The myth of continents

This is the kind of bullshit geographical essentialism that irritates me:

“As the Argentine drums beat a rhythmic pulse, as the Nigerians’ horns subsided into forlorn bleats, there was no question of South American superiority over African determination.”---NYTs June 13, 2010.

I hate that crap, especially because I have to spend hours and hours trying to unwind the environmental determinism and ethnocentrism that my college freshmen generally bring with them to class.(1)

It’s not their fault--- it is what they’ve been taught. US students in the 21st century rarely receive a geographical education. What’s worse than the ignorance is that when geography is taught, it is often taught ‘wrong.’ Martin Lewis and Karen Wigen (2) argue in ‘The Myth of Continents’ that a ‘continental framework’ guides the US curriculum and produces geographic knowledge based on environmental determinism, which is the belief that social and cultural differences between human groups can ultimately be traced to differences in their physical environment.

The ‘myth’ that the world is organized in discreet, separate land masses (continents) underscores the corresponding erroneous belief that cultures and peoples are also bounded, fixed to and determined by static territories. The “myth of continents” guides much more than our physical notion of the world—it also contributes to “a tendency to let a continental framework structure our perceptions of the human community.” (ibid.)

In pedagogy, the continental system continues to be applied in such a way as to suggest that continents are at once physically and culturally constituted. By that I mean, that natural and human features somehow correspond to space/territory. Lewis and Wigen argue that having been taught that continents are the basic building blocks of global geography, students slide easily into assuming that the configuration of landmasses must correspond to the formation of cultural traits and social forms. It’s as if the continent itself imparts an essence to its human inhabitants.

Our notion that the world is made up of physical entities, neatly and logically separated from each other by water, transfers into a belief that cultures are separated from each other by place. For centuries (as Lewis and Wigen demonstrate) scholars have debated the logic of defining two, three, four, five or seven continents---there is very little coherence to any of the formulations. Even more importantly, in the 21st century, migration (of people, capital and ideas) is so intense that there are all sorts of people ---and ideas and cultural practices, not to mention circuits of capital---everywhere.

So: why is our thinking of geography and culture so far off the mark? Why do we insist of speaking of teams as if their ‘continent’ has anything to do with how they play?

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1) I apologize for the generalization. I’m aware that I am speaking in broad strokes and I’m failing to account for the exceptions, indeed, the truly exceptional students who speak three languages, travel abroad for study and work, and actively and critically examine their local and global environments. I’m generalizing based on the some 3,000 students I have taught in my career as a university professor, but it is deliberately general to make a broad claim about meta-geographies.
2) Lewis, Martin W. and Karen E. Wigen. 1997. The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography, University of California Press: Berkeley.