Cultural Geographies

An Introduction

John Horton, Peter Kraftl

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781317753674
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Naturwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Humangeographie

Cultural geography is a major, vibrant subdiscipline of human geography. Cultural geographers have done some of the most important, exciting and thought-provokingly zesty work in human geography over the last half-century.

This book exists to provide an introduction to the remarkably diverse, controversial, and sometimes-infuriating work of cultural geographers. The book outlines how cultural geography in its various forms provides a rich body of research about cultural practices and politics in diverse contexts. Cultural geography offers a major resource for exploring the importance of cultural materials, media, texts and representations in particular contexts and is one of the most theoretically adventurous subdisciplines within human geography, engaging with many important lines of social and cultural theory.

The book has been designed to provide an accessible, wide-ranging and thought-provoking introduction for students studying cultural geography, or specific topics within this subdiscipline. Through a wide range of case studies and learning activities, it provides an engaging introduction to cultural geography.

Part 1 Cultural processes and politics

Part Map

• Chapter 2 — Cultural production
• Chapter 3 — Cultural consumption

In Chapter 1 we identified three major ways in which the work of cultural geographers is important:

• researching cultural processes and their complex geographies and politics;
• exploring the importance of cultural materials, media, texts and representations in all kinds of space and geographical context;
• engaging with new lines of social and cultural theory, and reflecting upon their importance for human geographers.

Part 1 deals with the first of these themes. The following chapters introduce some key concepts and geographical research exploring cultural processes and politics. We also introduce a broader context of ideas and research — particularly by sociologists and cultural studies scholars — that has inspired many geographers working in this context. As we shall explain, a great deal of this work has tended to focus on either:

• cultural production — the processes through which all manner of cultural objects, spaces, commodities, texts, representations and media are created; or
• cultural consumption — how cultural objects, spaces, commodities, texts, representations and media are encountered, purchased, and used by consumers.

We shall focus on each of these topics in turn. Chapter 2 introduces some key processes of cultural production, including: how and where cultural objects are literally manufactured; how meanings, norms and notions of ‘good taste’ are produced and attached to certain cultural objects in particular geographical and historical contexts; and how cultural spaces are produced and regulated. We note, too, how these forms of cultural production often effectively (re)produce particular and unequal forms of power relations. Chapter 3 introduces the notion of cultural consumption, with a particular geographical focus on: the substantial importance of consumption practices in everyday spaces; the development of spaces of/for consumption within ‘consumer societies’; practices that involve the consumption of places; and the geographical complexity of consumption. We note how consumption is central to one's cultural identity, and can sometimes be central to politicised practices that seek to contest or subvert the forms of cultural power identified in Chapter 2.

Chapters 2 and 3 should help you get to grips with important bodies of research about processes of cultural production and consumption respectively. But — and this is a big but — it is crucial to bear in mind that these processes are not neatly separated in real life. Although much classic research in this context did tend to focus on either cultural production or consumption, more recent work within cultural geography and cultural studies has begun to recognise that this was deeply problematic. In Section 3.5 we outline why this ‘either/or’ approach was so problematic, and argue that the processes discussed in this section should actually be understood as always already closely and complexly interconnected.

After reading Part 1, several later chapters of this book should help you to extend and develop your understanding of cultural processes and politics in three key ways.

• Part 1 provides a kind of general ‘sketch’ of how cultural objects and spaces are produced and encountered. Several chapters in Part 2 provide a much more detailed and specific focus on particular kinds of cultural object. Now consider the complex geographies evident in the later chapters on built spaces (Chapter 4), images of landscape (Chapter 5), diverse cultural texts (Chapter 6) or forms of performance (Chapter 7).
• Follow up Chapter 3's discussion of identities and subcultures by exploring the extended discussion of concepts of performativity and identity formation in Chapters 7 and 8.
• In Part 3, we introduce notions of everydayness (Chapter 9), materiality (Chapter 10), emotion and affect (Chapter 11), and embodiment (Chapter 12), and discuss the inherent complexity of all human geographies. Consider how these concepts are relevant to the processes outlined in Chapters 2 and 3. It should become clear that all cultural production and consumption involves embodied, emotional, everyday practices in complex and material spaces. How does this realisation add to, or complexify, our understanding of cultural processes and politics?

2 Cultural production

DOI: 10.4324/9781315797489-2

Before you read this chapter …

Consider this book. Try to answer the following questions. (Note any gaps in your knowledge.)

• Where and how was it made?
• Who was involved in making it, and under what conditions did they work?
• Who decided its content?
• Who profits from the publication of the book?
• Think about the spaces in which this book can be found. How, and by whom, are these spaces produced?

Chapter Map

• Introduction: producing a cultural geography textbook
• Questioning cultural production
• Making meanings, discourses and taste: key concepts from cultural studies
• Geographies of cultural production: commodity chains and the cultural industries
• Producing and regulating cultural spaces

2.1 Introduction: producing a cultural geography textbook

Think, for a moment, about this book. How much do you know about this object? Where, when and how was it made? As authors we can shed light on some aspects of this book's production: the many hours spent writing (or not writing) on computers in the English East Midlands; the many notepads, pens and printer cartridges used in the process; the many meetings and emails between the authors and commissioning editors; the contracts, drafts, proofs and other paperwork signed, sealed and delivered; the whole process commissioned by a publishing company based in Harlow, England; the book itself printed in Gosport, England. Many other aspects of this process are rather more difficult to map. (Where were the raw materials used in the book's paper, cover and inks sourced? How did the book get from the printers to wherever you picked it up? Who was responsible for typesetting, inking, maintaining the production line, or driving the delivery lorries? What are their working lives like? What exchanges of finance, and what behind-the-scenes goings-on in the publishing industry, enabled the book to be commissioned? Who, ultimately, benefits from the production of this book?) As we shall suggest, cultural objects, texts and media are typically created via complex processes of production, although these processes frequently pass unnoticed by consumers of these objects.

This chapter introduces some of the ways in which geographers have explored processes of cultural production. As we shall explain, questions of cultural production have been important for many cultural geographers. To help you understand this importance, this chapter outlines:

• why cultural production has been a major concern, one way or another, for many cultural geographers;
• some key concepts that have been useful to geographers exploring cultural production;
• some key work by economic, urban and industrial geographers that explored the making of cultural objects, texts and media;
• some geographical research about the creation and maintenance of different kinds of cultural spaces.

2.2 Questioning cultural production

In Chapter 1, we noted that the word ‘culture’ can be used to describe a number of things. It can refer to:

• texts, objects and spaces created by human beings: everything from small-scale, individually crafted artefacts through mass-produced commodities and globalised media to large-scale public spaces and architectures;
• practices, habits and lifestyles that relate to these cultural texts, objects and spaces;
• meanings, norms and value judgements that relate to all of the above;
• power relations, group identities and inequalities that relate to all of the above.

We also identified several lines of work by cultural geographers who have explored some spatial patterns, processes and consequences of all this. The question of ‘cultural production — how all these cultural objects, spaces, practices, meanings and relations are made and come to be as they are — has been a key issue for many cultural geographers. Indeed, we can think of cultural production as a foundational, but divisive, issue for many cultural geographers: on the one hand, many cultural geographers have been motivated to explore processes, politics and spaces of cultural production; on the other hand, many others have been motivated to react against a perceived predominance of work on cultural production. Either way, there is an acknowledgement that cultural production is a significant issue: for some, it should be a central and motivating concern for cultural geography; for others, it has been an overwhelming focus for too much geographical work in this context.

This chapter focuses on the making of cultural objects, meanings and spaces: here, we outline how studying cultural production reveals processes, and forms of cultural politics, that are fundamentally geographical. In Chapter 3, however, we introduce some important critiques of geographical work on cultural production. In particular, we recommend that you read Section 3.5 — connecting cultural production and consumption — when you have reached the end of this chapter.

Here are three key reasons why cultural production became a foundational concern for many cultural geographers. You may find that referring to Box 1.3, and the related commentary, helps you to place these points in a broader context.

• A good deal of early, classic work in human geography — particularly those lines of work named traditional cultural geography and regional cultural geography in Chapter 1 — explored connections between human activity and landscape morphology. As we outlined in Section 1.4, traditional cultural geographers, most notably the Berkeley School, conducted many studies of ‘cultural landscapes’: exploring, for example, how particular forms of material culture, manufactured objects, dwelling spaces, technologies and creative practices emerged and spread from particular ‘cultural hearths’, and resulted in changes to ‘natural’ landscapes. Somewhat similarly in spirit, early regional geographers such as the Annales School investigated how particular agricultural or manufacturing traditions shaped distinctive local and regional ‘ways of life’ as manifest in, for example, local artistic and folk cultures. Although these lines of geographical work have been criticised, and to some extent disowned, by later cultural geographers (see Section 1.4), their recognition that cultural artefacts, practices and lifestyles are closely linked to agricultural, manufacturing and landscape processes remains important. These early geographers were important in shaping expectations of what human geographers do; and their understandings of cultural production continued to shape and direct the work of cultural geographers for many decades.
• As noted in Section 1.4, a new cultural geography emerged from geographers' encounters with contemporary work from other disciplines, including cultural studies, during the 1980s and 1990s. Some of the most exciting and important work within cultural studies during the 1970s and 1980s had argued for research exploring the production — and producers — of popular cultural media such as newspapers, television programmes, movies and pop music. It was argued that such research would unveil the often-overlooked ideological content of such media, and the particular, exclusionary, inequitable processes and industries that produced them. This heady, politicised line of work inspired many geographers who encountered it during the ‘new cultural geography’. See Sectio...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Authors' acknowledgements
• Publisher's acknowledgements
• Part 1 Cultural processes and politics
• Part 2 Several cultural geographies
• Part 3 Key concepts for cultural geographers
• References
• Index