No longer youthful, but not yet middle-aged: thirty years of the Journal of Cultural Geography

Abstract

With its establishment, the Journal of Cultural became the first scholarly English-language serial publication devoted to cultural geography. Discussions about creating such a journal had begun in the late 1970s, and the first issue of the Journal of Cultural (JCG) was published in 1980. This year we celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of that significant event, with an eye to the fact that 1980 was a remarkable year for cultural for other reasons as well. Notably, that year also saw the publication of A Plea for Cultural Geography by Peter Jackson, The Superorganic in American Cultural Geography, by James Duncan, and J. M. Blaut's A Radical Critique of Cultural Geography. It is more than a little ironic that the first issue of the JCG coincided with the emergence of the so-called cultural geography and the beginnings of the cultural turn in academia more broadly. Facetiously, one might be tempted to ask, of the publications mentioned above diverges most from the others? Jackson's plea was for a reconciliation of the practice of British social with American cultural geography. He wrote (1980, p. 113), Cultural can finally only be of interest to the British geographical profession if it can successfully accomplish a rapprochement with social geography, in a joint commitment to study the spatial aspects of social organization and human culture--not just those aspects which are directly observable in the landscape. Duncan was also simultaneously addressing problems with the practice of cultural geography. Duncan's article remains among the most strident indictments of the theory of culture as invoked by Sauer and some of his students at Berkeley. Blaut, who had been a student of Fred Kniffen's at Louisiana State University, took issue with the conventional, elitist position of academic cultural geographers and urged them to consider the relationship between their practice of cultural and the reinforcement of ideologies of domination. He specifically called for a greater attentiveness to oppressed groups, class and gender differences, and the importance of power as a factor influencing cultural patterns and processes. Despite the stridency of Duncan's article, only two responses to it were published in a subsequent issue of the Annals: one by Miles Richardson and the other by Richard Symanski. (1) This was perhaps the result of an editorial decision made for reasons of space but tellingly, neither Richardson nor Symanski strictly identifies as a cultural geographer. Other geographers have commented, often in passing, on Duncan's article (see, for example, Solot 1986). Still, it was not until 1994 and the publication of The Reinvention of Cultural Geography by Marie Price and Martin Lewis that a direct response, other than in the form of brief commentaries, was published. Thus, it is curious but not entirely surprising that the JCG remained aloof from the debates and discussion that helped to define the subfield. But why this aloofness? Four possible explanations for not engaging in this debate come to mind: (1) such debates were considered much too internal and specific to geography, were contrary to the journal's interdisciplinary position, and were not part of its original mission; (2) good work in cultural should speak for itself and does not need further justification; (3) contributors to the journal had little interest in either debating the nature of cultural or engaging theoretical issues or currents in their research and publications; (2) or (4) starting a new journal and producing the first several issues of it is labor-intensive enough as it is and the emphasis at the time was on establishing and receiving a regular flow of manuscripts. Whatever the reason, the journal has always championed a pluralistic vision of cultural geography. Price and Lewis (1994, p. …