(Un)Making Human Geography in Turkey under the Dominance of Environmental Determinism

The environmental determinism is still being debated for more than a century among both geographers and nongeographers. In recent years, a new type of environmental determinist thinking so-called 'neo-environmental determinism' has emerged in the discipline of geography. However, in this paper our aim is not to advance neo-environmentalist debate in geography, but to show how early twentieth-century versions of environmental determinism still alive and thriving in a number of ways in current Turkish human geography. While environmental determinism was abandoned in the western geography, namely Anglo-American countries, between 1920s and 1950s, it continues to be practiced as dominant approach in Turkish human geography. Indeed, starting from the 1960's Turkish geography has been alienated from modern western geography both in terms of philosophical approaches and methodological practice. In the last 50 years, although the discipline of geography in the west has experienced significant developments and paradigm shifts, unfortunately the same level of success has not been reflected in Turkish geography. In this context, using data based on content analysis of the articles, books and PhD dissertations published by Turkish geographers over time, this paper seeks to answers two questions: (1) By whom and in which way has the environmental deterministic thought been transferred to Turkish geography and what were the consequences of this transfer? (2) How and why were Turkish human geographers able to keep up with approach of environmental determinism so long time? This paper provides a critical reflection on historical development and practice of human geography in Turkey. The paper show that, apart from Anglo-American geography, Turkish human geography has developed very unique disciplinary context by ignoring both quantitative revolution in the 1950s and 1960s and post-positivist transformations from 1970s onwards and thus reproduced its environmental deterministic approach and regional geography method until now and in this way the sub-discipline represents very anachronistic example in terms of history and philosophy of geography. Our findings suggest that the direction of causality in geographic research at the framework of human–environment interactions in Turkey have always been from the environment to humans. Humans and its culture and activities have always remained on the back, passive and weak. Overall result of this situation has led to distort the reality in the favor of the nature and to fall into an anachronic position in the face of other disciplines when they analyze the social, political and economic issues as geographers due to their inability to save themselves from the domination of nature and physical factors. As a result, it is very clear that the mild environmental determinism, mostly in the form of possibilism, is the hidden philosophy or paradigm of Turkish human geography. In other words, Turkish human geography -although recently new methods and approaches are emerging but still in its infancy stageis fundamentally and strongly characterized by a methodologically “regional” and philosophically “mild environmental determinist” subdiscipline.