2 HANDBOOK OF CULTURAL GEOGRAPHYIn this introduction, we are not going to provide a history – or life story – of cultural
geography, as if it was a character in an academic drama. Partly, our reluctance to do this has to
do with a refusal to institute a canon of work that is identifiably cultural geography. Partly, this
reluctance is about installing (or not) certain figures as foundational to the discipline, but it is also
about seeing cultural geography as being motivated differently in different places. We see
cultural geography, therefore, as a contested terrain of debate – in fact, a far-flung set of debates.
We do not wish, that is, to stitch these different debates together into a seamless story: birth,
life ... and ultimately death. Cultural geography is a living tradition of disagreements, passions,
commitments and enthusiasms. It is something of this that we wish to evoke in this book.
For the purposes of this book, cultural geography is better thought of as a series of
intellectual – and, at core, politicized – engagements with the world. It is a style of thought,
fixed in neither time nor space. It is nevertheless possible to pull out certain strands that go
to make up this style of thought. So, we would like to begin this introduction by setting out
some of these strands in a little depth. These strands are multiform, and they are far from dis-
crete, being instead knotted together in ways that bind various kinds of geographies in variable
geometries and patterns. While this might offer a disturbingly flexible ‘map’ of cultural geo-
graphy, we would like to make a particular case for cultural geography. In the next section,
we would like to argue that – at this point in time – the most radical of these agendas has
involved the injunction to think spatially about the world. Later, we will exemplify these
issues through the use of four ‘vignettes’: each will show how various geographies can be read
out of particular events, objects, situations and locations. In this way, we hope to introduce
what it is that cultural geography does: not as a closed and bounded field of academic endeav-
our, but as an open and engaged style of thought.
Our working definition of cultural geography, then, is more related to an unfolding
intellectual terrain than it is to a long path, littered with iconic texts that mark the disci-
pline’s sure-footed academic journey. As we begin to think about cultural geography, and
especially as we read over the contributions to this book, we are better able to see that these
unfolding arguments and debates are about specific ‘geographical problems’, rather than
keeping within an identifiable terrain of thought. For us, we can see that five particular
themes are evident across this book – and cultural geography as a whole. No doubt these are
not the only ones, but they make sense in terms of the intellectual frontiers this Handbook
opens up. They are:- culture as distribution of things
- culture as a way of life
- culture as meaning
- culture as doing
- culture as power.
Let us think further about the various strands of thought that have gone to make up cultural
geography. We have noted that these strands are bound together in different ways, and you
will find various aspects of the thinking described in each of the chapters – in sometimes
more and less apparent ways. These strands are long standing and represent aspects of
cultural geography as both a style of thought and a substantive arena of research and
debate. We have decided to stabilize these threads on aspects of culture, as a convenient
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