Rucinque,
H.F.
Colombian
Geography:
Tradition and Current
Status
2005
Research and scholarly writing in
geography is a well-grounded tradition in Colombia. Nowadays, the country ranks
high in the Hispanic American region in the trend of geographic development,
but the practice of geography runs back to the very beginnings of the nation in the early
sixteenth century. The pre-modern phase of that history has been aptly detailed
by Acevedo Latorre (1974). A book
entitled Summa de Geografía by Fernández de Enciso was the first geographic work prepared in the New
World shortly after the Discovery and then published in Spain in 1519.
Since the onset of the colonial
period, the Spanish chroniclers set forth in their writings a learned
geographical tradition that was continued over the centuries both in the form
of studies by individuals and as comprehensive reports by corporate expeditions
in which geographic accounts were a substantive ingredient. Of the latter kind
were the Fidalgo Expedition (1794-1810), which surveyed and mapped the
Caribbean coast for the Crown, and simultaneously the Botanical Expedition, led
by the well-known Spanish botanist José Celestino Mutis. Mutis and his Creole
associates carried out extensive research on vegetation and other natural
resources of New Granada, as Colombia was named under Spanish rule. Later on,
during the republican period, such a form of government-sponsored scientific
research was replicated in the mid-nineteenth century’s Corographic Commission.
This highly productive expedition — reminding the Great Surveys of the American
Far West that took place a little later in the same century — was led by the
Italian-born geographer Agostino Codazzi, whose death in the field in 1859 put
an end to the project. The work of Codazzi was an invaluable accomplishment
according to the scientific standards of his time and provided the government
of the new nation with most necessary first-hand data and maps of the territory
(Caballero 1994).
The contributions of individuals to
the development of the discipline of geography have been limited but honorable.
Two of them, Francisco
José de Caldas (1768-1816) and Francisco
Javier Vergara y Velasco (1860-1914), were highly reputed in the early days of
geography in Colombia. Caldas, a self-educated geographer of the cosmographic
school of the late eighteenth century, is generally regarded as the Colombian scholar
(“el Sabio”) par excellence. A contemporary of Alexander von Humboldt, with
whom he became acquainted in Quito in 1801, Caldas has been named the “father”
of Colombian geography. Nonetheless, he did not attempt to build a school of
geography as other fathers of the discipline have done in other countries
(e.g., Vidal de la Blache in France, Davis in the USA, Deffontaines in Brazil,
etc.). In 1816 the Spanish army crashed the first Republic that Caldas had
helped to organize and he was shot by a royalist squad in Bogotá at the age of
48. He had been associated with Mutis in the Botanical Expedition and conducted
extensive research in climatology, biogeography, geodesy and mapping (cf., for
example, Schumacher 1986).
Some seventy-five years later, at the
close of the nineteenth century, another geographer caught the attention of the
Colombian intellectual community: Vergara y Velasco (1974). Born in Popayán as Caldas was, Vergara pursued a
successful military career but he was also very dedicated to studies in history
and geography. The use of raw data,
reports and maps of the Corographic Commission, together with those obtained
through his own field research, allowed him to publish in 1892 his Nueva
Geografía de Colombia. This was a remarkable book in which the
country’s geography was exhaustibly described through a “new geography”
approach of natural regions.
Modern
Geography
The roots of modern geography in
Colombia are to be found in developments that took place in the 1930s, with the
founding by President Alfonso López Pumarejo of the Instituto Geográfico
Militar (1935) — later on named Instituto Geográfico Agustín Codazzi
(IGAC) — and the Normal Superior de Colombia (1937) —nowadays known as Universidad
Pedagógica y Tecnológica de Colombia (UPTC). As Rucinque
(1991: 35) puts it,
If
modernization in geography is associated with that process that includes professional
organization, advanced training of geographers, and active participation in,
and awareness of, current paradigms and trends of the discipline in the world,
then Colombia shares with Venezuela, Mexico, [Costa Rica] and Chile a healthy
awakening that took place during the past twenty or thirty years. A remarkable
parallelism occurs in the history of geography in these countries. That history
can be typified by the early foundation of a geographic academy or society and
a geographic or cartographic institute, both public. Then college departments
of social science with strong pedagogic commitments were established to prepare
high school teachers in history and geography. During such an early stage — in
which several Latin American countries still remain — every geography post is
staffed with non-geographers, many of them retired military officers.
Eventually, the take-off stage comes through university innovation prompted by
enlightened, self-educated native geographers, or by a foreign scholar (such as
Pierre Deffontaines in Brazil), or by native professionals who became
geographers through graduate training overseas.
The IGAC is a technical agency
created to take care of such governmental functions as topographic and geodetic
surveying, photogrammetric engineering, mapping, cadastral and soil surveying,
and geographic research at large. After more than six decades of continuous
operation, IGAC has evolved into a solid, capable and well-equipped
organization. Lately, however, under the pretext of administrative
modernization, this Instituto has been plagued by bureaucratic interference,
including an unnecessary and impractical merging with the census and
statistical agency, and budget cuts that drastically reduce its operative capacity.
On the other hand, the UPTC has been
the leading university in educational programs. When first functioning as the
Higher Normal School in Bogotá in the late 30s, it became the first academic
center in which geography courses were taught at the college level. Several
social sciences were combined in a four-year licentiate degree program with
yearly courses on physical geography, cartography, human and economic
geography, and world and Colombian regional courses. In 1952, the Normal School
was relocated at Tunja, some 100 miles north of Bogotá, later to be re-named
as Universidad Pedagógica y Tecnológica
de Colombia (UPTC). A school of education still exists in the multidisciplinary
UPTC, though no longer alone in the country — over twenty such schools now
crowd the nation’s university system, both public and private. And as far as
the geography part of the social studies program is concerned, all of them
follow the pattern set forth by the Normal School over sixty years ago (Rucinque 1989).
By and large, individuals getting
licentiate degrees in education with emphasis in the social sciences are not
geographers stricto sensu. The same is true of graduates in geographic
and cadastral engineering. But a number of persons of either these or other
academic extraction have become competent geographers through advanced training
both locally and overseas.
Since the mid-1960s, the UPTC and the IGAC
joined efforts to promote geography as a scientific and academic discipline in
Colombia. All that process started in Tunja in 1967 when the UPTC served as the
host institution for a small gathering of geographers and geography-supporters,
conveyed there by the late Dieter Brunnschweiler, a Fulbright visiting scholar
from Michigan State University, and Hector F. Rucinque, his Colombian liaison
at Tunja. The historical outcome of that meeting was the establishment of the
Association of Colombian Geographers, ACOGE for short (Montañez
Gómez 1999).
For over three decades, ACOGE has
provided apt leadership to build a solid geographic profession and to orient
geography as a modern scientific discipline. Every two years this organization
has sponsored the Colombian Geographic Convention, one of them (1977)
international in scope and attendance, held in conjunction with a meeting of
the Conference of Latin Americanist Geographers (CLAG). To pursue its
educational goals, ACOGE was able to secure the cooperation of the US Fulbright
Commission in the early 70s. With this support, as well as the UPTC’s and
IGAC’s, four graduate summer seminars were taught by several American
geographers led by C.W. Minkel, then a Michigan State University professor and
dean of the Graduate School. These seminars proved to be a significant stimulus
for about twenty would-be geographers who in the following years became leaders
of the discipline in all research and academic centers related to geography.
Minkel helped two of those students all the way through the Ph.D. (H.F.
Rucinque and Luis Aragón, the first Colombians ever to earn that degree in 1977
and 1978, respectively).
Again, the UPTC and IGAC joined
efforts in 1983 to carry out a formal Master’s degree program in Bogotá. During
the first 10 years of operation under the chairmanship of Dr. H.F. Rucinque the
project was staffed with a selected number of geographers (Dr. Gustavo
Montañez, Dr. Antonio Flórez, Dr. Welf Selke, Dr. Verena Meier, Dr. Darío
Galindo, Dr. Catherine Martinez, Dr. Gloria Umaña de Gauthier, Dr. Carlos
Munar, and a few others holding at least a Master’s degree: Prof. Ovidio R.
Toro, Prof. Ricardo Martínez, and Prof. Fernando Casas). The program was
designed to meet all scientific and academic standards as those current in
similar ventures in the developed world. It originally took two years of
full-time study plus the approval of comprehensive examinations and the writing
and defense of a thesis. A score of Colombian geographers who have graduated in
the UPTC-IGAC program now lead the way in all universities offering career
options in the field.
During the 90s the development of
Colombian geography was furthered through the formal organization of academic
departments to provide university-wide services and to offer degree options at
the B.Sc. level. In 1992 the National University at Bogotá began its four-year
geography degree program staffed with two PhDs and four Master’s. Currently,
this program has a faculty of ten geographers, and several professionals have
already been graduated there. Subsequently, other undergraduate programs have
been established in other places: in the University of Nariño, at Pasto,
southwestern Colombia; then in the nearby University of Cauca at Popayán, at
the University of Córdoba, Montería, and at the University of Valle at Cali. In
2005 a Master´s degree program started operation at Córdoba in close
association with GeoCaribe, a
research institute created at that university to deal with geographic and
environmental problems of the Caribbean realm. Plans are under responsible
consideration to gradually bring together most of those factors that in the
near future may grant the University its right and academic opportunity to
establish the Ph.D. program in geography. In such a prospective development,
the doctoral program would be designed to serve not only the Colombian coastal
region but the Caribbean countries as well.
Since the 90s the National Pedagogic
University at Bogotá has been offering a graduate option at the M.A. level in
geographical education. Unfortunately, in this same city the undergraduate
program in geographical engineering of the Universidad Jorge Tadeo Lozano came
to an end. Such program had been in operation since the early 50s and was one
of the three founding careers of a college that was established as a private
concern to revive the ideals and deeds of the1850-59 Corographic Commission. At
the close of the century, a number of interested geographic engineers succeeded
in having their school resurrected at the Universidad de Ciencias Aplicadas
(UDCA), a new private college sited in the Colombian capital. Another
undergraduate program started in 2005 at the Universidad Externado de Colombia,
being this the second instance in which geography is offered at private colleges
in the country.
On the other hand, during the last
decade of the twentieth century, geography was enriched through the passing of
a bill in Congress by means of which Colombian geographers were granted legal
career recognition. The same law established a Colegio Profesional de
Geógrafos, a sort of professional council whose main function is to issue
the professional ID cards to individuals who meet legal requirements. Likewise,
the law established the Geographer’s Day (the last Friday of October),
and created the Order of Caldas as the highest academic
distinction to be conferred upon geographers by the Colombian President.
References Cited and Further Reading
Acevedo-Latorre, Eduardo. 1974. Las
Ciencias en Colombia — Geografía, Cartografía. In: Historia Extensa de
Colombia, ed. Academia Colombiana de Historia (Bogotá, Editorial Lerner),
vol. 24.
Caballero, Beatriz. 1994. Las Siete Vidas de Agustín Codazzi. Bogotá,
Instituto Geográfico Agustín Codazzi.
Caldas, Francisco José. 1976. Obras Completas de Francisco José de Caldas,
ed. by Universidad Nacional de Colombia. Bogotá, Imprenta Nacional.
Fernández de Enciso, Martín. 1974. Summa de Geografía [Sevilla, Spain,
1519]. Bogotá, Banco Popular.
Montañez Gómez, Gustavo. 1999.
Elementos de historiografía de la geografía colombiana. Revista de Estudios Sociales [Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá,
edición especial sobre “Historia de las Ciencias Sociales en Colombia], N° 3,
Junio, s.p. [4-23]. Documento web:
http://publicacionesfaciso.uniandes.edu.co/paginas/res/rev3.pdf
Rucinque, Héctor F. 1989. Geography in Colombia. The
Professional Geographer, 41: 218-220.
Rucinque,
Héctor F. 1991. Colombia. In: Modern Geography: An Encyclopedic
Survey, ed. by Gary S. Dunbar (New
York & London, Garland Publishing, Inc.), 35-37.
Schumacher, Hermann A. 1986. Caldas, un Forjador de la Cultura,
trans. by E. Guhl. Bogotá, Ecopetrol. [Part two
of Schumacher’s original book Südamerikanische Studies. Drei Lebens — und Cultur — Bilder. Mutis, Caldas, Codazzi (1760-1860)]
Vergara y Velasco, Francisco Javier. 1974. Nueva Geografía de Colombia
[Bogotá, Imprenta de Vapor, 1892] Repr. Bogotá, Banco de la República, 3 vol.
Contributed by Hector
F. Rucinque