The Dictionary of Human Geography

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define cultural regions (Crang, 2000). In

Britain, Geddes’ influence produced a re-

gional survey approach that emphasized a

visual integration of the landscape as a

method of finding unity (Matless, 1992),

while the local history work on landscapes

of W.G. Hoskins focused on studies that

sought to capture the identity and spirit of

specific regions through their landscapes.

These classic traditions focused upon the

commonalities in the landscape and rural, his-

torical or traditional forms. Criticism of this

tendency mounted through the last quarter

of the twentieth century. First,humanistic

geographychallenged the lack of concern

with, and scope for, individual interpretation

and actions. Authors looked at the meaning of

places for specific people, and theemotional

geographiesof cultures found in the bond

with specific places and theirgenius loci

(e.g. Pocock, 1982). Second,radical,femi-

nistandmarxist geographycriticized the

assumptions of organic wholeness given to

cultures, and pointed to the internal divisions,

contradictions and conflicts while, moreover,

pointing to more contemporary and urban

formations. Third, the political context and

implications of European traditions has been

examined. Thus the work of a German geog-

rapher such as Franz Petri, writing between

the world wars, examined the spread of

Germanic culture from a supposed ancestral

cultural hearth around post-Roman Frankish

peoples. Based upon an examination of field

and place names, taken as indicators of

Germanic culture, he could label ‘[t]he char-

acter of Frankish settlement in Walloon and

Northern France [as] utterly Germanic’ (Ditt,

2001, p. 245) – a highly charged verdict, given

the territorial disputes around Germany. This

highlights the problematic relationship of arte-

fact to cultures – choosing certain things as

indicators of a culture, but leaving other things

as analytically insignificant, reveals political

dimensions and choices in the analysis.

To these issues was added engagement with

other sub-disciplines and fields outside geog-

raphy, which – in the last two decades of the

twentieth century – were also undergoing their

own cultural turns. We might, for the sake of

argument, characterize the work that followed

in two strands, the first tending to respond

to developments in social geography and soci-

ology, and the second as drawing from the

radical ends of the arts and humanities.

Together, they have often been labelled the

‘New Cultural Geography’, which began as

something of a rebellion to the above tradi-

tions but rapidly swept on to transform other

sub-disciplines as well.

The first strand drew on work frombehav-

ioural geography, to which it added the long

tradition ofethnographyfrom thechicago

schoolof urban sociology, and arguments

over the sociology of culture emerging in the

1970s and through the 1980s. This inspired a

rich vein of work on urban cultures and sub-

cultures in moderneveryday life. The latter

were seen as resistance ortransgression, con-

testing the categories of the majority culture.

Culture was no longer seen as somehow

a ‘natural’ property of a group but, rather,

the medium of power, oppression, contest-

ation and resistance. Much of this work grew

from an engagement with the Birmingham

Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies,

and worked to look at the role of culture in

securing and maintaining thehegemonyof

dominant groups. It began to push at the cul-

tural construction of social categories (such as

age,race,class,sexualityorgender) and

the ways in which these came to signify

particular meanings and be connected with

specific ways of life (e.g. Bell and Valentine,

1995; Kofman, 1998; Skelton and Valentine,

1998; Pred, 2000).

The second strand of work was differenti-

ated not so much by topic as by method,

drawing from the arts andhumanities. Work

here drew on critical studies of often high

cultural artefacts such asartandliterature,

but moved these techniques to include more

popular cultural forms such asfilmor other

media. Rather than using these cultural forms

as sources of ‘data’ about what occurred in

places, or as rich evocations of emotional res-

onance (which had been the tendency in

humanistic geography; e.g. Pocock, 1981),

it unpacked the spatialities of the materials to

examine what work they did in representing

and shaping cultures. Thus landscape paint-

ings were examined not just for content, but

the way in which they framed the landscape –

indeed, created ‘landscape’ as a visual cat-

egory. Often using a linguistic approach,

studies treated cultural artefacts astextsthat

could be read and interpreted to uncover hid-

den meanings and the imprints of thepower

that shaped them and which they embodied.

In this, it drew from the techniques ofdecon-

struction andpost-structuralism, which

focusedonhow texts shape meaning through

processes of exclusion or repression, whereby

they downplay or negate some possible inter-

pretations while foregrounding others. The

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CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY