The Dictionary of Human Geography

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and religion, reproduced every day by the

repeated practices of many individuals

(a notion ofsocial reproduction);systems,

or regularized patterns of interaction between

individuals often but not always functioning

to keep institutions going (and in some voca-

bularies, ‘institution’ and ‘system’ become

interchangeable); and structures, or ‘deeper’

structural forces underpinning systems, insti-

tutions and (the being and doing of) individ-

uals, often understood in terms of unequal

relations of power, status and influence travers-

ing axes of social difference (notably ofclass,

ethnicityandgender, but also the likes of

ageing,sexualityanddisability). In such

Giddensian theorizing, the focus is on how

society arises – is ‘instantiated’ – in the coming

together of agency and structure, made real by

actions mediated through institutions and sys-

tems, and there is also a recognition that time–

space relations are crucial to the precise

manner in which this coming together occurs

(Giddens, 1979, 1984; Gregory, 1981, 1994;

Thrift, 1983; Werlen, 1993).

There has long been a relationship between

geographical scholarship and notions of soci-

ety, and one simple point is that geographers

have often had a sharper sense than others of

the exact worldly spaces to which different

picturings of society commonly attach. On

one reading, this means nothing more than

recognizing that accounts of society are nor-

mally referencing particular territorial units

(Pain, Burke, Fuller and Gough, 2001, p. 3):

perhaps (nation-)stateswith knownbound-

aries(i.e. ‘Bulgarian society’); perhaps com-

monly understood regions large or small

(i.e. ‘Mediterranean society’ or ‘Appalachian

society’); or perhaps still smaller, more local

areas (i.e. London’s ‘West End society’). The

implication of moving down spatialscales,

as here, is to reveal that dangers accompany

any identification ofonesociety (with allegedly

distinctive features) occupying or filling a large

spatial extent, and that closer geographical

scrutiny will always require a more nuanced

portrayal of the different societies there

present. On another reading, geographers

have been prominent in acknowledging that

urban and rurallocalitiespossess different

sorts of societies, with the classic distinction

drawn by the German sociologist Ferdinand

To ̈nnies between Gemeinschaft (close-knit

society or community, based on repeated

face-to-face contacts) andGesellschaft(weakly

bound society, based on impersonal, contr-

actual relations) mapped on to, respectively,

the countryside and thecity. Such a mapping

has to be treated with caution, however, and

many practitioners of urban and rural

geographywould insist that any given urban

or rural area, wherever located, is unlikely

to possess just one, homogeneous, internally

consistent society. Crucially, what emerges is

the appreciation that society is not a singular

entity, undifferentiated from one place to the

next, and that scholars – not just geographers,

but all informed intellectuals – should think

in terms of many societiesin the plural.

In works of geography, it is possible to find

countless casual references to ‘society’. As one

instance, Kariel and Kariel (1972) define

social geographyas the ‘study of the spatial

aspects of characteristics of the population,

social organisation, and elements of culture

andsociety’ (p. v, footnote; emphasis added),

but never define nor explain what society

means for the remainder of their text (which

deals with the spatial patterns displayed by a

range of phenomena such as food, buildings,

language and religion). The lack of a definition

of society is also true of more recent social

geography texts (Valentine, 2001; Panelli,

2004), although the explicit concern here for

social groupings, categories and relations

means that the reader arguably emerges with

a greater sense of what the social entails. One

current text does provide a definition, how-

ever, noting how: ‘‘‘Society’’ denotes the ties

that people have with others.. .. Societies are

usually perceived as having a distinct identity

and a system of meanings and values which

members share’, (Pain, Burke, Fuller and

Gough, 2001, p. 3, box 1.3). It is possible to

find geographers leaning towards all of the

theoretical positions laid out above and more,

but many have been drawn to the loosely

Giddensian formulation, complete with its

alertness to time–space relations.

Finally, it is interesting to reflect upon how

different geographical traditions have worked,

unwittingly or more knowingly, with different

conceptions of society, and in the process

started to theorize in different ways the rela-

tions between society (the social) and space

(the spatial). Tracing such differences across

the twentieth-century history of human – or,

more narrowly, social – geography is the task

that Philo and So ̈derstro ̈m (2004, esp. p. 106)

set themselves, probing ‘the work of geograph-

ers trying to make sense of ‘‘the social’’ by

their own means, including their ownbricolage

of elements culled ... from a diversity of

sources in social theory, other disciplines

and popular discourses’. Environmental,

regional, spatial,radical,humanisticand

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SOCIETY