Organic analogy in geography
Topic: Human Geography: Nature, Scope and Approaches · NCERT: Class 12, Ch 1 "Human Geography: Nature and Scope"
Meaning
Organic analogy means describing land and places with words for parts of a living body. Geographers speak of the face of the earth, the eye of a storm, the mouth of a river, the snout of a glacier, the neck of an isthmus and the profile of a soil. German geographers went further and called the state a living organism. Transport networks were called "arteries of circulation", like the blood vessels of a body. These words show that geographers saw people and nature as one living whole.
Example
The Gangotri glacier in Uttarakhand ends at Gaumukh. This lowest end of the glacier is called its snout, and the Bhagirathi river flows out from there. Far downstream, the Hooghly meets the Bay of Bengal at its mouth in West Bengal.
Don't confuse with
- Lebensraum: it grew out of one organic analogy, the state as an organism. But it is a political idea about a state's need for land, not a way of naming landforms.