The Four Traditions in Turkish Geography: An Empirical Analysis

In this study, the four traditions of geography whose conceptual framework was for the first time drawn by William Pattison in 1964, empirically analyzed in the context of modern Turkish geography to have a better understanding of development of the discipline in Turkey. For this purpose, Ph.D. thesis written by geographers from 1943 to 2016 have been classified and then analyzed according to the traditions they belong to. Results show that the area studies (regional) tradition constitutes the most dominant form of disciplinary practice, followed by the earth-science and the spatial traditions. The man-land tradition is characterized by the weakest practice in Turkish geography historically. However, such a pattern shows periodical changes. While in the first period between 1943-1989 the earth-science tradition was the leading one, in the second period between 1990-2016 the area studies (regional) tradition became the dominant form of scientific practice in the discipline. This pattern reveals that the dominance of the earth-science tradition and the leading universities in the pre-1990 period of Turkish geography were replaced by the dominance of the regional tradition and peripheral universities after 1990s. In this respect, the study concludes that the contemporary composition of Turkish geography is characterized by a pattern in which traditional geographical practices and contemporary geographical practices have a sort of symbiosis