Vers une adoption de la France ?
Résumé
Adopting another land as the focus for one's academic career is not a decision to be taken lightly. Familiarity with the appropriate language(s), the written and cartographic sources recent and past, the practice of the discipline in the chosen country, and its institutions and academic community must, of course, be matched by frequent visits for research. Publications should be made in the appropriate scholarly journals of the adopted land and membership obtained of the relevant learned societies. Ideally, one should earn a higher degree in the country in question, thereby demonstrating expertise in that land as well as on it. Such expectations assume knowledge of the progression of an academic career at the outset rather than knowledge wisdom and experience allow one to acquire over time. In practice, adoption of another land may begin in a random way, reflecting linguistic familiarity, the influence of one's teachers, contacts of friendship, or patterns of travel or holidaymaking. Personal characteristics, such as one's degree of self-confidence, may well fashion one's preference for archival work or for conducting interviews. However, such methodological orientations may change with the acquisition of experience. Then comes the responsibility for conveying one's enthusiasm for another land through teaching an audience of students who may only function effectively in their own language and hence be unable to access works written by geographers based in the ‘adopted' land. Those students will depend instead on literature written in English (or available in translation) by academics in cognate disciplines.
Using my own career, in which research and teaching about the geography of France has figured over the past forty years, this paper offers a reflexive account of the challenges facing an English geographer who chooses to adopt another land. A sense of oral inadequacy has always steered me toward using archival documents and the printed word, whether that be about the agrarian geography of Haute-Normandie, the agricultural geography of the whole of France ca. 1840, the war-torn landscapes of the ‘Western Front', or the reconstructed environments of Basse-Normandie following World War II. Even, my investigation of recent changes in the rural environment of the Auvergne privileged a postal questionnaire over direct face-to-face inquiries. Of course, such ‘paper landscapes' had to be verified by subsequent excursions in the field. Over recent years, archival records and geographical periodicals have energized my investigations into the fashioning of geographical knowledge during the 19th century and into social relations among the Vidalians in the 20th century. This interaction between researcher and source material has always been enhanced by critical advice offered by French geographers regarding sources and the interpretation of evidence. In all these ways, my exploration of France has been undertaken and has, of course, been reinforced by frequent visits as a geographical tourist during which invaluable images and memories have been acquired for incorporation into teaching.
Using my own career, in which research and teaching about the geography of France has figured over the past forty years, this paper offers a reflexive account of the challenges facing an English geographer who chooses to adopt another land. A sense of oral inadequacy has always steered me toward using archival documents and the printed word, whether that be about the agrarian geography of Haute-Normandie, the agricultural geography of the whole of France ca. 1840, the war-torn landscapes of the ‘Western Front', or the reconstructed environments of Basse-Normandie following World War II. Even, my investigation of recent changes in the rural environment of the Auvergne privileged a postal questionnaire over direct face-to-face inquiries. Of course, such ‘paper landscapes' had to be verified by subsequent excursions in the field. Over recent years, archival records and geographical periodicals have energized my investigations into the fashioning of geographical knowledge during the 19th century and into social relations among the Vidalians in the 20th century. This interaction between researcher and source material has always been enhanced by critical advice offered by French geographers regarding sources and the interpretation of evidence. In all these ways, my exploration of France has been undertaken and has, of course, been reinforced by frequent visits as a geographical tourist during which invaluable images and memories have been acquired for incorporation into teaching.
Domaines
Géographie
Origine : Fichiers produits par l'(les) auteur(s)