Whittlesey, Derwent (1890–1956)

One of the more important figures of cultural geography in the early to mid 20th century, Derwent Stainthorpe Whittlesey is best known for advocating the notion of sequent occupance. He served as president of the Association of American Geographers (AAG) in 1944 and was editor of the Annals of the Association of American Geographers for 12 years.

Born in the farming community of Pecatonia, Illinois, Whittlesey studied at the University of Chicago, where he completed a degree in history in 1915; he then attended the School of Geography, where he studied under Ellen Churchill Semple and Harlan Barrows. After graduation, he taught at Chicago from 1920 to 1928, when he moved to Harvard to become its first human geographer; for the remainder of his career, he was professor of cultural and political geography at Harvard. He served as a consultant for the U.S. state, war, and navy departments during World War II. His interest in political affairs led him to publish The Earth and the State in 1939 and, with two coauthors, German Strategy for World Conquest in 1942. Whittlesey delved into several other topics, including agricultural development and the nature of regions and regionalism. He also studied Africa for 35 years, particularly Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). His work historicized cultural and political issues in an era when much of geography viewed the world in static, ahistorical terms.

In 1929, Whittlesey introduced the term for which he is best known, sequent occupance—a technique for analyzing landscapes as the product of successive groups over time, each of which uses it in its own way and leaves a lasting imprint. Landscapes are thus created by the number of groups that occupied an area at different moments, and comprise a palimpsest. To understand the landscape was to understand the history and practices of its various groups of inhabitants, each of which created a spatiality that both reflected that of its predecessor and subsequently influenced that of its successor. Each group, he argued, carried the seeds of its own transformation; culture was thus never a frozen set of ideas or objects but was continually in motion. In framing this issue, Whittlesey drew selectively from human ecology, but he forcefully offered a social dynamic at odds with the deterministic erosional cycle of William Morris Davis, which was then the dominant means of interpreting landscapes. In this respect, Whittlesey shared much in common with Carl Sauer, that is, a view of cultural landscapes as ever changing and historically generated, as produced rather than given; both played a vital role in combating environmental determinism. Sequent occupance would later find its way into the resurrection of localities research in the late 20th century.

As president of the AAG in 1944–1945, Whittlesey published his presidential address when the annual conference was canceled to curtain wartime travel. His essay “The Horizon of Geography,” published in 1945, deftly summarized the changing scale of spatial consciousness that accompanied humanity's ascent from hunting and gathering to the modern age: “By scrutinizing successive space-horizons from the most primitive known down to the present, it should be possible to determine the character and limits of geographic space in the present world of revolutionary technology and social adaptation” (p. 3).

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