Paul Vidal de la Blache
Paul Vidal de la Blache (born January 22, 1845 in Pézenas , † April 5, 1918 in Tamaris-sur-Mer ) was a French geographer , historian and ethnologist . He was one of the founders of human geography .
Brief biography
Paul Vidal de la Blache was an excellent student of the Lycée Charlemagne . From 1863 he studied history and geography at the École normal supérieure in Paris , where he graduated in 1866. He then went to the Archaeological Institute of France in Athens , from where he made several research trips. thereafter in Nancy to graduate . A few years later he returned to Paris, where he pursued his research and wrote some works. It was he who gave geography a general reputation and brought this scientific discipline to universities and schools.
Main theses, concept of the genres de vie and the pays
According to Dietrich Fliedner, Paul Vidal de la Blache can be seen as the founder of human geography , as he developed many of its concepts.
Mainly the "man himself as a social being" was the focus of his consideration. He examined the relationship of people or whole groups of people with their environment or with the physical conditions and said, unlike Friedrich Ratzel , that people in this interrelationship shape the landscape through housing, cultivation, etc. However, Vidal de la Blache did not come to geography through opposition to Ratzel's milieu theory , but rather from history . And thus to his approach. So man enters into a relationship with nature and forms it.
The focus of his considerations was the investigation of certain cultures and peoples such as nomads , fellahs , peasant cultures , mountain peoples , etc. The different ways of life shape their environment and use their possibilities quite differently from case to case . In this approach one can already see that Vidal de la Blache did not, like Ratzel, subscribe to geodeterminism , according to which human action is primarily determined by natural conditions. Rather, he saw that the forms of life, which he called genres de vie , freely and actively adapted to the given physical-biotic milieus, the pays . With this approach, Vidal de la Blache created what is known as Possibilism . Paul Vidal de la Blache himself said in his work Tableau de la Géographie de la France :
“A geographical individuality does not result from simple geological and climatological considerations. It is not a thing given in advance by nature. One must start from the idea that a landscape is a reservoir where energies slumber, the germ of which nature has sunk, but whose use depends on people. He illuminates their individuality by developing them for his benefit. He makes a connection between absent-minded traits; he replaces a systematic connection of forces with incoherent effects of local circumstances. Then a landscape becomes more precise and differentiated and in the long run becomes like a medal embossed with the portrait of a people. "
Regionally bound genres de vie , i.e. ways of life, were interpreted as events of a possibilistic adaptation to natural spaces. It was observed and evaluated how peoples or even smaller communities that use the resources offered or not offered by nature, react to them and develop with and through them. Thus, more highly developed forms of cultures adapt better to comparable natural conditions than z. B. tribes that have remained standing on lower level. The investigation of the above-mentioned peoples with regard to the human-nature relationship was easy to carry out, as they were autochthonous , which means something like regionally bound. Even on the edge of ecumenism, such as on the coasts or in the high mountains, the autochthony was given at the beginning of the 20th century, but as soon as the peoples spread over too large areas, Vidal's approach is no longer suitable.
Works
Paul Vidal de la Blache has written a total of 17 books, 107 articles and around 240 reviews and reports, only a few of which have been translated. The most important publications are:
- Tableau de la Géographie de la France (1905): In this work, Vidal de la Blache looks at France in two directions. The first part, the Personalité géographique de la France, deals on 54 pages with geofactors such as shape, structure, circulation, etc. The second part, on 320 pages, is devoted to regional geography. The result is that France was created not by its nature but by its people . He brings other sciences into play to better describe the human-nature relationship, e.g. B. ethnology , social geography , geology and history .
- Annales de Géographie (since 1891): Vidal de la Blache founded the Annals of Geography in collaboration with M. Dubois, in which several of his articles on regions in France in connection with the investigation of the correlation between genres de vie and pays were published. The Annales de Géographie still appear today.
criticism
Gerhard Hard describes Vidal de la Blache's point of view as cultural ecology . According to Hard, with this approach, people would only be viewed from the perspective of their territorial organization and not their social organization. Even at the time of Vidal de la Blache, the forms of life of the Beauce or the Brie [...] were no longer tangible. They [the forms of life] differentiated themselves very strongly within one region and, on the other hand, became more similar interregionally.
In his book, Hard finds three main weaknesses in the cultural-ecological approach:
- The approach suggests that the norms of action, non-material and non-landscape cultural elements can be disregarded and that the relationship between group and milieu is sufficient. Thus, if at all, the geopossibilists would only return to a limited extent to the social and cultural background of the way of life, and thus to relatively trivial and abstract economic explanations.
- Second, he adds that even the geographic cultural ecologist tends towards a vague determinism - one, as Claval put it , douce nostalgie du determinisme . For possibilists, determinist was a dirty word. In light of this, geo-possibilism is based on the trivial statement that groups do not react reliably and in the same way to natural conditions over a long period of time. Likewise, according to Hard, a contradiction could be seen in general as well as in detail in the literature of cultural ecologists.
- The third and decisive weakness is that cultural-ecological problems such as those investigated by Vidal de la Blache and his successors split up into several approaches in any more sophisticated analysis. In every question one would find at least one scientific-ecological problem part and one problem of environmental perception.
reception
In conclusion, one can say that in no other nation has geography been so strongly shaped by a man as in France. Today's French social geography goes directly back to him. Likewise, albeit much later, the Utrecht School in Holland (e.g. Vuuren) and various schools of anthropogeographic traditions in Germany ( Hettner , Bobek), in the United States of America and also in England refer to him. The relationship between man and nature and the associated regional consideration of very different areas is still called la tradition vidalienne today.
literature
- Beck, Hanno: Great Geographers. Pioneers, outsiders, scholars. Berlin 1982.
- Dickinson, Robert E.: The makers of Modern Geography, Routledge and Kegan Paul. London 1969.
- Fliedner, Dietrich: Social geography (= textbook of general geography ). Walter de Gruyter, Berlin 1993.
- Hard, Gerhard: The geography. An introduction to the theory of science , Walter de Gruyter, Berlin 1973.
- Jörg Maier et al .: Social geography . In: The geographical seminar . Westermann, Braunschweig 1977, ISBN 978-3-14-160297-5 .
Individual evidence
- ^ A b D. Fliedner: Social geography (= textbook of general geography). Walter de Gruyter, Berlin 1993, p. 37.
- ^ A b J. Maier, R. Paesler, K. Ruppert, F. Schaffer: Social Geography (= The Geographic Seminar). Westermann, Braunschweig 1977, p. 13.
- ↑ H. Beck: Great Geographers. Pioneers, outsiders, scholars. Berlin 1982, p. 301.
- ↑ D. Fliedner: Social geography (= textbook of general geography). Walter de Gruyter, Berlin 1993, p. 38.
- ↑ G. Hard: The geography. An epistemological introduction. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin 1973, p. 196.
- ↑ H. Beck: Great Geographers. Pioneers, outsiders, scholars. Berlin 1982, p. 300.
- ↑ G. Hard: The geography. An epistemological introduction. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin 1973, p. 197.
- ↑ G. Hard: The geography. An epistemological introduction. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin 1973, pp. 195-200.
- ↑ J. Maier; R. Paesler; K. Ruppert; F. Schaffer: Social geography (= the geographical seminar). Westermann, Braunschweig 1977, p. 14.
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Blache, Paul Vidal de la |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | French geographer |
| DATE OF BIRTH | January 22, 1845 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Pézenas |
| DATE OF DEATH | April 5, 1918 |
| Place of death | Tamaris-sur-Mer |