Elusive Societies: A Regional-Cartographical Approach to the Study of Human Relatedness

Despite a common propensity to conceptualize the social world as a jigsaw puzzle comprised of nonoverlapping pieces labeled “societies,’the geography of human relatedness defies all attempts at representation in such terms. Social relations may indeed be divided into geographically framed units by any number of criteria, and many of the resulting entities have at one time or another been designated as the primary foci of human interaction. Yet mapping such different aspects of human relatedness as cultural affiliation, social structure, political organization, and linguistic commonality often yields wildly noncongruent boundaries. This paper explores some of the dominant ways in which geographers and anthropologists have attempted to come to terms with the complex spatial patterning of human social life. Its purpose is twofold: first, to extract elements from both disciplines that may be used to construct a new geographical model of human relatedness, and second, to criticize developments in both fields that have hampered our understanding of the geographical dimension of human groupings. A brief empirical discussion, focusing on the Cordillera of northern Luzon in the Philippines, highlights the complexities that must be accommodated by any reformulated conception. The ultimate argument presented is that human relatedness must be apprehended by joining the social insights of the recently forwarded “new regional geography’ with the explicit concern for mapping detailed spatial structures that characterized earlier approaches.