Cultural Turns/Geographical Turns

Perspectives on Cultural Geography

Simon Naylor, James Ryan, Ian Cook, David Crouch

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781317879046
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Introduces undergraduates to the key debates regarding space and culture and the key theoretical arguments which guide cultural geographical work. This book addresses the impact, significance, and characteristics of the 'cultural turn' in contemporary geography. It focuses on the development of the cultural geography subdiscipline and on what has made it a peculiar and unique realm of study. It demonstrates the importance of culture in the development of debates in other subdisciplines within geography and beyond. In line with these previous themes, the significance of space in the production of cultural values and expressions is also developed. Along with its timely examination of the health of the cultural geographical subdiscipline, this book is to be valued for its analysis of the impact of cultural theory on studies elsewhere in geography and of ideas of space and spatiality elsewhere in the social sciences.

Part I
Cultural turns, geographical turns

Paris. Bois de Vincennes. 1987. © Josef Koudelka/Magnum

Introduction

James R. Ryan

Few commentators would disagree with the claim that the cultural turn in contemporary geography has represented and produced new ways of thinking about culture and geography. There is, however, much less consensus on the processes underpinning this trend as well as its long-term consequences (Barnett, 1998b; Castree, 1999). Warnings of the theoreticist, journalistic, culturalist, irrelevant, pretentious tendencies of the currents which constitute the cultural turn might deflate its grander posturing. Yet at the same time its critical currency at the centre of such debate further establishes it as a fixture in a range of intersecting intellectual landscapes. As Nigel Thrift points out in his preceding Introduction in this volume, this is an opportune moment in geography, and in the social sciences and humanities more generally, for the refashioning of critical cartographies of the cultural turn. Having said this, we should not posit the situation as one of either-or choices; the cultural turn as a single track, downhill path which is either taken or rejected in favour of some alternative, more level-headed route. Indeed, it is profitable intellectually and politically to travel on a number of routes and roundabouts; to support and critique simultaneously this absorption with the cultural (Butler, 1998).

This opening part consists of three essays which engage in different ways with the general themes of this volume and set the scene for many of the debates which follow. Each essay makes an important contribution to the generation of more nuanced accounts of the distances covered and directions taken thus far on the cultural turn. They should not, however, either individually or collectively, be taken as attempts at comprehensive overviews of some uniform, singular and complete development. To map fully the interwoven twists and turns of 'culture' and 'geography' would be a mammoth and a complex task, involving negotiation of the complex genealogies of both these terms, as well as their inflection within dynamic disciplinary and geographical settings. In any case, useful introductions to many of these fields, from cultural geography (Crang, 1998) to cultural theory and popular culture (Storey, 1993), as well as more comprehensive assessments of the cultural turn in geography are readily available elsewhere (Barnett, 1998a; Matless, 1995, 1996; McDowell, 1994). There is neither the space nor the intention to produce full surveys here. Rather, the essays in Part I – like others throughout this book – are offered as deliberately selective and careful accounts of aspects and effects of the cultural turn from particular perspectives.

Whilst the essays in Part I refer inevitably to disciplinary boundaries and foci, notably of anthropology, geography and sociology, they also emphasize their porosity and the fruitful outcomes which stem from their blurring. For whilst ideas of culture in geography have drawn on work in cultural studies, anthropology, sociology and related fields, geographical metaphors and techniques for 'mapping' the 'topographies' of culture have become incorporated into the language and practice of disciplines such as cultural studies (see, for example, Baldwin et al., 1998).

Part I begins with an essay by anthropologist George E. Marcus in which he considers the more recent cultural interweavings of geography and anthropology. Conceptualizations of culture within geography have long been influenced by parallel developments in anthropology. Early cultural geography drew on ideas developed in cultural anthopology for its definitions of culture which focused on the material productions of particular social groups. More recently, the lively interest across human geography in retheorizing culture – central to the whole 'cultural turn' – owes much to the important work by anthropologists such as Marcus on the interpretation of cultures and politics of cultural representation (see, for example, Geertz, 1973; Clifford and Marcus, 1986).

In his essay Marcus considers the potentials of geographical and anthropological dialogue within the setting of what he terms 'the sobering wake of the great awakening', where the 'theoretical imaginaries' which characterized the beginnings of the cultural turn have given way to more grounded and applied work in a second wave of interdisciplinary research strategies. Taking 'multi-sited ethnography' as his focus, Marcus argues that both 'obvious' strategies (tracking movements and exchanges of transnational communities, or the circulation of objects) and 'non-obvious' strategies (exploring the unknown networks and disjunctions between particular places and emergent social relations) pose important reformulations of the idea and practice of 'fieldwork' and suggest new dialogues between and within geographical and anthropological enquiry. Whilst Marcus is keen to endorse such interdisciplinary connections and developments he ends his essay in cautious mode with an interview with Wlad Godzich in which the latter argues for the significance of the temporal, as opposed to the spatial, in ethnographic enquiry.

The effects of the cultural turn upon embedded research practice is also the concern of Chris Philo who, in the second essay, reflects critically upon the cultural turn within social and cultural geography. As an enthusiastic pioneer of the cultural turn within British geography Philo is well placed to offer an avowedly personal account of aspects of this trend and the problems which its hegemony poses for the theory and practice of human geography. In particular, Philo shows how a narrow preoccupation with the 'cultural' can result in 'dematerialized' and 'desocialized' geographies. In his concern with the neglect of the 'social' and his critique of abstract, un-'earthed' enquiry Philo has much in common with Marcus. Whilst Marcus puts forward multi-site fieldwork as one means of renewing 'social' questions whilst keeping the interpretative gains of the cultural turn, Philo points to recent studies in geography which, blending theoretical sophistication with empirical grounding, do not simply redress the balance away from flighty 'cultural' concerns to proper 'social' questions, but actively recast categories of 'social' and 'cultural', 'material' and 'immaterial', revisioning the relations between them.

Questions of the fate of 'the social' under the shadow of the cultural turn also provide the focus for the third and final essay in Part I, by the sociologist John Clarke who takes a more 'applied' domain than either geography or anthropology, namely social policy. Clarke explores the place of the cultural turn within dynamic currents in social policy and a transforming welfare state. As Clarke reminds us, welfare policies are shaped decisively by conceptions of social groupings and cultural identity, from 'the family' to 'the nation'. Yet what is actually meant and understood by concepts of 'social' and 'cultural' within fields such as social policy has changed considerably in the last half century.

The insistence in recent years upon the 'socially constructed' nature of identities previously thought of as fixed or natural – of 'race', disability, sexuality – within professional welfare practice has been closely connected to conceptual and methodological debates within social policy. Here a localized manifestation of the cultural turn, incorporating a range of theoretical perspectives and methodological influences as well as individuals and social movements, has nourished new conceptions of social policy study and practice. Clarke shows that whilst the rise of interest in the cultural and social construction of identity can offer important new ways of thinking about social policy, it can render welfare issues vulnerable to attempts to 'de-socialize' them. Such attempts stem from a range of factors, including political tendencies towards individualism; redefinitions of social problems as 'moral' ones; the rediscovery of biology (notably in genetics); and the definition of social issues (such as 'race') as matters of geography. The results, as Clarke shows, are both complex and contradictory, and yet it is within such a landscape of the cultural turn that the most provocative and difficult questions arise.

These three essays provide an important opening on to the issues developed throughout this book by posing a range of difficult questions of the cultural turn from different disciplinary and theoretical perspectives. In their accounts of particular moments and settings within anthropology, geography and social policy, these essays show some of the complexity obscured within that catch-all term 'the cultural turn' and show how it has particular and localized versions and effects. Nevertheless, the essays also show the virtue of tracking some of the shared, intersecting and interdisciplinary domains in the social sciences which have been informed by the cultural turn and which continue to shape its myriad effects.

All three essays in Part I are concerned with making sober assessments of the cultural turn in the light of renewed interest in theoretically and empirically grounded enquiry. In doing so they connect directly to wider calls within both geography (Barnett, 1998a) and cultural studies (Grossberg, 1993, 1998) for a renewed need to subject culture and cultural analysis to further theoretical scrutiny, and associated moves in human geography towards a more informed engagement with philosophical debate on issues such as ethics (Smith, 1997; Thrift, this volume). Taken together these contributions warn of any easy acceptance of theoretical and methodological assumptions characteristic of much of the cultural turn. Declarations that all manner of things are 'socially and culturally constructed' roll off many tongues and printers, yet the theoretical and analytical complexity behind such assertions are more rarely discussed (see Hacking, 1999). Furthermore, all of these essays stress the serious difficulty of combining critical, analytical awareness of the constructions of culture with attention to the 'solidification' of such constructions across a range of geographies. It is the potentials and problems of the kinds of engagement with the cultural turn discussed in these introductory essays which inform many of the essays in the remainder of this book.

References

Baldwin, E., Longhurst, B., Smith, G., and Ogborn, M. (1998). Introduction to Cultural Studies, Hemel Hempstead: Prentice Hall.

Barnett, C. (1998a). 'The cultural worm turns: fashion or progress in human geography?', Antipode, 30, 379-94.

Barnett, C. (1998b). 'Cultural twists and turns', Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 16, 631-4.

Butler, J. (1998). 'Merely cultural', New Left Review, 227, 33-44.

Castree, N. (1999). 'Situating cultural twists and turns', Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 17, 257-60.

Clifford, J. and Marcus, G.E., eds. (1986). Writing Culture: The Politics and Poetics of Ethnography, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Crang, M. (1998). Cultural Geography, London: Routledge.

Geertz, C. (1973). The Interpretation of Cultures, New York: Basic Books.

Grossberg, L. (1993). 'Cultural studies and/in new worlds', Critical Studies in Mass Communications, 10, 1-12.

Grossberg, L. (1998). 'The victory of culture', Angelaki, 3, 3-29.

Hacking, I. (1999). The Social Construction of What?, London: Harvard University Press.

McDowell, L. (1994). 'The transformation of cultural geography', in Gregory, D., Martin, R. and Smith, G., eds. Human Geography: Society, Space and Social Science, London: Macmillan, 146-73.

Matless, D. (1995). 'Culture run riot? Work in social and cultural geography, 1994', Progress in Human Geography, 19, 395-403.

Matless, D. (1996). 'New material? Work in cultural and social geography, 1995', Progress in Human Geography, 20, 379-91.

Smith, D. (1997). 'Geography and ethics: a moral turn?', Progress in Human Geography, 21, 583-90.

Storey, J. (1993). An Introductory Guide to Cultural Theory and Popular Culture, London: Harvester Wheatsheaf.

The twistings and turnings of geography and anthropology in winds of millennial transition

George E. Marcus

Several of the papers in this volume seem to operate from the assumption that the so-called cultural turn is mature, or even spent, as a purely theoretical enterprise. As an enterprise primarily of the 1970s and 1980s (also associated with overlapping labels like 'the postmodern turn' or 'the poststructuralist turn'), there was great ferment and stimulation in English-speaking academia over the study of culture, and the theory and practice of interpretation associated with it. I believe that the sense of the waning of the interdisciplinary fervour over the working out of new ideas at a sometimes indulgently theoretical level is very widespread at present. There now seems to be as widespread a preoccupation with developing the stock of ideas and styles of analysis as distinctive or experimental research programmes within those disciplinary traditions that were most affected by the cultural turn. While certain disciplines like geography (and less so anthropology) might have kept the balance between theoretical exegesis and empirical research traditions all along, there is a sense in which innovation for the moment has been recentred within the bounds of disciplinary authority rather than in their interstices – the sites of earlier interdisciplinary spaces built upon the critique and even, scorn of disciplinarity. Yet, in the sobering wake of the great awakening, so to speak, that the cultural turn was for many scholars in the social sciences and humanities, I think there is immense potential for a second wave of interdisciplinary fusions (partnerships, even) more fine-tuned and defined, along certain borders that crystallize as a result of affinities in how certain disciplines or disciplinary fractions responded to and assimilated the cultural turn. Reality, so to speak, signalled in the pervasive use of the yet poorly understood framing trope of globalization, is pressing upon the storehouse of theoretical imaginaries explored in the 1970s and 1980s. The task now is to experiment with research practices that both are rooted in distinctive disciplinary styles and arise from partnerships in how the cultural turn has defined affinities in modes of inquiry.¹

Here I want to explore the possibilities for this sor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Introduction: Dead or alive?
• PART I. CULTURAL TURNS, GEOGRAPHICAL TURNS
• PART II. POPULAR CULTURE AND CULTURAL TEXTS
• PART III. CULTURE AND POLITICAL ECONOMY
• PART IV. NATURE AND SOCIETY
• PART V. SPACES AND SUBJECTIVITIES
• Index