Page "Carl O. Sauer" Paragraph 4

Carl Sauer's paper " The Morphology of Landscape " was probably the most influential in developing ideas on cultural landscapes and is still cited today.

However, Sauer's paper was really about his own vision for the discipline of geography, which was to establish the discipline on a phenomenological basis, rather than being specifically concerned with cultural landscapes.

" Every field of knowledge is characterized by its declared preoccupation with a certain group of phenomena ,” according to Sauer.

Geography was assigned the study of areal knowledge or landscapes or chorology — following the thoughts of Alfred Hettner.

“ Within each landscape there are phenomena that are not simply there but are either associated or independent of each other .” Sauer saw the geographer ’ s task as being to discover the areal connection between phenomena.

Thus " the task of geography is conceived as the establishment of a critical system which embraces the phenomenology of landscape, in order to grasp in all of its meaning and colour the varied terrestrial scene "