DWill wrote:The decline of geography as a subject is an excellent topic to look at. I don't know what the reasons could be, and like you, can hardly think of a better or more important subject. I haven't heard of racism as part of the explanation for the decline. I know that when my daughter was in h.s., the kids took geography if they couldn't get into AP Government or just didn't want to be challenged. It was a bonehead class. A random fact floating around in my head is that Michael Jordan, the basketball great, had a geography degree from the University of North Carolina.
I may have been a little premature in declaring ‘geography’ dead on racist grounds. Maybe it is the ‘bonehead’ factor that has led to it assuming a lower profile as an area of study, although I don’t remember geography being any easier than other courses, but that might be my own ‘bonehead factor’! In any case, I just like the study of physical landscapes and places and all that, bonehead or not ..
I did a bit of checking and possible racism in geography is linked to the idea of ‘environmental determinism’ as described below. It’s interesting that Diamond does tackle this point at the end of the first video …clearly his critics’ views are bothering him. He seems like a genuine and fair minded man, I can’t imagine he is racist. But as the item below details, Diamond and other environmental determinists have taken a few intellectual brick bats, including at least an inference of racism. I found it at absoluteastronomy.com but its actually from Wikipedia. I excerpted a few sections because it is a long article and added bold and italics.
"Environmental determinism, also known as climatic determinism or geographical determinism, is the view that the physical environment, rather than social conditions, determines culture. Those who believe this view say that humans are strictly defined by stimulus-response and cannot deviate.
The fundamental argument of the environmental determinists was that aspects of physical geography, particularly climate, influenced the psychological mind-set of individuals, which in turn defined the behaviour and culture of the society that those individuals formed.
For example, tropical climates were said to cause laziness, relaxed attitudes and promiscuity, while the frequent variability in the weather of the middle latitudes led to more determined and driven by work ethic.
Because these environmental influences operate slowly on human biology, it was important to trace the migrations of groups to see what environmental conditions they had evolved under. Key proponents of this notion have included Ellen Churchill Semple, Ellsworth Huntingdon, Thomas Griffith Taylor and possibly
Jared Diamond. Although Diamond's work does make connections between environmental and climatic conditions and societal development, it is published with the
stated intention of disproving racist and eurocentric theories of development.
Between 1920 and 1940, environmental determinism came under repeated attacks as its claims were found to be severely faulted at best, and often dangerously wrong. Geographers reacted to this by first developing the softer notion of “environmental possibilism” and later by abandoning the search for theory and causal explanation for many decades.
Later critics charged that determinism served to justify racism and imperialism. The experience of environmental determinism has left a scar on geography, with many geographers reacting negatively to any suggestion of environmental influences on human society.
While this accurately reflects the popular belief and perception in the geographic community towards environmental determinism, the debate was overlaid with hues of gray. Rostlund pointed out in his essay in Readings in Cultural Geography: "Environmentalism was not disproved, only disapproved." He also points to the fact that the disapproval was not based on inaccurate findings, but rather a methodological process which stands in contrast to that of science, something the geographers have arguably sought to ascribe themselves to. Carl O. Sauer followed on from this in 1924 when he criticized the premature generalizations resulting from the bias of environmentalism.
He pointed out that to define geography as the study of environmental influences is to assume in advance that such influences do operate, and that a science cannot be based upon or committed to a preconception."