Historical Materialism

If geography must be historical-materialist then there can be no "cultural geography" as such. Historical-materialist geography must find ways of convening the history and practice of social, material life; to ignore the former is to ignore the very constitution of the world we live in. To convene history and practice, one must begin from the premise that the world is produced, not immanent. Then, one must seek to understand the unfolding history of this production. History in this sense is internal to materiality and to ignore it is thus to ignore precisely the ingredients of geography. Men and women make their history and themselves is the first premise of historical materialism. The second is that they make the world out of an already produced world. This is a world that has always already been historically constructed, over the long haul of natural history and the shorter haul of social struggle.