Livingstone, Sauer and French Regional Geography Essay

Livingstone, Sauer and French Regional Geography - Essay ExampleLivingstone, initially a missionary, explored Africa during the novel imperial age of exploration opening new paths for European ideals. feeler into close contact with Africas slave trade, he intended to replace the slave trade with Christianity and commerce as carriers of the civilization he felt Africa needed, still he was not successful as a missionary and made numerous geographical errors (Sykes 1996). His miscalculations nearly sacrificed his Zambezi expedition and he judgment he had found the source of the Nile only to realize later that it was the upper Congo (Sykes 1996).Sauer is considered one of the founding fathers of American geography marking the initial detachment of physical geography from human or cultural geography. His predominant concern was the relationship between people and their environment and he stressed the importance of anthropology. Coming from a scientific background, his purpose was a s cientific observation of other traditions and religions. In his presidential address delivered to the Association of American Geographers in 1940, Sauer explains his academic three-point underpinning to the information of geography including the studies of the history of geography, physical geography, and anthropology (Sauer 1997).The main difference between Livingstone and Sauer can be found in anthropology, which stresses the importance of avoiding ethnocentricity. Livingstone, an example of the contrary, considered the Africans wild and described them as humans of a lower form (Crawfurd 2005). Sauer was a follower of human geography feeling human geography... is a science that has nothing to do with individuals but only with human institutions, or cultures (Sauer 1997) and remained interested in how the environment is managed.The design of science that Montesquieu, Herder, and Buckle forecast, failed because we know that natural law does not apply to tender groups We have come to know that environment is a term of cultural appraisal which is itself a value in cultural history (Sauer 1997).