Cultural Geography

A ROUGH GUIDE 3

Culture as distribution of things All groups of people produce cultural artefacts, from

the everyday personal items we see around us like furniture and clothing, to the larger-scale

and more public artefacts such as buildings and roads. But how exactly do we understand

the relationships between the patterning of those artefacts and the values, livelihoods, beliefs

and identities of the cultures who have produced them? What really can the pattern of mate-

rial artefacts tell us about the social, economic and political dynamics of cultures? These

concerns are central to cultural geography.

In the first half of the twentieth century, cultural geographers concentrated on

charting the movement and locations of material artefacts in the landscape. Some

geographers of the Berkeley School of cultural geography spent considerable energy map-

ping the locations of certain key, and primarily vernacular, artefacts within the United States

in order to delineate cultural regions, that is, regions that expressed a defined cultural

homogeneity. Fred Kniffen, for example, used folk housing styles as a diagnostic for deci-

phering cultural regions. But as many cultural geographers have reminded us since, hous-

ing, and by implication material artefacts, can tell us much more than this about culture.

Studying the distribution of cultural artefacts involves asking whoseartefacts,howdid they

get put in place, and for what reasons. For example, housing style and decor are among the

most public forms of identity expression; they can reveal the economic class of the inhabi-

tants, their ethnicity, perhaps their attitudes toward nature, their sense of belonging in a

community. Open the door to the interior, and its design can suggest the gendered

relationships in the family, their social and economic aspirations, their work situations.

Conversely, housing often reveals more about societal structures than about individual

identity. The disinvestment in housing that is evident in many inner-city neighbourhoods

reveals a common pattern of capital mobility by the large stakeholders in urban real estate.

Charting the distribution of these neighbourhoods can tell us as much about the workings

of post-Fordist capitalism as it does about the cultural attributes of its inhabitants.

Deprived of formal expression in the design of artefacts, people may express their views

through the graffiti that decorate the walls and buildings in these neighbourhoods – symbols

and signs of community and resistance.

Cultural geographies of artefacts, then, are as much about the graffiti themselves as they

are about the locations of the graffiti-marked buildings; as much about the idea of home

as they are about the distribution of housing; and as much about the diversity within

culture as they are about cultures per se. These geographies ask whyand how, as much as

whereand when.

Culture as a way of life Perhaps one of the most persistent of the democratizing moves

marking out the field of cultural geography, at least in its Anglo/American/Australasian

trajectories, has been that profoundly relativist appreciation of the diverse properties of

people in place. From studies of the genre de vieof regionally based groups – typically rural

and ‘traditional’societies – through to more recent forays into the signifying systems of all

social groups – ‘us’ as well as ‘them’, and back again to ‘them’ with the tools of postcolonial

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