Fragment de la introducció a What is Geography?
Introduction
We are all explorers. Even as tiny children we search out the limits of our world. A few years on, our imagination stretches further: fin- gers batting at a giddy plástic globe ... a spinning top, gaudy with colour, representing perhaps the most ambitious idea possible, the world.
Geography is a fundamental fascination. It is also a core compo- nent of a good education. Yet a lot of people are not too sure what it is. They stumble over the question ‘What is geography?’ Perhaps they are worried by the scale and the implications of the obvious answer. For geography is about the world. To study geography is to study the world, both near and far.
This book introduces geography as one of humanity’s big ideas. Geography is not just another academic specialism. Indeed, in an age when knowledge is fragmented into thousands of disciplines, geogra¬phy can seem like a throwback. Its horizons are just too wide. After examining the way geology, climatology, ecology, environmental Science and a number of human Sciences evolved from geography, the historian Peter Bowler suggests that ‘Geography is a classic example of a subject that can disappear as a sepárate entity, each of its functions siphoned off by a new specialisation’.
But geography has not disappeared. Over the last 100 years its death has been predicted, even announced, many times. But it refuses to die. It seems that the desire for splintering the world into a kaleido- scope of intellectual shards also has its limits. More than this: that cer- tain forms of knowledge familiar to people thousands of years ago (for geography is no spring chicken) still mean something to people today. Indeed, the need for world knowledge - for environmental knowledge, for international knowledge, for knowledge of the places and people beyond the parochial patch called home - could hardly be more pressing, more contemporary.
A: What is Geography?, Alastair Bonnett. https://books.google.es/books?id=G_491U8PQFEC. SAGE Publications
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