âNew Cultural Geographyâ emerged during the 1980s as a prominent approach to geographic research. During 1980s, a range of (largely UK-based) cultural geographers became interested in the insights of the âCultural Turnâ (see Box 1.1) and, with that, Cultural Studies (Jackson 1989) and the work of a range of âCultural Marxistsâ (Cosgrove 1984). These ideas were translated into a geographic mind-set, producing a very different cultural geography. The ânewâ here refers to a distinction drawn with the well-established cultural geography of the âBerkeley Schoolâ, practiced primarily in North America in light of the pioneering work of Carl Sauer (see Sauer 2008 and Chapter 4).
In distinction to the âBerkeley Schoolâ, this New Cultural Geography argued itself to be:
Central to New Cultural Geography then was a specific attention to how culture is spatially constituted. This, in turn, entailed a focus on issues of power, ideology, discourse, and forms of representation enacted within space. Such concerns were perhaps most evidently manifest in work critically engaged with cultural landscapes â with the representation of landscapes and the people within them, with specific meaningful objects present in landscapes (statues, monuments, signage, and so on), and the practices through which landscapes were produced and maintained (see Wylie 2007a; Chapter 5). Over the years, such analyses were developed through engagements with, amongst others, semiotics (Duncan and Duncan 1992), iconography (Cosgrove and Daniels 1988), post-structural analyses of texts and representations (Duncan and Duncan 1988; Matless 1998), and feminist scholarship (Rose 1993).1
Box 1.1 The Cultural Turn
The âCultural Turnâ refers to âA set of intellectual developments that led to issues of culture becoming central in human geography since the late 1980sâ (Barnett 2009: 134). This is often associated with the emergence of New Cultural Geography. However, a shift toward an interest in culture also took place in a range of other sub-disciplines in geography, such as economic and political geography, given the suggestion that culture was increasingly important to economic processes and political conflict (Barnett 2009). The Cultural Turn is often characterized by a movement away from certain approaches and trends rather than a more positive determination â a move away from a certain form of Marxist analysis, a move away from positivism/quantitative approaches, and not being realist in orientation. In their place, we find interests in post-modernism and post-structuralism (as well as Cultural Marxism), qualitative and textual analysis, and a concern for how the world is socially constructed (Barnett 2004; see Chapter 2). A significant impetus behind this shift toward an interest in culture was the work emerging from the âBirmingham Centre for Cultural Studiesâ and its ârecognition of cultural diversity and processes of cultural changeâ (Scott 2004: 24). This has included concerns for various sub-cultures and âlowâ cultural forms (as opposed to âhighâ culture) (Jackson 1989) and issues of power and inequality (Barnett 2004). As such, the Cultural Turn leads to the argument that âMeanings are contextual, specific, and contingent. And this is where geography comes in: because of culture, things happen differently in different placesâ (Barnett 2004: 42).
In some of the early introductions to NRTs written by Thrift New Cultural Geography formed a key target of critique and something that NRTs were variously articulated against. However, New Cultural Geography was rarely named. This unfolded less through the direct citation of, or engagement with, examples from such New Cultural Geographersâ work and more through the targeting of some of New Cultural Geographyâs conceptual influences. For example, Thrift (1996: 4) was critical of work informed by post-structural philosophers such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, in which, he claimed:
A hardly problematised sphere of representation is allowed to take precedence over lived experience and materiality, usually as a series of images or texts which a theorist contemplatively deconstructs, thus implicitly degrading practices.
This is not to say, though, that NRTs are not found in post-structuralist philosophies (Cresswell 2013a; Doel 2010; Wylie 2010; see Box 1.2). Rather, Thriftâs target of critique here is a particular version of post-structuralism which led geographers to focus on, for example, the sorts cultural landscapes suggested above, taking them primarily (or even solely) as texts that can be read. The problem for Thrift is that these âtextsâ, whether literally a text or something treated âas-textâ (see Duncan 1990), form the primary focus of the analysis rather than the practices that they potentially play a part in shaping.
Box 1.2 Post-structuralism and geography
Post-structuralism is a name that is normally used to refer to a relatively diverse body of philosophical work that emerged during (and since) the 1960s in France (Harrison 2006). In terms of general characteristics, one important point for much of this work is that it is:
profoundly suspicious of anything that tries to pass itself off as a simple statement of fact, of anything that claims to be true by virtue of being âobviousâ, ânaturalâ, or based upon âcommon senseâ. As a philosophy and a set of methods of doing research, post-structuralism ⌠exposes all such claims as contingent, provisional, subject to scrutiny and debate.
From this, it is common to encounter claims that a whole host of things (values, meanings, identities, social structures, or hierarchies) are âconstructedâ rather than true or essential and that such claims to truth need to be deconstructed through a process of radical questioning. Effectively, post-structuralism is suspicious of anything claiming to act as a foundation for thought or understanding. This suspicion meant, for example, âexamining how social relations of power fix social practices, objects, events, and meanings as self-evident, given, natural, and enduringâ (Dixon and Jones 2004: 80). Post-structuralismâs role was to un-found such fixings.
Post-structuralism has been a significant influence for Cultural Geography since the 1980s. This included the growth in interest amongst New Cultural Geographers in representation â âthe social mediation of the real world through ever-present processes of significationâ (Dixon and Jones 2004: 87) â and questioning the politics and inequalities that are found in and are reproduced by these representations. However, given post-structuralismâs internal diversity, post-structuralism has influenced other approaches to cultural geography. For example, certain strands of post-structuralism such as Actor Network Theory (ANT) have also influenced the development of more-than human geographies (see Whatmore 2002; Chapter 4). The development of NRTs in geography has equally been influenced by the work of ANT but also other post-structuralists, including Deleuze and Derrida (Wylie 2010; see Chapter 2).
In his chapter âSteps to an ecology of placeâ, Thrift (1999: 300) develops this critique of representationalism further in listing one of his theoretical âdislikesâ as work which takes the position that:
human beings are engaged in building discursive worlds by actively constructing webs of significance which are laid out over a physical substrate. In other words, human beings are located in a terrain which appears as a set of phenomena to which representations must be affixed prior to any attempt at engagement.
Again, Thriftâs target here is work where the focus falls upon the deliberate and deliberative production and attribution of meaning, in this case by subjects in relation to the environment they live within. It is not so much that Thrift is arguing that we do not do this. Obviously, at times, we will find ourselves in a situation where we quite consciously interpret and project meanings onto our surroundings based on our past experiences and current frame of mind. For example, we might reminisce with family member...
