ABSTRACT

In his Anthropogeography, German geographer Friedrich Ratzel introduced the eponymous concept in a bid to reconcile earth science with the humanities. The traditional societies of small numbers can be termed communitarian-ecological; nowadays any form of ethnology must be an ethnoecology or a human ecology. In a scientific approach, social evolutionism comes hand in hand with natural evolutionism – a nature that change not in function of natural laws, but of the sole will of human beings. More recently, in a 1977 book on 'new geography', Paul Claval classified human societies according to their degree of technical mastery of space. He identified three main levels: Archaic societies can only hunt, fish and gather; they do not have efficient means of transportation and lack knowledge of distant communication: their dominant characteristics are their imperfect mastery of their environment and the difficulty of relationships.