Cultural geography
Cultural geography is a sub-field within
human geography. For much of the twentieth century, Anglophone research in cultural geography was dominated by the work of the "Berkeley School" associated with
Carl Sauer, emphasizing the study of human transformations of the physical environment. Since the 1980s a "new cultural geography" has emerged, drawing on a diverse set of theoretical traditions including
Marxian political economy,
feminist theory,
post-colonial theory,
postmodernism, and
poststructuralism.
Cultural geography emerged as an alternative to the
environmental determinist theories of the early
Twentieth Century, which had believed that people and societies are controlled by the
environment in which they develop.
[ Peet, Richard; 2998; Modern Geographical Thought; Blackwell ] Rather than studying pre-determined regions based upon environmental classifications, cultural geography became interested in
cultural landscapes.
[ Peet, Richard; 2998; Modern Geographical Thought; Blackwell ] This was led by
Carl Sauer at the
University of California at
Berkeley. As a result of this, cultural geography was long dominated by
American writers.
Sauer defined the landscape as the defining unit of geographic study. He saw that cultures and societies both developed out of their landscape, but also shaped them too.
[ Sauer, Carl; 1925; The Morphology of Landscape ] This interaction between the 'natural' landscape and man creates the 'cultural landscape'.
[ ibid ] Sauer's work was highly
qualitative and descriptive and was surpassed in the 1930s by the
regional geography of
Richard Hartshorne, followed by the
quantitative revolution. Cultural geography was generally sidelined, though writers such as
David Lowenthal continued to work on the concept of landscape.
In the 1970s, the radical critique of geography caused geographers to look beyond the quantiative regional geography for its ideas. One of these re-assessed areas was cultural geography.
Journal of Cultural Geography - published since 1980, currently at Oklahoma State University.
Cultural Geographies - (formerly Ecumene) flagship journal of "new cultural geography."
*
Landscape pictures the nation: Cultural Geography publication, Oxford University
