Africans have this thing called UBUNTU. It is about the essence of being human, it is part of the gift that Africa will give the world… We believe that a person is a person through another person, that my humanity is caught up, bound up, inextricably, with yours. When I dehumanize you, I inexorably dehumanize myself. The solitary human being is a contradiction in terms and therefore you seek to work for the common good because your humanity comes into its own in belonging.
Desmond Tutu
Archbishop Emeritus
One of the greatest challenges I face as I teach introductory regional geography courses is explaining to my students what geography is, and why it is important as a discipline. Pick up just about any introductory geography text and look at some of the turgid definitions of geography that you find in the first chapter, and you will quickly learn that the difficulty I have in explaining my discipline is by no means unique.
This isn’t because geography lacks intelligent and articulate practitioners. On the contrary, I think that some of the brightest minds in academia are to be found in geography. The reason that geographers have so much difficulty in explaining our discipline is that the study of geography begins with the breathtakingly obvious, but proceeds very quickly to the mind-numbingly complicated. Not only that, but both its simplicity and its complexity are essential to the discipline.
To put it another way, the essence of geography lies in dialectical relationship: places are different (that’s the simple bit), but at the same time they are connected (more complicated.) But there’s more: places are often different because they are connected, and connected because they are different. The real value of geography lies in simultaneously appreciating differences, similarities, and connections, and how each affects the others (really complicated.)
I have for many years taught an introductory course in World Regional Geography (WRG). For most of my students, it is the first encounter they have had with geography at the college level. I have found that WRG can be really easy to teach if I focus only on the simple part of what geography is: how places are different from one another. North Africa and Southwest Asia are mostly dry, predominantly Arab, and overwhelmingly Muslim. Sub-Saharan Africa consists of tropical and sub-tropical environments populated predominantly by black Bantu-speaking Christian peoples. I can list ten major geographic qualities of Southeast Asia, and ten different geographic qualities for South Asia. And in an exam I can ask my students to list these qualities, to compare and contrast North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa, and I can get them to label the capitals and major rivers of South Asia on a map.
If I take this approach, I have an array of willing accomplices in the form of World Regional Geography textbooks. Just about all of these texts divide the world into twelve or thirteen major regions, a number determined primarily by the number of weeks in a college semester rather than any disciplinary consensus on how best to slice up the globe (a week for introductory stuff, a week for each region/chapter, and a week for tests and exams.) Ever-helpful publishers often provide instructors with packaged PowerPoint presentations, multiple choice and true/false test questions, and map quizzes; students get study guides, maps, and lists of key concepts and place names.
Taught this way, World Regional Geography may give students a very good understanding of what makes world regions – and perhaps even places more generally – different from one another. They may even have a good appreciation of why some of these differences exist; they may, for example, be able to explain the atmospheric processes that produce deserts in North Africa and tropical rainforests in central Africa, or the ways that relative location has affects trade and culture in South and Southeast Asia. What they would probably not be able to do, though, is explain how South and Southeast Asia are (and always have been) connected to one another. Students would not have an understanding of the fact that it is dry in North Africa in part because it is wet in tropical Africa, and that Europe is wealthy and developed region largely because Sub-Saharan Africa is not.
In short, it is easy to list how places differ from one another in discreet and definable categories such climate, demographics, culture, and levels of economic development. It is more difficult to explain why these differences exist, and it is an almost impossibly complicated task to explain how, in the real world, it is the interactions among places than result from their differences and their similarities that make places what they are. Yet that is what geography is about.
An old African notion, most popularly propounded by South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu, is that of ubuntu, a word that tries to express the essence of being human. In its simplest form, it is explained in the Zulu phrase, umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu, a person is a person through other people. As the Archbishop explains it
Ubuntu speaks particularly about the fact that you can’t exist as a human being in isolation. It speaks about our interconnectedness. You can’t be human all by yourself… We think of ourselves far too frequently as just individuals, separated from one another, whereas you are connected and what you do affects the whole world…
More simply, people are people through other people.
Maybe geographers can learn something from this. Maybe it’s not only people, but also places that can’t exist in isolation. A place can’t be a place all by itself. Perhaps it is this quality of what we might call utopu that best expresses the essence of geography: places are places through other places.
Donald N. Rallis
Phnom Penh, Cambodia.
May 24, 2010.
May 24th, 2010 on 2:19 pm
Donald, thanks for this great entry! You have captured so well what makes geography such a meaningful, interesting and valuable subject. I am going to share this entry with my social studies education students in the hope that when they teach geography they will embrace the challenge to teach it this way and resist the temptation to taking the easy way out by following the textbook route of what I call a “Trivial Pursuit” approach of teaching geography.