1. Discussion Question: Which definition of Cultural Geography do you agree with?

2. Reading Reflection: Solid one-page reflection paper about your thoughts on the reading. This could include a brief summary and your opinion. There are not many guidelines or format (e.g., APA, MLS style) for these weekly reading reflection assignments. But please use 12 point font, Times New Roman, and don’t get ridiculous with the margin settings

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Cultural Geographies

DOI: 10.1177/1474474010363845
2010; 17; 169 Cultural Geographies

Tim Cresswell
New cultural geography – an unfinished project?

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Article

Corresponding author:
Tim Cresswell, Department of Geography, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, Surrey, TW20 0EX, UK
Email: tim.cresswell@rhul.ac.uk

cultural geographies
17(2) 169–174

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DOI: 10.1177/1474474010363845

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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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170 cultural geographies 17(2)

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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Cresswell 171

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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172 cultural geographies 17(2)
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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Cresswell 173
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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174 cultural geographies 17(2)
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: tim.cresswell@rhul.ac.uk
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Foundations of Contemporary
Cultural

Geography

Lecture 2

Eastern Washington University

CSBS 310

What is
Geography?

Eastern Washington University

CSBS 310

Geo = Earth

Human

EnvironmentCulture

Politics Biodiversity

Climate

Physical

Natural Disasters

Environment and Society

Economics

Religion

Natural ResourcesLandscape

Eastern Washington University

CSBS 310

Graphos = writing

Landscape Study

Social Statistics

Spatial Statistics

GIS

MappingEthnography

Discourse/
Textual Analysis

Remote Sensing

Eastern Washington University

CSBS 310

Geo = What we study
Graphos = Method

Mapping, GIS, Spatial Statistics,
Social Statistics, Landscape

Study, Ethnography, Discourse/
Textual Analysis

Culture, Environment, Politics,
Biodiversity, Economics, Climate,

Religion, Natural Disasters,
Natural Resources

Geography

Eastern Washington University

CSBS 310

Geo = What we study
Graphos = Method

Verstehen: Ethnography,
Landscape Study, Discourse/
Textual Analysis, Positivism:

Social Statistics, GIS

Cultural Geography

Meaning, Symbols,
Texts, Ideas, Discourse,

Rituals, Cultural Practice,
Performance

Eastern Washington University

CSBS 310

Cultural geography, the early years

• At the start of
academic geography,
there was no
specifically “cultural”
geography

• Physical and cultural
world were seen
holistically

• Alexander von
Humboldt’s “Kosmos”

Eastern Washington University

CSBS 310

• Physical geography
affected/determined
human geography

• Economics, politics,
technology, religion
were all dependent on
the immediate physical
geography

• Environmental
determinism

Cultural geography, the early years

Eastern Washington University

CSBS 310

• ‘Culture’ meant
anything human (as
opposed to physical/
natural world)

• A “degenerate”
environment caused a
“degenerate” culture:
tropics and deserts
were particularly
harmful

Cultural geography, the early years

Eastern Washington University

CSBS 310

• Cultural geography was
closely connected to
imperialism and
colonialism

• Modernity and “being
modern” was seen as
the ability for humans
to rise above geography
through technology and
high culture

Cultural geography, the early years

Eastern Washington University

CSBS 310

Cultural geography, the early years

Academic Geography in the 1800s:
Thousands of different environments in the world,

but only one essential culture

Eastern Washington University

CSBS 310

Cultural geography, the early years

Bad Environment =
Low Culture

Good Environment =
High Culture

Eastern Washington University

CSBS 310

The Beginning of Modern Geography

• Anthropologists began
to argue that different
societies have
fundamentally different
cultures

• We should no longer
speak of culture but of
cultures

Eastern Washington University

CSBS 310

20th C. Geography:
Superorganic Culture

• Different societies were
viewed as being distinct
social organisms

• Culture was the product
of a societal organism
evolving

• Thus, culture was seen as
superorganic (an emergent
property of individuals coming
together in a society)

Eastern Washington University

CSBS 310

20th C. Geography:
Superorganic Culture

• Superorganic Culture is
seen as standing above
individuals and causing
them to act

• Superorganic Culture is
seen as a homogenous,
relatively unchanging
force

Eastern Washington University

CSBS 310

20th C. Geography:
Superorganic Culture

• Doesn’t consider agency
of individuals to act
against and change their
“culture”

• Can’t account for how
“cultures” change

• Can’t account for the
emergence of sub-
cultures

Criticisms
(1970s-1980s)

Eastern Washington University

CSBS 310

Against Superorganic Culture

Eastern Washington University

CSBS 310

Against Superorganic Culture

Eastern Washington University

CSBS 310

Against Superorganic Culture

Eastern Washington University

CSBS 310

“New” Cultural Geography

• Against superorganic
culture, “new” cultural
geographers argued:

1. culture needs to be
explained (it is not the
explanation)

2. there is no single societal
culture

3. different cultural elements
are constantly in conflict

(1980s – 1990s)

Eastern Washington University

CSBS 310

“New” Cultural Geography

4. Cultural conflict is key to
understanding human
geography/society

5. Cultural conflict is largely
between powerful and
powerless, insiders and
outsiders

6. Culture is not a fundamental
structure of society but is
rather an arena for economic
and political conflict

(1980s – 1990s)

Eastern Washington University

CSBS 310

“New” Cultural Geography
(1980s – 1990s)

Did “old” cultural geography completely get
it wrong?

Did “new” cultural geography suddenly
discover the what culture really is?

Or were “old” and “new” culture explaining
different phenomena?

Eastern Washington University

CSBS 310

“Old” Cultural Geography
(1920s – 1970s)

“Old” Cultural Geography
=

Pre-modern societies

Eastern Washington University

CSBS 310

“New” Cultural Geography
(1980s – 1990s)

“New” Cultural Geography
=

Modern societies

Eastern Washington University

CSBS 310