Matthews, John A., and Herbert, David T., eds. Unifying Geography: Common Heritage, Shared Future.

• Author: Broad, David B.
• Position: Book review

Matthews, John A., and Herbert, David T., eds. Unifying Geography: Common Heritage, Shared Future. London: Routledge, 2004. 402 pages. Paper, $44.95.

Is geography grappling with the illusion that place no longer matters? Is knowledge of the earth itself obviated by technology? Hardly, but this is a book motivated by the challenge faced by the discipline of geography to continue to exist as a scholarly discipline and retain its place in the British university system and beyond. It is just below the surface an exploration of the state of disciplinarity itself. The editors maintain that geography should be preserved as a "holistic entity" (p. xii). Forces arrayed against the preservation of that unity are located within the discipline in the form of specialization and beyond geography itself in its interactions with natural sciences, social sciences, humanities, and technology. Will the unfettered pursuit of technologies such as global information systems make such disciplinary unity irrelevant? From within geography there is a pervasive dualism of human geography and physical geography. Dualism is the philosophical idea that reality consists of disparate and often irreconcilable parts. In pre-Socratic thought there was a distinction between appearance and reality; Plato saw forms and world; Kant, fact and value; and, of course, Descartes, mind and matter. Taken to its extreme, the concept of dualism obviates the construct of discipline.

The present volume is an ordered attempt to seek in the common heritage of the discipline of geography the ability of its current practitioners to "... look beyond their particular specialisms and across the physical-human divide" (p. xiii). The editors have paired invited authors by their location relative to that divide. Their goal is for the collection to "... become a standard text for courses in geographical thought and methodology" and that it "... be of interest to those in cognate disciplines ..." so they are addressing both the internal and external challenges to geography's future (p. xiv).

In its relations with other disciplines, the editors explain, geography has been less theoretically productive and, therefore, subject to marginalization in the overall structure of intellectual and scholarly discourse (p. xii). The present volume attempts to address that shortcoming of the discipline by highlighting hypotheses, models, and formative theories that integrate other disciplinary ideas and data...