Al-Masudi, for example, asserted that in the land like Sham (Syria) where water is abundant, the people are gay and humorous, while the people of dry and arid lands are short-tempered. Al-Battani, Al-Masudi, Ibn-Hauqal, Al-Idrisi, and Ibn-Khaldun attempted to correlate environment with human activities and mode of life. They divided the habitable world into seven kisbwars, or terrestial zones (climate) and highlighted the physical and cultural characteristics of races and nations of these zones. Geographical determinism continued to dominate the writings of the Arab geographers. The people of warm climates are timorous, weak in body, indolent and passive. Montesquieu pointed out that the people in cold climates are stronger physically, more courageous, frank, less suspicious and less cunning than those in the warm climates. Similarly, Strabo-the Roman geographer-attempted to explain how slope, relief, climate all were the works of God, and how these phenomena govern the life-styles of people. Aristotle emphatically attributed the progress of certain nations to their favourable environmental conditions. They contrast the tall, gentle, brave folk of the most windy mountains with the lean, sinewy blonde inhabitants of dry lowlands. The Greek scholars have referred to the easy-going ways of Asiatics living in favourable environmental conditions, while the penurious Europeans had to work hard for a little amelioration of their poor environment. The people of Greece, on the other hand, who occupy ‘the middle position geographically’, he sees as endowed with the finest qualities and thus destined by nature itself to rule over all. Moreover, according to Aristotle, the inhabitants of cold countries are courageous but “lacking in political organization and capacity to rule their neighbours” and also the people of Asia lack courage and so slavery is their natural state. Because humans often judge their own home as the best place, it is not surprising that Aristotle believed that the middle place, combing the best of all possible worlds, was Greece (Glacken, 1967: 93). Aristotle thought that the people inhabiting the warm climates of Asia were intelligent but lacking in spirit and therefore subject to slavery. He argued that the colder climates of Europe produced brave but unintelligent people who were able to maintain their independence but who did not have the capacity to rule others. Aristotle, for example, explained the differences between Northern Europeans and Asians in terms of climatic causes. Strabo referred to similar phenomena when explaining the mighty and greatness of Rome. Thucydides and Xenophon saw Athens’s natural conditions and geographical position as the factors underlying its greatness. In the Greco-Roman period, regional studies were closely bound up with the study of history. They included the physician Hippocrates, the philosopherĪristotle, and the historians Thucydides, Xenophon, and Herodotus. The first attempt to explain the physical features and character traits of various peoples and their culture with reference to the influence of natural conditions was made by the Greek and Roman scholars. In brief, determinists believe that most human activity can be explained as a response to the natural environment. The determinists generally consider man a passive agent on which the physical factors are constantly acting and thus determining his attitude and process of decision making. The essence of the deterministic school of thought is that the history, culture, living style and stage of development of a social group or nation are exclusively or largely governed by the physical factors of environment. In other words, the belief that variation in human behaviour around the world can be explained by the differences in the natural environment. The point of view is that the physical environment controls the course of human action. Their major initial source for explanations was the physical environment, and that theoretical position was established around the belief that the nature of human activity was controlled by the parameters of the physical world within which it was set.ĭeterminism is one of the most important philosophies which persisted up to the Second World War in one shape or the other. The first approach adopted by the geographers to generalize the patterns of human occupations of the earth surface was deterministic.
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