Cultural Geography

A notable exception to this tendency is, of

course, David Sibley’s Geographies of Exclu-

sion(1995), a text that is justifiably widely cited

in this literature. But what intrigues me about so

much of this positive citation is that it ignores the

crux to Sibley’s arguments, which is to locate his

understanding of exclusion not at the level of

particular excluded social groups but in object

relations theory, and in Kristeva’s notion of

abjection. His reading of ‘the social’ then (and

societal reproduction) is grounded very strongly –

and transparently – in a psychoanalytic reading,

which means that ‘the social’ becomes little

more than the effect of fear, rejection, expulsion,

loss and so forth. This, of course, is very different

from a historical materialist reading of exclusion,

which is located primarily in relation to (non-

participation within) the labour force. All of

which is to argue that it is not enough merely

to cite inclusion, exclusion and/or marginaliza-

tion. Rather, these in themselves are no more

than descriptive terms which require theoretical

(and not just empirical) work to expose the

nature of their connection/s to ‘the social’ and to

society.

Fourthly and relatedly, I would highlight what

for me is another striking absence, the seeming

reluctance to locate this ‘social’ within any arena

that might be labelled ‘economic’. Indeed, it

would be very easy to get the impression from

reading this social geography literature that it

operates with a sense of the social that is coun-

terposed to an unspoken, unarticulated ‘economy’.

For example, the ‘spaces’ of this work are

bodies, homes, neighbourhoods, ‘public’ spaces

(streets, squares, parks) and rarely those of paid

employment and unpaid ‘work’. And it is

unusual for this research to make reference to the

ways in which these same spaces, and particu-

larly the home and the body, are permeated with

and/or shaped by the worlds of work – in the

ways, say, that much feminist economic work

has attempted to do (Hanson and Pratt, 1995;

Massey, 1995; McDowell and Court, 1994). In

addition, it is worth noting that many of the sub-

jects of this social geography are connected by

their marginalization and/or exclusion (direct or

indirect) from legal employment (children;

youth; the elderly; people with disabilities) and

that at least several areas of empirical interest

are represented as in some way ‘cultural’ – for

instance, ‘cultures’ of parenting and/or mothering,

youth ‘cultures’. For me, this absence is the area

more than any other within this social geography

which signals the influence of the cultural

within/to its reimagining. Not only is it possible

to infer in all this a positive identification with

‘the cultural’ – which we might note remains

tacit in its reading of ‘the cultural’ – but also the

denial of certain materialities and social relations

seems to imply an acceptance of the (false) oppo-

sition drawn in much recent geographical litera-

ture between economy and culture (Gregson

et al., 2001; Ray and Sayer, 1999; Sayer, 1997).

Hence, at the same time as it is taking its cues

from arguments about the presence/absence of

the body in social theory, it is the prism of the

cultural which appears to have exerted a critical

force in the contemporary reimagining of the

social within social and cultural geography.

So, and at the risk of oversimplifying and

eliding considerably, my contention is that rather

than having languished through the 1990s, social

geography has been reconfigured and that this is

a reconfiguration which has used an alliance

with ‘the cultural’ to define in/out its field. This

reconfiguration has been primarily body-centred

and is (mostly) about individual experiences. It is

frequently, though not exclusively, divorced

from a notion of society which continues to take

seriously needs, values and the pattern and

provision of goods and services. This, of course,

is at considerable odds with political economic

interpretations of ‘the social’, in which the

(re)production of social life, its conditions,

possibilities and limits within capitalist, market-

led and increasingly neoliberal regimes, figures

centrally. Small wonder then that, from the latter

perspective, all this reads like an evacuation of

the social. But what I would also want to argue is

that evacuation is not simply a product of recon-

figuration. Rather, and concurrent with these

developments, significant changes have occurred

within those strands of social geography

informed by political economy. These point to a

different understanding, an evacuation of ‘the

social’ from within. It is to these that I turn in the

following section.

OLD WOR(L)DS, NEW WOR(L)DS:

ON EVACUATION FROM WITHIN

Talking and thinking explicitly in terms of

material inequalities used to be familiar terrain in

social geography. Grounded in the historical

materialist tradition, materiality was widely and

unproblematically regarded as comprising the

basic conditions necessary for the reproduction

of social life on both a daily and a generational

basis (namely shelter, food, income, health,

education, employment, welfare). Inequalities in

resource distribution, specifically their connec-

tions with class, were regarded as of primary

empirical interest, and, more theoretically, these

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