Cultural Geography

6 HANDBOOK OF CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY

work, much of which is intended to be an active engagement with what we might call

(following the work of people such as Stuart Hall) cultural politics. Early writings in cultural

politics were interventions in debates within Marxism about the role of culture in the

functioning of society. Terms such as ‘Hegemony’ and ‘Ideology’ were hotly debated within

cultural studies and geographers were quick to see the implications of these debates.

Over time, understandings of power have shifted, away from models based on the power

of one group over another, towards those involving the power to do things. This has

suggested that power relations consist not only of domination, but also of seduction,

influence, persuasion, capacity, ability, manipulation, consent, compromise, subversion,

control and so on. More than this, class-based models of power have been supplemented

(though, for some, this meant weakened) by analyses of power relations organized around

politics, gender, lifestyle, nature, race, sexuality, nationality and so on. Cultural geographers

continue to be interested in the analysis and critique of power because space is bound up

in the constitution of injustice, inequality and oppression. In particular, geographers have

pointed to the sites of oppression and resistance, the different scales through which

power relations operate and how space is manipulated by the powerful and the weak.

As a result, geographers have drawn on and contributed to debates within Marxism, femi-

nism, development studies, international relations and queer and postcolonial studies.The

problem remains, still, both how to identify and understand the ways in which space, place

and nature are implicated in – and constitutive of – unjust, unequal and uneven power

relations, and how to suggest ways of addressing and redressing these relations.

These themes weave in and out of the Handbook, and in many ways give this book a coher-

ence of endeavour and perspective. Further, these themes are to be found in the four case

studies that we will be presenting later. However, the next step in this introduction will be to

think more carefully about the relationship between the geographical and the cultural, and

how to understand the world through space offers particular ways of opening it up.

THINKING SPATIALLY ABOUT CULTURE, THINKING

CULTURALLY ABOUT SPACE

Not surprisingly, thinking spatially about culture has had a long history in cultural geogra-

phy, arising out of the general history of geography, its often protracted negotiations with

other disciplines, and the changing spatial tapestry of historical events and discourses.

Roughly speaking, we can identify a series of stylesof thinking spatially about culture which,

though not incompatible, cannot be just placed together since they often show up quite

different things. One style of thought is what we might call ‘building bloc’. Such a style

attempts to identify large processes in order to produce large explanations. A good example

is Harvey’s highly influential work on ‘time–space compression’, a transmission mechanism

by which something called ‘economy’ could be linked to something called ‘culture’, so

allowing traffic to take place between the two blocs. Space then becomes both a central

engine of change in the nature of capitalism and its expression. Notwithstanding recent

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