Cultural Geography Research Paper

1. The Berkeley School

The term ‘cultural geography’ can be traced to nineteenth century German scholarship, but is thought to have been introduced into American geography in the 1920s by Carl Sauer (Price and Lewis 1993). Sauer, his colleagues in the geography department at Berkeley, and their students dominated American cultural geography until the 1980s. (This is not to say that this was the only strand of ‘traditional’ cultural geography. For a contemporary overview of a broader range of traditional cultural geographies, see Foote et al. 1994). Sauer (1925) framed cultural geography in opposition to environmental determinism, which he criticized for subjecting the diversity of cultures to a monocausal, nomothetic theory. Sauer instead advocated historical synthetic accounts of human interaction with natural environments. For Sauer, landscape study was an exercise in historical reconstruction that sought to show how a particular cultural group, working on and through the natural landscape, enacted a cultural landscape. The relevant unit of observation was the cultural region, defined as an area over which a functionally coherent way of life dominated. Much of Sauer’s fieldwork was located at the US Mexican border, and he explored the border as a cultural, rather than a physical divide. In the prologue to his important book, The Early Spanish Main, Sauer wrote that: ‘the same mountains and desert, pine forest, and woodlands, scrub, and grasslands extend north and south; the difference is the people and their ways’ (Sauer 1966, p.V). Members of the Berkeley School explored a range of themes in mostly rural locations: the migration of human groups and the process of adapting a familiar culture to a new land; the domestication of plants and animals; the development, intensification, and dispersion of agriculture; ancient cultivation systems; and the genesis and diffusion of cultural traits and material culture (e.g., folk housing).

1.1 Recent Assessments Of The Berkeley School

In the early 1980s, as new approaches to cultural geography were developed, a (contested) critique of the Berkeley School emerged. Berkeley School cultural geography was charged with conceiving cultural groups and regions as unities, and deploying a super-organic concept of culture that invested agency in culture rather than individuals. Power relations were given short shrift (Duncan 1980). The accuracy of this critique has been disputed (Price and Lewis 1993) but, even among those who accept it, there is now a renewed appreciation of the cultural ecology tradition that grew out of the Berkeley School. Crang (1998) draws attention to the ways in which Sauer bound the material and social, viewing crop species and gene pools, for example, as ‘material expression and embodiment of social processes and knowledge’ (p. 16). Willems-Braun (1997, p. 705) acknowledges the significance of studies of pre-contact indigenous cultural transformation of nature; they offer important tools for those who wish to disrupt the equation of ‘native’ and ‘nature.’ Even the disdainful treatment given to the Berkeley School’s preoccupation with establishing cultural hearths deserves reconsideration; Woods (1998), for example, deploys the notion of cultural hearth in relation to ‘blues epistemology’ as an indigenous knowledge. Woods insists that the US south, in particular the Mississippi Delta, is the center of African American culture and that its ‘lands, rivers, streams, air, plants, and animals … must be restored to their sacred status’ (p. 290). This is an empirical and strategic claim, which he poses in opposition to white writers who focus on the degradation of African American culture and thus the necessity for cultural assimilation. ‘Not only is working-class African American culture not broken and deviant, it is a powerful world culture held together, and expanded, by repeated blues movements’ (p. 289). The Mississippi Delta must be understood as a ‘Mecca’, and African American blues culture as a model for sustainable communities.

2. New Cultural Geographies

Recent tendencies toward accommodation mute a sense of sub-disciplinary transformation that existed in the late 1970s and 1980s, when a new generation of cultural geographers began to engage with a diverse range of philosophical traditions, and social and cultural theories. In some ways paralleling Sauer’s rejection of nomothetic theory, humanistic geographers positioned themselves against spatial science and drew upon phenomenology, existentialism, and symbolic interactionism to recover the role of individual agency in the construction of place and cultural meanings. Historical materialism, and then an increasingly diverse array of cultural theories have also been drawn upon, such that the subdisciplinary—indeed disciplinary— boundaries of cultural geography are now exceedingly blurry. Some of this history and excitement can be organized around the themes of representation, power, and cultural identity.

2.1 Representation

The linguistic turn of the 1980s was felt throughout the social sciences and humanities; in cultural geography it focused attention on the landscape as text and the politics of the representations that geographers pro-duce (i.e., on the culture of geography).

2.1.1 Landscape As Text. There is a long tradition of ‘reading’ the landscape in cultural geography. Peirce Lewis (1979, p. 12), for example, described the landscape as ‘our unwitting autobiography.’ Since the 1980s, however, the metaphor of landscape as text has been pursued more rigorously through a fuller engagement with literary and cultural theory, for example, in Duncan’s (1990) study of the Kandyian Kingdom in early nineteenth century Sri Lanka. Duncan describes how the king of Kandy concretized two intertwined discourses on kingship through a massive city-building program, in an at- tempt to secure his political power; this landscape transformation was then interpreted differently by the king, nobles, and peasants, through the lens of the two key texts. The story, then, is of intertextuality, of the interplay of discourses enacted in land-scape and texts.

This textualization of landscape has itself been criticized, less in relation to Duncan’s specific empirical application than as a general theory of land-scape interpretation. It is criticized for erasing process (Gregory 1994), for over-emphasizing the coherence of texts and landscapes, and for suppressing traces of non-human others: ‘it treats the landscape as a blank page that only human actors can read and write upon’ (Demeritt 1994, p. 170). Nevertheless, the metaphor has been reworked, for example around the notion of theatre and the script, to draw out the open, performative possibilities of text—partly structured and partly improvised. Gregory (1999), for example, writes about the scripting of Egypt in the nineteenth century by a growing tourism industry. European tourists not only read voluminously when traveling down the Nile (Fig. 1), the guidebooks also provided stage directions for transforming dahabeeah (floating barges) into ‘secure viewing platforms’ (e.g., English travelers were advised to bring 60 yards of chintz as a means of effecting this), and the remains of ancient Egypt were literally and materially staged as an ‘extended exhibition.’ It is this attention to the materiality and spatiality of writing, in this case travel writing, that distinguishes the work of cultural geographers (Duncan and Gregory 1999).

2.1.2 Landscape And Maps As Ways Of Seeing. Humanistic geographers of the early 1980s were drawn to the textual metaphor; Cosgrove (1985) entreated them to pay closer attention to the visual, as a way of understanding one of their key, though untheorized, concepts, that of landscape. In Gregory’s (1994, p. 98) assessment, this recognition of the ‘conceptuality’ of landscape is one of the ‘cardinal achievements’ of the revival of cultural geography in the 1980s. Cosgrove traced the emergence of lands-cape as a visual ideology, as a way of seeing, in fifteenth and sixteenth century Europe. The discovery of linear perspective enabled a realist illusion of space: ‘Landscape is thus a way of seeing, a composition and structuring of the world so that it may be appropriated by a detached individual spectator to whom an illusion of order and control is offered through the composition of space according to the certainties of geometry’ (Cosgrove 1985, p. 55). This way of seeing coincided with and supported a transition from feudalism to capitalism, and new social relations with nature, and land as property.

What landscape paintings achieve aesthetically ‘maps, surveys, and ordnance charts achieve practically’ (Cosgrove 1985, p. 55); this recognition has led to a critical reassessment of another of geographers’ representational forms: the map. The assumed link between reality and representation has been broken, and maps are now read as ‘mechanisms for defining social relationships, sustaining social rules, and strengthening social values’ (Harley 1992, p. 237), in short, as technologies of power. Harley has used deconstructive methods to read a simple road map, specifically a map of the State of North Carolina. He begins his interpretation at the margins of the map—for example, with the pictures of points of interest (that include a Cherokee woman making beaded jewelry, and a sand dune), a ferry schedule, and a message from a state official—to argue that the map does more than help ordinary motorists find their way. Through the marginal, mundane notes, and images, the map constructs a mythic geography: a landscape full of points of interest; it affirms State sovereignty; and it sustains the American ‘love affair’ with the car. Maps are such effective technologies of power because they ‘operate behind the mask of seemingly neutral science’ (Harley 1992, p. 238).

2.1.3 Other Ways Of Seeing. Cultural geographers have sought to unmask this neutrality through their own representations; one of the most adventurous has been Pred (1995,) who experiments with font size, repetition, and montage to engage us in (re)cognizing European modernities. In his essay on the Stockholm Exhibition of 1897, Pred invites the reader to participate in the ‘phantasmagorical dream’ of the exhibition by leading us through a tour of endless lists of commodities and visual pleasures. This description is jostled by fragments of quotations from cultural theory, newspaper and government reports, and personal anecdote. Rather than being declarative and closed, Pred’s analysis emerges through a series of un-answered questions. An unlabeled cartoon (Fig. 2) is repeated incessantly, its interpretation shifting in juxtaposition to different portions of the text. We eventually learn that it is a cartoon of the extensive looting that took place at the close of the exhibition. We more fully understand Pred’s repetition of the cartoon when he asks, in closing the essay, whether the looting—which was largely erased from official his-tory—is not in fact an over-determined metaphor for the exhibition. Pred’s experiments in montage are an effort to ‘force discordant fragments to ‘whisper’ and ‘shout’ at each other in polylogue’ (1995, p. 26) in order to re-present contemporary commodity society.

2.2 Material And Symbolic Geographies As Technologies Of Power

It should now be clear that power and politics have been central concerns for contemporary cultural geographers (Jackson 1989). Landscapes not only express social relations, they are also an important means of enacting them. And landscapes, like maps, are such effective technologies of power because they tend to naturalize these relations (Cresswell 1996, Mitchell 1996). Pred (1995), for example, understands Stock-holm’s exhibitions as training grounds for citizen-consumers. The exhibition of 1897 afforded visitors new perspectives on the city: ‘Spy on others without their knowledge. Observe restaurant customers shamelessly flirting with waitresses … Be titillated in these and other ways while simultaneously (re)learning the lessons of modern power, of panoptical bureaucratic power … Be reminded that the power of the State lies not so much in its ability to rally police or locally stationed troops at points of actual or potential disturbance, as in the ability of its constituent agencies to keep an eye on, to maintain bureaucratic surveillance over, each and every subject’ (p. 61). By the 1930 exhibition, the geography lessons are quite different. The dominant architecture does not enable a bird’s-eye view; it is a 74-meter advertising mast that gathers the crowd around the commodity: ‘A mast to command all, to be seen from below … a mast to be dwarfed by, to integrate one with the everyday masses, to instill a sense of solidarity’ (p. 122). Cultural geographies organize people in space so as to communicate and effect social relations.

Considerable attention has been given to the various geographies that constitute colonial relations, in the past and in the ‘colonial present.’ Sparke (1998), for example, traces the multiple material and symbolic geographies deployed by the Canadian State to extinguish two First Nations—the Wet’suwet’san and Gitksan—claims to sovereignty and land rights in an extended 374-day trial in 1987. The geographies include the relocation of the trial from Smithers (a small community in the heart of the claimed territory) to Vancouver, a distance of over 1200 kilometers, that imposed costs on many of those testifying for the First Nations, removed those testifying from their support networks, and placed the trial squarely within the metropolitan ‘center.’ This material geography, among others, was supplemented by symbolic ones, for example, in-stances of ridiculing First Nations’ counter-maps, in which they translated House songs of territory into map format. The lawyer representing the Canadian federal government dismissed these maps: ‘The place names, the names of creeks, rivers, and hills and all the other features, are none of them geographic names, they are Gitksan names’ (Sparkae 1998, pp. 474–5). Ironically, when these maps of traditional boundaries of Gitksan and Wet’suwet’-san territories were introduced in court, they were labeled, by the presiding judge, as ‘the map that roared,’ and Sparke argues that they did indeed roar in profoundly disruptive ways. It is this potential for resistant, transgressive, and transformative ‘roaring,’ and for the eruption of social conflict in and through conflicting claims to space, that captures consider-able interest among cultural and social geographers (Cresswell 1996).

2.3 Cultural Identity And Place

A persistent theme for cultural geographers has been cultural identification with place; in the 1970s, humanistic geographers re-activated concerns about attachment to place, (sub)-cultural variations in use of and meanings attributed to places, and alienation in modern, bureaucratized landscapes such as suburbs. The latter concern also permeates a now vast literature on the ‘disneyfication’ of urban space, leading to the criticism that a romantic nostalgia for authentic landscapes runs through it.

What is newer is a profound unease about the bounding of cultural identity and place. This unease is tied to the ways that claims to territory function as mechanisms for social exclusion and control. In an early attempt by a cultural geographer to engage with Said’s analysis of Orientalism, Anderson (1991) argued that the creation of Chinatown as a space apart in early twentieth century Vancouver was constitutive of Chinese people as a race. It is not only that Chinatown ‘expressed’ racist sentiment or racial ideology; the definition of Chinatown as unhygienic (marked, for example, by listing it as a separate entry in public health records—it was the only neighborhood to be listed in this way) and a place of vice was part of the process of racializing Chinese people as ‘other’ than Canadian. Using the psychoanalytical concept of abjection, Sibley (1995) further explores the compulsion on the part of dominant groups to ‘purify’ space. Designating a group, such as gypsies, to a marginal, polluted place is quite literally part of the process of marginalizing the group.

Mitchell (1995) traces this concern back to the concept of culture itself, arguing that it is a modernist concept, integrally tied to notions of otherness: ‘culture is a concept to stop flux in its tracks, creating stability and ‘‘ways of life’’ where before there had been changes and contest. The idea of culture demanded a mapping of boundaries and edges, the specification of a morphology: culture had to become a bounded object that ultimately differentiated the world’ (p. 107). He urges geographers to resist conceiving culture as an ontological entity, and to focus instead on the work done by the idea of culture. In whose interests is the idea of culture deployed? Who has the capacity to define cultural boundaries?

These concerns have led to attempts to conceive of identities that exceed fixed boundaries; for cultural geographers this also entails imagining the spaces in which this might happen. A striking example of such an exercise is Law’s (1998) discussion of one bar in Cebu City in the Philippines. Law criticizes the discourses currently used by Western feminists and non-governmental health organizations to frame sex workers in the Philippines (as either victim or economically empowered), in part because sex workers are unable to recognize themselves within them. She draws on her ethnography of one bar to represent both dancers and their male, mostly Australian, customers in more nuanced terms. This involves conceiving shifting relations and identities so as to render neither dancer nor customer as powerful or powerless. The space of the bar is more than a backdrop to this ambiguous dance of identities and power relations; it is the liminal space in which it can happen. By pursuing the spatialities of hybrid, mobile identities, geographers have a good deal to contribute to a more free-floating discussion in cultural studies. In Law’s case, she offers a cultural representation that might lead to more effective communication between dancers and health organizations around HIV AIDS education.

Attempts to rethink the relations between identity and place have been provoked also by the realizations not only that cultural identities are multiple and shifting, and that multiple identities inhabit the same place, but also that places are open and unbounded. The global flows through the local, in terms of financial capital, commodities, ideas, and migration of individuals and households. The attachments that individuals may feel to multiple places (captured by the term polylocality) enrich and complicate increasingly multi-cultural locales. Tensions arising from multiculturalism often become manifest as landscape conflict. Ley (1995) has written an exemplary case study of one such conflict over the transformation of the affluent neighborhood of Shaughnessy in Vancouver. Shaughnessy was built in the early twentieth century, by mainly foreign-born English immigrants, to the standards of conservative English landscape tastes. This English theming has little cultural salience for ethnic Chinese immigrants who have come to Vancouver in increasing number since 1980 from nations in the Pacific Rim. Ethnic Chinese elites have rebuilt parts of Shaughnessy along a different landscape aesthetic, and the construction of what have been called ‘monster houses,’ sometimes necessitating the removal of trees, has been hotly contested by the old, Anglo-identified elite. Ironically, this elite—themselves immigrants or descendents of immigrants—deployed the rhetoric of roots, nature, and preservation to naturalize their claims to place and to convey their deeply-held sentiment for the landscape. A strength of Ley’s analysis is that he conveys the old elite’s topophilia, love of place, and the integrity and intensity of their griefing for a lost landscape, while simultaneously problematizing their exclusive claims to an urban—indeed national—space, and drawing out the interwoven colonial histories of the Anglo and Chinese elites. Ultimately, Ley makes an incident involving the felling of two sequoias on a residential lot speak to the problem of constructing a homogeneous national citizen in what has been identified as the first ‘postmodern’ State (Canada). This movement between scales, and the demonstration of the interwoven construction of scale, are features of the best contemporary work in cultural geography.

3. Beyond Dualisms

If Sauer defined the cultural against environmental determinism, and humanistic geographers defined the cultural against economism, recent theorizing disrupts both sets of implicit dualisms, leaving Matless (1996, p. 380) to ask: ‘Is ‘‘cultural geography’’ then a nonsensical term?’ Rather than nonsense, it is gaining a new sense in relation to, rather than in opposition to, nature and economy.

3.1 Nature And Culture

Geographers have drawn from Bruno Latour and Donna Haraway to interrogate the assumed duality between nature and culture (Demeritt 1994, Mitchell 1995, Matless 1996). There are two issues at stake. First, the division between nature and culture enforces the view that humans are the sole social agents. An artifactual understanding of nature pluralizes agency; cultural geographers are now willing to consider that we live in a livelier world in which nonhuman actors also have agency. The notion of agency has been reworked, away from that of a conscious and controlling self, to one of having effects. Second, conceptualizing the boundary between nature and culture as a social construction has opened up a rich set of investigations around both the production of the boundary and slippages across it. Anderson (2000), for example, examines the ways in which racial ideology has been interwoven with discourses of animality and nature, and Emel (1995) argues that the eradication of wolves in the USA has been underwritten by norms of masculinity.

3.2 Economy And Culture

The lines between economy and culture are no less blurry. Economic development is increasingly about culture, whether it be in the form of tourism or the redevelopment of urban areas for the purposes of spectacle and consumption. Access to jobs and job performances are interpreted as cultural phenomena. Economic theory, models, and methods are being read for the ways in which they are structured by metaphor. Gibson-Graham (1996), for example, argues that recent discussions of the globalization of capitalism function through the metaphor of rape. Drawing on feminist attempts to conceive a perspective on rape in terms other than victimization, Gibson-Graham entreats us to imagine possible economic futures that exceed the ‘rape’ of capitalism.

The spirit of the Gibson-Graham analysis, of conceiving of non-violent trespass, is perhaps a good note on which to end. Cultural geography is currently extremely lively, no longer operating as a bounded sub-discipline but as a critical perspective on the production of boundaries and processes of differentiation.

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