Pure Geography

Johannes Gabriel Grano's career as a geographer spanned the first half of the 20th century. In the course of his explorations in Central Asia (where his father had served as Lutheran pastor to Siberia's Finnish colony) Grano initially specialized in geomorphology. It was not long, however, before theoretical themes began to emerge in Grano's work. In the 1920s, he began to develop an original methodology of landscape geography, based on the idea that the real object of geographical research should be the environment as perceived by the senses and regions constructed on the basis of these perceptions. It was from this starting point that he created a doctrine he called "pure geography".