Geography and Social Science

Abstract

We began the last chapter with the analysis of the unsophisticated — fused societal conception of space in the primitive world and we ended discussing the dilemmas of the relationship between the unsophisticated — fused and the sophisticated — fragmented conceptions which characterise nation states. Chapter 7 has brought us full circle in our conceptual surface. We have returned to the original problem of describing and reconciling different views of space but this time from the perspective of the group. Space is experienced from all of these views but modern man is often at a loss to know which one applies in which context and what are the significant interconnections among them because activities have become so very complex and knowledge so very compartmentalised that the relationships between space and substance, between subjectivity and objectivity, have been both practically and conceptually severed. It is no longer clear what are the geographic consequences of our actions. Even a science of human behaviour has not always been seen to deal with the relationship between space and substance as it would necessarily have to if it were indeed a science. The few efforts to study the concept of space for human behaviour mainly have explored space only within the narrow confines of practical behaviour in a Western context.