Cultural Geography

A ROUGH GUIDE 5

But these approaches have been criticized as too reliant on the discursive, ignoring the very

real material conditions of landscape production and thereby erasing the meanings of its pro-

ducers. Conversely, some geographers call for studies of meaning that focus on the non-

material aspects of landscape, that is, on people’s intimate experiences of and performances in

places.These methodological debates only underscore the importance of trying to understand

the powerful, and often conflict-ridden, relationship between cultural meanings and the places

and landscapes that embody, reflect and shape those meanings.

Culture as doing For some, the idea that culture is ‘done’ is associated with ideas within

Marxism, and particularly Marx’s understanding of consciousness as practical. Following

Epicurus, it seems that Marx thought of matter as too recalcitrant or unruly to be part of an

order of natural necessity; matter therefore had a kind of vitalizing property. But, under the

influence of Hegel, Marx went on to ally this recalcitrance and vitality with human self-

consciousness, so losing touch with an appreciation of agency within nature and producing a

division which still plagues so many accounts of culture. So on the one hand, there is a philoso-

phical anthropology in which the ‘swerve of the atom’ – an idea taken from Epicurus to

describe deviation from assigned paths – becomes man’s capacity to resist physical form. On

the other hand, there is a view in which the ‘swerve’ is much more deeply embedded in

materiality, in which the division between nature and culture is challenged, and where agency

is distributed across all kinds of hybrid actors.

Recent work in cultural geography has similarly moved away from philosophical anthropol-

ogy towards more general notions of life that can reinstate the Epicurean notion of

materiality (more and more often, under the general heading of performance), so attempting

to reinstate the richness of the world which is so often rendered in conventional aca-

demic accounts as ‘just’ everyday life. Such attempts have taken up various traditions, as

diverse as certain kinds of phenomenology, certain ethnomethodological attempts to fol-

low outcomes of action and affect, and certain kinds of virtualism, reworking them through

notions like ‘habitus’, ‘actor network’ and immanent ‘becoming’ to produce new modes

of thinking and harrying space which, at one and the same time, create new spaces.

Such cultural geography tends to be hyperactive, caught up especially in forms of life as varied

as theatrical performance and various kinds of protest, forms of life which tend to

refuse the directive cultural politics so beloved of academics for a quicksilver cultural

politics that is not only more tenuous but also, in its emphasis on the mobility of

circumstance, more alert to differences and so more able to follow some of those paths

to freedom.

Culture as power In some ways, this theme stands out from the other four that we have

identified.This is because the analysis of ‘power’ is, at least, implicit in each of these themes.

Meaning, for example, is contested. Geographers have asked questions about how artefacts

get made, how they get from one place to another, and (sometimes) who benefits from all

this trading and placing. Often, power itself is not the object of cultural geographical analy-

sis. Nevertheless, critiques of power relations are usually uppermost in cultural geographical

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