Book Review: The myth of continents: A critique of Metageography

Abstract

The construct of continents has been a widely accepted global spatial structure in academic and popular discourse as well as a common framework of global geography and history in school education today. However, Martin W. Lewis and Kären E. Wigen contend that this over-simplified meta-geography is grounded mainly on ethnocentrism and environmental determinism and ignores the complex reality and diversity of human communities around the globe. In contrast, they adopt a moderate post-modern approach, which accentuates fluidity and multiplicity, to challenge the conceptions such as continents, West and East, nation-states and isolated civilizations that co-construct a static order of the world. In order to rectify the flaws of meta-geography, they propose a revised scheme of the world regions that emerged in the North American academia, and they believe that this scheme could liberate geographical and historical studies from the misconceptions, reflect more accurately the socio-cultural reality of a highly interconnected world, and promote further debate regarding meta-geography. The organized style of composition is a notable strength of the book. In Chapter 1, the authors present a review of the historical development of the scheme of continents and introduce the fallacy of environmental determinism underlying the scheme as well as the little utility of the scheme in geology. Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 deconstruct West and East as spatial and cultural notions, reveal the arbitrary nature of the West-East division driven by Euro-centrism, and evidence that the imagined boundary between the West and the East has been shifting in response to the practice of the West to construct a central Western image and tradition composed of rationality, democracy and economic progress. In Chapter 4, the authors mainly discuss and criticize Eurocentrism and Afro-centrism, which are both forms of ethnocentrism. They also point out the inappropriate use of race as a geographical concept because race is merely a social construct and the distribution of the “racial” characteristics does not correspond with the continents. Chapter 5 reviews Arnold Toynbee’s scheme of isolated civilizations for carving up the world and elucidates a paradigm shift to a refined world-system theory, which considers both civilized and uncivilized areas of the world and emphasizes the cultural interconnectivity among civilizations and world regions. In Chapter 6, the authors present their revised “world region” scheme by elaborating on the challenges of treating Southeast Asia, Central Asia and Latin America as a single region. They finally conclude the book with ten principles for meta-geographical reforms and emphasize the importance of historical and cultural connections in the division of regions. They also suggest directions for further research such as non-Western people’s view of the globe, the impacts of European geography on non-European intellectual framework, sea communities as well as international flows of capital, commodities, and labor. Behind the clear structure of the book are the authors’ tremendous efforts to reveal the arbitrary biases and logical flaws hidden in the language and conventions of metageography and their rigorous attempts to demonstrate the fact that regions of the world are not isolated but have long-