Documents found
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755.More information
Human geography was born, at the end of 19th century, as a natural science of landscapes and places. Today, it aims at an understanding of the human experience on Earth, deals with representations and has to take values into consideration. Values are produced through a mental process of decentring which opens perspectives on what could or should exist and allows for its comparison with what exists. In the societies with purely oral traditions, the vision of the great beyond from which one can judge the world came from an access by some members to time immemorial of the origins and which were expressed through myths. All societies produce narratives functionally similar to myths in order to build interpretations of their social structures and dynamics and collective or individual destinies. Geographers are only social scientists who are in a position to explain the genesis of values, since it relies on a spatial process of communication. The geographical exploration of values shows that geographers more often base the history of geographic thought they use on oral memory rather than documentary evidence, which means that it is akin to mythical tradition. Societies are based on values. As a consequence, it may be dangerous for geographers to analyse them in the way they deal with landscapes or physical or economic forces, as is shown by the incorrect interpretations they often developed in the early exploration of geopolitics or urbanism. The use of the fashionable techniques of deconstruction opens purely moral perspectives on today's societies: social sciences tend to become exclusively ideological. In order to avoid such a risk, geographers have to develop critical views of modem epistemologies and the idea of 'alternative explanations': the latter are produced by the network structure of modem communication which gives the illusion of enjoying a privileged access to the time immemorial of origins.
Keywords: communication, décentrement, histoire de la géographie, idéologie, idéologies contemporaines, sociétés traditionnelles, tradition orale, mythe, religion, temps, communication, decentring, history of geography, ideology, myth, religion, time, contemporary ideologies, traditional societies, oral tradition
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756.More information
SummaryA double artistic meaning is superimposed on the notion of landscape: invented images and real cultural territories. Adopting horizontality as a visual point of reference, Civilisation by Quebecer Ivan Binet and Cold City Frieze by Iroquois Jeffrey Thomas wander nomadically through this paradigm of identity. The "wanderings" of the postmodern woodsman and the Native in the City work in tandem.
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