ABSTRACT
G. H. T. Kimble was referring here to what geographers say about ‘the regional concept’, but his observation also applies with particular force to the cacophony of claims that geographers have made over the twentieth century on the subject of social geography. Indeed, all manner of things have been said about social geography (géographie sociale; Sozialgeographie), not just in different languages, but from a great variety of positions, regarding both the nature of geography and (though rarely stated explicitly) the character of society. It is impossible to provide an account that does justice to this diversity, and any such account, including our own below, inevitably will imply too much coherence and ‘harmony’ in how social geography has been practised in given periods and between different places. Given our own linguistic abilities, we focus principally on social geography as written in English and French, and, in striving to combine our reflections on work in these two languages, we probably end up suggesting more symmetry between elements and trajectories within the two than is warranted. At the same time, we risk neglecting ‘alternative histories’ associated with social geography, as developed in parts of the world that do not speak English or French, and we are acutely aware of the rather different accounts that might emanate from other regions of Europe or from regions outside the West. Moreover, we offer very much an interpretative narrative, conveying an argument about changes, gains and losses in social geography across the century, preferring to debate the contributions of particular individuals, papers, books and projects than to produce lengthy lists of citations. One way in which to describe the task of this chapter would be as ‘mapping’ onto
conduct of human geography. To some extent, and certainly with reference to social theory, such mapping has already been undertaken by the likes of Derek Gregory (1978, 1994), while Peter Jackson and Susan Smith (1984) have charted the borrowings from social theory and elsewhere which have arrived in social geography. Valuable as such exercises are, they risk portraying geography as dominated by social theory and other disciplines, and being a net importer of conceptual goods. The result somewhat obscures the work of geographers trying to make sense of ‘the social’ by their own means, including their own bricolage of elements culled, admittedly not always that selfconsciously, from a diversity of sources in social theory, other disciplines and popular discourses. Our account seeks to keep the lens focused on the geographers themselves, endeavouring to show how they have tried to capture the social in their own scholarship, first by defining (‘constructing’) it in different ways and, second, by inventing or using different concepts, in the course of which they have more or less deliberately created different geographies of the social (or different social geographies). Instead of taking something called the social for granted, we chart metamorphoses in the idea of the social within geography, and more especially within the sub-discipline named ‘social geography’, and our aim is to clarify what the social in geography has been, what it has not been and what in the future it could become. We suggest that geographers prior to the 1970s tended to have a ‘black box’ sense of
the social, in that it was only invoked in the guise of material social facts perceived to be outward expressions of society’s inner workings, and in so far as such material social phenomena were believed to exhibit definite environmental bases, regional characters or spatial distributions. We identify different ways in which these material social geographies have been conceived, particularly around notions such as landscape, organization and structure. We also note some exceptions to these trends, particularly stemming from the Vidalian tradition and in one Anglo-American version of regional social geography. We then suggest that geographers from the late 1960s through to the 1980s began to enlarge greatly their substantive and conceptual senses of what the social entails, and in so doing started to problematize the whole terrain of groups, classes, relations, systems, structures, experiences, struggles and the like which is the social and which connects to countless worldly spaces in such a complex fashion. The focus then shifted to taking seriously the immaterial social dynamics of society’s internal workings, in that many geographers increasingly realized that they needed to look inside the black box of the social if they were to understand properly its geographical associations. In so doing, we hint at the emergence in the 1980s of a more sophisticated approach to understanding the mutual articulations of the social and the spatial (see also chapter 1), one which rebounded all over human geography but still held particular implications for social geography. Finally, we comment briefly on the excitements of the 1990s, a period during which human geography’s intellectual landscape became so twisted and torn that it is hard to comment on its new shape with any confidence, but we still speculate about certain dangers attaching to a ‘culturally turned’ social geography wherein the social itself risks complete dissolution.
