ABSTRACT
Secondly, therefore, the paper attempts an interrogation of Evans’s geography in terms of the insights which it might offer into the political, economic and cultural conflict engendered by the existence within Ireland of contested bases for social understanding; his work remains a resource to be used in contemporary analyses of the nature and meaning of Irishness and its inevitable sub-text of partition. While issues of regional identity are much to the fore in these debates on Ulster’s meaning and location within Ireland, there is little overt cognizance of Tuan’s observations [in “Language and the making of place: a narrativedescription approach,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 81, 1991] that regions may
Late in his career, he continued to profess admiration for Marc Bloch, Lucien Febvre and, perhaps above all, Braudel, applauding – like Sauer – the French genius for regional synthesis. From Vidal too, Evans took the idea of the pays as the geographical mediation of synthesis and continuity, the product of ‘man’s [sic] interaction with his physical environment over centuries’ [A.R.H. Baker, “Reflections on the relations of historical geography and the Annales school of history,” in Baker and Gregory, Explorations in Historical Geography, 1984] larger generalizations could emerge only gradually from a series of detailed and exact case studies of various pays.
