Bruneau, Michel <br/><br/>
Civilization(s): Relevance or Resiliency of a Term or a Concept in Geography? 

 -  2010.<br/>							 
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<br/><br/> The two last decades, the term and concept of civilization came back into fashion within social and political sciences. Emerged in the Europe of Enlightenment, this term has known a great success in history, even though it has been quickly replaced by the very near concept of culture in sociology and anthropology. Geography adopted it later by the way of rural studies with the « agrarian civilizations », and liked better for a long time the more speciï¬c concept of « genre de vie », fallen into disuse now from the sixties. Pierre Gourou took civilizations as central concept of his human geography, reï¬ning it all along his works. In the same way, Fernand Braudel, geo-historian, has thought deeply on the spatial size of civilizations, feeling the need to associate to it other connected concepts. Ambiguity, plural meaning, fuzziness of the civilization concept made its success and at the same time its theoretical weakness. Most of the geographers gave it up today, while continuing to use the term and keeping it in their dictionnaries, but prefering the concepts of culture and society. However it has been recently reintroduced in political geography by Samuel Huntington (1996) in order to understand ethnic or « civilizationnal » conflicts at the end of the twentieth century. This very much debated approach, which is inclined to essentialize cultural entities located side by side on a map, does not enough take in account reciprocal interferences and influences between these shifting realities within which Nation-States still play a great role.