Chorology

Also known as aerial differentiation, chorology comes from the Greek words for the science of place, in contrast to chronology. Thus, it has a long history in geography. Strabo (64 BC–24 AD), a Greek geographer working for the Romans, advocated a form of chorology in his 17-volume Geography, which was essentially a handbook for administrators. In contrast, Ptolemy (87–150 AD), a Roman geographer and astronomer working in the famous museum at Alexandria, maintained that the task of geography is the description of the earth as a whole. In his eight-volume Guide to Geography, Ptolemy ridiculed Strabo's emphasis on regions, arguing instead for a holistic view of the earth and that the regional emphasis was like painting a person by showing only one of their eyes or ears. Ptolemy differentiated among 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 (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 the theoretical sciences such as chemistry, geography and history were essentially concerned only with the empirical and the unique. His views were hugely influential in subsequent philosophies of space.

During the 19th century, geographers such as Carl Ritter likewise practiced a form of chorology. Perhaps its first explicit advocate was Paul Vidal de la Blache (1845–1918), considered the father of French geography, who studied small French rural areas called pays and their associated styles of life (or genres de vies). Because the climate of France did not vary much but lifestyles did, Vidal de la Blache was also crucial to the introduction of possibilism to the discipline. His German counterpart, Alfred Hettner (1859–1941), argued in the Kantian tradition that geography was the art of regional synthesis (i.e., the pursuit of interrelations in given areas), an aspect that other disciplines ignored. Thus, chorology became the basis of geography's disciplinary identity.

During the 1920s, American geographers adopted chorology or aerial differentiation in the aftermath of the catastrophe of environmental determinism. American chorology was personified by Richard Hartshorne (1899–1992), who studied under Hettner and 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 fieldwork. Because large regions are diverse and complex, he argued that chorology should focus on small, relatively homogeneous regions. Hartshorne maintained that regions are essentially mental concepts, that is, subjective tools to find meaning and create order in the landscape. Thus, regions were necessarily[Page 38] simplifications and were useful only inasmuch 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 (i.e., proximity was synonymous with causality), leading to a crude form of spatial determinism reminiscent of Tobler's first law. Finally, Hartshorne argued that because landscapes are essentially stable from a human perspective (i.e., exhibiting 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 could 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. Later, more theory-conscious geographers acknowledged that all data are theory laden.

...