Anthropogeography

Anthropogeography is a term used predominantly in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that means roughly “the geography of humans.” The term comes from Anthropogeographie, the title of a two-volume work published in 1882 and 1891 by the German geographer Friedrich Ratzel, who is well known for his influence in early human geography, particularly his thought in political geography. Ratzel strongly influenced the thought of the well-known American geographer Ellen Churchill Semple, who presented Ratzel's anthropogeography to North America through her 1911 work Influences of Geographic Environment: On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography. Some thinkers, like the geographer J. K. Wright, criticized Semple for not clearly stating which ideas were hers and which originated from Ratzel.

The British geographer Halford Mackinder had a positive view of anthropogeography and believed that it required the ability to understand and use many subjects, including physics, biology, and geology. In Mackinder's opinion, this knowledge of various disciplines made anthropogeographers well-rounded scholars. Generally speaking, anthropogeography was an attempt to study and organize the relationships between people and their environments. More specifically, its goal was to systematically and scientifically describe the economic, historical, and political characteristics of people and the places they inhabited.

Unlike much geographical thought today that explores how humans affect their environments, anthropogeography focused on how humans were affected or “influenced” by their environments. In her essay “The Anglo-Saxons of the Kentucky Mountains: A Study in Anthropogeography,” Semple begins with a physical description of the Appalachian Mountains in Kentucky. She goes on to describe how the isolation caused by the rough terrain influenced its people to be inbred, violent, backward, and lawless. Since the publication of this essay in 1901, similar images of Appalachia have persisted to this day. The scientific appearance of Semple's descriptions made them seem all the more believable. Semple described Appalachia and its people as cut off from civilization and progress. At the same time, however, she praised the residents of the Kentucky Appalachians as people of good stock. Many considered Appalachians to be the purest Americans: They were white and were not corrupted by the negative aspects of progress like the rest of the country. They were thought to be frozen in time. This view was widespread and was not limited to Semple or anthropogeographers, but it does highlight the fact that anthropogeography was influenced by prevailing cultural discourses. It is also likely that it helped reinforce those discourses.

The term anthropogeography is rarely used today because of its overtones of social Darwinism and environmental determinism. Occasionally, it is used as a synonym for human geography or to refer to the aspects of human geography that intersect with anthropology. In its heyday, anthropogeography focused predominantly on the environment's influence on humans. Despite its flaws, however, anthropogeography of the late 19th and early 20th centuries helped open the field of geography and its goal of exploring the relationships between humans and nature.