and narrative is one of its strongest points, particularlygiven that it was conceived as a textbook. Such a book was necessary in the ﬁeld at the time forseveral reasons; explaining this requires some context.First, when Filosofía y ciencia en la geografía contemporánea appeared there was no history ofgeography published in Spanish. Even though the book is written from a very European point ofview (some Latin Americans, especially Brazilians, would soon challenge the prevalence of Eu-ropean approaches), the author is a Spanish speaker and his books were and are read by a broadaudience beyond Spain’s frontiers.Second, somehow the book appeared at the right moment to respond to one of the disci-pline’s biggest problems: the lack of a clear identity. As Anne Godlewska observes: “Towardthe end of the eighteenth century, the community of geographers entered a troubled period. This‘trouble’ consisted of a loss of direction and a perceived real loss of status among the ‘scienceshumaines.’ ” Incidentally, this problem can still be seen today when geographers are asked whatgeography is and have no clear answer at the ready. Capel’s narrative, as selective and biasedas any other, nonetheless builds up a modern identity for the discipline that linked it to othermodern disciplines (in Foucauldian terms). He took as a starting point disciplined knowledgeproduced under speciﬁc rules at established institutions, notably universities. The book engageswith all those attempts to demonstrate the scientiﬁcity of geographical knowledge. Creating apast or “inventing a tradition” (Eric Hobsbawm) is a way to create identities.3 If this past hasthings in common with others (in this case, with the pasts of other disciplines), that identity isreinforced by the sense of “belonging” to something larger (here, the scientiﬁc community). Inthat context, old-fashioned geographical methods (exploration, description, etc.) tended to be re-placed by logical and positivistic approaches.The bias favoring institutionalized geography as a modern discipline becomes clear whenwe note that Capel omitted or minimized the crucial circumstance that older geographers whohad been active in socially inﬂuential geographical societies were in fact the very ﬁgures whotook those celebrated ﬁrst chairs offering isolated courses in geography at European universi-ties. For what is often presented as “the institutionalization” of geography in the late nineteenthcentury was not the founding of departments of geography, the creation of a career path at uni-versities, or the granting of degrees in geography but, rather, the emergence of new courses indifferent kinds of geography run by historians, geologists, zoologists, and others. The importance3 Anne Marie Claire Godlewska, Geography Unbound: French Geographic Science from Cassini to Humboldt (Chicago: Univ.Chicago Press, 1999), p. 57; and Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: CambridgeUniv. Press, 1983).SECONDLOOKISIS—Volume 109, Number 1, March 2018 113of these courses tends to bemagniﬁed to establish a watershed between the “prescientiﬁc period”and “scientiﬁc geography.” Indeed, geographical societies (which multiplied around the worldduring the nineteenth century) were considered by Capel and many others to be nonscientiﬁcgroups; here they saw a contrast with the older academies of sciences that preceded the organi-zation of their respective modern disciplines, which adopted new identities and retained theirprestige, traditions, and social recognition (now many of them are museums, botanical gardens,etc.).From the 1970s until the end of the twentieth century, histories of geography ﬂourished.The following works were the most inﬂuential in the Spanish-speaking academies: Paul Claval,Evolution de la géographie humaine (1964); Milton Santos, Por uma geografía nova (1978); Jo-seﬁna Gómez Mendoza, Julio Muñoz Jiménez, and Nicolás Ortega Cantero, El pensamientogeográﬁco: Estudio interpretativo y antología de textos (1982); AntonioCarlosMoraes,Geografía:Pequeña história crítica (1983); TimUnwin, The Place of Geography (1992); David Livingstone,The Geographical Tradition (1992); and José Ortega Valcárcel, Los horizontes de la geografía(2000).4 This ﬂourishing can be understood as a symptom of the need to reconsider the narra-tives of the past of the discipline.These publications opened my mind to new historiographical perspectives with which I feltmore empathy. And so I turned away from Filosofía y ciencia for a time. My main criticism wasthat Capel’s book established a clear turning point with Humboldt and Ritter and their follow-ers, without mentioning the earlier history of geographical thought. This rupturist option ne-glected the most brilliant periods in the production of geographical knowledge, including antiq-uity and the Renaissance, in the Western world and elsewhere. Moreover, I am convinced thatgeography used to be more widely recognized as necessary for understanding the world beforeits institutionalization in universities. In others words: in the nineteenth century, geography be-came an “undisciplined discipline.”However, taking a second look many years later, and setting aside my own personal historio-graphical approach, I ﬁnd that—even though nearly four decades have elapsed since its ﬁrst pub-lication—Filosfía y ciencia en la geografía contemporánea continues to be an essential referencework. It is fundamental for beginning an exploration of the history of geography because it is aconsistent, coherent, solid, and well-documented historiographical book that still amply repaysreading and study.As a student of geography at the University of Buenos Aires, one of the ﬁrst courses I tookwas “Theories and Methods in Geography I (1870–1950).” At that time, the course was man-datory for all students of geography, and Capel’s Filosofía y ciencia was the primary text. Twentyyears later I myself began teaching the course, now called “Contemporary Theories in Geogra-phy I (1870–1950)”—but it is no longer mandatory. Even worse: it is an optional class for ad-vanced students. Every year, at the beginning of the semester, I experience the same feeling: Iam more and more surprised that students so close to becoming professional geographers them-selves completely ignore what geographers in the past—that is, anything more than thirty yearsago!—used to do. And we, as professors, have the opportunity to ﬁll this gap only for those fewstudents who choose to take the course. Sadly, the majority of young geographers will remainin the dark about the history of their discipline.4 Paul Claval, Evolution de la géographie humaine (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1964); Milton Santos, Por uma geografía nova: Dacrítica da geograﬁa a uma geograﬁa crítica (Sao Paulo: HUCITEC, 1978); Joseﬁna Gómez Mendoza, Julio Muñoz Jiménez,and Nicolás Ortega Cantero, El pensamiento geográﬁco: Estudio interpretativo y antología de textos (Madrid: Alianza, 1982);Antonio Carlos Moraes, Geografía: Pequeña história crítica (Sao Paulo: HUCITEC, 1983); Tim Unwin, The Place of Geography(London: Routledge, 1992); David Livingstone, The Geographical Tradition (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1992); and José Or-tega Valcárcel, Los horizontes de la geografía (Barcelona: Ariel, 2000).114 Carla Lois Capel, Filosofía y ciencíaGeographers of my generation (and a couple of others) are in debt to Horacio Capel for sav-ing us from such an embarrassing state of ignorance and for making us familiar with the past ofthe discipline. For this reason, at least (but not only for this), all criticism of Filosfía y ciencia enla geografía contemporánea must be tempered by recognition of how original, risky, and pos-itively ambitious this project was in the early 1980s. In fact, we should thank Capel for the in-spiration that moved other Latin American scholars to think about and indeed to write historiesof geography from “this side of the Atlantic” perspectives.As a professor now, I teach my students to read the tables of contents of several histories ofgeography in order to identify the authors’ approaches and perspectives. And some of the chap-ters of Filosofía y ciencia en la geografía contemporánea are included in my syllabus as oblig-atory readings. Moreover, I recommend that students read the book at several times at differentpoints in their careers and scholarly endeavors. They will always ﬁnd something new in it to keepthem inquiring into the history of geography, and it continues to inspire new questions aboutthe past that help us to understand the present of this undisciplined discipline.SECONDLOOKISIS—Volume 109, Number 1, March 2018 115

The history of geography: Narratives to discipline the past and reinvent geography as a modern discipline

LAReferencia - Red Federada de Repositorios Institucionales de Publicaciones Científicas Latinoamericanas

generations of geographers and historians of science in Spain, Latin America, and beyond as acomprehensive and rigorous guide to the history of their chosen fields. Over thirty years later hisextensive bibliography remains relevant, and his incisive readings of the works he surveys stand tothis day as an example of the highest level of scholarship in the history of geography.2The History of Geography: Narrativesto Discipline the Past and ReinventGeography as a Modern DisciplineCarla LoisHoracio Capel, born in Málaga in 1941, is one the most influential figures in the Spanish-speaking geographical community. After obtaining the degree of licenciado in philosophyand letters at the University of Murcia in 1962, he got his Ph.D. in geography at the Universityof Barcelona; he has enjoyed a remarkable career as a professor and researcher at the Universityof Barcelona. Capel played a very active role training students and young scholars. He was es-pecially enthusiastic in advising Latin American geographers: by the end of the twentieth cen-tury, more than two generations of geographers had been deeply influenced by his ideas. Capelmaintained a close personal involvement with Latin American universities, especially inMexico,Brazil, and Argentina.His commitment to the geographical community is manifest: he organized many interna-tional conferences, he promoted international exchanges, and he created a touchstone amongIbero-American academic journals in 1976, in what could be considered one of his most impor-tant legacies: Geo Crítica, a prestigious journal that is still active today.1Capel’s Filosofía y ciencia en la geografía contemporánea was published in 1981.2 Althoughin recent years Capel has been better known for his studies in urban geography, in the 1980s heinvestigated and published a series of reflections on the history, historiography, and philosophy ofgeography. This book is by no means a minor contribution: geography and geographers have acomplex relationship with the past of the discipline; during the twentieth century geography hasbeen consolidated as a “science of the present,” and there seems to be little willingness within the2 Capel continued working on the history of geography in three subsequent books focused on the development of the field inSpain. Of his numerous articles on history and geography, many were published in the journal Geo Crítica and subsequently inScripta Nova. He is Professor Emeritus at the University of Barcelona, where he worked from 1967 until 2011.Carla Lois, licenciada in geography, holds a Ph.D. in history. She is now a researcher at the Consejo Nacional de InvestigacionesCientíficas y Técnicas (CONICET) and a professor at the University of Buenos Aires. She coordinates the working group“Historia y Epistemología de la Cartografía” (UBA) and is an Associate Editor for Volume 5 of “The History of CartographyProject,” under way at the University of Chicago Press.1 The journal’s website is http://www.ub.edu/geocrit/menu.htm.2 Horacio Capel, Filosofía y ciencia en la geografía contemporánea: Una introducción a la geografía (Barcelona: Barcanova,1981).112 Carla Lois Capel, Filosofía y ciencíadiscipline to look back. This book was in fact one of the few comprehensive examinations of thehistory of geography at the time.Filosofía y ciencia narrates the modern history of geography; it is a history written by a ge-ographer for geographers. Beginning with a couple of short chapters on origins, Capel tells usabout two men he called the “symbolic” fathers of the discipline, the emblematic figures Al-exander von Humboldt (1769–1859) and Carl Ritter (1779–1859).The second part (six chapters) presents a careful study of the processes of the institutionaliza-tion of geography in Europe, focused on Germany, France, Great Britain, and Russia in the lastdecades of the nineteenth century. These chapters form the core of the book’s historiographicalapproach: they explore how geography came into universities and became a modern science.The third part (five chapters) describes the “philosophy of geography”; it follows a simplisticKuhnianmodel by presenting a chronology of predominant theories, ideas, and perspectives, butwithout avoiding all the conflicts concerning the “dualism” of geography in every paradigm.The simplicity of the book’s structure and narrative is one of its strongest points, particularlygiven that it was conceived as a textbook. Such a book was necessary in the field at the time forseveral reasons; explaining this requires some context.First, when Filosofía y ciencia en la geografía contemporánea appeared there was no history ofgeography published in Spanish. Even though the book is written from a very European point ofview (some Latin Americans, especially Brazilians, would soon challenge the prevalence of Eu-ropean approaches), the author is a Spanish speaker and his books were and are read by a broadaudience beyond Spain’s frontiers.Second, somehow the book appeared at the right moment to respond to one of the disci-pline’s biggest problems: the lack of a clear identity. As Anne Godlewska observes: “Towardthe end of the eighteenth century, the community of geographers entered a troubled period. This‘trouble’ consisted of a loss of direction and a perceived real loss of status among the ‘scienceshumaines.’ ” Incidentally, this problem can still be seen today when geographers are asked whatgeography is and have no clear answer at the ready. Capel’s narrative, as selective and biasedas any other, nonetheless builds up a modern identity for the discipline that linked it to othermodern disciplines (in Foucauldian terms). He took as a starting point disciplined knowledgeproduced under specific rules at established institutions, notably universities. The book engageswith all those attempts to demonstrate the scientificity of geographical knowledge. Creating apast or “inventing a tradition” (Eric Hobsbawm) is a way to create identities.3 If this past hasthings in common with others (in this case, with the pasts of other disciplines), that identity isreinforced by the sense of “belonging” to something larger (here, the scientific community). Inthat context, old-fashioned geographical methods (exploration, description, etc.) tended to be re-placed by logical and positivistic approaches.The bias favoring institutionalized geography as a modern discipline becomes clear whenwe note that Capel omitted or minimized the crucial circumstance that older geographers whohad been active in socially influential geographical societies were in fact the very figures whotook those celebrated first chairs offering isolated courses in geography at European universi-ties. For what is often presented as “the institutionalization” of geography in the late nineteenthcentury was not the founding of departments of geography, the creation of a career path at uni-versities, or the granting of degrees in geography but, rather, the emergence of new courses indifferent kinds of geography run by historians, geologists, zoologists, and others. The importance3 Anne Marie Claire Godlewska, Geography Unbound: French Geographic Science from Cassini to Humboldt (Chicago: Univ.Chicago Press, 1999), p. 57; and Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: CambridgeUniv. Press, 1983).SECONDLOOKISIS—Volume 109, Number 1, March 2018 113of these courses tends to bemagnified to establish a watershed between the “prescientific period”and “scientific geography.” Indeed, geographical societies (which multiplied around the worldduring the nineteenth century) were considered by Capel and many others to be nonscientificgroups; here they saw a contrast with the older academies of sciences that preceded the organi-zation of their respective modern disciplines, which adopted new identities and retained theirprestige, traditions, and social recognition (now many of them are museums, botanical gardens,etc.).From the 1970s until the end of the twentieth century, histories of geography flourished.The following works were the most influential in the Spanish-speaking academies: Paul Claval,Evolution de la géographie humaine (1964); Milton Santos, Por uma geografía nova (1978); Jo-sefina Gómez Mendoza, Julio Muñoz Jiménez, and Nicolás Ortega Cantero, El pensamientogeográfico: Estudio interpretativo y antología de textos (1982); AntonioCarlosMoraes,Geografía:Pequeña história crítica (1983); TimUnwin, The Place of Geography (1992); David Livingstone,The Geographical Tradition (1992); and José Ortega Valcárcel, Los horizontes de la geografía(2000).4 This flourishing can be understood as a symptom of the need to reconsider the narra-tives of the past of the discipline.These publications opened my mind to new historiographical perspectives with which I feltmore empathy. And so I turned away from Filosofía y ciencia for a time. My main criticism wasthat Capel’s book established a clear turning point with Humboldt and Ritter and their follow-ers, without mentioning the earlier history of geographical thought. This rupturist option ne-glected the most brilliant periods in the production of geographical knowledge, including antiq-uity and the Renaissance, in the Western world and elsewhere. Moreover, I am convinced thatgeography used to be more widely recognized as necessary for understanding the world beforeits institutionalization in universities. In others words: in the nineteenth century, geography be-came an “undisciplined discipline.”However, taking a second look many years later, and setting aside my own personal historio-graphical approach, I find that—even though nearly four decades have elapsed since its first pub-lication—Filosfía y ciencia en la geografía contemporánea continues to be an essential referencework. It is fundamental for beginning an exploration of the history of geography because it is aconsistent, coherent, solid, and well-documented historiographical book that still amply repaysreading and study.As a student of geography at the University of Buenos Aires, one of the first courses I tookwas “Theories and Methods in Geography I (1870–1950).” At that time, the course was man-datory for all students of geography, and Capel’s Filosofía y ciencia was the primary text. Twentyyears later I myself began teaching the course, now called “Contemporary Theories in Geogra-phy I (1870–1950)”—but it is no longer mandatory. Even worse: it is an optional class for ad-vanced students. Every year, at the beginning of the semester, I experience the same feeling: Iam more and more surprised that students so close to becoming professional geographers them-selves completely ignore what geographers in the past—that is, anything more than thirty yearsago!—used to do. And we, as professors, have the opportunity to fill this gap only for those fewstudents who choose to take the course. Sadly, the majority of young geographers will remainin the dark about the history of their discipline.4 Paul Claval, Evolution de la géographie humaine (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1964); Milton Santos, Por uma geografía nova: Dacrítica da geografia a uma geografia crítica (Sao Paulo: HUCITEC, 1978); Josefina Gómez Mendoza, Julio Muñoz Jiménez,and Nicolás Ortega Cantero, El pensamiento geográfico: Estudio interpretativo y antología de textos (Madrid: Alianza, 1982);Antonio Carlos Moraes, Geografía: Pequeña história crítica (Sao Paulo: HUCITEC, 1983); Tim Unwin, The Place of Geography(London: Routledge, 1992); David Livingstone, The Geographical Tradition (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1992); and José Or-tega Valcárcel, Los horizontes de la geografía (Barcelona: Ariel, 2000).114 Carla Lois Capel, Filosofía y ciencíaGeographers of my generation (and a couple of others) are in debt to Horacio Capel for sav-ing us from such an embarrassing state of ignorance and for making us familiar with the past ofthe discipline. For this reason, at least (but not only for this), all criticism of Filosfía y ciencia enla geografía contemporánea must be tempered by recognition of how original, risky, and pos-itively ambitious this project was in the early 1980s. In fact, we should thank Capel for the in-spiration that moved other Latin American scholars to think about and indeed to write historiesof geography from “this side of the Atlantic” perspectives.As a professor now, I teach my students to read the tables of contents of several histories ofgeography in order to identify the authors’ approaches and perspectives. And some of the chap-ters of Filosofía y ciencia en la geografía contemporánea are included in my syllabus as oblig-atory readings. Moreover, I recommend that students read the book at several times at differentpoints in their careers and scholarly endeavors. They will always find something new in it to keepthem inquiring into the history of geography, and it continues to inspire new questions aboutthe past that help us to understand the present of this undisciplined discipline.SECONDLOOKISIS—Volume 109, Number 1, March 2018 115

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The history of geography: Narratives to discipline the past and reinvent geography as a modern discipline

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