Human Geography

Written and reviewed by Subhra Gupta, Humanities faculty at UniDrill (M.A. Sociology, University of Delhi · 7 years teaching Humanities). Based on NCERT Geography Class XII (Fundamentals of Human Geography), Chapter 1.

Who is more powerful: the forest or the person?

Benda lives in a three-hut village deep in the forests of central India. Before he drinks from a stream, he thanks the spirit of the forest. Kari lives in Trondheim, where winter nights last for months. She works in a heated, glass-domed campus, eats banana and kiwi flown in from warmer lands, and commutes to London by a morning flight. One person bows to nature. The other has built a bubble around herself. This chapter asks how both lives can be true, and which one is the "natural" human relationship with the earth.

What human geography studies

The earth's surface has two sets of components: nature (landforms, soils, climate, water, natural vegetation, flora and fauna) and life forms, including humans. Physical geography studies the first set. Human geography studies the relationship between the physical and the human worlds, how human phenomena are spread over space, and why societies in different places differ socially and economically.

Everything humans have built on the stage that nature provides is part of this study: houses, villages, cities, roads, railways, farms, ports, industries and the objects of daily life. These are called elements of material culture. Nature shapes people, and people reshape nature, so the two cannot be studied apart.

Geography itself has long argued about how to divide its work. Three pairs of choices keep coming up.

The chapter's conclusion is that the split between physical and human geography is not really valid. Nature and humans are inseparable and have to be seen holistically. Even our language shows this: we speak of the face of the earth, the eye of a storm, the mouth of a river, the snout of a glacier, the neck of an isthmus and the profile of a soil. Road, rail and water routes are called the arteries of circulation.

Two views. For the exam: physical and human geography are two sides of one discipline and must be seen together. Another reading: many geographers say the nomothetic and idiographic approaches are partners, not rivals. General laws are tested against particular places, and the study of one place is sharper when it is compared with a pattern. Both readings agree that the divide between nature and people is a convenience, not a fact.

Four definitions to memorise

Each definition stresses one word. CUET asks "who said what" and "which word is the key" in the same question.

A quick way to separate them: Ratzel is about synthesis, Semple is about dynamism, and Vidal de la Blache offers a new conception of the earth-human link.

Technology: why the relationship changes

What humans produce is less important than the tools and techniques with which they produce it. Technology is the measure of a society's cultural development. And technology depends on understanding the laws of nature: knowing about friction and heat led to fire, knowing the structure of DNA helped conquer many diseases, and the laws of aerodynamics gave us faster planes.

This is the engine of the whole chapter. Better knowledge of nature gives better technology, and better technology loosens the grip of the environment on people. That is why Benda and Kari live so differently.

Naturalisation of humans: the early stage

In early societies technology was very low and social development was primitive. People adapted to the demands of nature, feared its fury and worshipped it. The physical environment was "Mother Nature", the source of everything they needed. Such strong dependence on nature is called environmental determinism. The picture of a naturalised human who listens to nature fits Benda, who practises shifting cultivation in the forest and respects its spirits.

Humanisation of nature: possibilism

With time, people understand their surroundings better and develop more efficient technology. They move from a state of necessity to a state of freedom. Nature offers opportunities, and humans use them. Slowly nature gets humanised and carries human imprints: health resorts on highlands, fields and orchards on plains, ports on coasts, ocean routes, huge urban sprawls and satellites in space. These imprints together form the cultural landscape. The idea that nature provides possibilities and people choose among them was called possibilism. Kari's life is the example.

Neodeterminism: the middle path

Griffith Taylor, a geographer, proposed a middle path between determinism and possibilism. He called it neodeterminism or stop and go determinism. Think of a traffic light at a crossing:

The message is that there is neither absolute necessity (determinism) nor absolute freedom (possibilism). Humans can conquer nature by obeying it. They can create possibilities within limits that do not damage the environment. A free run, as attempted by some developed economies, has already brought the greenhouse effect, ozone layer depletion, global warming, receding glaciers and degraded lands. Neodeterminism removes the "either determinism or possibilism" choice.

The three ideas in one view:

Pause and predict: a country builds a dam, then finds that the river downstream dries up and farmland turns saline. Which idea says "you moved on a green light that was really red"?

Check your answer: neodeterminism, or stop and go determinism. It says people can proceed with development only when nature permits the modification, and that a free run without respecting limits ends in damage.

Beyond the textbook. For the exam: determinism belongs to early societies, possibilism to technologically advanced ones, and neodeterminism is the balance. In reality: these are best treated as three ways of seeing the human-environment link, not three neat periods of history. Most scholars today see the link as a two way process in which societies are influenced by their surroundings and also change them. Why it matters: a CUET option that says "determinism ended and possibilism began in the same year" is a trap, because these are ideas, not dated events.

Stages and thrust of human geography

The discipline itself changed its questions as the world changed. This timeline is a staple of statement-based questions.

Why the pendulum swung. The quantitative revolution tried to find mappable patterns for human activities, treating people like points on a graph. Many geographers felt this left out the human beings themselves. That discontent produced the three schools of the 1970s. Post-modernism then went a step further and doubted that one theory could explain every place.

The three schools of the 1970s

Two views. For the exam: the three schools arose from discontent with the quantitative revolution. Another reading: some scholars describe the quantitative phase as the stage that gave the discipline its scientific tools, such as statistical analysis and mapping with computers, which later geographers still use. The criticism was aimed at leaving out the human experience, not at the use of numbers as such.

Fields and sub-fields: human geography meets other social sciences

Human geography explains the link between all elements of human life and the space in which they occur. That makes it highly inter-disciplinary, with close ties to its sister social sciences. As knowledge grew, new sub-fields appeared.

Memory hook. The unusual pairs are the ones CUET picks: electoral geography with psephology (the study of elections), medical geography with epidemiology, cultural geography with anthropology, and behavioural geography with psychology.

Pause and predict: a researcher maps which neighbourhoods of a city have the most cases of a waterborne disease and links it to piped water supply. Which sub-field, and which sister discipline?

Check your answer: medical geography, interfacing with epidemiology. The mapping of disease against place is the geographical part, and the study of how diseases spread is the epidemiological part.

Exam traps

60-second revision

Where this chapter connects

• Foundation: Geography as a Discipline in Class XI introduced the branches of geography that this chapter builds on.
• Next: The World Population applies the idea of human phenomena spread over space to the most basic human element, people.
• Same debate, later chapter: Human Development asks what a good relationship between people and resources should deliver, which is where the welfare school's concern with well-being returns.