Cultural Geography

evolutionary accounts of different ways of life

(i.e. it functioned againstimperialist knowledge

frames), it was this very idea that was a tool in

the classification of ethnographic collections by

museums (i.e. it functioned asan imperialist

knowledge frame). Put simply, knowledge fields

that understood other ‘cultures’ through a rel-

ativist (as opposed to evolutionist) model

were not automatically located outside colo-

nial logics. As Patrick Wolfe (1999: 55) suggests

in relation to anthropology, cultural relativism

had specific geopolitical value for the consoli-

dation of power in late colonial settler socie-

ties. This issue is hinted at by Bruce Braun

(Willems-Braun, 1997: 705) when he argues

that it remains unclear what kind of relation-

ship Sauer’s nostalgic and romantic recon-

struction of pre-contact cultures had to the

contemporary politics of land in Latin America.

Of course, it is important to acknowledge

that colonized peoples involved in contempo-

rary postcolonial struggles have their own

nostalgias to which the frame of ‘culture’ is

often very central. ‘Culture’ and ‘cultural dif-

ference’ have gained a new legitimacy in the

governance of many states that imagine them-

selves to be postcolonial and/or multicultural.

Under such conditions, the ability of marginal-

ized groups to garner some form of recogni-

tion (and material benefit) depends entirely

upon performing their needs and aspirations

by way of ‘cultural difference’. Sauerean-style

cultural geographies may well offer useful

‘tools for a politics of decolonization’ in such

contexts (1997: 705).^9 For example, a geography

that is attentive to the embedded accretions

and ongoing (and adjusting) associations

between land and life can provide much

needed proofs of evidence for adjudications of

the prior rights of indigenous peoples (see, as

example, Baker, 1999). In such contexts, the

essentialist concepts of culture that remain

attached to such geographies can be put to

strategic use. Whether such geographies are

radical or reactionary in their effects –and here

we might compare the land rights context I

have just mentioned with certain kinds of

nationalisms and exclusivist regionalisms –

remains an open question, and not always one

under the control of those scholars who pro-

duce these geographies.

Brenda Yeoh’s thoughts on postcolonial

memory work in the chapter to follow adds

to our questioning of this notion of ‘strategic

essentialism’ (see also Jackson and Penrose,

1993; Jacobs, 1996; Penrose, 1995). She shows

how in places like Singapore the present is not

simply defined by and against a colonial past.

Contemporary identity in Singapore is consti-

tuted out of a complex mix of migration and

settlement that both preceded European

colonization and postdated decolonization.

What stands for ‘Singaporean tradition’ in

such a hybridized space is necessarily complex.

Consequently, any effort to reclaim the past

for the present nation has its own internal

politics in which various subsets of the colo-

nized jostle to have their traditions recognized

and sanctioned by the state. Yeoh’s chapter is

also very suggestive of the need to think

beyond cynical accounts of ‘heritage’ and

‘nostalgia’ that emerged in cultural geography

(and elsewhere) in the 1980s. In settings like

Singapore the dislocations that arise from

colonialism and contemporary transnation-

alisms mean that nostalgia is not just a yearn-

ing for something lost. The making of heritage

and the re-enactment of traditions can also be

what Debbora Battaglia refers to as a prac-

ticed ‘vehicle of [self] knowledge’ (1995: 77), a

means by which subjects occupying multiple

sites in culture and history continue to know

themselves. Such identity questions have

become central to cultural geographical inves-

tigations into postcolonial circumstances. A

good example is provided by Richa Nagar’s

(1997) research with South Asian communi-

ties in Tanzania, which shows that simplistic

identity models that are confined to the struc-

ture of ‘colonized’ and ‘colonizer’ are no longer

sufficient.Yeoh’s chapter to follow extends this

scholarship. In the first instance, it usefully

locates the concept of ‘culture’ that under-

scores the scholarship on identity, within an

academic frame associated with the analytic

tools furnished by cultural studies. In the

second instance, it shows, by way of the case

of Singapore, how questions of identity are

structured through complex intersections of

varied axes of difference.

Arjun Appadurai (2000) argues that the

simplistic reproduction of a binarized logic is

unhelpful in thinking about culture in contem-

porary times. He is especially suspicious of

theories of globalization which, he argues, pre-

suppose a form of ‘trait geography’ in order to

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