The Dictionary of Human Geography by Michael Watts

now ?sought to lay out the concep tual foundations of a new discipline human geography' (Livingstone, 1992, p. 198). Its central statement was in the two volumes of his Anthropogeographie, published in 1882 and 1891, the first subtitled ?Geography?s applica tion to history' and the second ?The geograph ical distribution of mankind'. These volumes have to be placed in the context of the contemporary debates within the German intellectual community over the place of the cultural sciences and their relation to the nat ural sciences (Smith, 1991). Ratzel's achieve ment was to put ?the human' back into gEographY: in his view, the discipline could not be assimilated to the natural sciences but, on the contrary, had to explore the reciprocal relations between ?culture? and ?nature?. It also had to set those relations in motion by recognizing the dynamics of spatial formations (notably diffusion and Migration). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Ratzel?s project was thus not environmen tal determinism, as some commentators have suggested, but it was distinguished by the attempt to elaborate a series of nominally scientific concepts whose significance extended beyond the formalization of an aca demic discipline. For Ratzel, writing in the middle of what Bassin (1987c) describes as an ?imperialist frenzy', the development of a state could not be separated from its spatial growth. Natter (2005) is thus surely right to say that Ratzel's Anthropogeographie ?bleeds into? his Politische Geographie, published in 1897. Indeed, Ratzel himself saw Anthropogeo graphie as only a preliminary stage in the foundation of ?the science of poLmcaL geog raphy?. In his Politische Geographie, Ratzel ac cordingly described the state as ?a living body which has extended itself over a part of the Earth and has differentiated itself from other bodies which have similarly expanded?. The object of these extensions and expansions was always ?the conquest of space?, and it was this that became formalized in the concept of lEbEnsRaum (?living space?): ?the geograph ical area within which living organisms de velop?. Ratzel was keenly aware of the dangers of organicism, but even so insisted that: ?Just as the struggle for existence in the plant and animal world always centres about a matter of space, so the conflicts of nations are in great part only struggles for tERRitORy? (see also geopolitics). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Wanklyn (1961) treats Lebensraum as ?a fun damental geographical concept', and in her eyes Ratzel's writings were directed primarily towards ?thinking out the scope and content of biogeography'. This is to understand bio geography in a highly particular way, but there is a more general tradition of biogeographical reflection within human geography that sug gests affinities between Ratzel's Lebensraum, Paul Vidal de la Blache?s genre de vie and the concept of rum (?room?) developed in Torsten Hagerstrand?s tiMe geography. If these affin ities are recognized, then Dickinson?s (1969) view of Ratzel's original formulation, stripped of its subsequent distortions by the Third Reich, as ?one of the most original and fruitful of all concepts in modern geography', becomes peculiarly prescient. But such a purely ?scientific' reading does scant justice to the context in which Ratzel was working and, in particular, ignores the fact that his vision of human geography not only had political implications but also rested on and indeed was made possible by a series of pol itical assumptions (Bassin, 1987b). Crucially, Farinelli (2000, p. 951) insists that through Ratzel's reformulations ?the state takes posses sion of geography, and becomes its supreme object'. dg (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Farinelli (2000); Natter (2005). (NEW PARAGRAPH)

anti-development
A body of work and practice that is fundamentally opposed to mainstream conceptions of dEVELOPMENt. Standard accounts of development assume that people's lives will be improved to the extent that they are linked to