Cultural Geography

Abstract

Cultural geography is a subdiscipline of human geography that explores the human organization of space and the impact of human activities and culture upon the natural environment. Human geography is one of the most active and interdisciplinary areas within the social sciences. There is a crossover in methodological and theoretical approaches with disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, and cultural studies. But cultural geography in particular retains its focus on culture and its signifying practices of self, groups, the creation of “others” and of worlds of experience while maintaining an emphasis on environment, space, and place. According to one of its most politicized proponents, its focus “includes the investigation of material culture, social practices and symbolic meanings, approached from a number of different perspectives” (McDowell 1994: 146). Broadly, the development of cultural geography arises in dynamic opposition to positivist themes in geography. We must remember that the roots of academic geography lie in colonial exploration and “discovery” (see, e.g., Driver 1992), which explains its strong predilection for “the empirical,” with fieldwork across sites, of going “out there” into the “field,” developing mostly descriptive accounts and seemingly hostile to theoretical innovations from outside (see Anderson et al. 2003:8). Despite‐or perhaps because of – geography's colonial heritage, there is a critical edge to cultural geography that asserts its relevance, especially in the “new” cultural geography, by being radically interdisciplinary and by being influenced by, and in turn influencing, other disciplines and subdisciplines across the humanities and the social sciences.