The Dictionary of Human Geography (37 page)

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Authors: Michael Watts

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human artefact, drawing on posthuman ism 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 (NEW PARAGRAPH) returns to issues of dwelling and the relation ship 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. mc (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Anderson, Domosh, Pile and Thrift (2002); Atkinson, Jackson, Sibley and Washbourne (NEW PARAGRAPH) ; Blunt, Gruffudd, May. and Ogborn (NEW PARAGRAPH) ; Crang (1998); Mitchell (2000); Shurmer Smith (2002). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
cultural hearth
The place of origin of a cul tural system. This concept was introduced into American cultural geography by Carl Ortwin Sauer (1952; see also 1969) and was important in the early work of the BERkELEY school. Sauer borrowed it from late nineteenth century German anthropogeography, along with the related notions of culture area, cultural land scape and cultural diffusion. For many in the Berkeley School, the term was used primarily to refer to the originary point of agricultural systems that had subsequently diffused out wards. For others, it represented the heart of cultural regions more broadly defined (Wagner and Mikesell, 1962). jsd (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Leighly (1969). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
cultural landscape
Conventionally, a princi pal object of study in cultural geography. The classic definition is Carl Ortwin Sauer's (1963b [1925] see figure): (NEW PARAGRAPH) The cultural landscape is fashioned from a natural landscape by a cultural group. Culture is the agent, the natural area the medium, the cultural landscape is the result. Under the influence of a given culture, itself changing through time, the landscape undergoes development, passing through phases, and probably reaching ultimately the end of its cycle of development. (NEW PARAGRAPH) This definition reflects not only Sauer's personal context and scholarly concerns (see BERkELEY school), but also theoretical issues that remain critical to discussions of cultural landscape. His description of cultural landscape as subject to evolutionary change echoes W.M. Davis? cycle of natural landscape evolution, but Sauer was explicitly concerned to counter environmental determinism and drew upon German studies of Kulturlandschaft that stressed the mutual shaping of people (Volk) and land in the creation of dwelling (Heimat) (Olwig, 2002). Sauer thus stressed culture as a geographical agent, although the physical environment retained a central significance as the medium with and through which human cultures act (see culture area). Hence such elements as topography, soils, watercourses, plants and animals were incorporated into studies of the cultural land scape insofar as they evoked human responses and adaptations, or had been altered by human activity. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Today, Sauer's neat distinction between nature and culture has been largely aban doned in favour of a ?social nature' (see also production Of nature): the tabula rasa of a ?natural landscape' upon which ?culture' inscribes itself ignores the constancy of envir onmental change, and the dialectic of ?nature' and ?culture' is historically constructed. All landscapes are at once natural and cultural (Cosgrove, 1998 [1984]). Furthermore, con temporary cultural ecology has deepened our understanding of the complexities of cul tural landscape change, and post colonial ism has reworked perspectives on the landscape impacts of colonialism (Sluyter, 2001, 2002; Mitchell, 2002e [1994]). In con sequence, greater attention is now given to grids of power, to cultural contestation and to the active role played by the diverse ?insiders' of landscape, so that Sauer's idea of a climax cultural landscape swept away by a rejuvenated one has been replaced by notions of a more mediated, hybrid and transcultural landscape (see also transculturation). (NEW PARAGRAPH) The emphasis on landscape's representa tional and semiotic qualities, particularly in studies informed by art history and icono graphy, has led to calls for renewed attention to its substantive aspects: its materialities and continued significance for lifeworlds. While cultural landscape remains closely iden tified with the tangible, visible scene, land scapes are increasingly read by geographers as moments in a networked process of social relations that stretch across time and space (see also sense of place). Closely connected to these developments, a nuanced use of phenomenology is apparent in some recent studies of landscape in which narrative strategies are used to explore and express the co constitution of material and experiential space (Wylie, 2002b). Attention to myth, mem ory and ?haunting? embodied in the material landscape is another expression of the retreat from an exclusive focus on representation in cultural landscape studies, but this is also another insistent restatement of the importance of historical apprehension that was the hall mark of Sauer?s original prospectus: but now understood in radically different terms. dec (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Beguin (1995); Duncan, Johnson and Schein (NEW PARAGRAPH) (2004). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
cultural politics
The processes through which ?meanings are negotiated and relations of dominance and subordination are defined and contested? (Jackson, 1989, p. 2). An insist ence that the cultural is political, involving rela tions of power and conflicting interests between different groups, has been central to much work in cultural studies and, more recently, cuLturaL geography. It depends upon a view of cuLture as plural, as socially produced and struggled over. Attention has focused in particular on the role of space and pLace in the construction of meanings and identities as well as processes of resistance and transgression, in recognition that ?[c] ulture wars are real wars? (Mitchell, 2000, p. 287). dp (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Mitchell (2000). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
cultural turn
A set of intellectual develop ments that led to issues of cuLture becoming central in human geography since the late 1980s. The renewed interest in questions of culture is not confined to human geography, but within the discipline the cultural turn usually refers a number of related trends: (NEW PARAGRAPH) the emergence of a ?new? cuLturaL geography; (NEW PARAGRAPH) the increasing attention to culture in sub fields such as economic, environ mental, historical and social geographies; (NEW PARAGRAPH) claims that culture has become a more important factor in the world itself for example, in economic processes or in driving political conflict. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Theoretically, the cultural turn has promoted a greater degree of pluralism in human geog raphy, drawing on concepts from other discip lines and focusing attention on multiple dimensions of difference (including gender, race and sexuaLity). Methodologically, the cultural turn has encouraged the use of a wider range of interpretative and quaLitative methods. Epistemologically, the cultural turn has underwritten a commitment to investigat ing the contingent and constructed qualities of phenomena. It has also gone hand in hand with a ?geographical turn? across the humanities and social sciences more generally. (NEW PARAGRAPH) But the cultural turn has also been criticized for distracting geographers from undertaking research that is useful for policy makers, and for retreating from the ?materialist? analysis of power under capitaLism. As these objections show, the cultural turn is embed ded in wider disputes about the relevance of human geography research and teaching (Barnett, 2004a), but both these criticisms underestimate the ways in which cultural turns have been pursued far beyond the academy and in the very two spheres that the (different) critics identify. Thus cuLturaL economy has demonstrated multiple ways in which ?fast cap italism? has taken a cultural turn that involves not only the commodification of culture but also the enrolment of cultural knowledges in economic activities, and still more recently the US military has pursued a ?cultural turn? in its search for a new counter insurgency strategy in its continued military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq (Gregory, 2008b). cb (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Barnett (2004c). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
culture
Famously described by Raymond Williams (1981) as one of the most complex words in the English language, culture is also one of the most influential, yet elusive, con cepts in the humanities and social sciences. Williams? methoDoLogy, almost philological in its attention to the historical accretion of meaning around words, is indicative of a dis tinctive style of conceptualization that any account of culture could do well to respect. Rather than look for a single, essential mean ing behind the complexity of usages of ?cul ture?, Williams (ibid., p. 92) held that the complexity ?is not finally in the word but in the problems which its variations of use sig nificantly indicate?. These problems include the relationship between the general and the particular, individual and society, structure and agency, autonomy and authority. What emerges from the history of ?culture? is not a word that designates an ontoLogicaL entity, but a complex noun of process, whose sim plest derivation is related to the idea of culti vation. In short, culture best thought of as a process, not a thing. Accordingly, Williams identified three broad usages of culture: (i) a general process of intellectual, spiritual devel opment; (ii) culture as ?a way of life? charac teristic of particular groups, whether nations, classes or subcultures; and (iii) works and practices of intellectual and artistic activity, such as music, opera, television and film, and literature (ibid., p. 90). This final sense is derived from the first, since these works and practices are the means of sustaining the pro cess of development designated in (i). (NEW PARAGRAPH) In human geography, the concept of cul ture has had a variable history. In the tradition of American cultural geography associated with Carl Ortwin Sauer, culture was rarely an object of explicit conceptual reflection. This approach concentrated upon the empirical scrutiny of materiaL cuLture, understood as expressions of unified cultural systems. Such a view was criticized by Duncan (1980) for hold ing a ?superorganic? understanding that reified culture as an independent entity with explana tory force (see BerkeLey schooL). This cri tique helped inaugurate the development of a so called new cultural geography, and a broader cuLturaL turn in human geography that drew on concepts of culture from a range of discip lines such as anthropology, semiotics, cultural studies, art history and literary theory. There have been two broad stages in this centring of culture as an object of conceptual debate in human geography. The first stage involved the assertion of the relevance of cultural or broadly interpretative approaches in the discipline. This stage ushered in a number of approaches that emphasized the representational dimen sions of cultural processes, and which also tended to be strongly holistic, even functional ist, in their understandings of the relationships between culture and other processes. The sec ond stage of theorizing culture in human geog raphy has concentrated on overcoming the closures inadvertently set in place by the rela tive success of the first stage. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The new cultural geography that emerged in the 1980s, and the cultural turn that fol lowed in the wake of this and debates around postmodernism, saw the concept of culture subjected to explicit conceptual reflection by geographers. In one strand of research, Landscape was re conceptualized as a ?way of seeing?, or a ?text?, or a ?symbolic form? or in terms of iconography (see Cosgrove and Daniels, 1988). These moves were often inflected by traditions of marxism, but specif ically by Marxist cultural theory that extended beyond the confines of the Marxist political economy that predominated in human geog raphy (cf. criticaL theory). This relationship has become increasingly strained, however, as the difficulties of theorizing relationships of agency, determination and meaning from within the Marxist tradition have become more acutely obvious. One outcome of this reconceptualization of landscape has been an anchoring of the concept of culture around a notion of representation understood by ana logy with seeing, imagination and vision. This visual account of landscape and culture has been the occasion for sustained critical thought (Rose, 1993), but this debate about culture and visuality has done little to contest the narrowly visual construal of representation bequeathed by this strand of the new cultural geography (see also vision and visuaLity). (NEW PARAGRAPH) A second strand of research, emerging from sociaL geography, drew on concepts of cul ture from the new field of cultural studies. Jackson (2003 [1989]) explicitly drew on Williams? cultural materialism to outline a pro gramme for a revivified cultural geography. Cultural materialism derives from Williams?s argument that ?culture is ordinary?, and builds on the notion that culture should be under stood as a ?whole way of life?; that is, an active, lived tradition of meanings or ?structure of feeling?. Williams drew on diverse sources (e. g. conservative philosopher Edmund Burke and liberal critic F.R. Leavis), but gave them a populist twist. Cultural materialism was intended as a contribution to, but also a move beyond, Marxist understandings of the deter minate relationships between economy and culture. Rather than formulating the differing degrees of relative autonomy of levels of a sociaL formation, Williams simply collapsed the base/superstructure distinction of clas sical Marxism altogether. He did so by extend ing the notion of ?materiaLism?, understood by analogy as any process of active making, to cultural life as well, arguing that culture was the practical activity of producing meanings. This move effectively brackets rather than resolves the key problem referred to by Marxist accounts of materialism, which is not the problem of the ontological status of culture or economy at all, but the problem of theoriz ing complex causal relations between different practices. Cultural materialism also informs the idea of a ?circuit of culture?, which has also been influential in human geography. This model integrates different aspects of cultural processes production and distribution, the ?text?, consumption and everyday Life into a series of discrete but related ?moments? in an ongoing circulation of meaning making (du Gay, Hall, Janes, McKay and Negus, 1997). Theoretically, the ?circuit of culture? privileges meaning as the essential quality of cultural processes. Methodologically, it provides a prac tical means of undertaking empirical work on specific cultural practices while remaining true to the axiom of cultural practices that need to be understood in relation to the totality of other practices of which they are a part. (NEW PARAGRAPH) These two strands of thought on culture (in terms of visual representation and in terms of meaning making) have served as an important route towards a widespread engagement with post structuraLism in human geography, with its emphasis on exposing the contingency of supposedly natural forms through the deployment of interpretive methodologies. Culture has been consistently construed in representational terms by geographers (and according to an impoverished understanding of representation at that); or in terms of the intangible or ideational aspects of processes that are somehow realized or materialized in some concrete form. This first stage of theor izing culture in geography has therefore been supplanted by a second, more critical stage in which the limitations of these concepts of culture have been challenged. One feature of this second stage has been the ascendancy of an ontological register of theory, involving the abstract delimitation of the ?the cultural? from ?the economic?, ?the representational? from ?materiality?, or ?the human? from ?the non human?, followed by the assertion of their inevitable entanglement. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The starkest example of this ontologization of theory is Mitchell?s (2000) argument that ?there is no such thing as culture?. This claim selectively invokes an essentiaList criterion of definition to assess the validity of the concept of culture, which it is supposed must refer to an ontologically independent thing like entity in order to have any salience. On these grounds, Mitchell concluded that ? ??culture?? has no ontological basis? (ibid., 12), and that culture ?represents no identifiable process? (ibid., 74). Mitchell also argues that the concept of culture is used as an explanatory category in both cultural studies and in human geography. This claim wilfully overlooks the processual, action oriented and practice focused conceptualizations of culture in both fields. In place of these, Mitchell recommends an explicitly reductionist model of culture understood as merely a medium for symboliz ing more fundamental economic, political and social processes. There is really just ?a very powerful ideology of culture? (ibid., 12), devel oped and deployed to control, order and define ?others? ?in the name of power and profit? (ibid., 75). Despite its ostensibly Marxist credentials, this approach to culture negates a long tradition of Western Marxism, one in which ideoLogy and culture are expli citly defined against this sort of explanatory reductionism (see also criticaL theory). The idea that culture is merely a medium through which the prevailing order of things is naturalized (i.e. a mode of reification) is a throwback to the nineteenth century, and does not stand up after the reorientation of questions of culture and ideology away from ?consciousness? towards ?subjectivity? that the twentieth century tradition of Western Marxism did much to inaugurate. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Mitchell's materialist correction of what he claims are politically quiescent concepts of culture is just one example of the vocabulary of ?materiality' coming to the fore in recent theorizations of culture in human geography. Calls for the ?rematerializing? of cultural geog raphy (Jackson, 2000) now abound. This usu ally means looking more closely at material cultures of artefacts and objects; at issues of embodiment; and at the entanglement of ?the cultural' and ?the economic'. The ascendancy of this ontological register goes along with attempts to supersede the narrow understand ings of representation, vision, meaning and textuality that geographers constructed through their initial engagements with post structuralism. But the ?materialist' turn com pounds the limitations of that construal, reinstalling dualisms between ideal and mater ial, subject and object, and the representa tional and the non representational. Calls for the rematerialization of culture, or indeed of human geography in general, give the impres sion that the value of a concept lies in its ability to disclose some level of ontological existence. But culture is not really an ontological category at all; it is a functional category of attribution, in the sense that to call something cultural is to ascribe a particular set of purposes and qualities to it, not to attribute a finite set of characteristics that define its essence. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The challenge to concepts of culture in human geography is not a matter of getting the correct ontology. It lies, rather, in loosen ing the hold exerted by holistic conceptions of culture that allow various sorts of exorbitant claims of political relevance to be ascribed to cultural analysis. Culture is often ascribed a particular sense (as one aspect of meaning of human affairs), and a very general and even totalizing (in which it is assumed that whole ways of life are unified and integrated through norms, meanings and values). The idea of ?cultural politics? often rests on claims that social totalities are in some way integrated, refracted or mediated through culture. There is a paradox here: holistic concepts of culture as meaning and symbolization help to acknow ledge the political salience of cultural pro cesses, but only at the cost of invoking undifferentiated concepts of power. By con flating politics with culture, this leads to the failure to think about the consequences of what it might mean if politics needs to be supplemented (cf. deconstruction) by cultural processes of symbolization, representation or mediation in the first place. What is left aside as a result is the question of what sorts of powersare intrinsic to cultural processes them selves powers such as authority, charisma, desire, feeling or seduction. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Three overlapping trends are likely to inflect the conceptualization of culture in human geography in the near future. In each case, it is by returning to a sense of culture as practice that progress is likely to be made. First, there is interest in concepts of culture that draw on Foucault?s ideas of governmentality. In this approach, culture is defined as a set of aes thetic practices for cultivating the capacities for self regulation (Bennett, 1998). This approach explicitly builds upon a genealogical analysis of the accretion of meanings of ?cul ture' as an independent and autonomous field. It reads this as an index of the practical deployment of culture as a medium for ?acting on the social'. This line of thought is open to an instrumentalist interpretation in which cul ture is understood as a medium for legitimizing or resisting the power of the state or capital (see instrumentalism). But its real potential lies in disclosing some of the powers that are specific to cultural processes. One feature of the modern concept of culture that this approach focuses upon is the antithetical and self divided structure of modern definitions of the term: not only is culture defined against society, anarchy or nature; but it is also internally divided against itself, into high and low, elite and popular or mass. This ?splitting of culture? (Bennett, 1998, p. 82) is crucial to understanding the powers of culture: it defines a range of resources that can be deployed to transform conduct and behaviour (e.g. a canon of great works, or various repertoires of cul tural judgement); and it also defines a range of domains that can be transformed through the application of these resources (e.g. ?cultures of poverty', ?institutional cultures', ?the culture of schooling'). This analysis of culture as both a medium and object of transformation owes a great deal to a tradition of anti colonial and post colonial cultural theory (see post colo nialism: see also Said, 1993). However, the strong Foucauldian inflection of the concept of culture implies a less holistic imagination of the relationship between culture and power than is implied by concepts such as cultural imperialism, hegemony and ideology (Barnett, 2001). (NEW PARAGRAPH) A second area in which the powers of cul ture are foregrounded follows from and develops Stuart Hall's seminal analysis of the concept of articulation. Grossberg (1993, p. 4) develops an

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