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Often I wish for a new academic discipline, which I'll
call conceptual geography.
Rather than study people
and landscapes, like other forms of geography, conceptual
geography would study what people think about landscapes,
especially if they've never seen the land in question.
Why stuff more in the academic porkbarrel, when we're already struggling to support multi-cultural pluralistic diversity and post-modern deconstructionism?
Because it could answer some questions. For instance, in conceptual geography, Ohio is the center of the United States, even though it lies well east of the physical center. Every region -- Northeast, South, Southwest, Midwest, Northwest, West -- is defined by its direction from Ohio.
Why are we supposed to get our directions from Ohio? There must be a reason, but I have no idea what it is.
A historical approach to conceptual geography might explain why Thomas Jefferson believed America was symmetrical, and was thus disappointed in the findings of the Lewis and Clark expedition.
From the eastern seaboard, big rivers extend inland, navigable almost to the crest of the Appalachians, where big and navigable tributaries flow to the Mississippi.
Jefferson seemed to think it was a law of nature that the West would work much the same way: go up a big tributary of the Mississippi, make a short portage, and enjoy a water route to the Pacific.
That was his conceptual geography -- I'd like to know
where it came from -- and only God knows how many men
suffered, starved and died looking for mythic locales
Northwest Passage
or the Rio
Buenaventura.
Another explorer during the Jefferson administration was Zebulon M. Pike, another victim of conceptual geography.
For reasons related to the boundaries of the Louisiana Purchase, Pike sought the source of the Red River (part of today's boundary between Oklahoma and Texas).
The simple method would be to start at the mouth of the Red and work upstream. But Pike labored under a conceptual geography. The other major western tributaries of the Mississippi drainage -- Missouri, Platte, Arkansas -- all headwatered in the Shining Mountains.
Therefore the Red must also start in the Shining Mountains, and since the Red's mouth is the next major river south of the Arkansas's, the Red's head must also lie just south of the Arkansas's.
Thus Pike figured he could ascend the Arkansas to its source, move south, and automatically be on the Red -- all on account of his conceptual geography, which insisted that the Red was required to start in the Rockies, not in the panhandle of Texas.
Where did Pike get his conceptual geography, which led to starvation and frostbite that nearly killed him and his soldiers? Perhaps from the Prussian scientist Alexander von Humboldt, who offered all manner of theories (some actually based on direct observations in South America) as to how the landscape was supposed to behave. Humboldt, though, had never been anywhere near the Arkansas or Red rivers.
The influence of old conceptual geography persists to this day. Jefferson, as a man of the Enlightenment, was much taken by Rene Descartes, who developed a grid-based geometry -- you remember it from graphing equations in algebra class.
Jefferson applied the Cartesian system to the public lands -- thus the section lines, ranges, townships, quarter-sections that spread across the continent, often in defiance of topography.
We live in a rectangular state, in towns and cities with street grids, in farming regions organized along section-line county roads -- all thanks to this conceptual geography. This method of organizing the landscape was not ordained by nature -- it's strictly a human product, from Descartes to Jefferson to the surveyors establishing lines in the field.
A study of conceptual geography, and its sometimes peculiar products in the past, might enable us to examine our current geographical conceptions, and perhaps avoid mistakes in the future.
Which brings us to the current Ken Burns PBS series,
the West,
now running. Burns calls the conquest of
the West one of the defining moments in American
history
-- a process that took 400 years is a
moment
?
And for the people who gave us many place names, as well
as great food, this was el Norte,
not the
West.
For the Utes, it was just home.
But in American conceptual geography, the West is this big empty place, offering hope and opportunity to all who are tough enough to take it on.
The West is actually a place where it's pretty easy to go broke while undergoing frequent invasions by people whose hopes and dreams don't have any place for you.
If there wasn't a physical West, the American psyche
would invent one -- Hollywood and the real-estate industry
need a West,
whether there really is one or not.
But I could be wrong about this, and that's why some college should start a department of conceptual geography.
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