Neil Smith commented recently that ‘cultural

and social geography have experienced diver-

gent fates in the English-speaking world during

the last decades of the twentieth century’.

Indeed, he went on to claim that cultural ques-

tions now predominate at the research frontiers

of the human side of the discipline and that, by

comparison, ‘social geography has languished’

(2000: 25). In this chapter, I want to develop a

more nuanced reading of events, to argue that the

trajectory of social geography in the English-

speaking world, and particularly in Britain,

through the 1990s cannot be depicted in the

singular, as an increasingly marginal counter-

point to the cultural. Neither is it best understood

through the lens of fate and its associated,

contrasting academic fashions. Rather, I want to

suggest that social geography/ies and cultural

geography/ies currently are relational construc-

tions, but in a way which is not just about autho-

rial power within (and ability to define) the

discipline. Indeed, I maintain that ‘the cultural’

is a presence, respectively mobilized to enable

specific reconfigurations of ‘the social’ on the

one hand and to permit both a reassertion and an

evacuation of the social on the other. Rather than

writing out ‘the social’ then, ‘the cultural’ has

figured as its prism, as a means of its refraction.

Correspondingly, I argue in this chapter that,

rather than having languished, ‘the social’ has

been simultaneously reconfigured, reasserted and

evacuated – a position which immediately

exposes the multiplicity of understandings of ‘the

social’ currently copresent within British human

geography, and their relative authority/ies.

Developing such a position requires that I

cover a deal of ground with considerable rapid-

ity. What it also means though is that neither can

I hope to achieve, nor would I want to claim, an

exhaustiveness of coverage. This has risks: in

covering so much these arguments will be

vulnerable, particularly in their specifics, to

charges of oversimplification, glossing and so

forth. Nonetheless, this seems a risk worth taking,

for two reasons. First, it provides the space to

represent British social geography in all its partial,

uncertain, provisional and messy complexity,

that is as situated within and produced through

an incredibly complex interwoven field of

power–knowledge. Secondly, this representation

helps foreground what we are struggling over,

what we mean when we invoke the term ‘the

social’. While this is rarely debated within

human geography in the English-speaking world

(at least in recent years), there is a strong case for

doing so now; not least because – as I show here –

the multiple understandings of ‘the social’ that

exist within the discipline work with very differ-

ent formulations of how ‘the social’ connects to

society. Indeed, whereas one reading of this

relation is grounded in no more than inclusion/

exclusion (and therefore rejection, if not always

abjection), for others it goes beyond this and is

tied intrinsically to the material conditions of

societal reproduction, to the constitution of society

through and by economy and polity. Having

established these points, in the next two sections

I argue that there is a clear case to be made for

reclaiming a ‘social’ that relates directly to the

materiality of social life, specifically to the

conditions of its organization and reproduction.

This involves a return to old(er) questions about

the materiality of society and about societal

inequalities. The penultimate section offers some

suggestions as to how such issues might begin

to be reclaimed and reimagined – by taking

1

Reclaiming ‘the Social’ in Social

and Cultural Geography

Nicky Gregson

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