This article analyses the geographical thought of Emil Mazúr (1925–1990), one of the most important figures in Slovak geography during the second half of the 20th century. Through intertextual and genealogical analysis, it explores how Mazúr critically received allocthonous influences, such as systems theory, cybernetics, the quantitative revolution, Soviet constructive geography and German axiomatics, and transformed them into autochthonous contributions, including landscape syntheses, the category of space, the axiomatisation of geography and the concept of landscape potential. This paper pursues several objectives. First, at the theoretical–methodological level, we aim to develop a methodology for identifying and analysing autochthonous and allocthonous determinants, and their mutual interference, in the study of geographical thought development. This framework should also include a procedure for identifying the developmental trajectories of a given author’s thinking. Empirically, we aim to uncover and interpret the evolution of Mazúr’s geographical thought by analysing a corpus of texts for which he was the lead or sole author. Particular attention is devoted to identifying autochthonous and allochthonous influences and their mutual interactions, culminating in a synthesis that demonstrates how these influences were transformed into original concepts within Slovak geography, and the implications for contemporary disciplinary discourse (epistemological, methodological and institutional) within the Slovak geographical school.
Matlovič et al. (Sat,) studied this question.