A New Look at the Four Traditions of Geography

Abstract

In the May 1964 issue of the JOURNAL OF GEOGRAPHY, William D. Pattison presented a brief and excellent statement concerning the main themes in geography.' His four traditions article has been quoted widely since then, and it has helped to reduce the problem of defining the broad scope of the discipline in one or two sentences which would be acceptable to and understood by the public, teachers, and professional geographers. An obvious difficulty of any brief definition is what is omitted by a summary statement. Instead of trying to produce a definition which would receive general agreement, Pattison suggested that we should consolidate the concepts and themes of geography into those few which have been persistent throughout the development of the discipline in the past century. Thus he identified geography's four traditions: spatial, area studies, man-land, and earth science. Many other people and numerous curriculum committees have listed the major concepts and principles of geography; each geography professor or teacher probably has his or her own list.2 Pattison's four traditions are a happy compromise in learning scale between compiling a list of a dozen or more “main concepts” of geography and memorizing a frustrating single-sentence definition.

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