Social geography: new religions and ethnoburbs – contrasts with cultural geography

Abstract

In this, my third and final review of social geography, I want to return to the theme on which I started (Peach, 1999). There is a fundamental, but hopefully fruitful, tension between the ways in which social and cultural geography consider matters of common interest. One of the consequences of the fashion for postmodernism in human geography is that cultural geography, with its emphases on hybridity, in-betweenness and flexibility, has claimed the epithet of ‘new’ while social geography, with its engagement in the ‘real’ world, with numbers and census categories, seems to have become, by default, ‘the old’. Social geography is criticized for its empiricism, its use of received categories and supposed political incorrectness. New cultural geography teaches that everything is nuanced, plastic and fluid, so that the analysis of censusgiven ethnic or racialized categories may be represented as static and empiricist. However, what social geography does is crucial if we are not to be complacent in the face of injustices. Sue Smith has written eloquently on this dilemma in Ron Johnston’s The challenge for geography (Smith, 1993a: 54; Johnston, 1993).