I know you disagree John, but does Brooks really have to regurgitate the scholarship of a field of study that is almost 150 years old? Anthropology predates Sociology, you know. <vbg>
No. I agree with you. If Brooks just wrote a column in which he simply stated something like "he believes that . . ."
The problem appears the minute he claims to be laying out a case for a discipline, cultural geography, and then claims some clearly inappropriate names as the leading lights. My guess is he also scrambled more than a few arguments. But I'm not interested enough to get that deep into Brooks stuff.
But my biggest problem was the mixing of the two arguments. If you are going to make a macro level argument about the role of culture, vis a vis, Weber, then the obvious contemporary counter claims come from Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs, and Steel, or, though I don't know that literature in cultural geography, no doubt there are counter arguments all over the place. There certainly are in sociology.
As for your point about culture and anthropology, spot on. So long as you are talking about cultural anthropology. The physical and economic types are a different story.
Got a bad lawyer joke coming up. Might want to cover your eyes. ;-) |
