Lives Lived and Lives Told: Biographies of Geography's Quantitative Revolution

Abstract

In this paper I draw upon both biographical and sociological approaches to examine one moment in the history of geography's quantitative revolution of the late 1950s and early 1960s: the publication of Brian Berry and William Garrison's paper, “The functional bases of the central place hierarchy”, in Economic Geography in 1958. The origins of that paper are traced through the life stories—the ‘lives told‘—of the two authors. In particular, I try to connect the specific life trajectories of Berry and Garrison up until 1958 with the wider social and cultural contexts in which they lived. The theoretical impetus for the study are three literatures: the first is science studies, and especially the work of Bruno Latour and his ideas of ‘black boxing’ and ‘translation’; the second is on the history and sociology of quantification; and the third is on biography, particularly scientific biography. The broader argument of the paper is that the seemingly disembodied numbers, calculations, and precisely drawn figures and graphs that increasingly inflect human geography from the late 1950s, and found in such papers as Berry and Garrison's, are socially embedded, a consequence not of a universal rationality but of specific lives and times that infuse the very substance of the works produced.