Corresponding author: Tim Cresswell, Department of Geography, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, Surrey, TW20 0EX, UK Email: [email protected]

cultural geographies 17(2) 169–174

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New cultural geography – an unfinished project?

Tim Cresswell Department of Geography, Royal Holloway, University of London

Being a cultural geographer after a decade of the 21st century is a curious state of being. Within a world of geographers it seems as though ‘we’ have been successful in insisting on the centrality of the broadly conceived ‘cultural’ for all of human geography. Most of the assertions of cultural geography made since the mid 1980s are now so much common-sense – hegemonic even. Cultural geography has not just one but a slew of journals devoted to it and the discipline’s flagship journals frequently feature papers that might be considered products of cultural geography. Many practitio- ners of economic, historical, political and now even transport geography also consider themselves to be cultural geographers. The application of the word ‘new’ to any subfield of human geography tends to suggest a cultural turn.

Despite all these reasons-to-be-cheerful it is not clear that being a cultural geographer in 2010 is terribly exciting. It is exciting to be new, to be marginal, to be able to complain about the hege- mony of others (in an academic context at least, when little is really on the line). Being generally accepted can leave us without a sense of purpose. I frequently find myself, when amongst geogra- phers, being met with a sense of ‘here we go again’ in discussions of landscape or place or repre- sentation or even the non-representational. But then I meet people in other disciplines. I talk to performance theorists, historians, artists, people who study music, architects, literary theorists, sociologists and others. They make cultural geography interesting again. They do not take for granted issues of place or landscape. They like much of what ‘we’ do. They want to hear about it and have plenty to add themselves. It is at times such as these when I reflect on my own trajectory through cultural geography and the ways in which the calls to arms of the mid 1980s represented the start of an unfinished project.

A trajectory through cultural geography In 1985, I sat in a course called humanistic geography. It was a second year course at University College London taught by Peter Jackson and Jacquie Burgess. It was a revelation to me. It made me decide I wanted to be a geographer. Here we learned about Tuan and Relph and Buttimer. We also learned to go out into London and talk to people, to record our impressions, to be creative – to practice a form of ethnography. Around the margins of ruminations on space and place and authen- ticity were other sets of readings. Some were from geographers like David Ley and Susan Smith who were working on issues that were identifiably social.1 Race, gender, class and power emerged

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gently. Not as a direct critique of the sometimes otherworldly texts of the humanists but as some- thing that made the whole exercise richer and more pointedly critical.

In my final year at UCL ‘humanistic geography’ was supplemented by courses taught by Peter and Jacquie as well as Denis Cosgrove, who was visiting for the year. Peter’s course focused on a more strictly social realm. We encountered ethnography through reading Erving Goffman’s Asylum or the monographs of the Chicago School.2 We talked about ethics, about participant observation and ethnography. Jacquie’s class was on environmental perception. One of our tasks was to read some form of travel writing and write about how it developed its authorial geography. Finally, in Denis’s course I encountered a different strand of the emerging cultural geography. I was asked to go to art galleries and look at old pictures. I was asked to think about architecture in renaissance Venice and to learn what certain Latin terms meant. But we also read John Berger’s Ways of seeing and discovered the possibility of having a Marxist flavoured view of art.3 The content of Peter and Denis’s classes in particular seemed worlds apart and it was a surprise to discover that they had written a paper together heralding a new cultural geography that would be broad enough to include both ethnographic accounts of urban subcultures and beautifully crafted discussions of Venetian paintings. Indeed, while in Wisconsin, undertaking my PhD, I learned that the course humanistic geography had been rebranded as ‘cultural geography’ – a term that might have meant very little before that in the UK context.

While at Wisconsin I was sent a manuscript in the post. It was the text of Maps of meaning.4 Peter Jackson wanted to know what I thought. I don’t know if it is possible to convey how I thought and felt. I was just a student. I decided Peter must have sent it to me to see if it would work for a simple (i.e. student) reader. In 1989 I received a copy and saw my name appear several times. I was walking on air for weeks. But aside from my own feeling of elation, reading the manuscript allowed me to get a sneak preview of a new kind of cultural geography that was in the process of being born.

Out of the kinds of readings and ideas I experienced at UCL along with Jim Duncan’s critique of the super-organic in cultural geography and Stephen Daniels’ collaborations with Denis had emerged the new cultural geography. When you consider that this singular title included Maps of meaning, Social formation and symbolic landscape and the City as text you can see just how broad it was.5 It is also possible to see how the kind of programme outlined by Jackson in Maps of mean- ing led him to tread a path that consistently linked some idea of the social to the cultural. Cosgrove, meanwhile, increasingly disavowed the ‘social formation’ part of his title and focused instead on the clearly cultural ‘symbolic landscape’ part.6

But if we go back to the late 1980s, to a time when Cosgrove was still happy to talk about social formations and the new cultural geography was emerging it is easy to see how this new thing called cultural geography involved a merger with a concern for the social. Peter Jackson and Susan Smith had earlier written Exploring social geography7 in which they had interrogated structuralist, posi- tivist and humanistic views of society and tried to synthesize them into a new way of doing social geography. Lurking in the background was both the influence of their supervisor, the straightfor- wardly social geographer, Ceri Peach and the ethnographic monographs of the Chicago School of sociologists.8 There had been something of a tradition of social geography in the UK, for the most part, one that involved mapping social groups onto space in a fairly descriptive way. Cultural geog- raphy, meanwhile was practically meaningless. Interestingly the reverse was true in the US where almost all of human geography was referred to as cultural geography and social geography led a precarious existence.

But back in the UK, Peter Jackson, Susan Smith and others became sites where an older interest in the social began to rub up against a view of culture that was emerging from Raymond Williams, E.P. Thompson, John Berger and the new work of Stuart Hall and his colleagues at the Birmingham

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Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies.9 This was a view of culture that was decidedly different from an earlier elite and formalist view of culture as the ‘best that has been thought and said’. It was a view of culture that was insistently political and social. It was, in turn, informed by Marxist theories of ideology and new forms of post-structural thought emerging around figures like Roland Barthes in France.10 The view of culture that emerged in Birmingham was determinedly social. It was a culture that was constantly in process, being made by people in all their variety. It was a culture that was saturated with power. Such a view necessitated concern for established social categories of race, class and gender, soon to be further specified with attention to sexuality, dis- ability and age.

It was in geography, though, that these ideas, in turn, were brought into creative tension with the humanism that had emerged within geography in the late 1970s with its interest in issues of space, place and meaning. Stuart Hall and his colleagues were certainly reading Marx and Gramsci but were not likely to come across Tuan or Relph or even the traditional social geography of Ceri Peach. This was and is the genius of the ‘new’ cultural geography. It spatialized cultural theory, not by simply mapping social groups on to space but by insisting on the power of the geographical imagination in the process of social formation. The title of Jackson’s book, Maps of meaning says it all. It was obviously not about mental maps. In fact it was not about maps at all except in a metaphorical sense (as an aside, and as an illustration of the differences within new cultural geog- raphy, consider the kind of book Cosgrove would have written if he had written a book with the title ‘Maps of meaning’).

During the early 1990s the subdiscipline of cultural geography began a seemingly relentless (but unorganized) march to take over older, more established sub-disciplines. A new economic geography concerned itself with the culture of the economy, with consumption and meaning in economic exchange.11 Forms of political geography such as critical geopolitics, engaged in extended discourse analysis and was happy to identify the political in films, novels and cartoons as much as in policy documents (which in turn were becoming cultural documents as much as politi- cal ones).12 Historical geography, under the influence of Cosgrove, Duncan and Daniels became almost synonymous with cultural geography. But it was social geography, more than any other part of our discipline that became joined at the hip to cultural geography in the name of institutional and departmental research groups and a journal. We (in the UK more than elsewhere) became social and cultural geographers.13

Now there seem to be two, seemingly opposite, worries about the social and cultural geography trajectory. On the one hand there are some geographers who identify themselves as social who believe that their field has been overtaken by cultural geography. In 1980, say, it would have been relatively commonplace to talk about social geography as a subdiscipline and almost impossible to speak of cultural geography in the UK. How things have changed. At least in the UK. I imagine there are some people out there who believe that soft, mushy, idiosyncratic cultural interests have taken a hard political and empirical edge off of our discipline.

On the other hand there are undoubtedly some geographers, and a growing number, who think that the whole trajectory cultural geography has taken since the late 1980s has been way too social: too fixed on making a cultural world something that is explained by recourse to the social world. The word ‘social’ probably raises the spectre of scary structuralism, of fixed senses of social order that can explain everything mechanistically through recourse to the black box of the social.14 Recent developments in more-than-human geographies and the exploration of the non-representa- tional have pointed in this direction.15

This later set of critiques began to emerge in the 1990s in papers that called elements of the no- longer-new cultural geography into question. Cultural geographers, it was argued, explained things

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through recourse to a social world which was treated as though it was a finished and accomplished thing. What do I mean by this? The social was given as an explanation for the cultural. ‘This is because of capitalism’, ‘this is because of class’, ‘that is because of gender.’ Post-new-cultural geographers identified a kind of nascent structuralism in cultural geography that posited an accom- plished and finished set of social relations that went around constructing things. This, they argued, was problematic. Society was not simply there, ready to construct things at the drop of a hat any more than culture was. The social and the cultural were, at best, processes rather than things, at worst, not there at all.

Another, and linked, part of the critique concerned representation. My education in cultural geography was very much about words like meaning, representation, iconography, text, and the image. These were all words we bandied about in seminars and furtive discussions over a beer. If a meaningful world was to be anything other than an individual world; if it was to be in some sense shared, and therefore social, it had to be mediated. There had to be a mechanism for this construction of meaning. We found this in John Berger’s still brilliant insights into the ways we see and look. We found it in the tall white volumes of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies with names like Culture, media, language and Representations: cultural representations and signifying practices.16 We found it in edited collections by geographers such as Barnes and Duncan’s Writing worlds and Ley and Duncan’s Place/culture/representation.17 Here we learned about the rules of text, about metaphor and metonymy and about the power of vision. We explored all manner of media to see how meaning in the world became shared – how it became social. This was, in part, a critique of humanism, a perspective which seemed resolutely in agreement with Latour that there was no such thing as society. Just as the idea of the social has come into question so has the focus on representation and mediation. Non-representational theory has turned our attention away from mediation and the way in which things are shared towards questions of emo- tions and affect, bodily knowledge and the fleeting and transient. In this sense the social (or at least the social as a realm that provides explanations) has indeed disappeared from at least some strands of cultural geography.

Why the social is still important It probably comes as no surprise that I still think that the social is just as important as the cultural and, in fact, entirely inseparable from it. While it is true that neither culture nor society are in any sense completed things they still name important aspects of the ongoingness of the everyday world. So I want to finish by telling you why I think the investigation of the social and of the power of representation are still important.

First of all I believe that the world is marked by inequalities and injustices. I do not mean the kind of injustice we can locate in the individual’s treatment of another individual. I mean the kind that involves the systematically asymmetrical arrangement of power such that things like oppres- sion and exploitation can occur. I believe that categories such as race, class and gender name aspects of these arrangements of power. I guess there are people who no longer believe this but I am willing to make a wager that they are wrong. If I am correct, I believe it is important to take account of them. To describe, explain and hopefully transform them.

Second, I am convinced that cultural geography has a significant role to play in this. I believe that the kinds of things we study – place, landscape, territoriality, mobility – often lie at the heart of the making up of social worlds. For much of our history the favoured concepts of geographers have been seen as the end points of a social process – as patterns, reflections, products of these mysterious things, culture and society. Geography since the 1980s, under whatever label, has been

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more confident in asserting that our objects of study are more active than this – that they are ele- ments in the constitution of culture and society. Without withdrawing into spatial fetishism, we have claimed a place at the production line. We can talk confidently about the geographical consti- tution of society or culture. So if I am right in believing that there are systematic asymmetries in the world that follow more or less recognizable social lines then, for me at least, it is important to show how geography is implicated in this world – the role it plays in its production.

My third point is that I do not believe it is possible to conduct such an analysis without some recourse to meaning. This is where culture comes in. Cultural geography still signifies something about what we study and the way we study. It suggests, above all, a concern with meaning and its material production at individual and shared levels. It suggests a certain kind of disposition with at least one foot, and sometimes both feet in the humanities. Sometimes this leads people into a world which is idiosyncratic and interesting without being in any way critical – I have been led in that direction myself. It is a fun place to be. But in other moments a cultural approach is insistently and sharply critical. It delineates how ways of thinking and being come into being – ways of thinking and being that also have a role to play in the arrangement of power and its effects. Geography, in other words, transcends the discipline and continues to matter in the wider world. The understand- ing and explanation of these ‘maps of meaning’ remains an urgent task.

Notes

1. D. Ley, The black inner city as frontier outpost: images and behavior of a Philadelphia neighborhood, Monograph Series of the Association of American Geographers, 7 (Washington, Association of American Geographers, 1974); S. Smith, Crime, space and society (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1986).

2. E. Goffman, Asylums; essays on the social situation of mental patients and other inmates (1st Edition) (Garden City, NY, Anchor Books, 1961).

3. J. Berger, Ways of seeing (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1972). 4. P. Jackson, Maps of meaning (London, Unwin Hyman, 1989). 5. Ibid.; J.S. Duncan, The city as text: the politics of landscape interpretation in the Kandyan Kingdom

(Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1990); S. Daniels, Fields of vision: landscape imagery and national identity in England and the United States (Cambridge, Polity Press, 1993); D. Cosgrove, Social formation and symbolic landscape (London, Croom Helm, 1984).

6. For a discussion of this see the introduction to D.E. Cosgrove, Social formation and symbolic landscape (Madison, WI, University of Wisconsin Press, 1998).

7. P. Jackson and S. Smith, Exploring social geography (London, George Allen & Unwin, 1984). 8. See, for instance, N. Anderson, The hobo (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1925); E. Burgess, ‘The

growth of the city: an introduction to a research project’, in R. Park and E. Burgess, eds, The city: sug- gestions for investigation of human behavior in the urban environment (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1925), pp. 47–62.

9. R. Williams, Marxism and literature, Marxist introductions (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1977); R. Hoggart, The uses of literacy (London, Pelican, 1958); E.P. Thompson, Making of the English working class (London, V.Gollancz, 1963); S. Hall, Culture, media, language: working papers in cultural studies, 1972–79 (London, Hutchinson in association with the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, University of Birmingham, 1980); Berger, Ways of seeing.

10. R. Barthes and A. Lavers, Mythologies (London, Cape, 1972). 11. P. Crang, ‘Introduction: cultural turns and the (re)constitution of economic geography’, in R. Lee and

J. Wills, eds, Geographies of economies (London, Arnold, 1997), pp. 3–15.

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12. G.O. Tuathail, Critical geopolitics (London, Routledge, 1996). 13. For lively discussion of this see C. Philo, ‘Introduction, acknowledgements and brief thoughts on older

words and older worlds’, in C. Philo, ed., New words, new worlds: reconceptualising social and cultural geography (Aberystwyth, Cambrian Printers, 1991), pp. 1–13.

14. For a broader account of this see B. Latour, Reassembling the social: an introduction to actor-network- theory (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2005); S. Whatmore, Hybrid geographies: natures, cultures, spaces (London, Thousand Oaks, CA, Sage, 2002).

15. See, for example, N.J. Thrift, ‘Summoning life’, in P. Cloke, P. Crang, and M. Goodwin, eds, Envisioning human geographies (London, Arnold, 2004), pp. 81–103; N.J. Thrift, Non-representational theory: space, politics, affect (London, Routledge, 2008).

16. Hall, Culture, media, language; S. Hall, Representation: cultural representations and signifying prac- tices, culture, media and identities; Bk.2 (London, Sage in association with the Open University, 1997).

17. J.S. Duncan and D. Ley, Place/culture/representation (London, Routledge, 1993); T.J. Barnes and J.S. Duncan, Writing worlds: discourse, texts and metaphor in the representation of landscape (London, Routledge, 1992).

Biographical note

Tim Cresswell is Professor of Human Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London and the UK editor of cultural geographies. His most recent books are On the move: mobility in the modern western world (Routledge, 2006) and Place: a short introduction (Blackwell, 2004). He is also the co-editor of Geographies of mobility: practices, subjects, spaces (Ashgate, 2010). He is currently working on a book about the Maxwell Street area of Chicago. He can be contacted at: Department of Geography, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, Surrey, TW20 0EX, UK; email: [email protected]

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