Cultural geography
Cultural geography is an academic discipline that explores the intricate relationship between people and their environments. It examines how cultural practices and identities are shaped by and interact with geographic spaces. By utilizing methods from various fields such as anthropology, sociology, and economics, cultural geographers analyze the impact of human activities—like construction, climate change, and media representations—on landscapes and community identities.
The field has evolved significantly since the 1920s, when it first focused on the "cultural landscape," and experienced a shift during the quantitative revolution of the 1950s and 1960s. In the subsequent decades, contemporary cultural geography emerged, emphasizing interdisciplinary approaches and exploring themes like power dynamics, historical context, and the production and consumption of culture. Cultural geographers also delve into "imagined spaces," which are shaped by perception rather than physical reality, such as maps and virtual worlds.
While the discipline has garnered criticism for its broad scope and potential neglect of long-term social issues, cultural geography remains a vital area of study that seeks to uncover the complexities of cultural interactions and spatial relationships.
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Cultural geography
Cultural geography is the study of the relationship between people and the spaces where they live. This academic field utilizes cultural materials, media, and interviews to understand the connection between geographic spaces, communities, and cultures. This includes the ways that humans affect geography, such as the creation of buildings and other structures, climate change, and the creation and mapping of imagined spaces through media such as the Internet. Also included in cultural geography are the ways that individuals and cultures produce identities and the ways that spatial patterns affect a culture. Because cultural geography is an interdisciplinary field, academics use research methods from many other fields, including economics, anthropology, sociology, and art.
Overview
In the 1920s, geographers, led by Carl O. Sauer, began to investigate the "cultural landscape," or how humans interact with the natural environment around them. Qualitative research dominated the field until the so-called quantitative revolution of the 1950s and 1960s shifted the main thread of academic geography away from cultural pursuits. A new form of cultural geography emerged in the 1970s and 1980s. At this time, academics were looking for a way to better understand the intersections of fields such as political science, economics, human behavior, psychology, and the environment. Geography provided a way to examine many such overlapping issues and borrowed from theories such as deconstructionism, postcolonialism, poststructuralism, and performativity.
Like other academic fields, cultural geography has fragmented as different theories explore different ways to define "culture" and best study it. For some scholars, historical context is key. Other cultural geographers are primarily interested in contemporary communities. Some scholars explore the spatial aspects of concepts such as art and music to better understand a culture. Others might look at languages and the ways that communities describe and give meaning to specific geographic features in their area, such as mountains and rivers. Still, other cultural geographers might explore power relations in spatial contexts, such as issues of colonialism, gender, race, and sexuality. Cultural geography often focuses on the distinction between cultural production and cultural consumption. Cultural production is the ways that objects and ideas are produced and distributed. Cultural consumption is the ways that objects and ideas are found, acquired, and used. This division allows cultural geographers to interpret networks of power within and between communities; such studies can help explain an existing situation or predict cultural outcomes.
Cultural geographers have also examined imagined spaces, which depend on perception rather than physical reality. A map is a common example of imagined geography. A cultural geographer might study the ways that European mapmakers imagined North America during the early period of colonization, and how those maps in turn influenced culture. Contemporary cultural geographers also study even more abstract imagined spaces, such as worlds created for online games. In this way, cultural geographers can better understand how human communities create and relate to ideal spaces.
Some critics of cultural geography are concerned that by focusing on new and interesting events, cultural geographers risk overlooking long-term social issues. Other critics argue that the field of cultural geography is so broad that anything could be included. These critics ask how cultural geography can make sense of so much information. Cultural geographers have answered that while they do take a broad approach, each scholar has the ability to focus on a particular topic, producing meaningful studies.
Bibliography
Anderson, Jon. Understanding Cultural Geography: Places and Traces. 2nd ed., Routledge, 2015.
Anderson, Kay, editor. Handbook of Cultural Geography. Sage, 2003.
Blunt, Alison, et al., editors. Cultural Geography in Practice. Arnold, 2003.
Crang, Mike. Cultural Geography. 2nd ed., Routledge, 2005.
“Cultural Geography Home.” LibGuides at University of Alaska Southeast, 22 Dec. 2023, uas.alaska.libguides.com/culturalgeography. Accessed 7 Dec. 2024.
“Human Geography.” Dartmouth Libraries, 22 Oct. 2024, researchguides.dartmouth.edu/human‗geography/cultural. Accessed 7 Dec. 2024.
Johnson, Nuala Christina, Richard H. Schein, and Jamie Winders, editors. The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Cultural Geography. Wiley-Blackwell, 2013.
Mitchell, Don. Cultural Geography: A Critical Introduction. Blackwell Publishing, 2008.
Oakes, Tim, and Patricia L. Price, editors. The Cultural Geography Reader. Routledge, 2008.
Rubenstein, James M. The Cultural Landscape: An Introduction to Human Geography. 12th ed., Pearson, 2016.