contrasted place with the standardization of space
New cultural geography
David B. Clarke
Swansea University, UK
The new cultural geography’s emergence in the
1980s represented more than the revitalization
of a sidelined subdiscipline, as “culture” became
increasingly central to thinking about the world
and, perhaps, to the world itself. Culture mate-
rialized in the most unexpected of places (e.g.,
airports, laboratories, the trading-floors of the
world’s stock exchanges) and encompassed top-
ics geographers had previously neglected (e.g.,
footwear, fascism, furniture, feng shui, film).
Globalization, postcolonialism, and a plurality
of socially constructed identities (tackling what it
means to be a woman, gay, black, or disabled in an
increasingly fluid world) underpinned renewed
attempts to understand how cultural differences
comprise the human world. The sense in which
that world is shaped “discursively” – meaning
that the human world is not distinct from
(or at least not independent of) its representa-
tions – became a mainstream concern: culture was
constitutive, performative, always-already in the
making. Despite some outstanding debts to the
Berkeley School of cultural geography – notably
an abiding interest in landscape – the new cultural
geography owed more to the growth of cultural
studies than to any home-grown antecedents.
The new cultural geography responded to a
fundamental impasse: the seemingly intractable
antinomy between “structure” and “agency.”
Within geography, culture held longstanding
associations with the uniqueness of place and
individual human agency. This humanistic focus
The International Encyclopedia of Geography.
Edited by Douglas Richardson, Noel Castree, Michael F. Goodchild, Audrey Kobayashi, Weidong Liu, and Richard A. Marston.
© 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2017 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
DOI: 10.1002/9781118786352.wbieg0002
and an emphasis on social structure (structural
Marxism reputedly reduced individuals to mere
bearers of structurally defined class positions). It
is significant that culture was the field in which
this impasse was tackled most vigorously. Since
its inception, “culture” had embraced contra-
dictory senses: culture, as opposed to nature, is
concerned with what is humanly determined
rather than what lies beyond human choice or
influence (thus privileging agency); yet culture
simultaneously implies stable patterns of values,
meanings, and conduct (structures constraining
agency). That approaches such as poststruc-
turalism sought to grasp how cultures persist
through change (because of, not in spite of, the
change that agency necessarily entails) hints at
the new cultural geography’s promise to grasp
the living nature of culture – including the social
life of other organisms and things (“nonhuman
agency”).
The new cultural geography shaped the
entire discipline, spanning topics as diverse as
nationalism and landscape painting, competitive
masculinity and global finance, popular culture
and geopolitics, subcultures and territoriality,
and dance traditions and tourism. Yet it became
an umbrella term for a heterogeneous mix of
approaches rather than resolving any obdurate
dualisms. Postmodernism’s influence on geogra-
phy’s “cultural turn” saw accusations of structural
factors being neglected in favor of free-floating
identities. A lingering humanism, coupled
with deconstructive tendencies, saw allegations
that the new cultural geography privileged
representations, eviscerating reality of its
(material) substance – prompting calls for
“non-representational theory.” Although such
N E W CU LT U R A L G E O G R A P H Y
charges typically attacked straw conceptions,
they demonstrate the checkered history of
the new cultural geography – from which the
sobriquet “new” has long since been dropped.
SEE ALSO: Cultural geography; Cultural
turn; Culture
Further reading
Cook, Ian, David Crouch, Simon Naylor, and James
R. Ryan, eds. 2000. Cultural Turns/Geographical
Turns: Perspectives on Cultural Geography. Harlow:
Prentice-Hall.
Cosgrove, Denis, and Peter Jackson. 1987. “New
Directions in Cultural Geography.” Area, 19(2):
95–101.
Duncan, James, Nuala Johnson, and Richard Schein,
eds. 2004. A Companion to Cultural Geography.
Oxford: Blackwell.