Géographicité,material agency and the thickness of the Earth: rediscovering Eric Dardel beyond ‘nature/culture’ dualisms

From Naturphilosophie to the ‘material turn’

Thanks to his familiarity with both French and German philosophical traditions, Dardel assimilated ideas of human-nature consubstantiality from German Naturphilosophie that had been quite common among 19th century’s geographers as an alternative to Kantianism. ²⁵ This tradition was later overtaken by modernistic and positivistic ideas of human supremacy and primacy of ‘culture’ over ‘nature’, implying what David Livingstone defines a ‘chasm between world and mind’. ²⁶ According to Chenxi Tang, Naturphilosophie strongly impacted geography when ‘the followers of [Friedrich] Schelling’s Naturphilosophie, Humboldt and Ritter [launched] modern human geography addressing the complex ways in which a human being is shaped by terrestrial nature’. ²⁷ Applying Spinoza’s notion of ‘system of forces’ to human-nature relations, Naturphilosophie thinkers concluded to ‘an unbroken continuity between terrestrial nature and human culture’ ²⁸ and consequently ‘the unity of subject and object’. ²⁹ These concepts exerted a strong influence on French-speaking geography ³⁰ and were famously relaunched by Elisée Reclus. ³¹

Now, some geographers claim for the rediscovery of authors such as Humboldt, Reclus and Kropotkin as inspirers of critical Anthropocene debates questioning human supremacy, by arguing that these debates: ‘Build on insights posed by geographers of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: unity of nature, humans as nature made conscious, humans as nature’s conscience’. ³² This means exactly that current questionings of human-nature dualisms and claims for material agency were variously predated by these critical geographical traditions. As for Dardel, the title of his most famous book was an explicit tribute to Reclus’s L’Homme et la Terre (1905), where ideas on consubstantiality of ‘humankind’ and ‘nature’ were developed since the famous exergue in which Reclus stated that humankind is: ‘Nature becoming conscious of itself’. ³³ Dardel’s idea of knowledge included both the emotional and rational spheres, starting from ‘enchantment’, ³⁴ eventually a component of what Claudio Minca calls the ‘bargain’ of Humboldt’s idea of landscape, providing a liminal space between modernistic rationality and epistemologies in which the subject is immersed in the world. ³⁵ Thus, intellectual tools for questioning dualisms were already available in Dardel’s intellectual genealogies, including theories such as Naturphilosophie that need to be rediscovered.

Recent scholarship investigating the geographies of material worlds seems to be not so far from Naturphilosophie concerns. Among others, Engelmann and McCormack discuss the interdisciplinary interest for the ‘elements’, including (material and metaphorical) ‘atmospheres’ as notions that question traditional Western philosophies by highlighting ‘the transformative agency of anthropogenic activity in relation to the composition of the Earth’ as well as ‘the limits of this agency’ ³⁶ . These authors argue that: ‘Worlds are formed from multiple associations between and attachments across humans and non-humans [which] allows us to avoid privileging either of the latter two terms’. ³⁷ Thus, elements plurally interact with (human and non-human) living beings within milieus that are ‘layered with culture, society and politics in ways that make those milieus “intra-active, naturalcultural” phenomena’ ³⁸ in terms of relational ontologies.

Furthermore, Dardel’s ideas of living geology and human-nature consubstantiality can foster dialogues with current notions of affect that include non-human agency. ³⁹ In Dardel’s work, living earthily forces exert multiple effects on humans, who are often described as: ‘Taken by the world . . . expressing their terror and astonishment [as] it is the world which . . . has the initiative’. ⁴⁰ Humans can exert voluntary agency but can also be ‘disoriented’ ⁴¹ and overwhelmed by these forces. While this recalls elements of Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy as recently discussed by Brazilian scholarship, ⁴² notions of more-than-emotional effects of material conditions plurally speak to ideas of affect that are discussed in post-phenomenological and NRT (non-representational-theory) scholarship.

According to Nigel Thrift, affect does not have a stable definition as ‘it can mean a lot of different things’, ⁴³ being open for a plurality of potential connections. Yet: ‘In a Spinozan interpretation [affect] refers to complex, self-referential states of being, rather than to their cultural interpretation as emotions’. ⁴⁴ Thus, affect is something more than mere relationality, as noted by Ben Anderson and Paul Harrison arguing that: ‘The social is affective and it is often through affect that relations are interrupted, changed or solidified’. ⁴⁵ This includes both emotional and material conditions. ⁴⁶ As Anderson discusses in several papers and in a book dedicated to this concept, ⁴⁷ affect understood as embodied and relational ‘affecting’ takes place ‘alongside processes of expression and qualification that construct space-times of experience’. ⁴⁸ In these spaces, contrasted experiences of hopeful human agency (recalling Dardel’s narratives of ‘hopeful’ humans dealing with earthily forces) interact with spaced and timed feelings that are affected by processes resulting ‘in the disclosure of space-time as a sphere of heterogeneities and pluralities’ ⁴⁹ in the frame of the multiple possibilities that are opened up by unpredictable relational encounters.

McCormack discusses relations between ANT and affect to address interactions that are not limited to feelings but are expressed by materialities and embodiments. McCormack argues that the issue is not to define how much there is of human or nonhuman in an event, but to think ‘about the human as a fragile achievement sustained by all kinds of circumstantial encounters, relations and forces’. ⁵⁰ While the fragility of the individual facing the impressiveness of the world is a notion that was quite familiar to Dardel, McCormack stresses how ANT can contribute to merge different approaches reconsidering human agency. In Dardel’s geography, elements such as air and water are considered as constitutive of ‘geographical space’, being both matter and dynamic agents that plurally affect living beings. Thus, variously applying to both feelings and materialities, affect can contribute to the agenda of connecting phenomenological and post-phenomenological approaches. As I discuss in the next section, this agenda should not neglect precedents such as Dardel.

Reengaging phenomenology and post-phenomenology

Dardel’s ideas of ‘lived history as concrete presence in the world’ ⁵¹ or ‘lived space’ were generally equated to Heideggerian phenomenological notions of ‘being-in-the-world’. Yet, one can claim that Dardel’s notions such as géographicité and espace géographique cannot be limited to mere phenomenological concerns with human subjectivity and perception as conceived by most humanistic geographers. First inspired by philosophers such as Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, phenomenology is a complex field whose applications to geography are quite contentious, ⁵² and it should be noted that even Dardel did not style himself as a phenomenologist. It can be broadly said that geographers first used phenomenology to emphasise the importance of perception and subjectivity in times of positivist hegemony. Then, after the ‘material turn’ inspired by notions such as socionatures and ANT, authors inspired by post-phenomenology and post-humanism lambasted phenomenology for its excessive emphasis on the centrality of the human subject in the construction of knowledge. In association with non-representational theory and notions such as affect and atmospheres, post-phenomenology and post-humanism emphasised material agency, circumstances and the ‘material situatedness’ ⁵³ of the social sphere, decentring human agency and subjectivity.

Yet, recent scholarship has stressed the continuing links and uncertain frontiers between what is called ‘phenomenology’ and what is called ‘post-phenomenology’, highlighting how the latter still engages with several concepts of the former. ⁵⁴ Thus, the idea that there can be plural relations between humans and material worlds, including decentred agencies, is a potential bridge between these contrasted traditions. Respected authors in post-phenomenological geographies such as James Ash and Paul Simpson mention a possible ‘re-engagement with phenomenology through post-phenomenology’, ⁵⁵ as post-phenomenology does not mean ‘abandoning the key insights of phenomenology’ but rather ‘refiguring and expanding phenomenology’s analytic and conceptual boundaries’. ⁵⁶

Reengagement with phenomenological notions is suggested by recent scholarship addressing empirical cases very close to Dardel’s preoccupations, such as walks and landscapes’ perceptions. Engaging with John Wylie’s works on landscape, ⁵⁷ Lynne Pearce wonders on how there can be any provisional fit ‘between self and world’. ⁵⁸ In my paper, I extend this literature by showing how Dardel’s works contribute to these dialogues by going beyond phenomenology through Naturphilosophie’s relational ideas of ‘humankind’ and ‘nature’, in which the Earth is considered as the only necessary term of any relation as it pre-exists humans. Additionally, Dardel’s ideas of human relations with places should not be confused with conservative notions of dwelling as simple attachment to the native land, because he explicitly defined these relations as ‘love of native soil or sake for disorientation’, ⁵⁹ far from mere statements of centrality and stability of human subjectivity.

Engelmann and McCormack explicitly contend that concepts such as ‘elemental worlds’ originate from ‘phenomenological traditions of thinking’ that were used by geographers before being criticised for their: ‘Inadequacy for dealing with contemporary ecological problems whose scale vastly exceeds human worlds’. ⁶⁰ While these authors use the notion of ‘world’ in post-phenomenological sense, this does not exclude ‘particular modes of anthropocentric affective attachment’. ⁶¹ This entails complex assemblages and entanglements of human and non-human lifeworlds, a concept that belongs in itself to humanistic geographical traditions. ⁶² It can be argued that these debates implicitly recall Dardel’s use of elements such as air, water and land to define ‘geographical spaces’, a category that included ‘material spaces’, ‘telluric space’, ‘aquatic space’ and ‘aerial space’, as I discuss in the next section.

A still neglected book

Opening HT, Dardel famously stated that: ‘Geographical anxiety precedes and brings about objective science. Either love for the native soil or sake for disorientation, quest for sensation of foreign places, a concrete relation is established between man and land, a géographicité as a mode of human existence’. ⁶³ While most commentators emphasised the subjective, intimate and perceptive aspects of géographicité, I would instead highlight the material (and historical) aspects of this relation, that are substantiated by the categories through which Dardel understood the idea of geographical space, strictly associated with that of géographicité. Dardel discussed disorientation (dépaysement) in the context of the historical events that he experienced: ‘In the dark days of 1940, the roads of France saw masses of refugees, who were indifferent to direction, demanding only one thing to the road-flight’. ⁶⁴ More broadly, for Dardel, human perceptions spring from the ‘acknowledgement of the terrestrial reality in its materiality’ marked by feelings of fear or marvel constituting an ‘affective vocabulary’. ⁶⁵

This included ‘influence of climate and relief’, ⁶⁶ although Dardel was far from considering himself as a ‘determinist’. However, Dardel understood geographical space as something more material than metaphysical. Espace géographique did not mean ‘geometrical space . . . which is unique, and has a proper noun’ ⁶⁷ being ‘the abstract space of the geometer’ rather than the space of the geographer. For Dardel, space is: ‘The blue of the sky . . . the emptiness of the desert, space for death; the frozen space of the ice floe . . . even silence or desolation are still a reality of geographical space’. ⁶⁸ Thus, geographical space includes materiality and concreteness before perception, consistently with works in the history of French geography stressing the heterogeneous uses of the definition espace géographique before its positivistic naturalisation in the 1970s. ⁶⁹

Dardel materially classified this space through definitions such as ‘material space’, ‘telluric space’, ‘aquatic space’, ‘aerial space’, ‘constructed space’ and ‘landscape’. While material space defines constraints associated with distance and concrete obstacles to human activity, telluric space crucially defines the ‘thickness’ of the Earth, which is not limited to its ‘surface’: ‘Being matter, it implies a depth, a thickness, a solidity and a plasticity that are not immediately given by the intellect’. ⁷⁰ This ‘intimate materiality’ ⁷¹ of the world is expressed in human terms by the emotion of experiences such as climbing and speleology. There, the solidity of the earth acts, like in the case of mountains which, for Dardel: ‘Favoured freedom’. ⁷²

Likewise, water spaces were defined by Dardel through terms indicating water’s agency. For instance, flowing water are: ‘Movement and life, that derides [geometric] space’ also by ‘singing’. ⁷³ Moreover, the ‘mobile space of the sea’ was defined by Dardel as a protagonist of history that: ‘Brough’ the British and the Dutch overseas; ‘Refused the Empire to Napoleon I’; becomes ‘accomplice of human destinies’; ‘Links peoples and continents’. ⁷⁴ Basically, the materiality and variety of spaces matters a lot to human histories and geographies, while the realm of subjective experience, limited to seize ‘the phenomenon’, ⁷⁵ did not suffice to explain the world. Additionally, the aerial dimension of space made Dardel claim that ‘geographical space is atmosphere’, ⁷⁶ which was both a metaphor, in the sense of the ‘magic atmosphere’ ⁷⁷ and a statement of acting matter, given that: ‘Aerial space is a carrying space where clouds run, from which the rain falls’, ⁷⁸ matching McCormack’s definition of atmosphere as metaphor and materiality.

Moreover, one of the geographical notions that are most directly associated to subjective perception, that is landscape, was deemed by Dardel as something that ‘is not made to be watched, being man’s insertion in the world . . . the place of a struggle’. ⁷⁹ In this struggle, the Earth acts as a factor that awakens and shatters human consciousness. Coming ‘before all objectivation, it meddles with all kind of [human] awareness’. ⁸⁰ It creates the ‘circumstances’ ⁸¹ in which human life unfolds, and yet resists all human attempts to dominate it, metaphorically and materially. For Dardel: ‘It is from the Earth understood as chthonian depth that we grab stones. But the terrestrial element of stones resists our efforts to penetrate its nature . . . Whenever we want to reduce geography to pure, objective knowledge, the properly terrestrial elements of earth disappear’. ⁸² It is therefore in the mutual permeation of the subject and the object that we should understand Dardel’s géographicité.

In the second part of HT, dedicated to the history of geography, Dardel criticised positivism and linear progress. ‘Mythical geography’ was the first case addressed, not as the first step in chronological sense, but as a qualitative attribute of geographical reflection. As I further detail below, mythical geography accounts first for the chthonian aspects of the Earth: ‘Grounding the cults of chthonian divinities, there is the feeling that the Earth is living and vivifying’ and exerts a ‘universal maternal function’. ⁸³ While ideas of Mother Earth are variously rediscovered by decolonial scholarship in association with notions such as the Pachamama, ⁸⁴ it was based on the etymologic kinship of humus and humanus that Dardel discussed the: ‘Mutual and ceaseless exchange between man and Earth’. ⁸⁵

The further historical steps highlighted by Dardel were Géographie de plein-vent, roughly translatable as ‘fieldwork-based geography’, and ‘scientific geography’, which Dardel criticised by arguing for the need of considering ‘life’ beyond a ‘short-sighted positivism’. ⁸⁶ Dardel carefully avoided discarding French geographical traditions, presenting his ideas as standing in continuity, rather than in opposition, with heterogeneous ‘noble ancestors’ such as Reclus and Vidal de la Blache. Yet, he proposed clear theoretical challenges to the traditional disregard for theory of the post-Vidalians, ⁸⁷ innovatively contending that ‘objectivity is not a guarantee of truth’ ⁸⁸ and that one cannot ‘eliminate the standpoint’ ⁸⁹ of the observer.

A point that was overlooked by most commentators is Dardel’s insistence on the social and ecological evils that human action can entail in ‘completely disfiguring the natural aspect of a region for interested aims’. ⁹⁰ In this vein, Dardel blamed humankind’s attitudes to ‘dispose of the Earth as an absolute master’. ⁹¹ Importantly, Dardel attributed these social and environmental evils to a main responsible: the colonial ‘West’, which ‘busies itself in submitting all the Earth to its power through science and industry’. ⁹² Finally, what Dardel’s geography challenged was the ‘indifference and distance of scholarly geography’. ⁹³ As there is an ‘intimacy’ between humankind and earth, one must be aware that geographers are not external to studied realities and should interact with these, as I discuss below.

A too ephemeral rediscovery

HT was published in 1952 without leaving any visible trace in French-speaking geographical debates of the following three decades. As Labaste and Pinchemel note, HT: ‘Did not attract the attention of the French geographical community at all; no book review of it was published – sad example of blindness’. ⁹⁴ Amazingly, it was in Anglo-American circuits that Dardel’s work was literally discovered by geographers in the 1970s. This discovery occurred in the intellectual context of ‘humanistic geographies’, which are generally known for having challenged positivism and the ‘quantitative’ hegemony over Anglo-American geography. Indeed, the theoretical and methodological innovations that authors like Buttimer, Tuan, Relph, Seamon and others provided to later developments in cultural geographies and plural critiques of positivistic modernities are still valued. ⁹⁵

One of the most representative ‘humanistic geographers’, Buttimer, recollected how: ‘It was from the rediscovery of writers such as Marsh, Vidal de la Blache, Braudel, Wright, and Dardel . . . that much of the enthusiasm for a “humanistic” movement emerged in the 1960s and 1970s’. ⁹⁶ While Buttimer’s (mostly) phenomenological and existentialistic inspiration is undeniable, it is intriguing to note how she paid substantial tribute to figures such as George Perkins-Marsh and Paul Vidal de la Blache, whose approaches to geography were clearly more naturalistic than phenomenological. For the Irish geographer, the research lines that Dardel and the French School inspired were: ‘Sense of place, regional personality, landscape morpho-genesis, and bioecology’. ⁹⁷ As noted above, Dardel did not discard completely Vidalian legacies, recognising for instance Vidal’s notions of genre de vie as a basis for engaging with geographical materialities. Thus, Buttimer’s references were far from being limited to subjectivity and Heideggerian being-in-the-world, which confirms the attempts to bridge humanistic and neo/post-humanistic approaches mentioned above, ⁹⁸ as well as philosophical scholarship stressing how Heidegger did not neglect spatial materialities. ⁹⁹

Unlike Buttimer, another important inspirer of the ‘humanistic’ movement, Tuan, seemed to consider Dardel’s work as mainly inserted in the line of ‘the study of people’s spatial feeling and ideas in the stream of experience . . . through sensation (feeling) perception’. ¹⁰⁰ Yet, the Anglophone geographer who most engaged with Dardel’s work was Relph. Explicitly adopting a phenomenological conceptual framework, Relph defined HT as: ‘The most complete investigation of the direct experiences of the world that underlie geography’ based on the assumption that ‘geographical reality is first of all the place where someone is’. ¹⁰¹ Relph’s emphasis was undeniably placed on human subjects, given that he considered geographical space as ‘man’s awareness of the world, his experiences and intentional links with the environment, [that is] full of significance for people’. ¹⁰²

Some years later, John Pickles ‘trenchantly criticized’ ¹⁰³ what he deemed a too superficial approach to phenomenology by most ‘humanistic’ geographers. For Pickles, Dardel did not provide any pregiven framework of human geographical experience and did not exclusively focus on subjectivity: ‘Geographical science presupposes not a geographical world, but a world that can be understood or constituted geographically’. ¹⁰⁴ Therefore, Pickles suggests to go further in considering the complexity of Dardel’s approaches. In this paper, I advance in this direction by arguing that Dardel’s concept of human ‘geographical experience’ should not be understood as an (almost Kantian) apriorism, but rather as a relational notion, where the human subject is always confronted with a world that constantly acts and affects humans.

Moving to the French-speaking reception of Dardel’s work, it is noteworthy that its earliest and most famous protagonist, Claude Raffestin, was the inspirer of a deep renovation in the narrow (regional, descriptive and positivistic) theoretical frameworks of Francophone geography by introducing critical stances from the set of theories that is broadly known as poststructuralism. ¹⁰⁵ In 1987, Raffestin published a provocative paper titled ‘Why didn’t we read Dardel?’, which sounded like a self-criticism on behalf of the community of French-speaking geographers, who did not notice at all the potentialities of Dardel’s work until the 1980s. According to Raffestin, this was due first to the fact that ‘Dardel was a paradigm ahead of his contemporaries’, ¹⁰⁶ being a forerunner of the ‘tendencies that, right or wrong, are defined as humanistic and phenomenological’. ¹⁰⁷ Second, the incipient quantitative tendencies that came to France from North-America and Germany since the 1960s–1970s, ¹⁰⁸ ‘started to fascinate [Raffestin’s] generation, even more as that new geography allowed us making revolution against our elders, among whom we would have classified Dardel without any hesitation’. ¹⁰⁹

Thus, for Raffestin, the early (critical) practitioners of quantitative approaches in geography were ‘sunk in a too rigid and heavy functionalism’ to can see the core of Dardel’s message that: ‘The object of geography is a relation rather than the Earth’. ¹¹⁰ Furthermore, Raffestin noted that Dardel’s ideas were nourished ‘by the conceptions of the Naturphilosophen, which the positivists of the nineteenth century strongly disliked’, ¹¹¹ in his understanding geographical phenomena in relational ways. This relationality was inspired by (Schellingian) Carl Ritter’s ideas that geographical thought is built around terms that are not opposed to each other, but mutually constitutive such as history and geography, humankind and nature, horizontal [cartographic] dimension and vertical [geologic/geo-gnostic] dimension. ¹¹² Raffestin especially highlighted Dardel’s idea of the Earth’s ‘depth’ that, in Ritter-like terms, ‘allows Dardel introducing his telluric space, which grounds the “thickness” and “solidity” of geographical space . . . Could we expect a more . . . effective definition of an ecological conception of our relation to the Earth?’. ¹¹³ For Raffestin, it was already clear that Dardel was far from neglecting the importance of the world’s materialities and their implications.

However, the most important notion that Raffestin took and popularised from HT was géographicité, as a response to geography’s ‘lack of ontology’. ¹¹⁴ Interestingly, for Raffestin, the idea of géographicité allowed challenging the ‘tyranny of the visual’, ¹¹⁵ that is the pre-eminence of mappings and visual representations in geography, recalling the critique of flat maps by Ritter and Reclus. ¹¹⁶ Raffestin understood that this was the occasion to build ‘a theory of the real, in geography . . . rooted in an intellectual model that is historicity’. ¹¹⁷ To Raffestin, diverse authors such as: ‘Ritter, Ratzel and Reclus had a very clear idea of this géographicité that fills their works’. ¹¹⁸ While this genealogy speaks clear in terms of Naturphilosophie, the key point in the relational nature of géographicité, for Raffestin, was exactly that it questioned the traditional hierarchy of subject and object. According to Raffestin, Dardel’s idea of human-Earth relation should not be expressed in terms of ‘Me and That’, but in terms of ‘Me and You’: ‘The original expression “Me-You” grounds a relational world where géographicité . . . is a reciprocal relation. This implies a change in the paradigm [to] fully embrace the connivance between man [sic] and Earth’. ¹¹⁹ While Raffestin, in the 1980s, could not be aware of the aforementioned debates on decentring human subjectivity, for sure his arguments anticipate current reassessments of human agency.

In French-speaking milieus, Dardel’s work has exerted a notable influence over cultural geography in Québec since the 1990s as discussed by Mario Bédard. ¹²⁰ In France, a key moment in Dardel’s (re)discovery was the reprinting of HT in 1990, with accompanying essays by Pinchemel and Besse. In particular, Besse noted how this work still stimulated deep reflections on geographical ontologies and epistemologies, following Raffestin in noting that, with géographicité: ‘The human and the terrestrial are not geographically thinkable as separated. Subject and object are mutually inclusive’. ¹²¹ Besse also highlights the idea of ‘geographical space’ as a ‘material space’, ¹²² suggesting again that Dardel’s work should not be reduced to mere matters of perception. However, neither Raffestin nor Besse fully develop this discussion, while Chollier’s and Waddell’s introduction to the 2014 anthology does not add substantially to former humanistic readings of Dardel. ¹²³

Other French-speaking scholars have mentioned Dardel’s géographicité, although without engaging directly with Dardel’s work. It was the case with Augustin Berque, who mentions Dardel among his possible inspirers as for ‘mediance’ (associated to Berque’s ideas of ‘milieu’ and ‘mesology’). Yet, he admits that, on this notion, he was rather inspired by Japanese Watsuji Tetsurô because, during his first reading of HT, Berque had the feeling that Dardel’s work ‘was more literature than geography’. ¹²⁴ It is also the case with Réné Blais, who considers Dardel, alongside Berque and Raffestin, as a possible inspirer for the refoundation of geography’s ‘relational ontology’, ¹²⁵ without engaging directly with HT.

HT had Italian (1986) and Brazilian (2015) translations. The Brazilian book is based on the French 1990 edition, including translations of Besse’s and Pinchemel’s essays and further comments by Werther Holzer and Eduardo Marandola Jr that do not add much to the Anglophone and Francophone commentaries mentioned above. ¹²⁶ Conversely, the Italian edition had a significant impact on Francophone Dardelian literatures also thanks to the editorial work of Clara Copeta. For instance, Raffestin’s paper ‘Why didn’t we read Dardel’ was firstly published in this book and later translated into French for the Cahiers de Géographie du Québec. The book edited by Copeta, who considered that she owed her disciplinary positioning as a geographer to her encounter with Dardel, had the function of agglutinating a transnational circuit of geographers from Italy, Switzerland, France and Ireland whose members would have played important roles in fostering cultural, historical and broadly non-positivistic approaches to geography in the respective countries. ¹²⁷ In the next section, I extend all these rich insights to understand further openings of Dardel’s ideas of intersection between history, geography and myth.