Geography as Journey and Homecoming

Benjamin Major

Keywords: Journey, homecoming, education, conversation, wonder,

From the famed voyage of Odysseus, through the pioneering expeditions of Alexander von Humboldt, to
the celebrated travels undertaken by Michael Palin in contemporary times, the trope of the journey has
held a particularly prominent place in the popular geographical imagination. One notable feature of all
the journeys just mentioned is that they all inevitably result in a homecoming; the traveller, after their
many trials and tribulations, returns to a home. In the case of longer journeys it is quite possible that this
home may have altered physically and visibly. However, what is more certain is that the traveller’s
perception and understanding of that home has shifted in accordance with the wider world through
which they have travelled. That is, they see their home with new and more complex lenses. It is
important to note that we do not have to literally travel to the ‘ends of the earth’ ourselves to gain this
fuller understanding. In this article I wish to show how learning in general and learning geography in
particular is both about a journey and a homecoming. The journey begins with wonder and curiosity at
the everyday world that surrounds us, continues as we engage and converse with the subject matter of
geography and ends in a homecoming in which the world seems revitalized, and more intricate, than
before. I then go on to consider more closely the trope of home in geography and geography education,
taking in romanticism and post-modernism along the way, in order to start thinking about how that
long-established notion of geography as the study of “earth as the home of humankind” might help us to
re-visualise a lively and relevant geography curriculum for our times.

Beginning in Wonder

The title of the Geographical Association’s new manifesto, A Different View, is inspired by the statement
made by the educational philosopher, R.S. Peters, that “to be educated is not to have arrived at a
destination, it is to travel with a different view” (Peters, 1965). Thus the idea that the process of
learning can be likened to a journey is by no means a new thought, although it could be argued that
much formal educational practice has laid more emphasis upon the destinations than the pleasures
awakened by the journey itself. But first we must ask; what is it that impels us to embark upon the
journey? Is it not wonder, awe, or just plain old curiosity inspired by the sight, sound, smell, taste, feel or
intuition of something that lies beyond our current sphere of experience, or beyond the ordinary, as it
were? And what do we admit as objects of wonder or curiosity? Do we admit only things of relative
rarity and majesty, like rainbows and waterfalls? According to philosopher Jeff Malpas, in a fascinating
chapter about wonder as the origin of thinking, “the experience of wonder… takes us out of ordinary
involvement with things and makes what is ordinarily questioned, questionable, makes what ordinarily
seems familiar, strange.” (Malpas, 2006: 289). Without the feeling of wonder to goad us on, it is unlikely
that we would ever be drawn to question the world and attempt to rethink that which seems most
familiar to us. Speaking of philosophy, Malpas goes on to claim that it

“does not begin in something out of the ordinary, but in the bringing to awareness of the
most ordinary; it does not find its limit in something that transcends our everyday
experience, but in the very ‘being there’ of that experience; it does not find its ‘end’ in a
space or time beyond, but only in this place” (Ibid: 296, my italics)

To my mind, this is a beautiful expression not only of the procedure of philosophy but of
geography when it is taught well and with relevance. Though travelers’ tales and studies of distant
places undoubtedly continue to have a place in the geography curriculum, this idea that
geography can begin in the ordinary, the very place(s) we find ourselves in, is a very powerful one.
The concept of ‘Living Geography’ (see Mitchell, 2009) captures this idea particularly well; a
geography that begins with the child’s perceptions of their local environment, just as Rousseau so
presciently advocated almost two and a half centuries ago.

However, though we may begin our geographical journeys at the doorstep, we should not stop
them there. There is always a wider world waiting to be discovered and I am not promoting here a
closing off of ourselves to this world. Living Geography is not about glamourising and exalting the
everyday, as though the local was a blameless, innocent counterpart to the global, rather it is
about recognising the everyday as the starting point of all learning and the boarding point for the
journey towards what Morgan (2006) has termed ‘geographical wisdom’. We must neither
disregard lived experience nor deify it. We cannot afford to linger at the boarding point; as the
educationalist Paulo Freire insisted, “Starting with the ‘knowledge of experience had’ in order to
get beyond it is not staying in that knowledge.” (Freire, 2004: 58) This is, of course, where the
subject matter of geography comes into its own. With regards to its interaction with the child’s
lived experience, John Dewey once said of organised subject matter that it ‘represents the ripe
fruitage of experiences like theirs, experiences involving the same world, and powers and needs
similar to theirs.” (Dewey, 2007 [1916): 138) Precisely because of its humanistic and cultural
aspects, its deep rooted insistence on exploring the interrelationships between people and their
environment, geography presents us with an unparalleled field within which this sharing of
experience can take place. This is the ‘conversation’ of geography, a conversation which signals
“students and teachers in a dialogic relationship with knowledge and with each other” (Lambert,
2003: 227) Of course, it is teachers who are the key to initiating and tending this lifelong
conversation, who can make the journey from wonder towards understanding a more endurable
and fulfilling one.

Taking the Journey

Early on in A Different View, we are told that “Geography underpins a lifelong ‘conversation’ about the
earth as the home of humankind.” (GA, 2009: 5) This idea that geography is about earth as the home of
humankind has its roots deep in antiquity. In Traces on the Rhodian Shore, a classic text chronicling the
long history of Western ideas about the interplay between nature and culture, Glacken (1967) explores
how the inherently geographical idea that the earth furnishes a hospitable and indeed, bountiful, home
for humankind has its roots in an age before the study of geography even existed. Indeed, it is quite
remarkable to discover how much intellectual effort was exerted over millennia to demonstrate that the
earth with its utility and beauty was a planned abode for humankind (though there were also many
dissenters to this view). Moreover, I suspect that if geography was somehow to vanish as a discrete
discipline of study, this urge to find and claim a home on earth would not go away. However, the mere
fact of an idea’s ancientness and robustness certainly does not mean that it is immune to reanalysis and
reinterpretation today. After all, the very ideas that Glacken explores have all too often led to an
unremittingly anthropocentric attitude towards earth as a home that has been imparted to man, who
must thus become a master or a steward of that home. In contemporary social theory, the very concept
of home is a contested one, and as such any perception of geography as a study of home must be
considered very carefully. Thus the recognition of the necessity of a ‘conversation’ on the matter is very
much welcomed.

When we embark upon any journey we begin in a place, more often than not, a home-place. This is the
place where we are now, the realm of our lived experience, a place whose horizons are reasonably lucid
to us even though they may well suggest of unchartered territory ahead. Rousseau understood this
aspect of learning when he argued that the starting point of a child’s geography lessons should be the
area immediately surrounding its home (See Tang, 2008: 143). The journey, in contrast, takes us away
from the home-place and away from the familiar and reassuring. Even those unpleasant cases where the
departure is from a home-place of fear or persecution the journey is still a journey into the unknown and
the unfamiliar, a journey that can be painfully hard to make. Unless we aspire to a life of itinerancy most
of us anticipate, at the end of our journeying, either a return to our prior home-place or else we intend
to establish a new home-place. But even in the case of return, does the home-place, once reached,
remain the same even if its physical appearance may be intact? The philosopher Edward Casey explains
here how this might not be the case:

“The home-place I knew then was not the whole, or even the essence of the place to
which I now return. The movement of such a journey of departure and homecoming is
from part to whole and back to part. But the second ‘part’ is a part that directly reflects
the whole, for now I know my home in the light of the larger place-world through which I
have travelled. Had I remained at home and not left, I would never have come to see it in
such a different and more complete light. The longest way around is the shortest way
home.” (Casey, 1993: 294)

If this is the case for our tangible journeys in and through the material world, then I conjecture that it is
least as much the case in the metaphorical learning journey that we undertake throughout life. The real
value of a life spent taking such a journey is the development of a capacity to see oneself and one’s
home afresh in the light of the larger whole that one has been given insight into. Of all subjects,
geography is almost certainly the one best placed to enable us to understand the whole of which we,
and the place we call home, are a part. In fact, I would compare the study of geography to both a
journey and a homecoming; the journey begins when we start to reflect on our current place in the
world, and extends and deepens as we voyage through the subject matter of geography and compare
the accumulated experiences of many others, in other places, to our own. Consequently, the place we
come home to is vastly different to that which we left. The paradox of course is that when we learn
geography, the journey never really ends. For although geography, as is often said, may very well be
about “the earth as the home of humankind”, is seems that we never know that world totally or
conclusively. In a sense, we are perpetually engaged in a homecoming. I don’t think this is a ‘problem’ to
be concerned about, but rather is something that should be recognised as a virtue. There remains
always something mysterious and unclassifiable about the earth and it is the very recognition and
acceptance of this fact that may preclude us from seeing ourselves as the masters and sole beneficiaries
of it.

Homecoming

We could say of the study of geography, as the German Romantic philosopher and poet Novalis once
said of philosophy, that it embodies a kind of homesickness; “the urge to be at home everywhere in the
world”. It was observations of an escalating divorce of humans from nature, our original home, which
partly accounted for the emergence of Romanticism at the turn of the nineteenth century. In a recent
study of the rise of the ‘geographical imagination’ in this period, Tang’s (2008) intriguing thesis is that
the origin of modern geography as it arose in the work of Alexander von Humboldt and Carl Ritter can
partly be found in the Naturphilosophie and landscape aesthetics of the early German Romantics. This
rich body of thought provided much inspiration for these early geographical luminaries but most
pertinent for our theme is that in their search for a “deeper, prereflexive unity” the Romantics
“contributed, knowingly or unknowingly, to the making of the modern geographical imagination that
was predicated on the fundamental unity of man and nature.” (Tang, 2008: 12) Although theories of the
close interrelationship between man and the earth can be of course be found much earlier than the
nineteenth century (as Glacken so vividly illustrates), it is arguably only in this period that such theories
moved substantially beyond a rigidly deterministic stance represented in a somewhat encyclopedic
fashion. With the emergence of geographical science, this interrelationship was now seen as altogether
broader and more complex. Indeed, for the most optimistic it suddenly appeared possible to

“understand mental disposition, culture, history, indeed, all aspects of the human world by
explaining the spatial structures and operations of natural forces, which combine to
constitute the dwelling place of humankind – the earth.” (Tang, 2008: 42)

Of course, the notion that we are able to gain a complete and integrated understanding of this dwelling
place and the interrelations between its many parts has fallen out of favour in recent times. As Alastair
Bonnett asserts in his recent monograph written in response to the question ‘What is Geography?’ the
integrative project was always “both a reflection of and a rebellion against the modern age” (Bonnett,
2008: 34). That is, it is a reflection of modernity in terms of its vast scale and ambition but a rebellion in
its refusal to fit into neat academic boundaries. As Bonnett goes on to say, we in the modern age “have
trouble making connections. It is not the modern way. Ours is an era of specialization.” (Ibid: 87) The
postmodern turn, moreover, has witnessed a bleak challenge to the very possibility of achieving
objective knowledge and truth, including knowledge of nature. As Michael Bonnett explains, these
influential views, at their extremes, “claim that there is nothing more to nature than its human
construction; it is simply a cultural artifact.” (Bonnett, 2004: 59) This view clearly undermines the idea
that we can study the earth as a ‘dwelling place’ or ‘home’. In fact, the very presupposition that we have
a home is thrown into doubt; instead we seemed destined for a homelessness and rootlessness in which
all that is solid turns to air. The consequences of postmodernism for geography education have been
pointed out by Standish (2008), who condemns the postmodern turn, arguing that it empties subjects
such as geography of any intellectual or moral basis and opens the gates for a dehumanised and
ultimately illiberal curriculum made up of ‘pet political and social projects’. I tend to sympathise with
Standish’s viewpoint. However, his apparent alternative, a reestablishment in the curriculum of a clear-
cut objective body of knowledge that must be assimilated, is too reactionary to be given serious
consideration. Indeed, I would argue that such a conception of the curriculum is in fact in itself
dehumanising and illiberal.

Ultimately, what the extreme postmodern view neglects in its stark condemnation of absolutes is that
the search to find a home, the homesickness described earlier, has always been precisely a search,
carried out with love, hope and imagination, for harmonious concord in a world that often seems so very
discordant. Despite the unbridled confidence of the age of Enlightenment and the more reserved
optimism of the Romantics, we have never been able to attain a full and complete knowledge of the
world and to thereby feel totally at home on it. As Bonnett concludes, the postmodern assertion that we
cannot know a reality that lies outside of our sensibility is actually otiose; of course “we can only know –
or imagine – anything from within our form of sensibility” (Bonnet, 2004: 59). He continues as follows,

“the issue now becomes a matter not simply of whether there is ‘empirically’ an
independent natural order that has its own properties – for us there manifestly is, this is
simply unavoidably how we experience many aspects of the world – but of the meaning of
this order, the quality of the space in which it presences… the value and the implications for
thought and action that we attach to it, are.” (Ibid: 60)

The urge for an earthly home, and to live in a world that has stability, meaning and value, is, I would
argue, another deeply engrained part of human sensibility. The likelihood that this stability, this
meaning, at least partly originates in the human imagination does not make it any less real to us. Even if
the earth is indifferent and sometimes outright inhospitable to our aims and desires, this has not
prevented people of the past and in the present from living as if the earth was a blessed benefactor. The
prospect of unity, of a harmonious home in nature, serves as a lodestar towards which humanity
infinitely strives. Thus, talk of an earthly home is defensible on these grounds, for how many of us really
wish to be adrift, homeless and rootless? Taking this further, I believe that studying the earth and our
interrelations with it can also bring us to a fuller understanding of ourselves and our place as global
citizens who share this home with each other. There is no other subject on the school timetable that
contains the intellectual resources to bring about this understanding more than geography does, and
this, for me, is where the subject’s inestimable humanising potential comes in. It must be added here
that, contra Standish, it is when learning geography takes the route of questioning, investigating and
enquiring, as opposed to learning by rote, that it comes closest to fulfilling its potentiality for realising
and enhancing our humanity. Although these claims of course need unpacking, examining and
qualifying, it is this tendency of geography to make us appreciate and understand our shared home
which it its greatest contribution to the lives of young people.

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