Territory: Part II

In Molière’ s famous 17th century play, Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, 1 the central character, Mr. Jourdain, discovers with delight that he has been producing for years, by his simple speech and without even being aware of it, quantities of pieces of a literary style which he had foreseen up to then as unattainable: prose. Like Mr. Jourdain, geographers have been "producing" something, in this case conceptions of territory, without being aware of it. To become aware of such a fact has implied on their part, and more generally on that of the community of social researchers at large, making two efforts-firstly, identifying the various categories of space that constitute their object of study and, secondly, establishing the best way to classify them including where "territory" fits in.