Cultural Geography

Mike Crang

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135637194
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias físicas
• Subtopic: Geografía

First Published in 1998. The so-called 'cultural tum' in contemporary geography has brought new ways of thinking about geography and culture, taking cultural geography into exciting new terrain to produce new maps of space and place. Cultural Geography introduces culture from a geographical perspective, focusing on how cultures work in practice and looking at cultures embedded in real-life situations, as locatable, specific phenomena. Definitions of 'culture' are diverse and complex, and Crang examines a wealth of different cases and approaches to explore the experience of place, the relationships of local and global, culture and economy and the dilemmas of knowledge. Considering the role of states, empires and nations, corporations, shops and goods, literature, music and film, Crang examines the cultures of consumption and production, how places develop meaning for people, and struggles over defining who belongs in a place. Cultural Geography presents a concise, up-to-date, interdisciplinary introduction to this lively and complex field. Exploring the diversity and plurality of life in all its variegated richness, drawing on examples from around the world, Crang highlights changes in current societies and the development of a 'pick and mix' relationship to culture.

1 Locating culture

• What do we mean by culture?
• Why Is It studied?
• What sort of things will It involve?

It seems obvious that a book introducing students to cultural geography must start with a definition of what it is about. Obvious, but almost unfeasibly difficult. Defining the word culture is a complex and difficult task which has produced a range of very different definitions. In some ways 'cultural geography' is easier to grasp than simply trying to define either of its component parts. This is because, despite occasionally sounding the most airy of concepts, this book will argue that 'culture', however defined, can only be approached as embedded in real-life situations, in temporally and spatially specific ways. This book focuses on how cultures work in practice. The philosophy of this book is that this is the contribution of geography - insisting on looking at cultures (plural) as locatable, specific phenomena.

There seem to be two typical reactions to the idea of cultural geography by new students. The first is to think of the different cultures around the globe, to think of the sort of peoples presented in documentaries such as Disappearing World. In this vision, cultural geography studies the location and spatial variation of cultures; it is a vision of peoples and tribes echoed in National Geographic magazines and travel stories. The second reaction is to associate culture with the arts, with 'high culture', that is, and is normally followed by a slightly perplexed look as to what geography can have to do with that. Both versions capture only a tiny part of what is dealt with as 'cultural geography'. It has been one of the fastest expanding, and, in my admittedly partisan view, one of the most

Box 1.1

Defining culture

By the 1950s authors could collect over 150 different definitions of culture in use in academic books. This book is not trying to push a very specific definition. Indeed the different approaches recounted here may imply rather different ideas of what culture is. The guiding principle in this work is that cultures are sets of beliefs or values that give meaning to ways of life and produce (and are reproduced through) material and symbolic forms. In this way I want to avoid two notions especially. The first is a depiction of culture as a sort of 'residual variable' for all those things not accounted for in other fields, the 'remainder' they don't explain. I argue culture is far more central than such accounts allow. Second, the mention of 'way of life' questions how much the individual can pick and choose, while the reproduction of them brings in issues of change over time. The possibility that current societies may actually develop a more 'pick and mix' relationship to culture is something that is developed through the book.

interesting sub-disciplines in geography over the last fifteen years. The reason is that its subject matter is so wide-ranging both in location, issues raised and the type of material involved. Let me try to show why this is so by starting to locate what cultural geography involves.

Travellers' tales

The initial assumption of many is that cultural geography is about how different cultures live in different parts of the globe. One of the prime motivations for many students doing geography is a fascination with the diversity of human life. Undoubtedly the diversity of people on the globe is an important starting point but one that needs to be developed further. Different groups are marked out not only by different clothes, ornaments, lifestyles but are also guided by different 'world-views', different priorities, different belief systems, different ways of making sense of the world. Cultural geography thus looks both at the forms of difference, the material culture, of groups but also at the ideas that hold them together, that make them coherent. This means this book will look not only at how cultures are spread over space but also at how cultures make sense of space. This book will thus track the ideas, practices and objects that together form cultures - and how these cultures form identities through which people recognise themselves and others. It will track through a range of scales as it ponders the role of states, empires and nations, firms and corporations, shops and goods, books and films in creating identities. Cultural geography looks at the way different processes come together in particular places and how those places develop meanings for people. Sometimes we may be looking at processes of a global scale, at other times we might be interested in the micro-geography of houses, the intimate and personal scale of things that form people's everyday world.

So cultural geography is about the diversity and plurality of life in all its variegated richness; about how the world, spaces and places are interpreted and used by people; and how those places then help to perpetuate that culture. This book will thus have to deal with how ideas and material, practices and places, cultures and space interrelate. You will find no single answer; rather, the chapters show different cases and different approaches people have taken to these issues.

Cultures are not just about exotic faraway peoples, but also about the way we, in the West, do things. It is all too easy to take your own culture as in some sense natural and look at the peculiarities of other groups. As Pierre Bourdieu puts it, any culture is a riot of colours and discordant sounds until you learn the rules that guide and make sense of it (Bourdieu 1984). The implication is that every culture has rules that are as arbitrary and surprising as every other. Thus the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins once famously remarked, we call India the land of the sacred cow because some Hindu customs seem strange - this animal is allowed to wander where it wishes, despite being edible it is not eaten, and it defecates wherever it goes. Of course, Marshall Sahlins points out, by the same criteria we could marvel at the UK or the USA as the land of the sacred dog (Sahlins 1976). In this sense cultural geography tends towards a relativistic stance. We must acknowledge the particularity of our own culture and not sit in hasty judgement over other cultures.

High culture, popular culture and the everyday

If we look around at any society, there are activities whose primary role is symbolic; say, theatre, opera, art, literature or poetry. All of these are generally seen as products or expressions of that society's culture. Indeed we might instantly extend our account to include the libraries, museums, galleries and so forth that allow these forms to exist; that preserve and reproduce them; that make them available to people. Cultural geography must thus include the institutions that keep cultures going. This in itself might take us into surprising comers - into, say, schools where children are taught the 'great' figures of their culture's history or literature, or maybe the interpretation of different public monuments. But even if we stick to symbolic things we would have to conclude that modem society is just as full of rituals and ceremonies as ones distant or remote from us. British people might have to include the rituals of royalty (the opening of Parliament, the Trooping of the Colours), in the USA the 4th of July, or Bastille Day in France. All these are festivals or rituals sanctioned or promoted by the state, so already cultural geographers might be asking why the state promotes certain rituals, and not others, and what it gets out of them. But culture extends further than just state-sponsored rituals. There are vast numbers of different festivals and rituals supported by different religions and the cultures associated with them; we would have to admit Christmas, Thanksgiving, Passover and Ramadan among many more, as festivals that sustain and reproduce different cultures.

Nor can we stop at religion: culture spreads further into our lives and societies. We might say that Christmas is a religious festival and draws on a Christian culture - but equally for most people it is a family festival that draws on consumer culture. So the role of manufactured goods, mass consumption and so forth would form part of some studies. We would have to say Valentine's Day or Hallowe'en bear even less connection to a sponsoring religion - we have secular and often commercial festivals. We would have to include popular festivals such as Guy Fawkes Night in Britain or Bums' Night in Scotland. However, culture is not confined to festivals and holidays; it pervades everyday life. So we might also include folk culture - looking at indigenous dialects, vernacular architecture and so on. But in the contemporary West the same logic means we need to include 'ordinary' culture, not just historic elements but the everyday. That means we need to think how people assemble meaningful worlds out of mass-produced goods, how they relate to places through films and books, how such cultures are bound up in work and leisure.

One of the things this book will try to illustrate is that cultures are often political and contested - that is, they mean different things to different people in different places. So the state may promote one vision of a 'people' through particular symbolic locations. Other groups might offer alternative symbolic geographies or might attribute very different meanings to the same places. In this way this book will look at how power and meaning are written on to the landscape. How monuments and buildings may be used to try to bind people together, to stress common interests, to promote group solidarity.

One of the clearest ways in which different cultures have reproduced themselves is through territorial segregation. Such a process can be seen in cities where different gangs mark their territory in graffiti. On a less intense level we can see the same process in supporting different football teams. Whether there are religious connotations such as Celtic versus Rangers, the wearing of team colours and so on suggests this is another smaller set of cultures. The contemporary city may house a vast range of peoples rubbing shoulders, buying different foods, creating festivals and music, forming a dense and variegated cultural mosaic. How these cultures relate over distance, how they bring fonnerly distant identities and put them together forms a fascinating element of contemporary cultural geographies. Cultural geography must then look at the fragmented juxtaposition of cultural forms and the identities arising from this. We thus need to consider how cities and nations may contain a plurality of cultures. We might term these sub-cultures. We need only think of the different worlds created through Rave culture and clubbing. These spaces offer a different social milieu, a different set of practices, sustained by a very different geography of venues than that associated with 'official' British culture. We could add to this by looking at how the gay community sustains itself and fosters a sense of identity through the spaces and practices of clubs and shops.

All this indicates we need to see both how particular sites acquire meanings and how places and sites are used by cultures. Let me illustrate this by looking briefly at student culture and how much of this is embedded in particular spaces and geographies. First, it is a geography of bringing people together; second, and symmetrically of separating these people from both the resources and constraints of the areas they come from. For the average fresher in the UK, there is a sudden pressure of new people, new rules of the game, a setting free from strictures of a parental home, yet also a loss of the support that home provided. A process that is supported around a geography of places - the bars and 'student-friendly' pubs where students can meet new people, the halls of residence, the canteens and faculties around which networks of acquaintances can be formed. The student community is stitched together out of these places; it relies on this geography. The provision of single study-bedrooms creates a private space which students control and can personalise, which they can invite people to or retreat into. Places gain meanings, lecture halls obviously are about learning (and possibly sleeping), libraries also are about learning but both also are places to meet people. Students may grow attached to 'their' department or faculty, maybe enjoy the symbolism of great halls or whatever on graduation. What this suggests is the way particular spaces and geographies are deeply involved in maintaining cultures all the time. And these cultures are not just about overt symbolism, but about the way people live their lives. The example above shows that the material things enabling students to live work and play are all involved in maintaining a culture.

Economy and culture

It should be clear that the separation of the economy and culture is problematic. In fact it is possibly a hallmark of modem capitalist cultures that they treat the economy as in some way separate from the rest of the culture. But if the two are to be analysed separately how should the relationship between them be seen? The most influential approach, from a number of perspectives, is to look at culture as some sort of clothing, superstructure, barrier to rationality or remainder after the economy has been dealt with. We shall come across these again but I shall introduce them here to warn the reader not to use these as implicit models. The first two models see culture as providing the symbolic face behind which the 'real' economy works. In early Marxist accounts the economy determined social relations that were reflected in particular cultural forms. In the other approaches, culture is treated as that which an economic analysis cannot explain. Thus geographers (and economists) deploy questionnaires to look at optimum-location decisions and, because these do not fully account for location, 'personal preferences' or cultural factors are introduced as a sort of remainder once the economic is accounted for. Likewise, in accounts of indigenous farmers' reactions to agricultural techniques imported from the West, their local culture is portrayed as 'local', peculiar and a barrier to accepting Western progress.

The primacy of 'economic' explanations has to be questioned since it is very easy to reverse the normal accounts. Thus instead of the economy determining cultures we can reverse that. To use Sahlins again, he points out the enormous amount of economic activity that is structured around men wearing trousers and suits and women skirts and dresses (1974). Think, he asks, of the consequences for hundreds of factories if that changed. Likewise we could return to look at food, and trace how changing tastes for food have altered economic systems over and over. Think how much of the Caribbean economy is based around a Western taste for sugar, or how much of India's has been linked to the taste for tea. Of course thinking in this way does not change the separation of culture and economy it just inverts the relationship. This book will argue that we need to avoid seeing either culture or the economy as determining the other; and indeed in many cases that it is more helpful to see how they interact than to separate them. This will be a central part of Chapters 8 and 9.

Positioning culture

So far then I have tried to establish that culture cannot be locked away in either distant peoples or in high art. Culture is part of our everyday lives, indeed it is what gives meaning to those lives. I have equally tried to stress how cultures can be seen to change, to be contested. Finally I have tried to show how these cultures are reproduced through a range of forms and practices embedded in spaces. How we might then approach cultures and these spaces is a complex issue. Essentially the rest of this book begins to see how different approaches have developed around these issues. I do not suggest that one approach can be isolated as reigning supreme. They tend to be looking at rather different situations. Chapter 2 opens with a 'traditional' approach to space and culture. It attempts to use 'material culture', artefacts and products, to see how different cultures inhabited different areas creating distinctive cultural landscapes. Chapter 3 looks more closely at how landscapes may be intentionally shaped by people to carry meanings -looking at the iconography of places. Landscapes are not solely interpreted through direct contact so Chapter 4 explores what we might call literary landscapes - the geographies created by books and novels. This chapter thus looks at the relationship of books to places, of how places may be affected by popular books and also how space is used within books to create a textual landscape. Following this, Chapter 5 looks again at the relationship of space and literature, but in this case looks at how popular literature deals with cultural difference. The focus of this chapter is on literature of the imperial period and it looks at how it helped shape Western views of cultures around the globe. Chapter 6 takes many of the same approaches and relates them to film and music, looking for continuations and differences in these different media. Chapter 7 takes a slightly different focus on global issues and raises questions about how people relate to places in a globalising world. It introduces ideas of a humanist geography, where personal meaning is the crucial category for geography and where a sense of place and attachment to place may be imperilled in a placeless world. Chapter 8 takes issue with many of the fears in the previous chapter; it focuses on how people construct meanings through mass-consumed goods, and how they may not be a threat to meaningful places, as it looks at different geographies and spaces of consumption. Both these chapters thus deal with how places can be constructed in ways that deliberately evoke faraway cultures that mediate cultural difference. Chapter 9 turns its attention to spaces of production looking at how different forms of work produce or utilise different cultures of accepted behaviour. Examples are taken from global industries, and the service sector where workers' cultures can be a part of the product. Chapter 10 picks up the themes of global change and cultural difference to pose questions about how culture is used as a basis for nationalism. In the contemporary world it makes an appeal to move away from the association of one culture with an area and rather look at the hybrid forms springing up as cultures meet. The concluding chapter asks questions about the role of the cultural geographer in all this, suggesting that we should see science and academia as another culture rather than independent of what is being studied.

Mapping cultural geography

If we have thus far thought about what sort of things cultural geography might study, we need to be aware that this has evolved over time. The chapters thus reflect, in part, the changing dynamics of the sub-discipline. We might call this the historical geography of cultural geography. The metaphor of an intellectual landscape can be helpful.If we think of a disciplinary 'map' we would see the blurred borders and traffic between areas of interest, we would see the traffic and paths leading out into other disciplines. Ove:r; time we would see shifting centres of population, shifting cores and peripheral topics. The landscape would be far from static. But we should hesitate before going further with this exercise with two cautionary thoughts. First, the evolution of cultural geography is bound up in wider disciplinary changes and changes in the social sciences and humanities, and also, at a wider scale, with shifts in society in general. This map is thus one tiny fragment that really needs embedding in a larger picture. Second, through the course of this book one of the k...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Cultural Geography
• Routledge Contemporary Human Geography Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of boxes
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1 Locating culture
• Chapter 2 People, landscapes and time
• Chapter 3 The symbolic landscape
• Chapter 4 Literary landscapes: writing and geography
• Chapter 5 Self and other: writing home, marking territory and writing space
• Chapter 6 Multiply mediated environments: film, TV and music
• Chapter 7 Place or space?
• Chapter 8 Geographies of commodities and consumption
• Chapter 9 Cultures of production
• Chapter 10 Nations, homelands and belonging in hybrid worlds
• Chapter 11 Cultures of science: translation and knowledge
• Glossary
• References
• Index