Idiographic

The term idiographic refers to the unique aspects of individual areas, that is, those that cannot be understood easily, if at all, on the basis of general rules of inference or deduction. Much of geography has traditionally been concerned with the idiographic in the context of regions and places, long mapping the unusual, colorful, and extraordinary. However, the uniqueness of places has also long been at the center of significant philosophical debates about how to study geography.

The tradition of chorology or areal differentiation, which predominated in the early 20th century, was epitomized by Richard Hartshorne, who maintained that geography is an integrative science concerned exclusively with the unique. In this perspective, regions form the highest form of geographic understanding. Idiographic perspectives hold that each region is a unique combination of physical and human elements embedded in the landscape. Smaller regions are more likely to be more internally homogeneous, and broader ones can be understood through the accretion of small units. Upholding the idiographic in this manner essentially disregards the need for general themes or causal properties that transcend regions—the key point of nomothetic (law seeking) approaches to geography. The idiographic approach has thus long been associated with atheoretical empiricist and inductive forms of thought in geography, that is, generalization without explanation or theorization.

Beginning with Fred Schaefer's famous critique of regional geography in 1953, the idiographic approach began to wane in popularity. The move into a nomothetic science sought to subsume all [Page 1532]the unique details of a place under general laws of understanding that could be applied in all contexts. The attempt to make geography nomothetic and thus “scientific” entailed a shift from regions without theories to theories without regions. This shift corresponded with the decline in popularity of regional geography more broadly.

However, in the 1980s, beginning with Doreen Massey's well-known work on regions in the changing spatial division of labor, geographers acquired a new respect for the idiographic. The so-called localities school attempted to resurrect the idiographic by approaching it in terms of the historical development of regions over time. Beginning with the observation that no social process unfolds in precisely the same way in different places, this view held that regions acquired unique combinations of imprints of different divisions of labor (i.e., investments, labor market practices, cultural forms). In such a view, general laws of explanation are only observable in unique, idiographic contexts, and the local becomes more than some inexplicable phenomenon—an object of scientific understanding. In an age of globalization, the local is always shot through with the global, requiring a multiscalar approach. Unlike the earlier tradition of chorology, therefore, this approach is theoretically sophisticated and far from the empiricism that plagued earlier attempts.