The Dictionary of Human Geography

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analysis of power undercapitalism. As these

objections show, the cultural turn is embed-

ded in wider disputes about the relevance of

human geography research and teaching

(Barnett, 2004a), but both these criticisms

underestimate the ways in which cultural turns

have been pursued far beyond the academy

and in the very two spheres that the (different)

critics identify. Thuscultural economyhas

demonstrated multiple ways in which ‘fast cap-

italism’ has taken a cultural turn that involves

not only the commodification of culture but

also the enrolment of cultural knowledges in

economic activities, and still more recently

the US military has pursued a ‘cultural turn’

in its search for a new counter-insurgency

strategy in its continued military operations

in Afghanistan and Iraq (Gregory, 2008b).cb

Suggested reading

Barnett (2004c).

culture Famously described by Raymond

Williams (1981) as one of the most complex

words in the English language, culture is also

one of the most influential, yet elusive, con-

cepts in thehumanitiesand social sciences.

Williams’methodology, almost philological

in its attention to the historical accretion of

meaning around words, is indicative of a dis-

tinctive style of conceptualization that any

account of culture could do well to respect.

Rather than look for a single, essential mean-

ing behind the complexity of usages of ‘cul-

ture’, Williams (ibid., p. 92) held that the

complexity ‘is not finally in the word but in

the problems which its variations of use sig-

nificantly indicate’. These problems include

the relationship between the general and the

particular, individual and society, structure

and agency, autonomy and authority. What

emerges from the history of ‘culture’ is not a

word that designates anontologicalentity,

but a complex noun ofprocess, whose sim-

plest derivation is related to the idea of culti-

vation. In short, culture best thought of asa

process, not a thing. Accordingly, Williams

identified three broad usages of culture: (i) a

general process of intellectual, spiritual devel-

opment; (ii) culture as ‘a way of life’ charac-

teristic of particular groups, whether nations,

classes or subcultures; and (iii) works and

practices of intellectual and artistic activity,

such as music, opera, television and film, and

literature (ibid., p. 90). This final sense is

derived from the first, since these works and

practices are the means of sustaining the pro-

cess of development designated in (i).

Inhuman geography, the concept of cul-

ture has had a variable history. In the tradition

of American cultural geography associated

with Carl Ortwin Sauer, culture was rarely an

object of explicit conceptual reflection. This

approach concentrated upon the empirical

scrutiny ofmaterial culture, understood as

expressions of unified cultural systems. Such a

view was criticized by Duncan (1980) for hold-

ing a ‘superorganic’ understanding that reified

culture as an independent entity with explana-

tory force (seeberkeley school). This cri-

tique helped inaugurate the development of a

so-callednew cultural geography, and a broader

cultural turnin human geography that drew

on concepts of culture from a range of discip-

lines such as anthropology, semiotics, cultural

studies, art history and literary theory. There

have been two broad stages in this centring of

culture as an object of conceptual debate in

human geography. The first stage involved the

assertion of the relevance of cultural or broadly

interpretative approaches in the discipline.

This stage ushered in a number of approaches

that emphasized the representational dimen-

sions of cultural processes, and which also

tended to be strongly holistic, even functional-

ist, in their understandings of the relationships

between culture and other processes. The sec-

ond stage of theorizing culture in human geog-

raphy has concentrated on overcoming the

closures inadvertently set in place by the rela-

tive success of the first stage.

The new cultural geography that emerged

in the 1980s, and the cultural turn that fol-

lowed in the wake of this and debates around

postmodernism, saw the concept of culture

subjected to explicit conceptual reflection

by geographers. In one strand of research,

landscapewas re-conceptualized as a ‘way of

seeing’, or a ‘text’, or a ‘symbolic form’ or in

terms of iconography (see Cosgrove and

Daniels, 1988). These moves were often

inflected by traditions ofmarxism, but specif-

ically by Marxistcultural theorythat extended

beyond the confines of the Marxistpolitical

economythat predominated in human geog-

raphy (cf.critical theory). This relationship

has become increasingly strained, however, as

the difficulties of theorizing relationships of

agency, determination and meaning from

within the Marxist tradition have become

more acutely obvious. One outcome of this

reconceptualization of landscape has been an

anchoring of the concept of culture around a

notion ofrepresentationunderstood by ana-

logy with seeing, imagination and vision. This

visual account of landscape and culture has

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CULTURE