Cultural Geography

Preface

Kay Anderson, Mona Domosh, Steve Pile and Nigel Thrift

The Handbook of Cultural Geographyis one of a series of handbooks published by

Sage. For Sage these books represent the ‘state of the art’ in their specific fields, and

they are pitched at an audience who have a degree of familiarity with the subject, but

would like to know more about a specific topic or extend their understanding of the

breadth of work in the area. For us – as editors – this has set some very interesting

puzzles. It is quite a challenge to think about the state of the art in any one field, but

for us the deeper problem was that we found it very hard to delineate ‘our’ field.

Indeed, if there is one thing about cultural geography that we know for sure, it is that

it is not a field! As we debated this ‘border’ problem, it became clear to us that the field

of cultural geography was better marked both by its disruption of the usual academic

boundaries and by its insatiable enthusiasm for engaging new issues and ideas – what-

ever their source. As we began to sketch out possible contents and structures for the

book, we decided that we should try to make this particular Handbookreflect this

interdisciplinarity and this passion for thinking more broadly about what counts as

geography. To this end, we contacted a number of people and asked them to edit

sections that reflected both the breadth of cultural geography’s thematic interests, and

also some of the most interesting areas of debate and research within these (let’s call

them) ‘fields of engagement’. Of course, the result is far from comprehensive in either

content or debate. However, our purpose was to reflect the varieties of cultural geo-

graphies being undertaken and suggest that there is far more to be done.

TheHandbook of Cultural Geographyis not a fixed map of a discipline that has a

clearly identifiable boundary and a terrain permanently marked out for itself. Instead,

this book contains leading representatives of the kinds of issues that have preoccupied

cultural geographers (and, like as not, will do in the future) and of the kinds of debates

that geographers are now engaged in. The Handbookis not, then, a signpost that the

traveller will pass on their way somewhere else, but a resource for travellers along a

journey. What we are suggesting here is that cultural geography is less of a fixed inven-

tory of objects, and more a way of changing how we understand the objects of knowl-

edge. What is distinctive about cultural geography – we’ll return to the cultural part in

a moment – is that it brings a geographical imagination to bear on these objects. This

imagination is not simply attendant on the whereness of things (where on earth?!), as

geography is often caricatured. Whereness now provokes a whole series of questions

about the spatial relations that constitute things, about the movements and gatherings

of things, and about the very constitution of space, place and nature. Geographers

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