Cultural Geography

identification of particular ‘excluded’ social

groups, but a social which is located in the body,

as well as another which continues to concern

itself with questions of class and poverty, even if

it doesn’t quite speak their names. There is much

more that could, and probably should, be

included here: on race, on gender, on ethnicity,

on sexuality. But my point in formulating this

discussion in this particular way has been to

position and situate, to site ‘the social’ within a

field of power–knowledge which, at least as this

appears to be being played out, is increasingly

foregrounding different readings of materiality –

one embodied, the other more conventionally

materialist in that it centres the conditions of

societal reproduction. Moreover, and as befits

this locatedness, all too frequently these materi-

alities are being represented and talked about as

if they are oppositional. Intriguingly, it is various

representations of ‘the cultural’ that are mobi-

lized to enable this. Again, what this points to is

the importance of siting discussions of ‘the

social’ within a power–knowledge framework.

For it is an association with ‘the cultural’ on

the one hand (often explicitly against political

economy) which confers discursive authority on a

particular (bodily) social, and an explicit disasso-

ciation on the other (on the part of those wishing

to reassert political economy) which is used by

the former to define the latter out, to reposition it

(I would argue falsely) within ‘the economic’.

This establishes, I think, that ‘the social’ has

neither languished nor been marginalized by ‘the

cultural’, but rather is itself being contested

through it.

Yet, as the discussion thus far also shows, in

the course of this positioning, repositioning and

reconfiguration, the retreat from inequality as a

theoretical concern has become increasingly

apparent. This, as I have shown, is as much an

effect of evacuation from within as it is of being

defined ‘out’. The question that perhaps ought to

be posed within social and cultural geography is

the normative one: should this continue to be so?

Do we want – for whatever motivations – to lose

sight of a social and cultural geography that con-

nects with inequality and the politics of distribu-

tion? My answer to this would be a definite ‘no’,

and for the following reasons.

Theoretically, thinking about ‘the social’ can-

not be divorced from ontological questions, prin-

cipally those that concern the constitution of

individual–society in time–space. This means

that ‘the social’ is about how (and why) indivi-

duals relate to and with others, in particular rou-

tinized, regulated and frequently institutionalized

(if negotiated and/or contested) ways, and with

what critical effects – a position which admits to

the importance of the politics of identity and

difference. But, this also means that ‘the social’

cannot be separated from society; and because it

is about this it is also, inevitably and simultane-

ously, about needs, resources, power, justice,

rights, values and normativity, and societal

reproduction. Moreover, I would want to insist,

since our situatedness remains primarily within

capitalist society/ies which continue to be

organized on territorial lines as nation-states, that

this ‘social’ is still about inequalities (and their

regulation). This is not to say, as so much of con-

temporary social and cultural geography seems

to presume, that inequality has to be interrogated

from a revisionist political economy position.

In what remains of this chapter then, and with

the intention of opening up rather than foreclos-

ing debate, I want to make a number of sugges-

tions regarding how such a social might be

reclaimed within social and cultural geography.

Specifically, I want to focus on the need to con-

sider forms of materiality that connect with the

conditions which shape the reproduction of social

life, and to think through how inequality itself

might begin to be reimagined. This, I argue,

requires that we address issues of consumption

and of material culture, and that we take seriously

a discursive that connects with materiality.^10

RECLAIMING ‘THE SOCIAL’:

SOCIETAL REPRODUCTION,

CONSUMPTION CULTURE/S

AND RETHINKING INEQUALITY

In addressing these questions it would seem

imperative to begin by returning to a fundamen-

tal question: how we think about the materiality

of societal reproduction. Now, whilst various

authors continue to argue the importance of pre-

vious understandings’ grounding in the basic

conditions necessary for the reproduction of

human life (food, shelter and so on: see, for

example, Doyal and Gough, 1991; Sen, 1992),

others, and particularly those concerned with

consumer culture/s, emphasize the impossibility

of distinguishing basic needs from the cultural

conditions of their production, from intersubjec-

tive meanings and institutionalized norms

(Slater, 1997). Discussions of the ‘consumerist

west’ have seen ‘needs’ reconfigured through a

particular form of consumption culture, specifi-

cally through our ability/ies to satisfy needs (and

understand them) through our relationship/s to

particular goods and services. So, for instance,

we tend to think of housing no longer primarily

50 RETHINKING THE SOCIAL

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