Vidal de la Blache

From Geography

Revision as of 16:17, 9 October 2011

Vidal de la Blache was a French geographer who was one of the 'founding fathers' of Humanistic Geography. Important in that case is the way in which he challenged the old traditional and determenistic geographical approaches, which were dominant during the beginning of the 20th century. One of those traditional approaches was that of 'environmental determinism', which regarded all facets of human activity as fully determined in character by the natural-environmental context of the particular region under study. So in other words, human activities like farming and politics were determined by physical things like climate, soils, flora and fauna, topography etc. According to Vidal though, the relationship between human activity and the environment is not just a 'one-way road', but more a two-way mutual relationship in which both things are interrelated and influence one another. Vidal referred to this as a sort of ongoing dialogue, an ongoing interaction, between, as he names it, 'milieux' and 'civilisations'. Or in other words, an ongoing dialogue between the natural environment and the human communities they support. The result of this dialogue was, as Vidal mentioned in his work 'Principles of Human Geography' (1926), a human world full of different 'genres de vie'(lifestyles) which differed for particular peoples living in particular places. This approach of Vidal de la Blache is often referred to as 'possibilism', which refers to Vidal's belief that the natural environment offers possible opportunities for human development, the precise one chosen being very much a human decision. In analyzing this opportunities Vidal's focus was mostly on the regional scale.

References:

Cloke, P., Philo, Ch. and Sadler, D. (1991). Approaching Human Geography. Chapman, London.

Roodenburg, H. & Buesink, T. (n.d.). Vidal de la Blache en het concept van genre de vie. Radboud Universiteit, Nijmegen.

Published by Marijn Termorshuizen & Gert Gerritsen