Idiographic

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

The tradition of chorology or areal differentiation, which predominated during the early 20th century and was epitomized by Richard Hartshorne, maintained that geography is an integrative science that is concerned exclusively with the unique. In this perspective, regions form the highest form of understanding. Idiographic understanding holds that each region is a[Page 244] unique combination of physical and human elements 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. Thus, the idiographic has long been associated with empiricist and inductive forms of thought in geography, that is, generalization without explanation.

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

However, during the 1980s, beginning with Doreen Massey's famous 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 (e.g., investments, labor market practices, cultural forms). In such a view, general laws of explanation are observable only in unique idiographic contexts, and the local becomes more than some inexplicable phenomenon; it becomes an object of scientific understanding. In an age of globalization, the local always is 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.