The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Cultural Geography

Nuala C. Johnson, Richard H. Schein, Jamie Winders

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781118384435
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Human Geography
• Index: Social Sciences

**Named a 2014 Choice Outstanding Academic Title** Combining coverage of key themes and debates from a variety of historical and theoretical perspectives, this authoritative reference volume offers the most up-to-date and substantive analysis of cultural geography currently available.

• A significantly revised new edition covering a number of new topics such as biotechnology, rural, food, media and tech, borders and tourism, whilst also reflecting developments in established subjects including animal geographies
• Edited and written by the leading authorities in this fast-developing discipline, and features a host of new contributors to the second edition
• Traces the historical evolution of cultural geography through to the very latest research
• Provides an international perspective, reflecting the advancing academic traditions of non-Western institutions, especially in Asia
• Features a thematic structure, with sections exploring topics such as identities, nature and culture, and flows and mobility

Chapter 1

Introduction

Nuala C. Johnson, Richard H. Schein, and Jamie Winders

It is hard to find a key word or topic in cultural geography these days that does not enjoy an interdisciplinary constituency. That is a good thing. The contemporary fascination with the “cultural” has generated an enormous body of work on which cultural geographers draw and to which they contribute. Cultural geography as a subdiscipline brings to the conversations a long tradition, most notably attention to space and place, to the spatiality of everyday life at multiple and fluid scales, to landscapes as the re-suturing of human and physical worlds, and to the politics and epistemological implications of these engagements. In the past decade, these traditional foci have remained intact, even as some have garnered renewed enthusiasm (such as nature–society questions), others have undergone increased conceptual scrutiny (such as the “cultural landscape” concept), and many have engaged new conceptual or theoretical possibilities (such as increased interest in affect and emotion or consideration of the “posthuman”). All of these developments are present in this volume, and this introductory chapter signposts some of these traditional, new, and renewed areas of interest in cultural geography and the ways these topics have shifted in the last decade. This chapter is not, however, meant as a comprehensive introduction to the subdiscipline of cultural geography. Instead, it is an invitation to examine the field’s ever-changing contours through the ensuing essays.

Cultural geography has been a foundational building block of human geography since the discipline formally was established in the nineteenth century. Documenting spatial patterns in human interaction with, responses to, and transformations of the natural landscape, raising questions about how landscape itself was shaped by and shaped social dynamics, and problematizing the ideas of culture, landscape, and nature have been cultural geography’s contributions to the ways that human geographers have thought about the world around them, past and present. Today, the line between human geography as a discipline and cultural geography as a subdiscipline is blurred to the point that cultural geography is human geography in some corners of our field. Recent intellectual and scholarly developments within geography have drawn cultural geographers closer to the fold and to deeper engagements with colleagues and ideas once thought beyond cultural geography’s purview – political, economic, historical, or environmental geography, for example. These connections have been strengthened through cultural geography’s embrace of and relevance to the so-called cultural and spatial turns across the human sciences as well as its engagement with social theory and concepts of interest to a broad range of scholars within and beyond the discipline. In short, cultural geographers today study nearly every aspect of human geography and do so in ways that simultaneously reinforce the subdiscipline’s place in geography and question the logic and locations of its boundaries.

Cultural geography is itself deeply geographic in terms of what places and spaces cultural geographers study and how cultural-geographic scholarship is conducted across institutional and national contexts. Although cultural geography developed historically and intellectually in relation to other areas of human geography, such as cultural ecology and social geography, it also has developed in relation to its practical and institutional contexts. Cultural geography means different things in different places and is enacted in different ways, especially between its North American and British variants (see, for example, Audrey Kobayashi’s discussion of this phenomenon in relation to geographic treatments of race in Chapter 9). Where cultural geography is performed, and where cultural-geographic research is produced, then, shapes what cultural-geographic scholarship looks like as much as does the widening array of spaces and places that cultural geographers now study. In all these ways, cultural geography, as a body of work, is as unruly as ever in its wanderings into other subdisciplines and disciplines, is as spatial as ever in the different strands of theories and writings that coexist as cultural geography in different places, and is as foundational as ever to the field of human geography in its interrogation of the relationship between the spatial and the social, landscape and cultural processes, past and present.

The chapters commissioned for this new companion to cultural geography take up the difficult task of sorting through the unruliness, spatiality, and continuing centrality of contemporary cultural geography. The chapters are written by scholars who self-identify as cultural geographers and by geographers who write about cultural themes from the perspective of other subdisciplines. Thus, this companion reflects on the field of cultural geography from within and from without. While this approach might problematize the notion of a coherent subdiscipline, it also makes a claim about the continuity and relevance of cultural geography as a way of looking at the world, from the past to the future. That claim is especially salient today. Scholarly and intellectual inquiry focused on the social, political, cultural, and economic worlds must respond to changes in the intellectual worlds of theory, the academic worlds of changing scholarly subjects, and, ultimately, the worlds of everyday social practice.

In the midst of these multiple, sometimes competing, foci, there is also a critical argument to be made for the normative qualities of any intellectual activity that might claim, even demand, that scholars go beyond “response” to the world around them to contribute to the shaping of that world in which they operate and upon which they gaze. This argument, of course, sat at the center of critical human geography as it emerged in the late 1990s. With a dual focus on critically interrogating the categories, lenses, and frameworks through which geographers examined the social world and on working to envision a more just and equitable version of that social world, critical human geography began from the presumption that geographers can, and should, do more than report on the world and, instead, should be part of interventions that improve it. Cultural geography played a key role in the development of critical human geography. Its connection to questions of emancipatory visions, interventions, and social justice is evident here in chapters covering such issues as the Occupy movement, the global financial crisis, the politics of food, and the continuing centrality of race and racism within the neoliberal rhetoric of a post-racial world. In the process, and in multiple ways, these chapters call for a politics of relevance in contemporary cultural geography and for engaging not only academic theoretical debates but also the everyday world around us.

To maintain that relevance, scholarly inquiry must remain vigilant of itself: always looking backward and looking forward, always remaining cognizant of the aims, intents, and consequences of a defined field, past and present, no matter how difficult the task of locating “the center” of that field. So it is with cultural geography. In responding to the ever-changing nature of the field of cultural geography and the world in which it practices, we introduce this new companion to cultural geography as a contribution to the ongoing conversation around this particular subdiscipline of human geography. It is emphatically a new volume, even as it follows almost ten years on the heels of the first companion (Duncan, Johnson, and Schein 2004). Some of the authors in this volume are the same; many are different. All of the essays are original and were commissioned specifically for this volume, with the intent of continuing to look forward and of looking at cultural geography from more than its center. As any review of the field makes clear, cultural geography has meant many things in many contexts; and that vibrancy must continue if it is to survive in the contemporary world of interdisciplinary study and challenges to intellectual orthodoxy, even those that fostered the subdiscipline in the first place.

Defining cultural geography, indeed any discipline or subdiscipline, is tricky; and different, imbricated categorical criteria often are employed. For cultural geography, these criteria might include attention to tradition or genealogies (which themselves have a geography, see Tolia-Kelly 2010); to personalities or hagiographies of specific cultural geographers; to theoretical and conceptual paradigms and debates over their utility and appropriateness across time and space; to thematic focus on some aspect of the world; to disciplinary key words and ideas; to calls for particular research agendas. Each of these categories is represented in this volume’s essays; and together, they comprise a broad introduction to cultural geography, albeit an introduction located in the Anglophone world and largely stemming from British and US traditions.

Those more generally interested in the definitional breadth of cultural geography per se also might look at other sources. This volume’s predecessor, for instance, presented three chapters which, at the time, proclaimed the fin-de-siècle revival of cultural geography as a field and attempted to trace traditions and a set of genealogies reflecting the differential nature of cultural geography across (part of) the Anglophone world (Schein 2004; Scott 2004; Barnett 2004). The fact that there were three chapters dedicated to “Introducing Cultural Geographies” explicitly recognized that disciplinary genealogies can be notoriously teleological and tend to present neat historical progressions that elide difference – including geographical difference – conflict, tension, and those who “lost” in the process. Designed to be read in stereo, one of those chapters told the perhaps “standard” genealogy of cultural geography from a US-based perspective (Schein 2004). This cultural geography, particularly in the United States, is sometimes referred to as traditional cultural geography. It generally is traced to the fifty-plus-year corpus of work produced by Carl Sauer, most famously associated with the geography department at the University of California, Berkeley, and ultimately known in shorthand as “the Berkeley School.”

Sauer himself was heavily influenced by German geography and American anthropological ideas of culture. His work drew on extensive fieldwork in the Americas; and as is the case with any active scholar, his approach to geography changed over the years, making any attempt to accurately characterize a fundamental or essential “Sauerian” position problematic. Nevertheless, there came to be something identified as a Sauerian, or Berkeley School, approach to cultural geography that seemed to take on a life of its own across the discipline. By the 1980s, that approach was under attack on primarily ontological and epistemological grounds that were part of human geography’s general critique of positivism at the time. In that critique, the two immediate targets of a so-called Sauerian cultural geography were, theoretically, the concept of culture and, substantively, the focus upon cultural landscapes. The challenge to both pillars of a “Sauerian” cultural geography came from British and US academics and, in its earliest manifestation, was perhaps most associated with the work of Denis Cosgrove, Jim Duncan, and Peter Jackson (e.g., Cosgrove 1984; Duncan 1980; Jackson 1989). These geographers were joined in short order, however, by other scholars, trained in cultural geography, who saw the opportunity to bring to the critique a continued interest in “cultural” geographies that took on board serious theoretical questions of social power, especially around questions of race, gender, class, nature, and the nature of fieldwork (e.g., Anderson 1995; Domosh 1991; Kobayashi 1989; Mitchell 1995; Nast 1994; Rose 1993). That challenge to traditional cultural geography by what became called the New cultural geography constituted a series of debates and battles over ownership of concepts, epistemologies, and subject matter. These struggles became known as a Civil War (although like most paradigm clashes, it was not always so civil) and helped to catalyze a round of disciplinary positioning in the 1990s that reinvigorated cultural geography as part of the larger discipline’s critical turn (see, for instance, Price and Lewis 1993; Duncan 1993; Cosgrove 1993; Jackson 1993; Foote et al. 1994).

Meanwhile, Heidi Scott could write in the second of those introductory chapters in 2004 that “recent decades have witnessed the meteoric rise of ‘culture’ and its study to a position of prominence across the social sciences and humanities.” Scott traced this “cultural turn” in British geography to Raymond Williams and the Birmingham Centre for Cultural Studies, thus marking a different genealogy of cultural geography from a different geographic starting point in Britain. While Scott acknowledged transatlantic links to American cultural geography through geographers like Jackson and Cosgrove, her genealogy took little note of traditional (American) cultural geography and demonstrated that (then) recent British cultural geography was more closely aligned with cultural studies, British sociology, and social geography (but see Peach 2002) – a subdiscipline that never had a strong counterpart in the US and, instead, was absorbed by urban and cultural geography (del Casino and Marston 2006). Britain’s new cultural geography, from Scott’s perspective, “embraced and was profoundly shaped by feminist scholarship, as well as by poststructuralist, postmodern, and postcolonial theory” (Scott 2004: 24). Its most recent, and perhaps most volatile and productive, set of debates focused around the non- or more-than-representational challenge to the genealogy established in that chapter.

Clive Barnett, in the third “introducing” chapter, took exception to (mostly British) geography’s (claim to a) cultural turn per se and worried about intellectual fashion and theoretical fetishizing, especially the “othering” of Marxism, positivism, and realism. He also raised concerns about claims on the part of one (sub)discipline (“cultural geography”) to stand for the whole of human geography, as well as what he perceived as the short shrift given to actually defining the culture of cultural geography and the workings of power and politics in the process.

What was meant then (c. 2002) to be a simple introductory chapter on cultural geography’s genealogy metamorphosed into three chapters demonstrating differing claims to tradition, different kinds of intellectual impetuses, and different institutional geographies and debates over what cultural geography comprised. More positively, the need for three chapters demonstrated the (re)invigoration of cultural geography itself, whether old or new, Marxian, poststructuralist or positivist, or focused on landscape, individuals, societies, or natures. In the 2000s, conceptual and theoretical debate joined a pluralism of substantive foci as the breadth of cultural geography expanded.

This reinvigoration was captured in geographical journals as well. The founding of new international journals Gender, Place and Culture in 1994, Ecumene (now Cultural Geographies) in 1995, and Social and Cultural Geography in 2000 gave new outlets to cultural-geographic scholarship, where previously the only subdisciplinary journal had been the US-based Journal of Cultural Geography. The foment of cultural geography in the past ten years can also be traced in the periodic “progress reports” that are the staple of the journal Progress in Human Geography. The fact of cultural geography’s joining the mainstream of Anglo-American human geography led to both a commonality of substantive topics in the subfields and to inevitable clashes over relevant and critical theoretical perspectives that are the hallmark of any vibrant intellectual pursuit. In a series of reports, Catherine Nash noted, for example, that cultural geographers’ concern with meaning, belonging, place, and identity mandated an engagement with other realms of social inquiry; and she called forth the necessary ties between cultural geography and the study of the nation, especially the postcolonial condition and links with anti-racist geographies (Nash 2002, 2003). Subsequent reports broadened cultural geography’s thematic or substantive engagement with human geography to take up intersections with geographies of home, migration, transnationalism, mobility, and diaspora (Blunt 2005, 2007). Other reports urged a reexamination of cultural geographies of race and racism and the body and a renewed engagement with the politics of visual culture itself (Tolia-Kelly 2010, 2012).

Meanwhile, theoretical challenges also were published. For example, Hayden Lorimer charged cultural geographers to move beyond their ostensible reliance upon the representational epistemology of cultural studies to engage the non- or more-than-representational aspects of everyday life (2005, 2007). This debate over representation has, in many ways, structured contemporary cultural geography for the last decade, splitting the subdiscipline into “representational” and “non-representational” camps in a manner that has yet to be fully articulated, yet whic...