Cultural Geography

on cultural geography have a section on the economy? It is our intention to show that

thinking culturally about space has impacted on the full range of human geography, and not just

on an identifiable subdiscipline labelled as cultural geography because of the ‘objects’ it

chooses to study. Our suggestion that cultural geography is a set of engagements with the

world carries implications, then, beyond the recognizable subdisciplinary boundaries within

human geography. More than this, it carries implications for thinking across the blurred bound-

aries between geography and academic disciplines with related (spatial, cultural) interests.

We begin the Handbookwith sections on the social and the economic precisely because

these have often been seen as incompatible with, or antagonistic to, the subject of cultural

geography. Indeed, we include authors who remain sceptical about the value of thinking cul-

turally, precisely to show where core debates are taking place in thinking culturally about

social and economic relationships. Following this logic, nature has been seen as the exclu-

sion of that which is cultural and therefore provides a next step in this exploration of cultural

thinking. In fact, culture has been heavily associated in geography with the analysis of land-

scape, our fourth section. The sections on nature and landscape have been placed side by side

in order to give a sense of both the boundaries and the connections between them. Cultural

geography has, in many ways, been born out of an engagement with issues around cultural

politics (see Jackson, 1989; Mitchell, 2000; Philo, 1991). Geographers have been keen to

explore the ways in which culture and geography intersect in the production of identity, and

latterly subjectivity. In particular, geography has been sensitive to difference in

different places, through a sense both of the legacies of their pasts, and the possibilities for

alternative trajectories. These form the core of the next four sections, on subjectivity, post-

colonialism, post-developmentalism and geopolitics. Finally, cultural geography has been

continually reflexive about its own practices and knowledges. This forms part of the core

work of the discipline, so our final section looks at geographies of knowledge.

We would naturally expect readers to dip in and out of the book, selecting for themselves

those chapters that look most relevant to their own work. Nevertheless, the section editors

provide invaluable contextualizations for the chapters. Not only do they situate chapters

within wider debates, they also provide small maps of the debates in these fields of endeav-

our. Readers will therefore find these essays invaluable prior to reading specific chapters.

At the outset to this introduction, we declared that cultural geography is a living

tradition, characterized by debate, enthusiasm, passion and commitment. In reading this book,

we hope you will find that – more than this – there is a commonwealth of different intellectual

cultures: to be drawn on, to be contested, to be changed, to do (differently) yourself.

FURTHER READING

In producing the ‘case studies’ we presented earlier, we realized that we were drawing on a

large stock of shared readings. Instead of relentlessly citing these in the vignettes, we decided

to collate them into one list. This is not meant to be a comprehensive list of all the key works

in cultural geography, but is rather a rough guide to help you explore the sheer variety of

cultural geographies around. We have included some monographs, as examples of the kinds

of research undertaken in cultural geography, but more in the way of anthologies gathering

together work in specific areas of research.

A ROUGH GUIDE 31

3029-intro.qxd 03-10-02 5:17 PM Page 31