History and Theory of Cultural and Humanistic Geography
History and Theory of Cultural and Humanistic Geography
Lecturer: Tania Rossetto
Course Scope: This course examines the evolution of cultural geography, tracing the shift from the traditional "Berkeley School" to humanistic perspectives and the modern "New Cultural Geography," concluding with contemporary non-representational theories.
The "Old" Cultural Geography: The Berkeley School
Foundations: Primarily associated with the Berkeley School and Carl Sauer in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century (1900-1950$ $).\n* **Culture Areas Concept:** \n * Geography was used to categorize regions based on cultural traits of indigenous populations.\n * **North American Culture Areas (c. 1400):** Mapping tribal distributions according to A. L. Kroeber. Named groups includes Inuit, Cree, Haida, Blackfeet, Iroquois, Cherokee, Hopi, Navajo, Comanche, and Maya.\n * **Culture Area Classifications (Clark Wissler):** Maps designed to highlight similarities in food gathering techniques. Wissler identified seven distinct culture areas within the Native American United States:\n * Woodsmen of the eastern forests\n * Hunters of the plains\n * Navaho shepherds\n * Pueblo farmers\n * Desert dwellers\n * Seed gatherers\n * Northern fishermen\n* **Cultural Landscapes:** \n * Defined by Carl Sauer in his seminal work, "The Morphology of Landscape" ( 1925).\n * Focuses on the physical signs of culture on the earth's surface (materiality).\n\n# Geography in Crisis and the Discovery of the Subject\n\n* **The Quantitative Era Context:** Before the change, the field was dominated by spatial analysis and quantitative geographies (e.g., Cole & King, W. Christaller's Central Place Theory).\n* **Crisis Period (1960s-1970s):** A period of transition where scholars began questioning the purely mathematical and abstract models of spatial analysis.\n* **Discovering the Subject:** \n * **Perception Geography:** A shift toward how individuals perceive their environment rather than just measuring objective space.\n * **Mental Maps:** The use of subjective mapping to illustrate how people internalize urban environments. Examples include mental maps of Los Angeles and Chicago, showing how landmarks like Disney Land, Walmart, or specific intersections form an individual's spatial reality.\n\n# Humanistic Geography (1970s)\n\n* **Core Philosophy:** Based on the perspective of experience and phenomenology.\n* **Yi-Fu Tuan:** \n * Pioneered the distinction between "Space" and "Place" in his 1977 work, *The Perspective of Experience*.\n * Explored "place" as an existential space involving topophilia (love of place).\n* **Edward Relph:** \n * Published *Place and Placelessness* (1976).\n * Introduced the concept of "Sense of Place" and critiqued "Placelessness"—the loss of unique character in standardized modern environments.\n* **Focus:** Humanistic geography focuses on subjective dynamics (Humanities-based).\n\n# Comparison of "Old" vs. "New" Cultural Geography\n\n* **"Old" Cultural Geography:**\n * **Materiality:** Focus on physical signs of material culture.\n * **Homogeneity:** Classification of cultures as homogeneous complexes.\n * **Certainty:** Descriptive and objective style.\n* **"New" Cultural Geography:**\n * **Immateriality:** Focus on meanings associated with space.\n * **Fluidity:** Flows of meaning that are produced, received, negotiated, and contested.\n * **Critical:** Problematizing and analytical style.\n\n# The Cultural Turn and New Cultural Geography (1980s-1990s)\n\n* **The Cultural Turn:** This move involves studying reality as a cultural construction through discourses, representations, media, and ideologies. It treats spaces as sites of assigned meaning.\n* **Institutional Origin:** The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham, founded in 1964, acted as the focus for British cultural studies.\n* **Denis E. Cosgrove (1948-2008):** \n * Authored *Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape* (1984$ $).
Linked social structures to the way landscapes are symbolically constructed.
Peter Jackson:
Authored Maps of Meaning ().
Reoriented the field toward the geographies of class, gender, age, sex, and ethnic/racial/cultural diversity.
Key Themes in Jackson's Work:
The concept of ideology and hegemony/power.
Rituals of resistance and folk devils/moral panics.
Popular culture and the politics of class (e.g., pre-industrial Britain vs. music halls).
Gender and sexuality: Feminist theory and the spatial basis of identity (e.g., gay politics and the restructuring of San Francisco).
Languages of racism: Social construction of 'race' and the roots of British racism.
Non-Representational Geographies ()
Nigel Thrift: Major theorist associated with Non-Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect ().
Core Shifts:
From representation to practice.
From texts to bodies.
Key Elements:
Embodiment: Direct corporeal experiences.
Everyday Life: Focus on the mundane and the routine.
Emotions and Multisensoriality: Moving beyond the visual to include soundscapes, touchscapes, and smellscapes.
Non-textual Geographies: Refusal to see the world only as a "text" to be read.
Terminology:
Representational: Viewed by some critics as "dead geographies" because they are fixed in signs.
Non-representational: Viewed as "hopeful, open-ended geographies."
"More-than-representational" geography: A term proposed by H. Lorimer.
"Flirting with space": A concept by D. Crouch regarding open-ended encounters.
Connection to Humanism: While moving away from "texts," non-representational geography returns to the humanistic interest in subjectivity and the daily experience of individuals.
Practical Application: Analyzing Tourist Maps
Representational Approach (Critical):
Criticizes the power dynamics of tourist maps in society.
Focuses on reading and deconstructing the cartographic text (e.g., "Hop on Hop off" Milan city tours) to find hidden ideologies.
Non-Representational Approach:
Focuses on "flirting" with the map.
Emphasizes practicing, experiencing, and embodying the map as a subject during the actual act of tourism.