The Dictionary of Human Geography (36 page)

Read The Dictionary of Human Geography Online

Authors: Michael Watts

BOOK: The Dictionary of Human Geography
7.76Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
cultural capital
A concept coined by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, cultural capital is one among many forms of capital that figure prominently in his intellectual pro ject; namely, to elaborate ?a general science of the economy of practices? that would explain the ?economic logic? behind apparently non economic and therefore disinterested practices such as gift exchange or cultural consumption. Cultural capital is closely linked to and func tions in conjunction with economic capital (the conventional and most crudely material form of capital that inhabits economic theory) and social capital. The inter convertibility of various forms of capital is a critical rather than incidental element in Bourdieu?s theory of practice; but Bourdieu is careful to note that the fungibility of cultural and social capital into economic capital is conditional rather than guaranteed, and frequently partial (in short, not without risk). Two additional con cepts, symbolic capital and academic capital, which have close affinities with the concept of cultural capital, also appear in Bourdieu?s writings. That said, academic capital may be regarded as a subset of cultural capital and symbolic capital as a superset. (NEW PARAGRAPH) In his instructive treatise, Distinction: a social critique of the judgment of taste (1984), Bourdieu deploys the concept of cultural capital to great effect to show how bourgeois practices of cultural consumption via the arts, educa tion, cuisine, attire and so on consolidate an aesthetic that ?consciously and deliberately or not . . . fulfill[s] a social function of legit imating social differences?. But his clearest discussion of the concept is in a short, often overlooked essay called ?The forms of capital?, where Bourdieu identifies three states in which cultural capital can exist: ?in the embodied state, i.e. in the form of long lasting disposi tions of mind and body; in the objectified state, in the form of cultural goods (pictures, books, dictionaries, instruments, machines, etc.) which are the trace or realization of the ories, problematics, etc.; and in the institution alized state [as educational qualifications] . . . ? (1985, p. 243). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Key aspects of cultural capital differentiate it from economic capital: principal among these are its necessarily embodied form, which makes it both less fungible and less easily acquired than economic capital; and the more overtly social and disguised conditions of its transmission. Economic logic dictates the effi cacy of cultural capital: hence, the symbolic profits of distinction (e.g. the ability to read in a society of illiterates) that accrue from cultural capital depend on the scarcity value of that capital, which in turn depends on its distribution within society. The more ill distributed a particular form of capital, the greater is its value. In a circular argument, Bourdieu maintains that inequalities in the distribution of capital in short, class divi sions are reproduced intergenerationally by those very forms of capital that demarcate class status in the first instance: ultimately, he writes, ?the means of appropriating the product of accumulated labor in the objecti fied state which is held by a given agent [i.e. various forms of capital], depends for its real efficacy on the form of distribution of the means of appropriating the accumulated and objectively available resources . . . ? (1985, (NEW PARAGRAPH) pp. 245 6). vg (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Guillory (1993); Lane (2000). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
cultural ecology
An important, if somewhat under appreciated, precursor to contemporary political ecology. Cultural ecology has been primarily concerned with the relationships among the transformation of nature, social reproduction and cultural processes within par ticular social formations. Emerging from North American anthropology in the mid twentieth century, cultural ecology has mostly concerned itself with non industrial societies, typically pastoralists, hunter gathers, fishing cultures and small scale cultivators, with an emphasis on ethnographic field methods. Cultural ecol ogy in this sense is most closely associated with the work of Julian Steward and the Chicago school, particularly after the publication of Steward?s Theory of culture change (1955). Work done or influenced by Steward in this tradition emphasized a close relationship between symbolic culture (values, religious beliefs and traditions) on the one hand, and the material, ecological basis of a society on the other. Steward in particular developed the notion of a ?cultural core? shaped in a possibilist sense by the ways in which critical environmen tal resources (crops, animals, energy sources etc.) were used by a culture. It would be fair to say that Steward?s primary interest was cultural formation and change, but cultural ecology more generally was at the forefront of scholarly attention to questions about the social bases of environmental change, how cultures respond or adapt to environmental change and also how cultures influence the management of crit ical environmental resources. Moreover, con siderable theoretical and methodological diversity characterizes self described cultural ecologists (Netting, 1986). (NEW PARAGRAPH) As the name would suggest, cultural ecology was heavily influenced by the rise of ecology. This is true not only in terms of a focus on the relationship between environmental condi tions and cultural processes, but also in some of the conceptual emphasis on systems, adap tation, homeostasis, resilience, stability and so on, all hallmarks of an earlier phase of ecology (see ecology). It would be unfair to attribute the kind of telos so evident in Clementsian ecology to cultural ecology. But some work in cultural ecology took on a cybernetic character, conveying a sense that all the pieces of a culture meshed into a coher ent, smooth running, well adapted and stable machine like whole, with cuLture function ally linked to environmental conditions and resource availability. This is apparent, for example, in Roy Rappaport?s (1968) work on wild pigs, and the spiritual beliefs and rituals surrounding these resources in New Guinea. (NEW PARAGRAPH) At the same time, strict adherence to tradi tional ethnography in cultural ecology at times meant that particular sociaL forma tions were conceptualized rigidly as such, independent and isolated from the rest of the world, with little or no consideration of or facility for the ways in which these ostensibly remote cultures articulate with social pro cesses at broader scaLes of analysis. This, in turn, meant that cultural ecology provided lit tle capacity for understanding power, the appropriation of surplus and valuation in the context of a global political economy, even when important linkages along these lines were recognized by cultural ecologists them selves (Robbins, 2004). This is a theme articu lated well by one of Steward?s students, Eric Wolf (1982), in his argument for the relevance of poLiticaL economy, and of the need for attention to the articulation of local social for mations with broader social processes. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Cultural ecology?s influence goes far beyond localized studies of non industrial societies, however. As among the first fields to reverse academic specialization, and to seriously con sider environmental change within a social science framework, and with an emphasis on careful, empirical observation and analysis, cultural ecology had an important influence in translating and reinforcing environmentaLism in the Anglo American academy. Cultural ecologists in numerous instances have docu mented the high levels of sophistication and sustainability in many ?traditional? settings, questioning the apparent ?advancement? of market guided and/or state managed resource appropriation (e.g. Geertz, 1963). And some cultural ecologists, before even talk of a first world political ecology, began to apply their approaches in more industrialized settings, with important results (see, e.g., Bayliss Smith, 1982). sp (NEW PARAGRAPH)
cultural economy
In mainstream econom ics, cuLture and economy are kept largely apart, in the belief that economic activity follows its own rules and rationality. In con trast, heterodox approaches, tapping deep into the history of classical economics, have long argued that the economy draws on cultural inputs or is culturally embedded. Thus, atten tion has been drawn, inter alia, to such phenomena as the rise of the cultural indus tries, the role of spectacLe, advertising and desire in sustaining consumption, the lubrica tion of economic relationships by trust and reciprocity, varieties of capitaLism explained by differences in national institutional and business cultures, and the role of culturally inflected routines and habits in influencing economic evolution. These various approaches acknowledge the existence of a tight link between culture and economy, but still con tinue to treat the two domains as separate entities, arguing that logics governing the two should not be conflated (Ray and Sayer, (NEW PARAGRAPH) . Indeed, many writers sympathetic to these approaches insist on the continued primacy of poLiticaL economy over cultural economy. (NEW PARAGRAPH) More recently, however, a second gener ation of cultural economy theorization has emerged, one that sees only a singular plane holding together hybrid inputs including abstract rules, historical legacies, symbolic and discursive narratives, social and cultural habits, material arrangements, emotions and aspirations (Callon, 1999; Du Gay and Pryke, 1999; Hetherington and Law, 1999). Still struggling for an exact vocabulary and dis persed across the social sciences, this approach sees economy as a cultural act and culture as an economic act, so that meeting material needs and making a profit or earning a living can be seen as part and parcel of seeking symbolic satisfaction, pleasure and power. Accordingly, in explaining the eco nomics of production, for example, corporate values, workplace cultures, conventions of welfare and rituals of creativity can be shown to shape competitive potential, along with various rules of technological, organizational and market ordering. Similarly, in the eco nomics of markets, rules of value based on price and other forms of rating can be shown to weave in with consumer tastes, the seduc tions of organized spectacle and the market power of some economic actors. (NEW PARAGRAPH) This variant of the cultural economy approach is marked by a number of concep tual orientations with long histories in classical economic thought (for a synthesis, see Amin and Thrift, 2004). One concerns the absolute centrality of passions in the economy, from the libidinal energies and spectacle of consump tion and possession that drive ?fast capitalism?, through to the love of objects that now so powers wants and needs. A second orienta tion, which can be traced back to Adam Smith?s emphasis on the role of empathy in making the market economy work, highlights the pivotal significance of moral values, as manifest in the market ethic itself and in the social conventions that justify particular mores of economic behaviour (hedonism, individual ism, fast food as bad/good food, trade versus aid). Third, there is new work on the econom ics of knowledge that recognizes the centrality of creativity based on unconscious neural mobilizations, materiaL cuLtures and learning by doing in small communities of practice. A fourth orientation is to explain generalized trust in ways that supersede the emphasis on interpersonal dynamics found in earlier variants of cultural economy. For example, Seabright (2004) has argued that the option of intimacy among strangers in the market economy, in which multitudes of eco nomic actors who do not know each other constantly jostle, is lubricated by many cul tural institutions that have evolved over time, including the facility of laughter. A fifth orien tation is to explain economic power less as a force possessed or wielded by some actors and institutions than as a diffuse and subtle form of cultural enrolment, scripted in the standards, rules and accounting measures that daily produce disciplined subjects and regulate economic life, or through particular narratives of what counts as significant in business journals, advertising scripts and stories of cor porate prowess. Finally, the cultural economy approach, following a long lineage of projec tion from particular situations (e.g. Marx?s projections on capitalist futures based on the British experience) explores the integrative work done by readings of the economy (e.g. Daniel Bell on the service economy or Manuel Castells on the information economy). (NEW PARAGRAPH) This new body of thought, in summary, rethinks the economy as a culturally infused entity, based on the potentialities of passion, moral sentiments, soft knowledge, instituted trust, symptoms of normality and discursive forms of power. These are considered to drive economic life at all levels and manifestations. aa (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Amin and Thrift (2007). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
cultural 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 ?culturaliza tion? 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 fragmenta tions in the field. (NEW PARAGRAPH) 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: (NEW PARAGRAPH) In North American geography, the domi nant 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 per spectives 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 arte facts, taken as metonyms of cultures in which they were embedded. Some work developed a notion of cultural areas dom inated 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 con tacting different environments, it tended to a singular view of culture held by and defining a group. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The focus on the mutual shaping of people and place was echoed in European tradi tions 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 connec tions of the rhythms of daily life and the environment over the long duree, creating a ?seamless robe? of people and place. Vidal de la Blache (1903) summarized this process as follows: (NEW PARAGRAPH) It is man who reveals a country's individu ality by moulding it to his own use. He establishes a connection between unrelated features, substituting for the random effects of local circumstances a systematic cooper ation 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. (NEW PARAGRAPH) 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 magis terial 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 Frederic 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). (NEW PARAGRAPH) In British geography, a regional approach was inspired by Hettner?s Landerkunde schema (see Hettner, 1907) of natural base up to social and finally cultural super structure starting from geology, then topography, climate, natural resources and finally leading to settlement and human culture adapted to those circum stances (Heimatkunde). A similarly choro logical approach in Swedish geography focused on hembydsforskning (home area studies), and drew upon ethnological stud ies of material culture and language to define cultural regions (Crang, 2000). In Britain, Geddes? influence produced a re gional 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. (NEW PARAGRAPH) These classic traditions focused upon the commonalities in the landscape and rural, his torical 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, femi nist 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 geog rapher 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 char acter 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 arte fact 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. (NEW PARAGRAPH) To these issues was added engagement with other sub disciplines and fields outside geog raphy, 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 soci ology, 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 tradi tions but rapidly swept on to transform other sub disciplines as well. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The first strand drew on work from behav iouraL 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 sub cultures in modern everyday Life. The latter were seen as resistance or transgression, con testing 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, contest ation 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 cul tural 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). (NEW PARAGRAPH) The second strand of work was differenti ated 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 res onance (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 paint ings were examined not just for content, but the way in which they framed the landscape indeed, created ?landscape? as a visual cat egory. Often using a linguistic approach, studies treated cultural artefacts as texts that could be read and interpreted to uncover hid den meanings and the imprints of the power that shaped them and which they embodied. In this, it drew from the techniques of decon struction and post structuraLism, which focused on how texts shape meaning through processes of exclusion or repression, whereby they downplay or negate some possible inter pretations 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 post coLoniaLism (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. (NEW PARAGRAPH) 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 dis tribution 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). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Beyond issues of ethnicity, cultural geog raphy 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 iden tity. A major strand of work emerged around the different forms and modalities of con sumption and how this related to people?s identities. (NEW PARAGRAPH) 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 eco nomic geography there was a double focus, both on cultural forms in the cuLturaL econ omy (e.g. Amin and Thrift, 2003) and on ?enculturing? approaches focusing upon pro cesses 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 dis ciplines, blurring the edges of geography. (NEW PARAGRAPH) 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 cat egories 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 anthropo centric basis of human geography, and culture as a

Other books

Stealing Home by Sherryl Woods
the Sky-Liners (1967) by L'amour, Louis - Sackett's 13
The Dead Drop by Jennifer Allison
Here Comes the Bride by Laura Drewry