Human geography has developed as a way to observe humans as they interact with, inside, and around a framework of physical, or geographical environments. The work covers both qualitative and quantitative research methodology, with more leanings toward qualitative approaches. The stunning array of focuses comes to light when the attempt to study the activities of the sociologists who work in human geography indicate that it may be an attempt to create global models or maps of human interaction and behavior as relating to physical maps of the earth and it’s features and structures.
Case studies, surveys, and statistical analysis of census or other data appear to be the primary source of observational data, which is then available for the entire tool kit of analytical tools for sociology, including modeling.
Human geography is not a new movement in Sociology. Like the human genome project, which actually was built over time upon the work of scientists beginning with Darwin, human geography has a form of origin in the 1700s with Carl Ritter’s “Organic Analogy”. Of all of the social sciences, Sociology lends itself to adaptations of principles from other sciences like no other. And Human geography is no different.
The movement of individuals and groups of individuals during volatile times, in disasters or riots, for example, could be examined under the concepts of wave propagation that are applied to the study of water movement. And volatile human behavior seems to be missing as a category of human geography.
Currently, there may be some agreement that the following areas of human geography are forming into academic fields of study. There is culture, economics, health, historical information, politics, population, tourism and urban, with a catch all field of “philosophic considerations”.noted in a Wikipedia article on human geography. “The Dictionary Of Human Geography”, however, correctly notes that there is a “diversity of subject positions” and “diversity and debate within the discipline.” pp ix
Those are understatements. Given the massive list of human situations, problems, programs, endeavors, goals, and behaviors within a massive list of social constructs, perhaps the field of human geography needs to focus on mapping itself first. The “Dictionary of Human Geography” is just one of many attempts to do just that: qualitative analysis of the field.
As a result, perhaps human geography is an attempt to map the human “social-nome” as the human genome was eventually mapped.
Wikipedia
R.J. Johnson, et al. “The Dictionary of Human Geography” 2000, Blackwell Publishing, p. ix
