Using storytelling from his experiences with the Western Apache, Keith Basso elaborates the notion that “wisdom sits in places,” that is, the way in which social and cultural knowledge and guidance—wisdom—is based on experience. Because experience occurs in places, landscapes (and their stories and place names) can come to encode social and cultural knowledge. This notion of geography as philosophy would not have been foreign to the ancient Greeks to whom the discipline is often traced, but geography today, with some notable exceptions, is only slowly returning to the quest for wisdom. As an academic discipline, geography must struggle against the limitations of the larger (post)modern episteme within which it is situated. A genuine engagement with Indigenous geography may open a pathway out of this fix.
What I call “modern geography”—meaning the Anglophone geography that has emerged during the past two centuries with influence from France and Germany—grew as both a tool and a product of the colonial era. The discipline helped map out the civilized and the uncivilized and the place of each in a world of empires. Its scholars at times justified territorial expansion with hints at world domination, laid out “scientific” justifications for racial inequality, or provided the technical tools and know-how for conquest and colonial rule. In the process, Western notions of geography—of space, time, and human- environment relations—were imposed on the rest of the world. The hegemonic power of the resulting modernist worldview continues to perpetuate in part through its intimate relationship with global capitalism. It is important to bear in mind that what is now held forth as a “rational” worldview has its roots in a European culture war—the Reformation. Although this worldview is accepted as common sense today, it embodies a distinct ideology that enabled the colonization of the world and the commodification of nature.
