Cultural Geography

its association with, on the one hand, militarism

and nationalism and, on the other, clear politi-

cal commitments that ruled it ‘unscientific’ in

the eyes of Sauer and his peers. Indeed, the

ascendancy of cultural geography was facili-

tated by active dissociation from political

issues. Cultural geographers showed as little

interest in politics as political geographers did

in culture. After World War II, if the political

geography that developed was studiously

disinterested in offering explicit political

judgement and aspired to a form of technical

objectivity, concentrating for the most part on

the description and classification of states and

their borders, or on studies of electoral geo-

graphy, then cultural geography was totally

blind to both the political contexts of the

cultural issues it studied (the diffusion of

technologies, ethnic geographies, and the dis-

tribution of place names) and the political

implications of what was studied (preferring

the world before 1800 so as to avoid contem-

porary politics altogether) (Smith, 1989).As in

so many fields, the Cold War of 1947–89 set

narrow limits to the study of politics and to

politically informed critique in the United

States and elsewhere.

Intellectually, part of the problem lay with

how culture was defined (Duncan, 1980). It

was seen very much as the effects of ‘tradition’

or past symbolically powerful strategies for

organizing life that lived on into the present,

either through intergenerational transfer or as

a result of living in places where the ‘culture’

was everywhere ‘in evidence’. Of course, this

meant giving little or no attention to relations

of power within local groups or seeing how

cultures change as a result of conquest, inva-

sion and suppression. The emphasis on the

diffusion of traits as the source of cultural

change led to a systematic neglect of political

relations of domination and subordination

within a given culture and in relation to

others. Culture existed almost, and ironically,

as a state of nature, without the divisions and

conflicts associated with politics.

Only with the reinvention of the concept of

culture, understood now as a system of signs

that give meaning to other activities, has the

concept come to have much relevance for

political analysis (for example, Jackson, 1989).

It does so by drawing attention to the depen-

dence of politics (and political geography) on

prefigured cultural identities and geographical

taxonomies. From this point of view, political

action, communication and representation are

only possible when based on commonly

understood cultural signs and symbols. A cul-

turally informed political geography is about

identifying and showing the mutually constitu-

tive effects of cultural signs and symbols, on

the one hand, and political acts, on the other,

in so far as they involve geographical sites, pre-

suppositions and taxonomies.

CULTURAL GEOPOLITICS

The social and intellectual waves that helped

transform geography as a whole from the

1970s onwards also washed over the subfield

of political geography, renewing its intellectual

importance and revitalizing its intellectual

core.The renewed political geography that has

defined the discipline for the last 20 years is

characterized by a variety of perspectives:

spatial-analytical approaches that continue the

subfield’s long-established concern with spatial

patterns and forms of political organization

(O Loughlin, 1986), political-economic perspec-

tives that address the structural processes of

state power and the world economy, and cul-

turalist trajectories of research that explore

the multiple entanglements of geopolitics and

states with questions of cultural identity, politi-

cal discourse and the cultural reproduction of

everyday life (Agnew, 1997).

As the field of cultural geography was trans-

formed by the cultural turn across the social

sciences in the 1980s, the intimate connec-

tions of the cultural to the political were made

visible and increasingly acknowledged. Cul-

tural geographies are now seen as entwined

within political geographies and political

geographies are now seen as sustained and

transformed by cultural discourses and prac-

tices (Godlewska and Smith, 1984). Studies of

national boundaries provide a particularly

vivid example of the effect of the emphasis on

cultural interpretation. If at one time political

boundaries were viewed predominantly in a

naturalistic light, as produced by natural fea-

tures and conditions, they have been increas-

ingly seen as the result of processes of cultural

definition and negotiation. Anssi Paasi (1996),

for example, has been a persuasive advocate

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