The locational discourse in geography

Edmund Bentley's well-known claim that ‘Geography is about maps, but biography is about chaps’ is, of course, incorrect both epistemologically and politically: geography is about much more than maps and biography (employed here as a surrogate for history) is about much more than chaps. But this claim's endurance as an aphorism rests in its capturing, while caricaturing, at least part of a truth: one essential trait of geography has been its concern with mapping distributions. Describing and explaining the specific location and general distribution of both ‘natural’ and ‘cultural’ phenomena has long been and remains a major theme of much geographical writing. Indeed, for some of its practitioners, geography is the science of location and distribution; it is the art of describing the spatial or geographical patterns of phenomena in particular places. All phenomena may be seen as having their own geographies at a moment in time and also geographies which change over time. But while location and distribution may be viewed as geographical concepts, they cannot be claimed to be exclusively so. A German geographer, Alfred Hettner, recognised almost a century ago that ‘distribution by place forms a characteristic of objects … and must necessarily be included in the compass of their research and presentation’ (Hettner 1905: cited in Haggett 1965: 13). Thus ‘objects’ studied by historians – such as art and alcoholism, boundaries and battles, and cultures and consciousness – each have their own geographical (spatial) distributions.