Indigenous Peoples Specialty Group

Selected Sponsored sessions,
Association of American Geographers
2003 Annual Meeting,
New Orleans

RDK Herman, Towson University

"The World is Flat: Geography, Modernity and Disenchantment"

When the 17th-century struggle between Church and Science was resolved by stripping Nature of purposefulness, an atomized, inanimate and mechanistic universe became our legacy. A paradigm of potent but superficial explanatory power, the mechanistic view served new discourses of economic exploitation--of both nature and colonized peoples.

With 20th century advances in physics, the mechanistic worldview should have lost its hegemonic grip on Western consciousness. Laying bare its ideological roots should likewise have undermined its tenacity. But even while the mechanistic paradigm has reached a dead end in modernist cultures of consumption, global capitalism, and environmental decay, its gate-keeping power remains.

This paper considers the historical complicity of Geography with this dis-enchanted worldview by examining Geographic texts on the Hawaiian Islands since 1779. Geographic discourses are linked to the relationship between science and religion, fueled by the commodification of land and the rise of market economics.
As mechanism is a hallmark of modernity, a post-modern Geography need not follow in this confined track. Geographers are already challenging other discourses of power. With its mutually human and environmental focus, Geography is in an optimal position for re-exploring the enchantment of the world.

Email: dherman (at) towson.edu

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