Post Modernism makes geography an excellent offer that it cannot reject

because the positioning of space is the privileged realm of

postmodernism

1.0 Introduction
The Geography discipline as an area of scholarship has undergone major evolution in
its core areas of research and approaches. Humanistic geography has gained much
prominence in understanding the various processes and outcomes of interaction
between man and his environment. Regardless of the approach to geographical enquiry
space has always been at the center of research in the discipline. The development of
modernist theoretical and philosophical approaches to geography utilized the concept
of uniqueness of space to shape the frame for research over the years. Various
theoretical and philosophical approaches to the study of the humanistic geography
were aimed at finding “grand theories” that sought to explain the uniqueness of regions
and how these theories could be applied in studying other regions to discover patterns
and relationships.
Theories and philosophical positions such as structuration, realism, and structuralism
were applied to study humanistic geography as part of modernism. In the late 1980s
and 1990s through the work of Foucault and others postmodernism became a dominant
philosophical approach to geographic enquiry; departing from grand theories and
structures. It is the contention of this essay that postmodernist approach does indeed
reinforced space as the central theme of geography and that in the humanistic
geographic tradition the uniqueness of space is strengthened by the application of the
postmodernist approach to geographic enquiry.

2.0 Space as the central theme of Geography

Based on the seminal work of Hartshorne (1939) the subject of geography was properly
defined as a spatial science with emphasis on the study of uniqueness of regions. Areal
differentiation became the geographical frame for enquiry. According to Hartshorne
(1939), geography is concerned with the description and explanation of the areal
differentiation of the earth’s surface. Central to the definition of geography is the idea
of space . Space or location, or place or region is used interchangeably in geographic
texts though there are differences and fine nuances in their definition and
understanding. The idea of space as a geographical location with its own characteristics
and attribute is at the center of geography. The concept of place and space have varied
throughout the recent history of geography (Saar and Palang,2009). Hartshorne urged
geographers to focus on spatial distributions and discover the uniqueness of regions
.The division of the discipline into broad categories, namely physical geography and
human geography led to the development of various tools and theories to study each
strand. The Humanistic approach to geography focused on the uniqueness of places to
discover the patterns and relationships produced bt the interaction between man and
the environment.

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In all this the concept of space as the core and central theme of geography was
preserved and strengthened. According to Singh (2012), the concept of ‘Space’ refers to
the surface of the earth within a given boundary. The concept of space answers the
fundamental geographical question of where more than what and how because without
space, there would be no geography. Space as a concept in geography can be view from
different perspectives including space as absolute, relative and relational. Absolute
space in its own nature without regard to anything external remains always similar and
immovable. Space is regarded as absolute when they can be referenced using
geographical coordinates such as latitude, longitude and attitude.
For instance, the absolute space of University of Ghana campus expressed in latitude
and longitude remain unchangeable. Space in relative term denotes position of a space
as compared to another landmark or non-euclidean geometries. Relative space can be
associated with either human or natural features like trees, rivers, buildings among
others.
Modern geographical interest in the concept of space emerge in the 1970s following the
inception of humanistic geography which emphases that geographers devote more
attention to the subjective experience of people around the world. According to Tuan
and Relph, a leading humanistic geographer stated that, space can be described in the
extent to which human beings have given meaning to a specific area.

3.0 Humanistic Approach to Geography and Centrality of Space

Geography as a subject took a humanistic turn in the early 1970s as the epistemological
foundations of scientific enquiry were challenged. The shift in geography as a subject
from areal differentiation to the positivist school was met by a rising tide of
philosophical and theoretical resistance. Urban and social geographers attacked the
positivism from the early 1970s. In fact, it was a rejection of the geometric determinism
in which men and women were made to respond automatically to the dictates of
universal spatial structures and abstract spatial laws which had taken hold during the
early years of the quantitative revolution in the 1950s and 1960s. According to the
leading dissenters of the strict positivism the practice geography as purely spatial
science treated people as dots on a map, data on a graph, and number in an equation.
Attempts to generalize, and theorize all spatial phenomena were resisted by the
proponents of the humanistic approach who emphasized the uniqueness of spaces in
the tradition of the areal differentiation school.
It was at the same time a claim for a human geography with the human being at its very
centre, a people’s geography, about the real people and for the people to develop
human being for all. Tuan (1976) argued for humanistic geography to focus on people
and their condition in space. For Tuan, humanistic geography was a perspective that
disclosed the complexity and ambiguity of relations between people and place (man
and environment).
Humanistic geography gives central and active role to human awareness and human
agency, human consciousness and human creativity. It is an attempt at understanding
meaning, value and the human significance of life events. In the humanistic strand, the

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intent has been to understand and recognize the dignity and humanity of the individual
from a spatial perspective.
The humanistic understanding of concept of space and place in geography has shifted
attention from the spatial science perspective to the understanding of places as unique
and having their own identity. The purpose of the humanistic approach to space and
place is to gain deeper understanding of unique places and bring human range of
emotions and beliefs to our interactions with the physical world.Many of the initial
disciplinary of geography tended to obscure differences in how space was thought in
order to lend a degree of coherence to the imagined trajectory of the subject.
Where space is defined, or perhaps better, assumed, it tends to be done so as a container
for things to exist in, a place where events happen. The human aspect of the process
that produced the patterns were not particularly interrogated by geographers and left to
other social scientists. This left gaps in the understanding of the space a geographic
phenomenon and its centrality to geographic enquiry was not made prominent.
Humanistic geography is thus not an earth science with its ultimate scientific goal of
describing or generalizing about space. Humanistic approaches to geography gain
insight into the human world by focusing what man does supremely well in the arts
and logical thought gained through examining social institutions in space . These
institutions can be viewed both as example of human inventiveness and as forces
limiting the free activity of individuals.
Humanistic geography achieves an understanding of the human world by studying
people’s relation with nature, their geographical behaviour as well as their feelings and
ideas in regard to space and place. Humanists reject the reduction of space to
geometrical concepts of surface and point as perceived and preached by the positivists
through the methodology of quantitative techniques. Much humanistic geographic
enquiry is devoted to illustrating and clarifying space. From a humanistic perspective,
the meaning of a space is inseparable from the consciousness of those who inhabit it
and interact and shape it.
The methods and philosophical underpinning of humanistic geography are essentially
those of social scientific enquiry. It is essentially based on hermeneutics; that is; the
theory of interpretation and clarification of meanings. Its interest is the recovery of
space and the description and interpretation of landscape to disclose their symbolic
meanings. Humanistic approach lays emphasis on participant observation,
interviewing, focus groups discussion and logical inferences, rather than statistical and
quantitative techniques for establishing correlation between people and space. Grand
theories such as structuration, realism, Marxism and structuralism were some of the
approaches and philosophical approaches to humanistic geography. These philosophies
of knowledge and theoretical approaches have been applied in geographic enquiry that
attempts to understand human agency as part of space and how it shapes the patterns
that results in the interaction between man and space. The dominance of these
approached which were collectively called modernist approaches to scientific enquiry.
Some see modernist approach to geographic and scientific enquiry as socially
progressive trend of thought that affirms the power of human beings to create, improve

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and reshape their environment with the aid of practical experimentation and scientific
knowledge. From this perspective, modernism encouraged the re-examination of every
aspect of existence, with the goal of finding ways to advance human progress. These
approaches ended up with grand theories and structures which were the pillars of
knowledge and scientific enquiry. The scientific method based on modernist
philosophy followed the discovery of truth using defined path of falsification with the
aim of theorizing and generalisation.
In the humanistic tradition of geography these approaches became the standard method
of production of knowledge. Harvey (1989) writes that this conception of the
humanistic approach using Meta narratives served some geographers well in theorizing
space from a human perspective. Urban sociological research with spatial interest
widely utilised Giddens structuration theory as well as Marxist historical materialism as
a framework. However the approach was criticised by scholars such as Foucault (1972,
1984) and Lyotard (1960) as being overly prescriptive and not open enough to “other
truths”. The new philosophical framework for geographical enquiry was
postmodernism which gained prominence from the late 1980s to 1990s. The
Enlightenment ideas of the 20th century included principles of scientific enquiry
rationality and progress. These principles were thought to be universally applicable and
totally compatible with each other. Therefore, Modern Theory built upon the
foundations of Reason was not conceived as limited to a particular context or set of
conditions but as applicable to all people at all times. In addition, modernity can be
seen both as an economic change resulting from the Industrial Revolution and an
ideological change resulting from the French Revolution .Progress was not only a
theoretical ideal.

3.1 Structuration
Structuration theory was one of the philosophical framework for scientific that
dominated the philosophy of scientific enquiry that became basic to research during the
emergence of the humanistic school. Social theory relates to the creation and
reproduction of social systems based on the analysis of both “structure” and “agents.
Structuration theory focuses on structure rather than production of the systems. Agents
within the systems and structure are active participants in the production and
reproduction of the system and not as passive observers.
Structuration theory unlike structuralism focuses on the relationships between human
agency and structures. The theory was proposed by sociologist Anthony Giddens who
tries to balance the role that actors play with their limited choice of position in history
and in the social fabric they find themselves. He specifies that structure and agency
cannot be separated; that they are connected to one another in what Giddens has
termed the ‘duality of structure’. Human actors are the elements that enable creation of
our society's structure by means of invented values, norms or are reinforced through
social acceptance. Yet, at the same time people are either constrained or made possible
by our social structure (Giddens, A. 1984).

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3.2 Realism
Realist also believes there are structures in the real world and not all can be seen. It
divides these structures into two (observable and non-observable). These non-
observable structures are forces of power and Structures found in the form of
experiences of people. It therefore focus on both structures and experiences. In
understanding a phenomenon, the actual event observed can be interpreted differently
by different people based on their experiences and understanding but the real reasons
(non-observable structures) behind people’s behavior are mostly not observed and this
is its major weakness. The inability to measure non-observable structures such
manipulation of people in a form of religion.

3.3 Critique of the Humanistic Approach

A general criticism of humanistic geography is that the investigator can never know for
sure weather one has actually succeeded in providing true explanation. Undoubtedly,
one can never know with certainty that a humanistic explanation is true; the same
objection may be raised to positivists, quantitative and theoretical approaches. The
theoretical physicist can never be certain of his theories. In fact, the history of natural
science is largely a history of abandoned theories. Yet progress has been made, because
with the failure of old theories, new more powerful ones have emerged.
Also in its methodological approach humanistic geography, separates physical
geography from human geography. In physical geography, the scientific techniques can
be applied for theory and models building and hypotheses testing as it mainly deals
with non-living objects. Contrary to this, in human geography, such quantitative
techniques may not give the authentic and reliable results as the behaviour of man
varies in space and time. The dichotomy of physical geography and human geography
is thus harmful for the growth and development of the discipline. This dualism has
eroded the geographical core of the subject—the unity of the subject.
In humanistic geography which is largely based on participant observation, it is difficult
to develop theory, abstraction, generalization and spatial geometry. Thus, it has no
sound and valid methodological base as it involves more subjective than objective
research.
Humanist approach is ‘methodologically obscure’. The goals of understanding man’s
meaningful experience seem to lead to a situation in which any method is acceptable. It
is not a practical philosophy as it involves thinking rather than practical activity. Its
methodology is eclectic and sources of interpretation are numerous and therefore it
becomes difficult to ascertain the reality.

4.0 Postmodernism
Postmodernism is a recent movement in humanities, philosophy, arts and social
sciences. It developed in reaction to historicism in modern geographic thought which
neglects spatiality (that the uniqueness of individual space). Modernist theories were
seen to be based on an overdeveloped historical contextualization of social life and
social theory that actually submerges and marginalized the geographical or spatial

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imagination. This results into subordination of space to time that obscures geographical
interpretation of the changeability of society.
Postmodernism theory arose in the second half of the 20th century as a critique
approach against the modernist philosophical ideas. It rejects the theory of the
modernism that focuses on a grand theory to explaining every phenomenon across
space. It doesn’t believe in the absolute truth but rather that every person has its own
truth. Many postmodernists appear to deny that an objective reality exists, and there are
no objective moral values.
Postmodern geography has become an established presence in the discipline. It is a
presence evidenced by the vast production of research work, from 1980s onward, and
numerous research and theoretical work explicitly informed by a ‘postmodern
perspective. The key place of the ‘postmodern’ in geography today is also supported by
the attention afforded to it by some of the most influential text in human geography. By
and large, the postmodern wave in geography is recognized as a phase – particularly
intense between the mid-1980s and the mid- 1990s, but which also retained part of its
vibrancy in the years that followed – that contributed in a fundamental way to the
intellectual atmosphere of the disciplinary debates of those years; a phase during which
human geography gained, in many ways, newfound prominence within the social
sciences.

4.1 Application of Postmodernism

In its application to geography, postmodernism points to is the need conceptualize
contemporary space in terms of uniqueness and particular with hybrid usage and
application. Diverse cultures and spaces cannot any longer be subsumed within a single
universal narrative of modernity. Nor can they be seen as entirely separate, bounded or
distinct.
Postmodernism believes that behavior of people cannot be theorized. Whiles someone’s
behavior is been shaped by the structures in place, others will be as a result of their
experiences. So it is not ideal to have one theory that tries to explain the actions of
everyone across space.
Postmodernism in its approach to the study and research in geography as a method and
philosophy places emphasis on space in the production of knowledge. A singular and
coherent body of ‘postmodern theory’ has never existed, possibly due to the very nature
of postmodern thought which shuns grand theories and single truths. Spatial
peculiarities and uniqueness which has become part of the modernist approaches to
humanistic geography finds even better expression in the postmodernist expression of
geographical knowledge. Postmodern scholars emphasized the ‘slipperiness and
instability of language’ and the impossibility of universal definitions for space and
place.

Postmodernism in geographic research has been criticising by many scholars. Due to its
radical nature, some in the scientific community have tended to view it scepticism in

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spite of the influential position it has attained in within the discipline. It is criticised as
focusing too much of cultural relativism.
Too much focus on differences means it cannot be used for generalization. The lack of
generalisation makes it difficult make theoretical statements based on postmodernist
approach to spatial scientific enquiry.

4.2 Space and Postmodernism

The central role played by space in geography has been retained by postmodernist
geographers. Geography, as a discipline that had always been concerned with the ways
in which the world and its spatial relations were represented, could not exempt itself
from this radical questioning of the very principles that guided the production of
knowledge.
This new centrality assigned to space in the postmodernist tradition within the
discipline of human geography was visible in a number of ways. Spatial (and
geographical) metaphors in contemporary social theory became widespread as the
uniqueness of space was very much in sync with the postmodernist idea of non-
universality of truth. Postmodernism strengthened the idea of space in geography and
the notion of uniqueness spaces.

References

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