Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Key features of the new cultural geography
The new cultural geography of the last part of the 20th century
was precisely concerned with the inner workings of culture; the
very component that traditional cultural geography had chosen
to ignore. New cultural geographers wished to distance
themselves from notions of culture as objective reality, visible
and material. They believed in culture as a process that was
socially constructed, actively maintained by people, and supple
in its engagement with other spheres of human life and meaning.
The new cultural geography was interested not in the patterns
of artefacts or of forms of behaviour but in the meanings that
underlay these objects and activities. It has been described as
the medium through which people transform the mundane
phenomena of a material world into a world of signifi cant
symbols to which they give meaning and attach value. All
acknowledged the infl uence of Raymond Williams, the British
social commentator, who described culture as the signifying
system through which (though among other means) a social order
is communicated, reproduced, experienced, and explored. Culture
can therefore be seen as a set of signifying systems with texts
capable of multiple readings. Thus, the subject matter of cultural
geography changed from objects and things, such as tobacco
barns and agricultural implements, to all forms of representation,
including symbols, gestures, words, and artistic expression (such
as art, fi ctional literature, and dance): that is to images that
create
meanings.
What lessons can be learned from this brief review of cultural
geography? The new cultural geography has enriched the wider
discipline of human geography. A defi ning characteristic has
been to seek a fully dimensional cultural geography approach.
However, the older cultural geography has not been replaced,
and the two approaches proceed side by side, often co-existing in
relative independence of each other. The social philosophies from
which the new cultural geographers draw their intellectual stimuli
