This post contains SPOILERS. Don't read if you don't want the surprise of Martin and Wigen's proposed replacement for continents to be spoiled forever!
The Myth of Continents, Ch. 6, p 186-188.
Clearly, the world regional system has some serious flaws. In most presentations, it is contaminated both by the myth of the nation-state and by geographical determinism. Similarly, though less Eurocentric than the standard continental scheme, it still bear[s] traces of its origin within a self-centered European geographical tradition. More fundamentally, a world regional framework continues to grossly flatten the complexities of world geography. No less than the continental scheme, it implies that the map of the world is readily divisible into a small number of fundamentally comparable units. Nonetheless, we remain convinced that some form of baseline heuristic scheme is necessary for teaching and thinking about metageography, and that a refined version of the world regional framework is the most serviceable alternative available.
The cartographic outlines of our own preferred regions are depicted in map 10. In its contours, this map does not differ dramatically from the standard depiction of world regions already employed in geography and other disciplines; with a few important qualifications, we endorse the global architecture that has emerged within the North American academic world. Where we part company from textbook geography is less in cartographic depiction than in conceptual procedure. Our methodological differences with textbook geography can be summed up in three main principles. First, we have avoided defining regions in terms of specific diagnostic traits, focusing instead on historical processes. Second, we have ignored both political and ecological boundaries, giving primacy instead to the spatial contours of assemblages of ideas, practices, and social institutions that give human communities their distinction and coherence. Finally, we have tried to conceptualize world regions not only in terms of their internal characteristics, but also in terms of their relations with one another. For one region's identity has often coalesced only in confrontation with another.
This last point deserves underscoring. As Patrick Manning and others have argued, sub-Saharan Africa emerged as a distinct region of the world in good part through the mechanism of the slave trade, an intrinsically interregional operation implicating Europe, the Americas, the North African and Southwest Asia. African unity was later enhanced by the common experiences of colonial rule and anticolonial resistance, and it is maintained today in part by the common yoke of global financial institutions. Southeast Asia, similarly, has coalesced in part through confrontations with the historically expansive civilizations of the Eurasian mainland. And it is emerging as a more coherent region today in part because the majority of its member states are developing a common pattern of economic relationships with East Asia, Europe, and North America. Now more than ever, relational issues are crucial to macroregional identity.
So long as these methodological points are addressed, we believe that the world regional paradigm can be reformed and should be retained. But a number of caveats are still in order. First, as we have insisted throughout this critique, any scheme of global geographical division is only a rough approximation, a convenient but crude device for making sense of particular patterns of human life. World regions are better approximations for most purposes than continents or civilizations, but they are no more naturally given. Second, we would emphasize that this scheme has evolved essentially as a pedagogical tool: a vehicle for talking and teaching about basic global patterns of sociocultural geography at the college level. We claim no authority for it beyond those uses. Third, we would note that while our map by necessity shows seemingly rigid boundaries separating world regions, many of those boundary zones themselves function almost like hybrid regions in their own right. Finally, we would ask the reader to see this scheme, like all similar efforts, as but one contribution to an ongoing dialogue. Our purpose is not to settle the many delicate issues of metageography, but to advance the discussion of those issues.
The cartographic outlines of our own preferred regions are depicted in map 10. In its contours, this map does not differ dramatically from the standard depiction of world regions already employed in geography and other disciplines; with a few important qualifications, we endorse the global architecture that has emerged within the North American academic world. Where we part company from textbook geography is less in cartographic depiction than in conceptual procedure. Our methodological differences with textbook geography can be summed up in three main principles. First, we have avoided defining regions in terms of specific diagnostic traits, focusing instead on historical processes. Second, we have ignored both political and ecological boundaries, giving primacy instead to the spatial contours of assemblages of ideas, practices, and social institutions that give human communities their distinction and coherence. Finally, we have tried to conceptualize world regions not only in terms of their internal characteristics, but also in terms of their relations with one another. For one region's identity has often coalesced only in confrontation with another.
This last point deserves underscoring. As Patrick Manning and others have argued, sub-Saharan Africa emerged as a distinct region of the world in good part through the mechanism of the slave trade, an intrinsically interregional operation implicating Europe, the Americas, the North African and Southwest Asia. African unity was later enhanced by the common experiences of colonial rule and anticolonial resistance, and it is maintained today in part by the common yoke of global financial institutions. Southeast Asia, similarly, has coalesced in part through confrontations with the historically expansive civilizations of the Eurasian mainland. And it is emerging as a more coherent region today in part because the majority of its member states are developing a common pattern of economic relationships with East Asia, Europe, and North America. Now more than ever, relational issues are crucial to macroregional identity.
So long as these methodological points are addressed, we believe that the world regional paradigm can be reformed and should be retained. But a number of caveats are still in order. First, as we have insisted throughout this critique, any scheme of global geographical division is only a rough approximation, a convenient but crude device for making sense of particular patterns of human life. World regions are better approximations for most purposes than continents or civilizations, but they are no more naturally given. Second, we would emphasize that this scheme has evolved essentially as a pedagogical tool: a vehicle for talking and teaching about basic global patterns of sociocultural geography at the college level. We claim no authority for it beyond those uses. Third, we would note that while our map by necessity shows seemingly rigid boundaries separating world regions, many of those boundary zones themselves function almost like hybrid regions in their own right. Finally, we would ask the reader to see this scheme, like all similar efforts, as but one contribution to an ongoing dialogue. Our purpose is not to settle the many delicate issues of metageography, but to advance the discussion of those issues.
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