Understanding Cultural Geography

Places and Traces

Jon Anderson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000368208
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

This book outlines how the theoretical ideas, empirical foci, and methodological techniques of cultural geography make sense of the 'culture wars' that define our time. It is on the battleground of culture that our opportunities, rights, and futures are determined and Understanding Cultural Geography showcases how this discipline can be used to understand these battles and how we can engage in them. Through doing so, the book not only introduces the reader to the rich and complex history of cultural geography, but also the key terms on which the discipline is built. From these insights, the text approaches place as an 'ongoing composition of traces', highlighting the dynamic and ever-changing nature of the world around us, and what our role can be in transforming it for the better.

The third edition has been fully revised and updated to incorporate recent literature and reflect the changing cultural context of its time. Retaining its exciting and innovative structure, the third edition will expand its focus into new areas, including updated chapters on ethnicity and race, and new chapters on gender and the body. This new edition captures not only recent changes in the cultural world, but also the discipline itself, offering the most up-to-date text to understand and engage with the cultural battlegrounds which constitute our lives.

Understanding Cultural Geography is the ideal text for students being introduced to the discipline through either undergraduate or postgraduate degree courses. The third edition is an important update to a highly successful text that incorporates a vast foundation of knowledge; it is an invaluable book for lecturers and students.

Part I

Introducing cultural geography

Chapter 1

Forward!

‘…A very good place to start’

Cultural geography, like any discipline, evolves over time. Its provocations and pursuits change with respect to fresh theoretical impetus, as well as reacting in response to a changing world. In the relatively short timeframe since the second edition of Understanding Cultural Geography: Places and Traces (2015) the world has changed – perhaps quite significantly. There are ‘new normals’ emerging in every aspect of our cultural life. Our assumptions and orthodoxies are changing with respect to non-human nature (as a consequence of virus pandemics, the rise of student-led climate change protests, and the increasing frequency of extreme weather, fires, and pollution); with respect to racial equality (due to the rise of neo-fascist far-right groups across Europe and America); with respect to gender (due in no small part to the establishment of the #metoo movement); with respect to sexuality (due to the widespread recognition of fluid and non-binary orientations in some places, and the rise in hate crimes in others); with respect to the nation (following the re-ordering of global relations, for example between the US and Korea, Russia, and China, and between the UK and Europe); with respect to the power of corporations (following the new and far-reaching influence of social media giants); and with respect to mobility (which cross-cut the issues noted above, as well as the significant changes experienced in the border debates between US and Mexico, into and through the European Union, and into Australia). In recent years, everything we thought we knew about the cultural world is now up for debate. A defining feature of Understanding Cultural Geography: Places and Traces has been to position its readers as part of this cultural world, and as our world changes, this new edition offers insight into their nature, and how best to engage with them.

This third edition of Understanding Cultural Geography: Places and Traces seeks to engage directly with the changing cultural context of our time. To this end, it consolidates and strengthens its focus on places and traces – arguing that a focus on geography gives material and metaphorical grounding to the key ideas of culture and affinity that come to define us; it also focuses on the notion of (b)ordering – the idea that through our cultural traces we seek to culturally order and geographically border the places of which we are a part.

But before we go further, let’s just pause and reflect for a moment. We stated above that the world has changed, perhaps quite significantly, since the second edition of this book; but to what extent is this claim true? Has the whole world changed, or just parts of it, for some people, in some places? When we critically look at the contexts we have listed above, it is clear that some subjects and selves have been re-ordered with respect to others in the ‘new normal’ of our time. For these issues, many people’s relative positions to power, to risk, and to the margins have changed, perhaps quite substantively. Yet if you are a black woman in a Western nation (to take just one example), perhaps the views and actions of the misogynist, populist, and racist right-wing are something you have been sensitive to since the day you were born (or at least since you first became self-aware). From this identity position, or for anyone who shares an affinity with it, perhaps not much has really changed in recent years – it’s a case of same sh*t, different day: forward! This point reminds us that we need to be sensitive to our positionality, and the cultures we have affinities with, whenever we are making claims about the world. We should re-check our cultural privileges, and re-insert (or indeed remove) them, in new ways. If we do so, we may re-frame the claims about the significance of changes we are currently witnessing in the cultural world. We could instead frame them as substantive changes to the cultures that are vulnerable, at risk, and subject to conflict. Where once particular cultures felt they enjoyed privilege or equity, they may now feel under threat and marginalized. Where some cultures felt they were the recipients of punches ‘down’ from the dominant, they may now be the new power brokers, ‘punching across’ to more established, but weakened, authority. Whatever our position in relation to these changes, it is clear that in recent years our cultural lines have been redrawn, and in some cases, made bolder. Maybe these changes have grabbed our attention because we do not find the new punchlines funny anymore. It is the premise of this book that cultural geography offers a clear and insightful way to analyse, engage with, and critique these new (b)orders.

Taking care: conflict and conviviality

As it does so, this book uses theoretical ideas to change our understanding of the world. Any theoretical idea helps us to scaffold and construct our framing of reality: their words make our worlds. As we pause to reflect on our own positionality in relation to the contemporary situation, we should also pause to reflect on the palette of theoretical ideas that are most useful to critique, and (re)construct, the worlds of which we are a part.

It is with this point in mind that this third edition of Understanding Cultural Geography argues that cultural geographers must be care-ful (see also Dorling, 2019). We must employ theoretical ideas that do not simply draw our attention to risks and threat, but also those that highlight the ways in which cultures forge complementarity and co-existence. What languages best enable us to engage with choreographies of conflict and conviviality?

In employing theoretical vocabularies that remain rooted in ‘modern’ binaries (see Box 1.1) this book suggests that cultural geographers not only have a brilliant means through which to understand the conflict that appears to be the dominant process (b)ordering our world, but we also run the risk of suggesting that conflict is the only way of comprehending and conducting our lives. Despite many scholars seeking to destabilize these modern binaries, their powerful legacy sometimes means that we are hot-wired for focusing on conflict – and to some extent this is understandable given its visibility and prevalence in the contemporary era. However, in doing so, we may pay less attention to the cosmopolitanism and compatibility that marks many aspects of cultural life. If we look away for a moment from the spectacular, the headline making, and the clickbait, we may also see the extraordinary ordinary, the everyday co-existence and conviviality which emerges and comes to define our places. In short, we must engage with this diversity of practices, in both the changing margins and mainstream, and connect theoretical insights that understand all these mainstays of our life. We must be wary that our discipline does not become the contemporary equivalent of its forebears and, through elevating conflict, function as a ‘weapon’ of and for the status quo. If the discipline can take and make a place for all approaches this is an important statement in and of itself; as well as becoming a provisional medley from which we can all choose the most appropriate strokes with which to swim through the cultural world.

Box 1.1 Dealing with modern binaries, their legacy, and contemporary culture wars…

If words make worlds, then the words we use to theorize the world are of primary importance. Indeed, even deciding what ‘things’ get words, where one ‘thing’ ends and another begins, are seismically significant. Ask yourself: what is that object? Is it actually an ‘object’, or a ‘process’? How does it relate to another one (or many)? How are they different? Is ‘one’ more valuable, better, or worse, in comparison to the others? On what criteria, and who gets to choose? As we will see in this book, the words we use to name ‘things’ matter – the power to name (after Jordan and Weedon, 1995, see Chapter 6) not only helps us to understand the world, but also renders it real – the world effectively becomes the meanings that we give to it, and words are one mechanism to order and border our lives.

One means by which we impose order is by deploying binaries of various kinds. They enable us to sleep at night, to have the modernist dream… binaries are the dream.

Barnes, 2005: 76

Sadly the American dream is dead, but if I get elected president I will bring it back… Bigger, better and stronger than ever before.

Donald Trump, when running successfully for election to the US presidency, in Neate, 2015

As Barnes suggests above, one key way in which words have been harnessed to order the world is through the ‘deploy[ment of] binaries’ (please note, this use of military metaphor is also not without meaning). The deployment of binary classifications has led to the messy complexity of life, death, and everything (else) having order imposed upon it using an ‘either-or’ categorization. Olsson explains that this filing of the world is premised on the assumption that ‘nothing can be one thing and its opposite at the same time’ (in Cloke and Johnston, 2005: 9). From the get-go then, this categorization of the components of the chaotic world are filed into one of only two pigeonholes; every-thing must other be either ‘one thing’ (for example ‘A’), or the ‘other’ (‘not-A’). This system suggests, therefore, that ‘one thing’ cannot be anything other than what it has been classified as (in other words, ‘A’ cannot be two things at once (i.e. it cannot be both ‘A’ and ‘not-A’). This system demands that no middle ground exists between classifications – all categorizations are clear and stark; in this binary version of the world, there is only one ‘thing’ or its ‘other’, there is no in-between.

Everyone is a Roundy or a Squarey

after Hargreaves, 1975

This binary classification system has dominated Western thinking and practice for centuries. As Barnes tells us, it has been the ‘dream’ that has enabled the world as we know it to develop, to live, and to sleep at night, and, as we have also seen, some power brokers not only wish to perpetuate this classification, but strengthen it (see Neate, above). We will interrogate the implications of this situation throughout this book, but at this point I wish to raise the effects this categorization has had for how we relate to the world, and to the vast array of ‘others’ we share it with.

If, in the binary version of the world, everything has to be one thing or the other, then this categorical imperative also demands that you, me, and everyone else in it, need to pick a side. We have to be a ‘Roundy’ or a ‘Squarey’. Inherent to the binary classification is the creation of an ‘us’ and a ‘not-us’, in other words, an ‘us’ and ‘them’. As a consequence, it requires us to position ourselves as part of one culture, and identify those who are not-us, or ‘Other’ (see Said, 1979). We are required to do this whether we identify with the given classifications or not (for example, what if I wanted to be an octagon, rather than a Roundy, or even break apart the two-dimensional orthodoxy and choose to be a dodecahedron?). Can you position yourself in this binary world, with respect to all the cultural ideas and practices with which you have affinity; which side are you on? Are you with ‘us’ or against ‘us’? How does this framing influence how you see the world? Are you always and absolutely a Roundy or a Squarey?

One of the attractions of applying such rigid categories is their reductive simplicity. A simpler world is one that human cultures can deal with and create policies for, a place where one can act in authoritative ways, and where expertise is democratized. Yet, in some cases an either-or categorization system does not begin to exhaust the possibilities that comprise our, and everything else’s, identity positions. Concomitantly, this classification system can also act to reduce the possibilities on offer for openly engaging with these apparent ‘others’. In sum, through simplifying the world, the modernist dream has re-placed it with a version where conflict between ‘us’ and ‘them’ has become normal and routine; in contemporary times binary classifications have been deployed to reduce the relations between cultures to nothing but war.

Figure 1.1 Culture wars all about the place.

Source: Hannah Salisbury.

As many scho...