Nomothetic and idiographic approaches
Topic: Geography as a Discipline: Nature, Branches and Approaches · NCERT: Class 12, Ch 1 "Human Geography: Nature and Scope"
Meaning
Nomothetic geography looks for general laws that hold true everywhere. Idiographic geography describes what is unique about each place. Richard Hartshorne's The Nature of Geography (1939) defended the study of unique regions, which is the idiographic view. Fred Schaefer's "Exceptionalism in Geography" (1953) attacked this view and called for a law-seeking spatial science. This debate opened the quantitative revolution of the 1950s and 1960s, when geographers began using numbers, statistics and models.
Example
Nomothetic: rainfall in the Ganga plain decreases from east to west, from Kolkata towards Delhi, as monsoon winds move farther from the sea. This is a general rule. Idiographic: a study of Ladakh's cold desert, its Buddhist monasteries and its high-altitude farming focuses on what makes that one place special.
Don't confuse with
- Systematic and regional approaches: these are about how geography is organised (by theme or by region). Nomothetic vs idiographic is about the goal: general laws or unique description.
Related concepts
- Systematic and regional approaches
- Systematic geography
- Regional geography
- Alexander von Humboldt
- Karl Ritter
- Dualism in geography