The Dictionary of Human Geography

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A second area in which the powers of cul-

ture are foregrounded follows from and

develops Stuart Hall’s seminal analysis of the

concept ofarticulation. Grossberg (1993, p. 4)

develops an explicitly ‘spatial materialism’ that

also builds on Deleuzian thought to argue that

the concept of culture needs to be changed

from that of ‘the field in which power is sym-

bolized to a set of practices which apply

power’. This is related to a shift from the

interpretative apprehension of meanings to a

consideration of the production of relations,

and recasts cultural studies as ‘a theory of

contexts’. There is considerable potential

here for geographical research, as there is in

the closely related reorientation of cultural

analysis away from narrowly construed issues

of meaning towards embodied practices of

feeling, shame and compassion (e.g. Berlant,

2004). The third area of growing interest lies

in moves to rethink culture as a field ofper-

formanceand action (e.g. Hastrup, 2004).

Here, again, there is a move away from holistic

accounts of how culture symbolizes and inte-

grates other social relations, towards an

emphasis on the specific powers of cultural

practices, and suggesting new models of rela-

tions and agency in the process (Strathern,

1995).

The odyssey of the concept of culture in

human geography is likely to continue awhile

yet, but do not expect anyone to arrive at

a singular, ontologically robust definition.

Duncan and Duncan (2004a) recommend

the self-consciously eclectic combination of

theories of culture backed up by empirical

analysis, and this seems more in the spirit of

the traditions of cultural studies and anthro-

pology from which human geographers have

drawn so much inspiration. Flexibility is one

of the reasons why ‘culture’ can serve as a

usefullingua franca between otherwise dis-

parate and disconnected fields. But the

continuing influence of cultural analysis in

the discipline depends on the acknowledge-

ment that there is more to culture than mean-

ing and representation; and more to culture

than the reproduction of or resistance to

power relations constituted by more funda-

mental processes. Above all, it requires a

greater degree of concern with what cultural

studies can teach us about how todotheory

itself – that theory is not about arriving at

essentialist criteria or the vain search for onto-

logical clarity, but is about appreciating the

essentially contestedqualities of concepts, and

analysing what is most at stake in these dis-

agreements. cb

Suggested reading

Frow (1997); Johnson, Chambers, Raghuram

and Tincknell (2004); Mulhern (2000); Robbins

(1993); Williams (1981); Yudice (2003).

culture area A geographical region over

which homogeneity in measurable cultural

traits may be identified. Contiguous zones

identified within a culture area arecore, over

which the culture in question has exclusive or

quasi-exclusive influence,domain, over which

the identifying traits are dominant but not

exclusive, and realm, over which the traits

are visible but subordinate to those of other cul-

turegroups.TheclassicstudyisMeinig’s(1965)

identification of a Mormon culture area centred

on the Great Basin of Utah. Today, the concept

is little used ingeography, as culture is identi-

fied more closely withprocess, connection and

networkthan with the areal boundedness of

mappable cultural markers. dco

cybernetics Derived from the Greek ‘kyber-

netes’, meaning ‘steersman’, it sees systems as

learning and self-regulating. The term ‘cyber-

netics’ was first used by theinformation the-

orypioneer Norbert Wiener in his 1948 book

Cybernetics: or control and communication in the

animal and the machine. The term has often

impacted on geography through compound

forms such as ‘cybernetic organism’, abbrevi-

ated tocyborg, and ‘cybernetic space’, abbre-

viated tocyberspace. However, two specific

inflections of the term ingeographyare worth

noting in themselves.

First, the term has literal and metaphoric

resonance with work that has usedmodels

and algorithmic programming to simulate geo-

graphical phenomena. The weaker version of

this is anepistemologicalinclusion offeed-

backin models.algorithmsas series of calcu-

lations or procedures can be sequences where

each step depends upon the previous ones.

Sophisticated agent-based modellingthus

has co-dependent multiple calculations. The

stronger version is anontologicalstatement

that sees the world as operating as, or analo-

gous to, aneural network. Thus the world

can be seen as operating like information pass-

ing through a system. Cybernetics focuses

upon the relationships of these parts to see

how the whole system is controlled or gov-

erned. This has the virtue of moving away from

acartesiandivision of thought and the world,

by insisting on seeing the world as a thinking,

reflexiveentity. However, it also risks redu-

cing thought to a communication system and

providing a mechanistic view of the world.

Gregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_C Final Proof page 138 31.3.2009 9:45pm

CULTURE AREA