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constraints (but not reducible to astructur-
alism).structuration theoryproposed to
replace this persistent dualism with a duality,
but this promised to do much more than inte-
grate ‘agency’ and ‘structure’ in explications of
the conduct of social life: it also madeplace
andspacethe pivots around which agency and
structure turned. This further troubled the
boundaries between contemporary andhis-
torical geography, already assailed byhis-
torical materialism, becausetimeas well as
space was seen as focal to the production and
reproduction of social life. In a sense, this
vindicated older claims that ‘all geography is
historical geography’ and socialized the for-
malism of classicaldiffusionmodels, though
in terms that their original protagonists would
scarcely have recognized. These developments
were reinforced by the ‘cultural turn’,
which inaugurated a ‘new’cultural geog-
raphywhose development was marked by a
series of theoretical ‘posts’ –postmodernism,
post-structuralismandpost-colonialism–
though here too Marxisms in various forms
continued to provide baselines for many geog-
raphers (Soja, 1989; Gregory, 1994).
This simple sequence is necessarily a carica-
ture – human geography is not a single project
and its history cannot be reduced to a linear
narrative – but it does capture some of the
major shifts in intellectual fashion in human
geography in much of the English-speaking
world since the Second World War. To describe
them as fashion is not misleading; the links
betweencultural capital, the commodifica-
tion of knowledge and academic prestige ought
not to be discounted. Yet they were also more
than fads. While it would be misleading to plot
these changes in an ascending arc of ‘progress’
in human geography, they have derived from
intellectual debates inside and outside the dis-
cipline, and they were responses to issues of
substance that required public address. This
is clear from the theoretical sensibility that dis-
tinguished postwar human geography from its
predecessors. Although few would welcome a
return of thegrand theorythat preoccupied
many areas of human geography as recently as
the late twentieth century,critiqueas a rigorous
interrogation of the ways in which concepts are
freighted with relations ofpoweris now firmly
established as a central moment in geograph-
ical enquiry (cf.genealogy). It is also clear
from the success of both critical human
geographyandradical geographyin estab-
lishing the crucial importance ofpoliticsalong-
side the narrower and usually more
instrumental focus on policy inapplied geog-raphy, although Martin (2001b) complained
that what he saw as ‘faddishness’ (in philoso-
phy and theory) has limited the practical pur-
chase of much of this contemporary work.
These developments have contributed to a
considered blurring of the boundaries between
the sub-disciplines of human geography; eco-
nomic geography and political geography were
brought into conversation throughpolitical
economy, for example, and both have been
markedly affected by acultural turn(see
alsocultural economy) that requires recog-
nition of the commodification of cultural forms
andpracticesandtheir enrolment in economic
and political figurations (cf. Harvey, 1989b).
This ‘blurring’ has several sources. ‘Theory’
has itself become interdisciplinary, even post-
disciplinary, and the same authors and texts,
motifs and themes recur across the spectrum of
the humanities and social sciences, while any
critical theoryworthy of the name cannot
draw back when it encounters disciplinary
boundaries. More than this, however,composi-
tional approaches that separate ‘economy’,
‘polity’, ‘society’ and ‘culture’ – all of them at
once as real and as constructed as the discip-
lines that have come to be identified with them:
they are all fabricated rather than found objects- are confounded by geography’s constitutive
interest in thecontextual: in thecoexistenceof
objects, institutions and practices in time and
space (cf. Ha ̈gerstrand, 1984, pp. 374–5: see
alsocontextuality).
It is thus not surprising that the interactions
between human geography and the other hu-
manities and social sciences should have been
a two-way street. It is perfectly true that many
of the early encounters were largely derivative.
Methods and theories were borrowed from
other fields and put to work on the research
frontier in order to stake a series of supposedly
distinctive geographical claims (and, not coin-
cidentally, to identify the adventurousness of
the intellectual avant-garde). Gradually, how-
ever, a return flow was established and cross-
disciplinary exchange increased:
(1) Human geographers have made substan-
tial methodological contributions.
Among the most significant have been
those to mathematical and statistical an-
alysis, particularly through advances in
the study ofspatial autocorrelation
that address the problem of applying
techniques associated with thegeneral
linear model to spatially referenced
data, and the development ofgeograph-
ical information systems that haveGregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_H Final Proof page 352 1.4.2009 3:18pmHUMAN GEOGRAPHY