Geography as a Cultural Field

Abstract

Geography’s relationship with cultural issues has been restricted in the past to the systematic field called cultural geography, a field to set alongside the other systematic divisions, such as political, urban, or economic geography. But in the last two decades new interpretations of the importance of culture in the differentiation of societies and space, as well as appreciation of the limitations of the realist assumptions that underlay traditional human geographical approaches, have transformed our understanding of the relevance of cultural issues to geography. The result can be seen in the very different content, methods and philosophy of textbooks that exemplify the old (Jordan and Rowntree, 1979, 1997) and new (Mitchell, 2000) approaches. An important part of these new ideas is the critique of the realist assumption behind most geographical work that there is some objective reality waiting to be written down. It is increasingly recognised that our knowledge has been ‘constructed’ through the culture of the peoples seeking to understand and communicate about the world. Certainly this does not mean that generations of empirical work are wasted. This has provided us with a great deal of understanding about the world. Rather, these new interpretations and understandings based on culture focus attention upon fundamental epistemological issues about the nature of our geographical knowledge, and how it has been created. Hence, it can be argued that the study of cultural issues have moved from being a restricted and even marginal part of research in human geography, to one that underpins the whole nature of the contemporary field. The rest of this chapter seeks to justify this position by showing the relationships between culture and geography in five contexts to justify the title that geography is a cultural field. It will begin by briefly summarising the alternative uses of the term ‘culture’ and its relationship with ‘society’. This is followed by a review of the traditional approaches to the field known as cultural geography, which provides the springboard for a brief summary of the profound changes represented by contemporary cultural geography. The next two sections discuss the position that the field of geography is not only culturally dependent but can be viewed as a cultural product, in the sense that the ‘type’ of knowledge produced is influenced by the particular values and needs of the society in which it is created.