Berkeley School

The Berkeley School refers to the loose association of like-minded geographers associated with Carl O. Sauer (1889–1975) and his perspectives and predilections. During his long career (1923–1975) in the Department of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley, Sauer fostered an “invisible college” of geographers and a distinctive school of geography grounded in biophysical, cultural, and historical approaches. Initial members were mostly his graduate students, but subsequent affiliates included visiting faculty and lineal descendants now into the fifth academic generation. Field study conducted in Latin America is one hallmark of the Berkeley School. Some 200 geographers can be included in these ranks. Perhaps an equal number have pursued Berkeley-style studies elsewhere in the world. First-generation adherents include some of geography's major figures of the 20th century: John Leighly, Fred Kniffen, Donald Brand, Joseph Spencer, Leslie Hewes, George Carter, Dan Stanislawski, Andrew Clark, Robert West, James Parsons, Wilbur Zelinsky, Philip Wagner, David Sopher, Homer Aschmann, Fred Simoons, and Marvin Mikesell. In turn, they and their students have spawned an ongoing collectivity that has carried the enterprise forward—with modifications, of course—into the present. Some of the notables of the succeeding generations of Latin Americanists include William Denevan, Daniel Gade, Bernard Nietschmann, B. L. Turner, II, David Harris, Daniel Arreola, Thomas Veblen, and Karl Zimmerer. Others less directly in the lineage include Yi-Fu Tuan and David Lowenthal. Geographers with informal ties to the Berkeley department could also be included. J. B. Jackson, Peirce Lewis, and Robin Donkin stand out here, but the list ultimately includes all of those geographers and kindred scholars who self-identify with, and draw inspiration from, Sauerian historical–cultural landscape studies in their various modes. That cohort, past and present, numbers in the hundreds and consequently remains perhaps the largest single such grouping in geography.

Although Sauer himself on various occasions disavowed promotion of a school or issuing programmatic statements, both their outlines and output were evident within Sauer's first decade at Berkeley. Sauer's 1925 philosophical/methodological tract, “Morphology of Landscape,” issued an incisive broadside against environmental determinist tendencies within human geography and the Davisian physiographic cycle as a model for physical geography. It also served to put historical chorology and cultural landscape studies at the center of a postenvironmentalist geography. Sauer's program was periodically reinforced by additional statements, most notably his entry on “Recent Developments in Cultural Geography” in the 1927 volume Recent Developments in the Social Sciences and his 1940 presidential address “Foreword to Historical Geography” to the Association of American Geographers. More important than his philosophical writings, however, were his substantive research interests. In this regard, his career trajectory went from regional studies in graduate school (his Ozark dissertation), to land use inventory and field methods in Michigan, to geomorphology at the outset of his California move, to historical studies of colonial California, to prehistoric investigations in northern Mexico (especially questions of plant and animal domestication), to cultural diffusions more broadly, to Pleistocene human migrations and adaptations, to tropical cultural biogeography, to anthropogenic environmental impacts globally, and finally (after retirement in 1957) to a suite of historical geographic studies of North America, the North Atlantic, and the Caribbean. Although this set of concerns scarcely encompasses the Berkeley School's bounds, it invited collaboration, elaboration, and imitation. Several of his students (e.g., Kniffen, Clark) have been credited with establishing their own distinctive schools, with multiple students producing studies that are recognizably part of the larger Berkeley tradition.

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