Cultural Geography

8 HANDBOOK OF CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY

a kind of foraging postmodernity, but this is surely ill-conceived. Rather, it is an attempt to

map out interconnections not just as incidental to how places are constituted but as central

and thereby articulate a ‘politics of coexistence’ (Latour, 1999). So, for example, as

Whatmore and Thorne (1998) map out how animals were drawn into various projects which

circulated them around the world, they are also trying to show how such shifting geographies

of power can be used to question our understanding of the natural, so providing the bare

bones of a new ‘natural contract’ in which ‘habitus’, the ‘unconscious’ and other such sedi-

mentations can be dreamt in different, more active ways.

So we come to the final style of thought which we might call experimental. This kind of

thinking attempts to culture a kind of delight in the intricacies of space, not from a dilet-

tantish need to add more and more twists and turns, but rather as a means of finding new

interconnections through which new kinds of humanity can be realized, so expanding out

what can be thought, felt and done – into the silence. The increasing appeal to performance

as a guiding metaphor goes hand in hand with attempts to produce new visions of place or,

more accurately, space–time, which are able to operate on preconceived notions by

articulating actors, most especially, in the collective register. Thus, work informed by

experiments in performance studies can be laid alongside work that attempts to name new

fluid forms of space which do not have shape or consistency but do still situate, in that both

are attempts – using bodies, contexts and all manner of other actors – to defy conventional

cognitive coordinates, by getting at something different, something that exceeds, something

that can unlock the power of virtuality with its attachment to life. So, against the background

of a weak ontology, a new kind of spatial ethics is being forged. This is what Bennett calls

an ‘ethical energetics’, which can produce new stances to the world, ‘fundamentally more

capacious, generous and “unthreatened” becomings of the self’ (2001: 93). There is all to

play for.

UNFOLDING GEOGRAPHIES OF CULTURE

The first two sections to this introduction have been fairly general. In them,

we have suggested that cultural geography is characterized by particular ways

of knowing, or of questioning the world. Perhaps it is better thought of, in fact, as a way

of unknowing – a way of making the familiar strange. By using a geographical imagina-

tion and through an understanding of culture that recognizes that we are bound up in our

own apprehensions and appreciations, cultural geographers seek new ways of addressing

their subjects, and of telling new stories about the world, and subverting others. In this,

we hope to grasp something of that world, but perhaps it is better to say something with

conviction, in the hope that these passions for our subject will make a difference.

Let us take this idea of passion for the subject one step further. In some ways, what we are

presenting in this section is a series of ‘case studies’. Geography, as an academic discipline,

has a strong heritage in exploration and what contentiously became called ‘discovery’. We

would argue that one positive consequence of this legacy is a strong sympathy with ‘the

empirical’, with empirical research and with fieldwork across diverse sites. For those outside

geography, this has often led them to see the discipline as atheoretical, descriptive – though

their evaluations of this as good or bad have differed markedly. Wherever one starts in this

3029-intro.qxd 03-10-02 5:17 PM Page 8