Cultural Geography

4 HANDBOOK OF CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY

criticism – a consistent focus has been the assortment of practices that constitute people

and place, life and landscape.The values, beliefs, languages, meanings and practices that make

up people’s ‘ways of life’, however mobile and mutable, have been the stock-in-trade of

cultural geography for close on a century.

Of course much has been made, and quite rightly, of the epistemological and political

differences distinguishing various conceptions of people’s diverse ‘lifeworlds’. The shift in

cultural geography’s focus from the exotic livelihoods and landscape imprints of ‘other’,

usually non-western groups, to the habits of mind and practice of western social groups, has

developed in tandem with poststructuralist critiques of knowledge in human geography

more generally. It is hard to overestimate the impact of the critique of essentialism on

cultural geography, and the subject’s inherent engagement with the different lifeways that

transform abstract space into lived worlds. Certainly, culture’s constituency has been radi-

cally enlarged and diversified, and many scholars would now accept that a ‘way of life’ can

be defined as much around an oppositional identity politics in an urban housing estate as

around a system of farming the land in rural Minnesota. Refinements are ongoing too, to

today, in how we might think about the ‘actants’ and agencies out of which ‘world-building’

takes place. But one detects, also, an intriguing continuity of ethical commitment in the

efforts that venture to foreground the lived lives of geography’s diverse beings, and all that

fuses and fragments them.

Culture as meaning Understanding the meanings of particular landscapes and places is

no small matter: battles are waged every day over control of religious sites; city streets can

be thronged with groups protesting the loss of public space; and feelings of grief and loss

fuel political conflicts over the design and siting of war memorials. Yet understanding how

and why landscapes become embedded with individual and cultural meaning and in turn

create new meanings is fraught with complications. What exactly do we mean by meaning?

Does it refer to individual emotions, experiences and memories, or to group values, attach-

ments and ideals? How do we interpret meaning from place? And whose meanings are given

precedence in those interpretations? Interpretation of ‘ordinary’ landscapes – places that we

often take for granted in our everyday life, like our homes and towns – requires in-depth,

often intimate, knowledge of local history, cultural values and economic structures.

Interpretation of symbolic landscapes – places that are imbued with special meaning beyond

the everyday – requires investigations at a different scale. A city’s skyline often becomes the

dominant icon for the city, and can resonate as a symbol of that city within the nation and

beyond. Deciphering the meanings in these cases requires delving into issues of civic pride,

national identity and global circulation – into, therefore, urban and national political agendas,

constructions of local and national identity, and the global market of image circulation.

Finding an appropriate method for such an investigation is a vexing issue. Some

geographers have adapted methods from literary criticism to provide a textual ‘reading’ of

landscape, and with it the potential for a deconstructive interpretation; others have borrowed

the technique of iconography from art history in order to interpret landscape as visual image.

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