anti-colonial objectives. In this sense the
discipline of geography has been provincializing
itself for some time and through theoretical
perspectives other than that offered up by
the framework of postcolonial theory. Most
obviously we might think of radical (i.e. post-
developmentalist) ‘development geographies’,
as represented in part in Section 7 in this
volume, edited by Jennifer Robinson.We might
also think of the work that has proceeded
through the framework of geographies of race
and racism.^8 Within both development geo-
graphy and geographies of racism, certain criti-
cal threads have raised relevant suspicions
around the very term ‘culture’ now apparently
so central to emerging postcolonial geogra-
phies.These are suspicions we need to remain
mindful of even if the culture concepts at the
heart of current postcolonial geographies are
quite distinct from those that were active at
earlier times. For example, James Blaut’s
(1992; 1993) sustained critique of Euro-
centrism has included an account of the way
in which ‘biological racism’ was supplanted by
‘cultural racism’. This racism, he argued, pro-
longed the life of European assumptions of
superiority by replacing scientific theories of
environmentally determined racial character
with claims about the so-called ‘uniqueness’ of
European ‘mentality and culture’ (1992: 294).
Furthermore, he argues that ‘cultural racism’
served as the foundation upon which twentieth-
century modernization theory was built, a
theory which itself legitimated an entirely new
period of western intervention in places
deemed to be less developed. Clearly, geogra-
phers need to carefully historicize how they
use and account for a concept like ‘culture’
and nowhere more so than in the project of
making the discipline aware of its imperial
sympathies.
Similar reservations might be expressed in
relation to the culture concept upon which
Sauerean cultural geography relied.This seem-
ingly arcane question has recently been reac-
tivated in the wake of claims that a revised
‘Sauerean tradition’ might provide a template
for a decolonized cultural geography. Sauer is
available for this recuperative project in part
because his recognition of precolonial ways of
life and landscape provide an important coun-
terpoint to colonialist assumptions about
colonized lands being ‘pristine’ or ‘empty’(Sluyter, 1997: 701). Some of this work has
attempted to mount a ‘postcolonial’ reinter-
pretation of contemporary landscapes on the
basis that precolonial landscapes quite literally
shaped, and continue to inhabit, the colonial
landscapes that followed (Sluyter, 1999; 2001).
Certainly, Sauer’s own intellectual project was
set against modernism and the various forms
of destruction (of cultures and natures) he felt
it wrought. And, as Solot (1986) has demon-
strated, Sauer’s culture areas chorology was
emphatically against the kinds of evolutionist
frameworks of human development that legiti-
mated Europe’s task of delivering ‘civilization’
to other ‘cultures’. In keeping with the revi-
sions of anthropological thinking about
culture set in train by Franz Boas, Sauer’s con-
cept of a ‘culture area’ signified a point at
which the discipline of geography departed
from the ‘scientific’ theories of climate and
race that were so much a feature of the geo-
graphies of empire. This said, it is not always
clear that Sauer’s culture areas approach was
entirely outside some of the developmentalist
assumptions of evolutionism. Although his
interest in cultural change was not deter-
mined by any ‘general law of progress’, he still
conceded that there were ‘progressive
cultures and others that show almost no sign
of change’ (Solot, 1986: 515). In short, in
Sauer’s work the boundary between what we
might think of as a self-evidently imperialist,
meta-evolutionist perspective (which saw the
present of other cultures as Europe’s past)
and a seemingly post-imperialist, synchronic
relativism (which imply coevalness and parti-
cularity) are not always clearly marked.
Before Sauerean approaches are embraced
in decolonizing revisions of cultural geography,
another kind of historical space clearing ges-
ture is needed. This entails asking what kinds
of social and political effects ‘culture area’ geo-
graphies had on the relations between those
people whose ‘presence’ was being defined by
‘culture’ (and specifically cultural artifacts) and
those geographers who had the privilege to
do such defining. Such a project is in keeping
with Barnett’s suggestion that the ‘cultural
turn’ in the discipline needs to account for the
‘formations of the cultural in different institu-
tional situations and ... distinctive forms of
social regulation’ (1998: 622–3). For example,
while the ‘culture area’ concept helped refuteINTRODUCTION 349Section-6.qxd 03-10-02 10:41 AM Page 349