Cultural Geography

Abstract

. . . We have not really prescribed limitations of inquiry, method, or thought upon our associates. From time to time there are attempts to the contrary, but we shake them off after a while and go about doing what we most want to do. . . . We thrive on cross-fertilization and diversity. Sauer (1956) You can’t go wrong when you call something cultural, for it is the one term that, without necessarily specifying anything, carries the full weight of all possible forms of specificity. Gallagher (1995: 307) . . . Both these quotations, one recent and one nearly a half-century old, point to the monumental task before us in attempting to report on the progress of cultural geography over the past dozen years. Many things get called cultural geography, for many different reasons, with varying purposes in mind. Different people who consider themselves cultural geographers often have wildly different ideas of what this label means, as well as radically different approaches to what they do. We cannot pretend to encompass the whole of this body of work, and we must admit as much at the outset. Instead, let us begin with the specialty group itself, since it provides some focus and continuity for taking stock of the subfield. The Cultural Geography Specialty Group’s membership has increased slowly but steadily since the group’s inception in the late 1980s. With 465 members, the CGSG was, as of 2000, the Association of American Geographers’ fourth-largest specialty group out of fifty-seven, behind the GIS, Urban Geography, and Remote Sensing groups. In terms of topical proficiency among AAG members, cultural geography looms even larger. Cultural geography is the third most frequently claimed area of proficiency, behind only GIS and Urban Geography, with 848 practicing professionals, or 13 per cent of the AAG membership. And, given Gallagher’s and Sauer’s points, the number of people who might be claimed by someone as cultural geographers would be much larger than this. Reflecting on these numbers, it appears that, far from being a moribund subfield dying out in the face of a technological revolution in the discipline, cultural geography, however it may be defined, is actually flourishing on the eve of a new millennium.