Human Geography Nature And Scope

Geography is an integrative, empirical, and practical field of study. It focuses on the inter-relationship between humans and their environment and is subjected to dualism and the wide-ranging debates as to whether the discipline should be more of theorising or descriptive. Even with the development of technologies, especially communication and transport that cut across geography, the discipline of geography has remained relevant.

Ancient epics are more focused on the storyline than the geography of any place, and often is exaggerated beyond any scientific use.

Human beings interact with their physical environment with the help of technology, which indicates the level of cultural development of society. Human’s use technology to understand the working of nature, and in turn technology loosens the shackles of the environment on human beings.

Quantitative revolution is not an approach in human geography, rather a broad feature in its evolution.

Human geography is a sub-field of geography along with physical geography. Human geography studies the inter-relationship between the physical environment and sociocultural environment created by human beings through mutual interaction with each other.

The sub-fields of human geography are: -

a) Behavioural Geography

b) Geography of Social Well-being

c) Geography of Leisure

d) Cultural Geography

e) Gender Geography

f) Historical Geography

g) Medical Geography

h) Urban Geography

i) Electoral Geography

j) Military Geography

k) Population Geography

l) Settlement Geography

m) Geography of Resources

n) Geography of Agriculture

o) Geography of Industries

p) Geography of Marketing

q) Geography of Tourism

r) Geography of International Trade

Human geography deals with the interaction of human beings with the environment. Since no human action can possibly be viewed in isolation, the discipline of human geography, inevitably, had to establish close interlinks, and often overlaps, with other sister disciplines of social sciences.

Naturalisation of humans refers to the human condition when human actions were dictated by nature. It is also called as ‘environmental determinism’. In the early, or rather primitive, stages of very low technological development, humans – who were unable to understand the forces of nature - were afraid of nature’s fury and worshipped it. They lived their lives in complete harmony with their natural environment, and viewed nature as a powerful force, revered and conserved it. They directly dependent on nature for resources to sustain themselves. For such societies, the physical environment becomes the “Mother Nature”.

But over time, humans began to understand the forces of nature with the help of advanced technology. They began to move from a state of necessity to a state of freedom, and began to create new possibilities with the resources obtained from the environment. The imprints of human activities are now created everywhere. Slowly, nature is being humanised or it is already.

Human geography is a subset of Geography. It concerns itself with the relationship between the physical/natural and the human worlds, the spatial distributions of human phenomena and how they came about, the social and economic differences between different parts of the world. The objective is to understand the earth as the home of human beings and to study all those elements which have sustained them. Ellen C. Semple gave an interesting definition is, “Human geography is the study of the changing relationship between the unresting man and the unstable earth.” The relation is, thus, dynamic – it changes/evolves with time. Early humans lived in close harmony with nature, as they were frightened with the forces of nature – which they could not understand. Over centuries, these very same humans developed technologies that enabled them to gain knowledge of nature. Soon, technology outstripped with nature. If humans were ‘naturalised’ earlier, now nature was ‘humanised’.