cultural geography
Cultural Geography
Dictionary of Human Geography
One of the most rapidly growing and energetic sub-fields in Anglophone geography over the past 20 years. Many have written of a cultural turn in geography paralleling those in other social sciences. Often the subject of controversy over its approaches, claims and methods cultural geography has seen the reinvigoration of some topics and the development of whole new topics of geographic enquiry. Indeed, it may be that we can identify a recent ‘culturalization’ of many branches of geography, rather than simply a field of ‘cultural geography’ – thus, it is not always clear if the field is defined by culture as the content of study, and what its limits might be, or the approach used.
There is also a long history of the study of the geography of cultures that has had an often-troubled relationship with the recent surge in interest in the field. So, for the sake of clarity, we shall start with these legacies, then move to the explosion of work in the
1990s and finally point to current fragmentations in the field.
Throughout most of the twentieth century, cultural geography existed as a sub-field in different traditions of geography that addressed ‘the existence of a variegated landscape of differentially adapted human groups to their immediate environment’
(Archer, 1993, p. 500). To draw out three approaches to this topic:
• In North American geography, the dominant tradition was the berkeley school , built around the work of Carl Ortwin Sauer (1889–1975). So powerful was this tradition that around the middle of the twentieth century cultural geography was often used to label all human geography in US universities. Drawing on the work especially of emerging anthropological perspectives on material culture , from the likes of Franz Boas (1858–1942), Sauer added a geographical focus on landscape, drawn from German geography’s work on landschaft . His most famous formulation on the morphology of landscape (in his essay of that name in 1925) described the cultural landscape , where culture was the agent and landscape the medium. Work in this tradition charted the origins and diffusion of cultures around the globe from cultural hearths . In this, it tracked the movement mostly via material artefacts, taken as metonyms of cultures in which they were embedded. Some work developed a notion of cultural areas dominated by one cultural group occupying an area. The focus on culture as an agent led to accusations that it was inventing a ‘superorganic’ entity rather than focusing on the mixed, changeable and contested experience of people
(Duncan, 1980). Despite its empirical attention to processes of diffusion and change in cultures contacting different environments, it tended to a singular view of culture held by and defining a group.
• The focus on the mutual shaping of people and place was echoed in European traditions in cultural geography. The annales school that developed in France

from the work of Paul Vidal de la Blache (1845–1918) is claimed by cultural, and by social and historical geography . It paid close attention to linkage of people and place through ‘ genres de vie ’; that is, the ways of everyday life. Exemplary works such as Le Roy Ladurie’s (1966) Les Paysans de Languedoc charted the intimate connections of the rhythms of daily life and the environment over the
long durée, creating a ‘seamless robe’ of people and place. Vidal de la Blache
(1903) summarized this process as follows:
It is man who reveals a country’s individuality by moulding it to his own use. He establishes a connection between unrelated features, substituting for the random effects of local circumstances a systematic cooperation of forces. Only then does a country acquire a specific character, differentiating it from others, till at length it becomes, as it were, a medal struck in the likeness of a people.
The focus was on ordinary folk and everyday cultures rather than high culture. Perhaps the greatest studies building from these traditions, that are still causing controversy, were those of Fernand Braudel (1902–85), whose magisterial works of the shared development of a Mediterranean culture (see Braudel and Reynolds, 1975 [original
French 1949]) – based around olives, wine and grain, and the long-term patterns of trade – remain scholarly landmarks. These works echoed the studies of Frédéric le Play
(1806–82), who developed a geographical account of France around the categories of
Place–Work–Folk. His work was picked up by the British planner and biologist Patrick
Geddes, and led to the foundation of the Le Play Society that sponsored a range of geographical expeditions during the mid-twentieth century. They share the vision of groups creating a cultural homeland as ‘an area carved out by axe and plough, which belongs to the people who have carved it out’ (Olwig, 1993, p. 311).
• In British geography, a regional approach was inspired by Hettner’s Länderkunde schema (see Hettner, 1907) of natural base up to social and finally cultural superstructure – starting from geology, then topography , climate , natural resources and finally leading to settlement and human culture adapted to those circumstances (Heimatkunde). A similarly chorological approach in Swedish geography focused on hembydsforskning (home area studies), and drew upon ethnological studies of material culture and language to define cultural regions
(Crang, 2000). In Britain, Geddes’ influence produced a regional survey approach that emphasized a visual integration of the landscape as a method of finding unity (Matless, 1992), while the local history work on landscapes of W.G.
Hoskins focused on studies that sought to capture the identity and spirit of specific regions through their landscapes.
These classic traditions focused upon the commonalities in the landscape and rural, historical or traditional forms. Criticism of this tendency mounted through the last quarter of the twentieth century. First, humanistic geography challenged the lack of concern with, and scope for, individual interpretation and actions. Authors looked at the meaning of places for specific people, and the emotional geographies of cultures

found in the bond with specific places and their genius loci (e.g. Pocock, 1982). Second, radical , feminist and marxist geography criticized the assumptions of organic wholeness given to cultures, and pointed to the internal divisions, contradictions and conflicts while, moreover, pointing to more contemporary and urban formations. Third, the political context and implications of European traditions has been examined. Thus the work of a German geographer such as Franz Petri, writing between the world wars, examined the spread of Germanic culture from a supposed ancestral cultural hearth around post-Roman Frankish peoples. Based upon an examination of field and place names , taken as indicators of Germanic culture, he could label ‘[t]he character of
Frankish settlement in Walloon and Northern France [as] utterly Germanic’ (Ditt, 2001, p. 245) – a highly charged verdict, given the territorial disputes around Germany. This highlights the problematic relationship of artefact to cultures – choosing certain things as indicators of a culture, but leaving other things as analytically insignificant, reveals political dimensions and choices in the analysis.
To these issues was added engagement with other sub-disciplines and fields outside geography, which – in the last two decades of the twentieth century – were also undergoing their own cultural turns. We might, for the sake of argument, characterize the work that followed in two strands, the first tending to respond to developments in social geography and sociology, and the second as drawing from the radical ends of the arts and humanities. Together, they have often been labelled the ‘New Cultural
Geography’, which began as something of a rebellion to the above traditions but rapidly swept on to transform other sub-disciplines as well.
The first strand drew on work from behavioural geography , to which it added the long tradition of ethnography from the chicago school of urban sociology, and arguments over the sociology of culture emerging in the 1970s and through the 1980s. This inspired a rich vein of work on urban cultures and subcultures in modern everyday life .
The latter were seen as resistance or transgression , contesting the categories of the majority culture. Culture was no longer seen as somehow a ‘natural’ property of a group but, rather, the medium of power, oppression, contestation and resistance. Much of this work grew from an engagement with the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary
Cultural Studies, and worked to look at the role of culture in securing and maintaining the hegemony of dominant groups. It began to push at the cultural construction of social categories (such as age, race , class , sexuality or gender ) and the ways in which these came to signify particular meanings and be connected with specific ways of life
(e.g. Bell and Valentine, 1995; Kofman, 1998; Skelton and Valentine, 1998; Pred, 2000).
The second strand of work was differentiated not so much by topic as by method, drawing from the arts and humanities . Work here drew on critical studies of often high cultural artefacts such as art and literature , but moved these techniques to include more popular cultural forms such as film or other media . Rather than using these cultural forms as sources of ‘data’ about what occurred in places, or as rich evocations of emotional resonance (which had been the tendency in humanistic geography ; e.g.
Pocock, 1981), it unpacked the spatialities of the materials to examine what work they

did in representing and shaping cultures. Thus landscape paintings were examined not just for content, but the way in which they framed the landscape – indeed, created
‘landscape’ as a visual category. Often using a linguistic approach, studies treated cultural artefacts as texts that could be read and interpreted to uncover hidden meanings and the imprints of the power that shaped them and which they embodied.
In this, it drew from the techniques of deconstruction and post-structuralism , which focused on how texts shape meaning through processes of exclusion or repression, whereby they downplay or negate some possible interpretations while foregrounding others. The recovery of these hidden meanings was thus linked to recovering the voices and views of silenced and oppressed groups, especially in studies informed by postcolonialism (Blunt and McEwan, 2002). This latter work also inspired studies of cultural definition and difference (e.g. Anderson, 2007), especially the creation of otherness .
Here, the focus became how cultural artefacts were not simply indicators of cultural belonging, waiting to be analysed by academics, but were actively used to signal and create identities by ordinary people.
These two approaches often fused and cross-pollinated. For instance, work on urban ethnicity moved from segregation analyses, of distributions of peoples, to studies of the lived experience of those cultures, how they signified belonging and how they signified exclusion. Rather than now examining the distribution of cultures seen as discrete entities occupying more or less exclusive territories , cultural geography engaged with the study of connections, movements and circulations of meanings in transnationalism and diasporic cultures created in the modern global world. These often form examples of cultural hybridity and hybridization, which confound the exclusions and repressions of hegemonic cultures that sought to maintain a link of people (singular) and territory. Studies saw the multiple categories of identity connected and inflected by people’s local milieu (e.g., on youth, class and race, Nayak,
2003), or looked at the fluidities and fixities of labelling and categorization in transforming urban milieux (Pred, 2000).
Beyond issues of ethnicity, cultural geography moved to explore many other aspects of identity politics (Keith and Pile 1993; Pile and Keith, 1997), such as sexuality and disability , which became ever more salient in the closing years of the twentieth century.
The main focus was on practices of inclusion or exclusion, belonging, resistance and identity. A major strand of work emerged around the different forms and modalities of consumption and how this related to people’s identities.
The focus on identity and the meaning of social activities was transplanted into other formerly discrete sub-disciplines. Thus it became increasingly common to see studies of rural cultural geographies, concerning issues of Otherness and identity (e.g. Cloke and
Little, 1997), and urban geographies of cultures, political geographies about identity or using similar methods in deconstructing key texts in a critical geopolitics . In economic geography there was a double focus, both on cultural forms in the cultural economy
(e.g. Amin and Thrift, 2003) and on ‘enculturing’ approaches – focusing upon processes of meaning and belonging within both firms and markets. In some cases this blurring

into other fields has been controversial and has met with hostility from those who regard with suspicion the topical focus (as not being of great importance) or the methods as lacking in either rigour or the appearance of rigour sufficient to persuade policy-makers. There have thus been arguments about the cultural turn going ‘too far’ and undermining former assumptions and unities (Martin and Sunley, 2001). The incorporation of cultural issues has had an energizing effect on other sub-fields, but has also meant that cultural geography’s own distinctiveness has become less clear. As a sub-discipline it has been relatively unconcerned, if not antipathetic, to policing the boundaries of enquiry, especially given how it has shown that definitions enact power relations and often work to exclude groups. Likewise, it has continued to draw catholically from other disciplines, blurring the edges of geography.
Within the sub-discipline, a recent series of debates have begun to challenge some of the sureties that have emerged over the past 20 years. First, while criticisms of idealism have long been levelled at cultural geography, often in the name of re-prioritizing other categories of analysis in the name of historical materialism , a new set of theorizations of materialism have emerged within the sub-field itself. These often refuse the cartesian divide into subject and object, and look at thinking as a material process embedded in the world. They also attempt to provide renewed senses of agency for the material world, rather than just focusing on human agency. Some work challenges the anthropocentric basis of human geography, and culture as a human artefact, drawing on posthumanism and driving renewed studies into animal geographies. Second, debates have contested the focus upon signification and meaning within cultural geography. Instead, recent work flags up the role of habit and routine focusing on the unconscious and preconscious shaping of identities and actions. Third, the focus on the textual mode of interpretation has been argued to privilege representation as a social process. Instead, non-representational theory focuses upon the performance and enactment of identities. This rematerialization and rethinking of cultural geography often returns to issues of dwelling and the relationship of people, but not peoples, to places drawing inspiration from post-Heideggerian and Deleuzian philosophy. It challenges a preoccupation with representational forms and meaning leading to the social construction of identities. Instead, it focuses upon the connection of material and social process in forging identities in practices and actions. These current debates promise to be as unruly as previous developments, drawing widely from outside the discipline and speaking to topics across sub-disciplines.
Suggested reading
Full bibliography is available here .
Anderson, Domosh, Pile and Thrift (2002)
Atkinson, Jackson, Sibley and Washbourne (2007)
Blunt, Gruffudd, May. and Ogborn (2003)
Crang (1998)

Mitchell (2000)
Shurmer-Smith (2002).