The reflexive turn in French and German-speaking geography in comparison
The papers presented by Bernard Debarbieux and Ute Wardenga at the symposium on "Les fabriques des `Géographies' – making Geographies in Europe'' and published in this thematic issue both take a historiographical perspective, which at a first glance seems evident. In or...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | deu |
| Published: |
Copernicus Publications
2013-05-01
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| Series: | Geographica Helvetica |
| Online Access: | http://www.geogr-helv.net/68/61/2013/gh-68-61-2013.pdf |
| Summary: | The papers presented by Bernard Debarbieux and Ute Wardenga at the
symposium on "Les fabriques des `Géographies' – making Geographies in
Europe'' and published in this thematic issue both take a historiographical
perspective, which at a first glance seems evident. In order to understand
how geography is thought about and practiced, the best is to look back on how
these thoughts and practices have been respectively established and have
evolved in the different national contexts. But at second glance, this
historiographical perspective seems revealing regarding the status and the
position of geography as an academic discipline. One can hardly imagine a
symposium on the "making philosophy'' or "making physics'' in Europe
privileging such a historiographical stance in order to illustrate and
understand the differences and commonalities of a discipline in different
countries today. Other disciplines might have favoured a dialogue on how a
theory or a prominent author is received in order to excavate the differences
or commonalities in a particular discipline of different countries. Such
dialogues have been organized for example in Sociology with the exchange of
approaches on Bourdieu published by Catherine Colliot-Thélène,
Étienne François and Gunter Gebauer (2005). Another example and a
reference of such dialogues is the famous debate on hermeneutics between
Hans-Georg Gadamer and Jacques Derrida in the
early 1980s.
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The emphasis on the history (Debarbieux) and the way to write the history of
geography (Wardenga) points out the difficulty of our discipline to position
itself in academia, and reveals the crisis to which Wardenga refers to in her
paper. As Ute Wardenga pointed out by quoting Jörn Rüsen, "genetical
narratives'' are part of identity formation processes by "mediating
permanence and change to a process of self-definition'' (Rüsen, 1987,
cited by Wardenga, this issue). Both
presented papers expose in different but complementary ways this identity
formation of geography as a distinct discipline on the national scale in
France (B. Debarbieux) and on a more international scale (U. Wardenga). The
first analyses the conceptualization of space, the nation and the national
territory by French geographers, while the second reflects upon the
internationalization of the historiography of our discipline, meaning the way
history is written and not the history itself. The underlying question here
is the specificity of geography in Germany or in France and what their
relationships are with other geographies, i.e. in how far they are influenced
by or reject ideas and methodologies especially (but not exclusively) from
Anglophone geographers. |
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| ISSN: | 0016-7312 2194-8798 |