Perspectives on Mobility

Abstract

In the late 19 century, close ties existed between early European cultural research and geography. Many of the founding figures of anthropology, for example, had an academic training in geography, which strongly influenced the development of concepts and methods in anthropology, ethnology, and folklore studies. Roughly a century later, with the emergence of the “third generation of border studies” (Newman 2007) and since the so-called spatial or topographical turn in cultural studies (Weigel 2009), the interaction between cultural research (anthropology, literary studies, cultural studies) and the various subfields of geography has become very close once again. Similar to other “turns” in the humanistic fields of research, there exists no single definition for spatial turn. However, at least in retrospect, several conceptual and theoretical preferences, such as widespread references to the works of Henri Lefebvre, Edward Soja, Michel de Certeau and Homi Bhabha, along with a keen interest in spaces, places, borders, and mobility, can be distinguished and used to characterize the spatial turn in cultural research (Weigel 2009; Gupta and Ferguson 2001).