The Social Science Encyclopedia, Second Edition
Cultural geography is concerned with understanding the diversity of human cultures across the surface of the earth and with exploring the spatial constitution of cultural difference. Its origins can be traced to the nineteenth-century German conception of Kultur (referring to the specific and variable cultures of different nations and periods). The geographical expression of culture in the landscape was central to the German tradition of Landschaftskunde, an approach that was assimilated and transformed in North America through the work of Carl Sauer (1889–1975) and his students at what became known as the ‘Berkeley school’. Sauer was implacably opposed to environmental determinism and approached the study of landscape change as an indication of the scope of human agency in transforming the face of the earth (Thomas 1956). To investigate such transformations, Sauer used a range of evidence including settlement patterns, the domestication of plants and animals, the distribution of material artefacts and the diffusion of innovations. Drawing on the work of contemporary anthropologists such as Alfred Kroeber and Robert Lowie, Sauer (1925:46) distinguished between natural and cultural landscapes, arguing that, ‘The cultural landscape is fashioned out of a natural landscape by a culture group. Culture is the agent, the natural area is the medium, the cultural landscape the result.’
Sauer’s work is still widely respected for his command of languages and dedication to fieldwork, his emphasis on human agency and ecological concern, and his scorn for narrow disciplinary boundaries. But his work has been criticized for its static, disembodied, ‘superorganic’ theory of culture (Duncan 1980) and for its antiquarian preoccupation with rural landscapes of the distant past (Cosgrove and Jackson 1987). Cultural geographers in Britain and North America have challenged Sauer’s unitary view of culture, suggesting that landscapes are contested cultural constructions, socially invested with conflicting meanings that derive from different material interests. Treating landscapes as a reflection of diverse ways of seeing, new methods of interpretation have arisen, including studies of the iconography of landscape and the relationship between social formation and landscape symbolism (Cosgrove 1984; Cosgrove and Daniels 1988).
Reflecting the ‘cultural turn’ throughout the social sciences and the humanities, cultural geographers have begun to explore post-structuralist concerns with discourse and text, developing a sensitivity to the politics of representation (Barnes and Duncan 1992; Duncan and Ley 1993). Some have also been influenced by developments in feminist theory and cultural studies, concerning the cultural politics of gender and sexuality, language, race and nation, as these are played out across the contested boundaries of public and private space (Jackson 1989). Such departures from the Berkeley school tradition have not been universally welcomed (see Price and Lewis 1993 and subsequent commentaries).
As people’s experiences of environment and nature are increasingly mediated through television and popular culture, places have come to be recognized as the product of invented traditions (Anderson and Gale 1992). Unitary definitions have given way to a plurality of conflicting cultures and to a conception of modern identities as inherently hybrid. These developments have led to a more sharply politicized conception of cultural geography in which notions of ideology and power now play a central role. Cultural geographers have returned to the question of nature, bringing new perspectives such as ecofeminism, psychoanalysis and post-modernism to issues that were originally raised by Berkeley school scholars such as Clarence Glacken (1967). Cultural geography is also coming to terms with its historical links with imperialism, exploring a range of post-colonial debates over issues such as native land rights. The diversity of cultural geography truly reflects the contested nature of its core concept, culture, which, as Raymond Williams (1976:87) observed, is ‘one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language’.
Peter Jackson
University of Sheffield
References
Anderson, K.J. and Gale, F. (eds) (1992) Inventing Places, Melbourne.
Barnes, T. and Duncan, J.S. (eds) (1992) Writing Worlds, London and New York.
Cosgrove, D. (1984) Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape, London.
Cosgrove, D. and Daniels, S. (eds) (1988) The Iconography of Landscape, Cambridge, UK.
Cosgrove, D. and Jackson, P. (1987) ‘New directions in cultural geography’, Area 19.
Duncan, J.S. (1980) ‘The superorganic in American cultural geography’, Annals, Association of American Geographers 70.
Duncan, J.S. and Ley, D. (eds) (1993) Place/Culture/ Representation, London and New York.
Glacken, C. (1967) Traces on the Rhodian Shore, Berkeley, CA.
Jackson, P. (1989) Maps of Meaning, London.
Price, M. and Lewis, M. (1993) The reinvention of cultural geography, Annals, Association of American Geographers 83.
Sauer, C.O. (1925) ‘The morphology of landscape’, University of California Publications in Geography 2, reprinted in J.Leighly (ed.) (1963) Land and Life, Berkeley, CA.
Thomas, W.L. (ed.) (1956) Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth, Chicago.
Williams, R. (1976) Keywords, London.
See also: culture; economic geography; landscape; social geography.
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