Chorology

Chorology is the study of places or regions, usually small ones. The term chorology comes from the Greek words for “the science of place,” in contrast to chronology, the ordering of events in time. Also known as areal differentiation, chorology has a long history as a term and concept in geography.

Strabo (64 BC to AD 24), a Greek geographer working for the Romans, advocated a form of chorology in his 17-volume Geography. In contrast, Ptolemy (AD 87–150), a Roman geographer and astronomer, maintained that the task of geography is the description of the Earth as a whole; in his eight-volume Geography, Ptolemy ridiculed Strabo's emphasis on regions, arguing instead for a holistic view of the Earth. Ptolemy differentiated between geography as the study of universals, topography as the study of localities, and chorography as integrating the two.

The great 17th-century geographer Varens (Varenius, 1622–1650), who wrote the highly influential Geographia Generalis in 1650, distinguished between what he called specific geography (concerned with the unique character of places) and general geography, which was concerned with universal laws. Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), a geographer as well as a philosopher, played an important role in the historical evolution of chorology by arguing that unlike theoretical sciences such as chemistry, geography, like history, was essentially concerned only with the empirical and the unique. His views were hugely influential in subsequent philosophies of space.

Some 19th-century geographers, such as Karl Ritter, emphatically practiced a form of chorology that was instrumental in mapping use values of places in the face of expanding colonial empires. Knowledge of local areas was important to colonial commerce and governance. A notable advocate was Paul Vidal de la Blache (1845–1918), the father of French geography, who studied small French rural areas called pays and their associated styles of life, or genres de vie. Because the climate of France did not vary much, but lifestyles did, Vidal de la Blache's work was also crucial to the introduction of possibilism to the discipline in the struggle against environmental determinism. His German counterpart, Alfred Hettner (1859–1941), argued in the Kantian tradition that geography was the art of regional synthesis, that is, the pursuit of interrelations in given areas, an aspect that other disciplines ignored. Chorology thus became the basis of geography's disciplinary identity in the early 20th century.

In the 1920s, American geographers adopted chorology in the wake of the demise of environmental determinism. American chorology was [Page 405]personified by Richard Hartshorne (1899–1992), who studied under Hettner, then graduated from the University of Chicago in 1924. In the tradition of Kant, Hartshorne and his fellow chorologists argued that the essence of geography was the regional description of regions, including cultural and physical phenomena. Chorologists advocated getting to know places in great depth, with a healthy regard for cartography and field-work. Because large regions are diverse and complex, Hartshorne argued that chorology should focus on small, relatively homogeneous regions. He maintained that regions are essentially mental concepts, that is, subjective tools to find meaning and create order in the landscape. Regions were thus necessarily simplifications and were useful only in as much as the gain in understanding they provided exceeded the loss of detail. Implicit in Hartshornian chorology was the view that location served as a form of explanation, that is, proximity was synonymous with causality, leading to a crude form of spatial determinism reminiscent of Tobler's First Law. Hartshorne maintained that because landscapes exhibit relatively little change in the course of one lifetime, there was no urgent need to study the process of change. In arguing that only by sticking to the facts can we remain objective, Hartshorne's line of thought drew on the philosophical tradition of empiricism, in which facts are simply true without regard for theory.

...