人 文 地 理 第53巻 第1号 (2001)

Culture Is Not What It Used To Be: The Transformation of Anglo-American Cultural Geography

Don Mitchell*

English-language cultural geography is not what it used to be. It's not what it was in 1989 (when the Berlin Wall came down, students took over Tiananmen Square and were repressed, and Peter Jackson published Maps of Meaning:An Introductionto Cultural Geography).1) It is certainly not what it was in 1973 (when America was engulfed in Watergate, activists from the American Indian Movement occupied Wounded Knee, South Dakota, the U.S. was still fighting in Vietnam, and 2) Wilbur Zelinsky published The Cultural Geographyof the United States): And it is not the same as it was in 1962 (when John F. Kennedy was president, the Beatles had not yet invaded America, American hegemony was ascendant, and Wagner and Mikesell published Readings in Cultural 3) Geography).The field is far more diverse, more complex, more decidedly political, and more theoretically sophisticated than ever. And yet there is a certain continuity that runs from the codification of "Berkeley-school" cultural geography by Wagner and Mikesell in 1962, the exuberant focus on nationalist identity that motivated Zelinsky in 1973, the multicultural, antiracist, politically leftist "new cultural geography" that Jackson did so much to define in 1989, and the current era of Anglo-American geography in which no single paradigm dominates, but in which all the best work is geared to understanding the relationship, at all scales, between cultural difference and cultural sameness. The purpose of this essay is to show how the range of work now being conducted within English-language cultural geography has developed from within- and moved well beyond -its Berkeley-school roots, and to suggest some areas in which it has fallen short, both theoretically and politically, from becoming the truly critical mode of geographical knowledge that it could be. The

* Don Mitchell is Associate Professor and Graduate Director in the Department of Geography, Syracuse University (144 Eggers Hall, Syracuse, NY, 13244,USA). He is the author of Cultural Geography: A Critical Introduction (Blackwell, 2000) and The Lie of the Land: Migrant Workers and the California Landscape (University of Minnesota Press, 1996), as well as dozens of articles and essays on labor and landscapes, public space and homelessness, and cultural theory. In 1998, he was awarded a five-year MacArthur Fellowship, only the third ever to be awarded to a geographer. With this Fellowship he founded and is the Director of the People's Geography Project, which is working to popularize radical geography in the United States (details at www.peoplesgeography.org).

1) Jackson, P., Maps of meaning: an introduction to cultural geography, Unwin Hyman, 1989. 2) Zelinsky, W., The cultural geography of the United States, Prentice Hall, 1973. 3) Wagner, P. and Mikesell, M. (eds.), Readings in cultural geography, University of Chicago Press, 1962. -36- Culture Is Not What It Used To Be (Mitchell) 37 following will be a partisan and therefore partial account. I have a real stake in the debates and theoretical developments I will explore below: I am a proponent of a particular view in cultural geography, a view that could perhaps be summarized as materialist, Marxist, and to some degree "economistic" in orientation. For me the place to look for culture is in the political -economy, in the world of commodity production. I do not see culture as an autonomous realm or sphere of meaning or signification, nor as an automatic site of "resistance" (two predominate contemporary ways of understanding culture). Indeed, I see much "culture" as repressive and oppressive, inextricably bound up in the reproduction of capitalism, and a form of political co-optation. But I get ahead of myself. We will get to these issues soon enough. I raise them here only as a warning. Do not take this article as an impartial account of Anglo-American cultural geography. I think it is an accurate account, but it is anything but an impartial one.

I New Cultural Geography-and Old

1989 was a remarkable year. The world quite literally changed. The Cold War came to a spasmodic stop; capitalism seemed to reign triumphant; forces of nationalist frenzy were unleashed; and millions upon millions of people saw their lives turned topsy-turvy. Even the repression in Tiananmen turned out to be a necessary prelude to the fuller introduction of the 4) market into China, and hence to a quite remarkable and unsettling reorientation of Chinese culture. Peter Jackson's important codification of "new cultural geography," Maps of Meaning, was launched, that is to say, at a propitious moment. Just at the moment when we could nor longer take the sureties of the bi-polar Cold War world for granted, Jackson helped geographers see how they had never been sureties in the first place-that the meaning of the worlds we lived in was not only socially constructed, but continually contested, and that it had never really been bi-polar anyway, but rather multi-polar. Nor could we any longer afford the fantasy that culture was somehow a realm apart from the messy world of politics and economy.There was a complex politics to culture, Jackson showed, and that politics was ineluctably geographic. The very focus of cultural geography 5) was radically reoriented. It is true that Maps of Meaning did not single-handedly affect this reorientation in cultural geography-that reorientation was quite complex-but it did effectively name, describe, and provide an agenda for a radically new kind of cultural geography, a kind of cultural geography well-suited to the post-Cold War world. To begin with, Jackson asked us to think much more clearly than we, as geographers, had previously done about just what culture is. Indeed, for many in cultural geography, particularly American cultural geography, the question of what culture is was not a question that geographers needed to ask. That was a task of others- anthropologists,

4) See, for example, (1) Zha, J., China pop: how soap operas, tabloids, and bestsellers are transforming a culture, New York: New Press, 1995. (2) Oakes, T., 1999, "China's market reforms: whose human rights problem?" (Weston, T. and Jensen, L. (eds.), China beyond the headlines, Rowman and Littlefield, 2000) pp. 295-326. 5) Jackson, op.cit., footnote 1). -37- 38 人 文 地 理 第53巻 第1号 (2001)

6) historians, philosophers, and the like. The task for American cultural geographers was to map and explain the geographical patterns of culture. At the height of "old" cultural geography, it was simply taken for granted that geographers were not much interested in the "inner workings of culture" as Wagner and Mikesell put it in the introduction to their famous collection, Readings in 7) Cultural Geography. Geographers applied already-theorized (or not-at-all theorized) culture to the landscape, region, or place. If there was an over-riding conceptualization of culture at work in geography, then it was the anthropological one of a "total way of life of a people," and the assumption was that differences between these total ways of life could be mapped. The way to map culture was to focus on particular traits or material artifacts. By mapping specific building styles, uses of language, religious beliefs, or use of particular tools, geographers could say something about not only cultural patterns, but also cultural change. Contact zones between cultures could be identified; even more importantly, the origin and diffusion of specific traits, and eventually perhaps whole cultures, could be traced. While this work has often been derided as "barn type and fence post geography" (because much of it seemed to focus on rural material cultural practices as they could be identified in particular landscape items), it was both far more complex and more important than such derision allows, especially if we understand it within the context of its times-a time marked by a quite vibrant technological triumphalism (despite Hiroshima and Nagasaki). Let me explain. "Old" Anglo -American cultural geography is, of course, most closely associated with Carl Sauer and his students (of which Wagner and Mikesell were two). Sauer's own approach to cultural geography was deeply historical. He was as concerned with the origins of particular practices, and with their subsequent development and spread, as he was with mapping either the historical or contemporary patterns. That is to say, he was interested in processes, not just patterns. Patterns- maps-were a lens on process; they were a form of organizing evidence, not necessarily an end in themselves. This concern with cultural process can be traced right back to Sauer's first methodological broadside, "The Morphology of Landscape," but is especially apparent in his two responses to Hartshorne's apology for a sterile and stultifying regional geography, "Foreword to 8) Historical Geography" and "The Education of a Geographer." In these two polemics, Sauer urged geographers to search not just for roots, but particularly for the roots of the modern, technological

6) It can be argued that before the early 1980s"cultural geography" was almost entirely an American affair, at least among English-speakinggeographers. Britain did not possess the same cultural tradition in geography as did Americans whose work was so heavily influenced by Carl Sauer. The transformation of cultural geography-the development of what gets called "new cultural geography"-was centered in Britain, at least in its early years (though the work in Canada and the United States of scholars such as James Duncan and David Ley, was of course important). Without a sedimented "tradition" of cultural geography upon which to draw (and by which to be hampered), British geographers interested in culture tended to look outside the field for theoretical inspiration, to, for example, the work of radical cultural theorists such as Raymond Williams and such prominent French philosophers and sociologists Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu. 7) Wagner and Mikesell, op.cit.,3). 8) (1) Sauer, C., "The morphology of landscape" (Leighly, J. (ed.), Land and life: a selection of the writings of Carl Ortwin Saner, University California Press, 1963), pp. 315-350. (2) Hartshorne, R., The nature of geography,Association of American Geographers, 1939. (3) Sauer, C. "Foreword to historical geography" (Leighly, J. (ed.), Land and life: a selection of the writings of Carl Ortwin Sauer,University California Press, 1963),pp. 351-379.(4) Sauer, C. "The education of a geographer" (Leighly,J. (ed.), Land and life: a selection of the writings of Carl Ortwin Sauer,University California Press, 1963),pp. 389-404. -38- Culture Is Not What It Used To Be (Mitchell) 39 world. Sauer was deeply skeptical of Western technological hubris and the steady abstraction of 9) humans from the natural world in which they were embedded. A key organizer of the landmark "Man's Role in Changing the Face of the Earth" conference held at Princeton in 1955, Sauer used his keynote address to the conference, as well as his power in determining the list of speakers, to 10) stand four-square against what Scott Kirsch and I have described as "heroic modernism." Heroic modernism is the sense that modern humans have the ability to fully control, and fully engineer, their environments. Even as Sauer was organizing the "Man's Role" conference, the American Atomic Energy Commission was formulating plans (thankfully never consummated) to use nuclear explosives for large-scale earth-moving projects-to practice engineering at the scale of the globe itself. The Atomic Energy Commission plans were extreme, but they also spoke to the tenor of the 11) times. They need to be understood as only the far edge of a technological triumphalism and confidence that also produced the fantasy of a technological utopia in the 1959 International Geophysical Year, the invigorating space race which was going to prove that humans (either capitalistically free or communistically cooperative) could conquer not just the earth but the whole of space, and John F. Kennedy's declaration of the opening of a "New Frontier" in which poverty would recede, peace would prevail, and a sleek new world would emerge. Against this world stood much American "Berkeley-school" cultural geography. Work emanating from Sauer and his 12) students was not just non-modern, but in crucial respects anti-modern. It sought the origins of environmental change and human development as a stay against the hubris of "Man" in the mid- twentieth century. Its focus on processes of colonization and change, of origin and diffusion, of the persistence of cultural variety in the face of homogenizing modernism, and of the sometimes pernicious effects of technological change, while not always understood as explicitly a political stance, was a political stance nonetheless-if largely a potential and ad hoc one. But still the problem of "culture" remained. Without a well-articulated theory of culture, American cultural geographers ran the risk of always receding into "mere description." This is the case because both explicitly and implicitly they located the forces and powers of development, change, and destruction in culture, rather than as a producer of culture. Since culture was causative, and yet untheorized, that is since culture was both absolutely central and yet all-but- absent from their research, their maps of cultural traits threatened never to rise above mere evidence of patterns. There was no mechanism of cultural explanation embedded in their tracings of cultural change. Culture was taken for granted. Cultural things had origins in specific cultures;

9) By the late 1970sCarl Sauer's work had been "rediscovered" by California environmentalists. Many of his works were republished in the 1960sand 1970sby the San Franciscoenvironmentalist organization, the Turtle Island Foundation. 10) (1) Thomas W. (ed.), Mans role in changing the face of the earth, Princeton University Press, 1956. (2) Kirsch, S. and Mitchell, D., "Earth moving as the 'measure of man': Edward Teller, geographical engineering and the matter of progress," SocialText, 55, 1998,pp. 101-134.(3) Sauer, C., "The agency of man on the earth" (Thomas,W. (ed.) Man's Role in Changingthe Faceof the Earth. University of Chicago Press, 1956),pp. 46-49. 11) See Kirsch, S., Experiments in progress: the AEC's project plowshare and the geography of science and technology, University of California Press, Forthcoming. 12) Entrikin, N., "Carl O. Sauer, philosopher in spite of himself," Geographical Review, 74, 1984, pp. 387-407. -39- 40 人 文 地 理 第53巻 第1号 (2001) things then diffused. Geographers traced the origin and diffusion, and the resulting patterns, but did not inquire after how things had origins, and precisely how they diffused (or didn't).13) Tracing diffusion might allow us to see the movement of a culture, but it could tell us nothing about just why it moved as it did, or what that "culture" was in the first place. The potential politics embedded within cultural geography could not become an explicit politics. Part of the problem was that "culture" was taken to be a whole, an indivisible something that was more important than whatever differences might exist within a "culture." As a later retrospective by Jonathan Smith and Kenneth Foote remarked (in a slightly different context), cultural geographers as a whole tended to work with a "consensus" rather than a conflictual view of culture. That is to say, cultural geographers, working in the traditions bequeathed by Carl Sauer's Berkeley School, understand 14) culture to be a "nonideological" terrain of similarity, rather than a contested terrain of difference. Ironically, the high point of such a position about culture came with the publication of Wilbur 15) Zelinsky's The Cultural Geography of the United States in 1973 This is ironic because, when, for perhaps the first time, an American cultural geographer took it as his imperative to not just use culture, but to theorize it in a book length work, the result was deeply ideological. One of Zelinsky's chief aims was precisely to provide geographers with a firm, and firmly geographic, theory of culture, but to do so, Zelinsky had to turn to a remarkably nationalist mode of argumentation. To begin with, Zelinsky, carefully associated culture (as a total way of life) with "ethnic group," which, he argued, "is the largest group to arouse a sense of gripping emotional commitment, one that in moments of crisis might be more precious than life itself" (p. 34). For any ethnic group, Zelinsky suggested, "useful nonstereotypic statements can be made about the cultural idiosyncrasies (that is, national character) of an ethnic group taken as a whole" (p. 38). For Zelinsky, quite explicitly, the people of the United States formed "a single, large, discrete ethnic group" (p. 38) and they thus possessed a definable national-or cultural-character. He cautioned, however, that such statements about "national character" at the level of the ethnic group "cannot be, indeed should not be, transferred to individuals because of sharp discontinuities of scale" (p. 38). This argument lead Zelinsky to his theorization of culture: Obviously, a culture cannot exist without bodies and minds to flesh it out; but culture is also something both of and beyond the participating members. Its totality is palpably greater than the sum of its parts, for it is superorganic and supraindividual in nature, an entity with a structure, set of processes, and momentum of its own, though clearly not untouched by historical events and socioeconomic conditions (pp. 40-41). A clearer statement of culture as superorganic could not be asked for. Culture is an "entity;" it has a definable "structure;" and a "momentum of its own," even though it might be to some degree conditioned by historical events and the bodies and minds who constitute it. Indeed, as Zelinsky went on to say, quite logically, given the definition he had just laid out, "it is a moot point...

13) See (1) Blaut, J., "Two views of diffusion," Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 67, 1977, pp. 343-349. (2) Yapa, L. and Mayfield,R., "Non-adoption of innovations," Economic Geography, 54, 1978, pp. 145-156. 14) Smith,J. and Foote, K., "Introduction," (Foote, K., Hugill, P., Matthewson, K. and Smith J. (eds.), Re-Reading Cultural Geography, University of Texas Press, 1994), pp. 27-33. 15) Zelinsky, op.cit., footnote 2). Unaccompanied page numbers in the text refer to this book. -40- Culture Is Not What It Used To Be (Mitchell) 41 whether it is possible for participants in a culture to alter its basic structure, even if they become fully, unhappily aware of it." Not only is culture superorganic, possessing a life of its own, so too is it timeless. Once formed in its essential structures, it is largely immutable-or at least it cannot and will not be changed by conscious struggle. Whatever the merits of this position, there can be no doubt that it is ideological; it is a fully political statement, one forged, as we will see, in a particular historical moment and responding to particular historical circumstances. Drawing on Kroeber and Kluckhohn's influential summary definition of culture, Zelinsky 16) further specified his theory of culture. He flatly stated that "all would agree that culture is an assemblage of learned behavior of a complexity and durability well beyond the capacities of non- 17) human animals" (p.70). Furthermore "culture can be regarded as the structured, traditional set of patterns for behavior, a code or template for ideas and acts... [that] survives by transfer not through biological means but rather through symbolic means, substantially, but not wholly through language. In its ultimate sense, culture is an image of the world, of oneself and one's community" (p.70).Finally, "the power wielded over the minds of its participants by a cultural system is hard to exaggerate"

(p.70). There is much of interest in these statements (which in any event only provide the merest flavor of Zelinsky's theory of culture). The first thing to note is that Zelinsky's argument about the superorganic nature of culture called up a fierce reaction, most notably from James Duncan, the effect of which was to throw open, really for the first time, the whole question of culture in cultural 18) geography. We will examine Duncan's reaction in a moment. But for now I want to point to another important aspect of Zelinsky's argument: its celebratory nationalism. That is, I want to turn to the issue of how a presumably "non-ideological" theory of culture, was in fact deeply ideological, and Anglo-American geographer's ignorance of this fact (as indicated by Smith and Foote's comments above) is quite problematic. Published in 1973, The Cultural Geography of the United States was launched into an American world of considerable turmoil. The wounds of the 1960s were still festering. Very few would venture, after the riots, the antiwar upheavals, the rise of feminism and various ethnic power movements, and the ugly corruption of the Watergate-era American State, that one could say anything useful at all about an American "national culture." Nor would many think, as Zelinsky did, that such a culture could be reduced to as few as four "pervasive themes or motifs" (these were individualism, a desire for mobility and change, a mechanistic world-view, and a "messianic perfectionism" [p. 40]). While Zelinsky argued that the relative weight of each of these four themes might change over time, their essential, foundational, existence did not. Zelinsky used the bulk of his book to show how the mix of these four themes varied by region, and how the resulting whole was something peculiarly

16) Kroeber, A. and Kluckholn, C., Culture: a critical reviewof conceptsand definitions,Harvard University, Papers of the Peabody Museum, 1952. 17) Zelinsky was referring to all cultural anthropologists, but since he had already declared them to be the main theorists of culture, he meant by inference, all thinking people. 18) Duncan, J., "The superorganic in American cultural geography," Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 70, 1980,pp. 181-198. -41- 42 人 文 地 理 第53巻 第1号 (2001)

"American." It was not only "American," but it was relatively homogenous. That is to say, within the context of the contentious political times within which Zelinsky was writing, his theory of culture had a quite specific point, namely, that the United States was a single, lasting, and relatively immutable culture, and that all regional variation, and all conflict within the culture, added up to less than the power of the singular culture itself. That is to say Zelinsky developed a sophisticated theory of cultural sameness or homogeneity, which allowed him to articulate a specific vision of American society, one of essential unity, despite the surface turmoil exploding all around the country. To put the matter another way, cultural sameness served Zelinsky's project in the same way that more recent arguments about cultural difference serve the political projects of "new cultural geographers." The connection between old and new cultural geographies in Zelinsky's work is his argument that "culture is an image of the world, of oneself and one's community" (p. 70). Zelinsky's own image was an image of a unified culture at the scale of the nation-state, and this is an image that simply could not stand scrutiny, either from within the political turmoil of the times, or by later geographers intent on further exploring national identity and nationalism in the post- 19) Cold War period, a period in which the myth of a unified nation-state was harder than ever to sustain. Even so, Zelinsky's theory, if not explicitly his nationalism, was adopted by mainstream cultural geographers with little self-reflexiveness. As late as 1989 an influential review of cultural geography could declare that most American cultural geographers simply "remained satisfied with 20) the superorganic." Zelinsky's ideological statement, in other words, was not recognized for what it was: a statement of unalloyed nationalism, not only a theory of superorganic culture. Despite mainstream acceptance, the theory of superorganic culture did eventually come under fire. The most prominent critique came from James Duncan who showed how Zelinsky's conceptualization of culture, and by implication that of those geographers who were less explicit about their theories of culture but who nonetheless invoked an implicit superorganicism, falsely reified culture as a thing rather than a process. For Duncan, Zelinsky's and others' superoganicism had the effect of reducing individuals to pawns of culture, rather than showing how culture derived from the actions of people. It also had the effect of creating a fully idealist theory of culture -idealist in the sense that reified ideas (e.g. "messianic perfectionism") were understood to be the 21) driving force of social action. Against this, Duncan argued for a more fully sociological definition 22) of culture, one that saw culture as the "interactions of people." Drawing on the influential work of Clifford Geertz and others, Duncan sought to establish the conditions for a theory of culture that

19) An excellent review of debates over theories of nationalism can be found in (1) Eley G. and Suny R. (eds.), Becoming national: a reader, Oxford University Press, 1996. For a representative example of contemporary geography's approach can be found in (2) Hooson, D. (ed.), Geography and national identity, Blackwell, 1994; and (3) Morely, D. and Robins, K., Spaces of identity: global media, electronic landscapes and cultural boundaries, Routledge, 1995. 20) Rowntree, L., Foote, K. and Domosh, M., "Cultural geography" (Gaile, G. and Wilmott, C. (eds.), Geography in America, Merrill Publishing, 1989), pp. 209-217. 21) Duncan, op.cit., footnote 18), pp. 194-196. 22) Duncan, op.cit., footnote 18), pp. 198. -42- Culture Is Not What It Used To Be (Mitchell) 43 centered on human agency-and therefore power and conflict-while at the same time 23) understanding that agency as always conditioned by culture. Like Zelinsky's book, Duncan's article was a product of its time. It was reacting in part to the rise of humanism in geography, and in part to concurrent critiques of structuralism and functionalism in many modes of theory that led to the whole question of the relationship between structure and agency being placed on the 24) intellectual table. But it also needs to be understood within the context of the general political exhaustion that marked the end of the 1970s. Where Zelinsky sought to intervene with an argument as large as the problems around him, Duncan helped reorient theoretical cultural geography towards the particular, the local, and the contingent: that precisely was the purpose of proposing a theory of culture that put individuals at the center. 25) While Duncan's critique drew an immediate reaction, in general outline it was widely accepted by a new generation of geographers seeking a more critical approach to cultural geography than the American mainstream had thus far allowed. Many of those hoping to reorient cultural geography were British. In Britain, at least through the early 1980s, there really had never been a strong cultural geography tradition. British geographers had far less invested in 26) perpetuating something like the Berkeley School. Perhaps even more importantly, the radical individualism of humanistic geography was also a largely American affair, and though prominent British "new cultural geographers" like Denis Cosgrove were quite happy to place themselves within the humanist camp, their work was, in fact more empirically grounded in historical development and change than that of the American humanists. Such an historical grounding gave lie to the notion that individuals created their own worlds in absence of structuring constraints, one of which was clearly "culture." But what then was culture? For geographers such as Denis Cosgrove, Stephen Daniels, and Peter Jackson (the three largely credited with founding British new cultural geography), the logical place to look for a theory of culture was not in the superorganicism of American cultural anthropology and geography, but in the tradition of cultural materialism associated with Raymond 27) Williams and the developing field of Cultural Studies. While a full reckoning with either Williams' work or the more broad question of how Cultural Studies came to be (and what it means) must

23) Geertz, C., The interpretation of cultures, Basic Books, 1973. 24) (1) Duncan, J. and Ley, D., "Structural Marxism and human geography: a critical assessment," Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 72, 1982, pp. 30-59. (2) Gregory, D., Ideology, science and human geography, St. Martin's, 1978. (3) Giddens, A., A contemporary critique of historical materialism, Macmillan, 1981. (4) Thrift, N., "On the determination of social action in space and time," Environment and Planning D: society and space, 1, 1983, pp. 23-57. 25) See (1) Richardson, M., "On the superorganic in American cultural geography," Annals of the Associationof American Geographers, 71, 1981, pp. 284-287. (2) Symanski, R., "A critique of the superorganic in American cultural geography," Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 71, 1981, pp. 287-289. 26) Yet they did have to define themselves against that tradition as is apparent from not only the work of these new cultural geographers, but in the strong defense of Berkeley culturalism that their work promted. See in this regard Price M. and Lewis M., "Reinventing cultural geography," Annals of Association of American Geographers, 83, 1993, pp. 1-17 27) See, for example, (1) Williams,R., Cultureand society,Chatto and Windus, 1958. (2)Williams, R., Thecountry and the city, Oxford University Press, 1973. (3) Marxism and literature, Oxford University Press, 1977. (4) Problemsin materialismand culture,Verso, 1980. -43- 44 人 文 地 理 第53巻 第1号 (2001)

28) remain beyond the scope of this essay, I can point to a few ways in which theories of culture were radically transformed by geographers' interaction with both. 29) For Raymond Williams, the most important thing to remember was that "culture is ordinary." Since culture was ordinary, the primary point for Williams was that it simply could not be homogenous; it was a field of difference, even over the smallest of geographical spaces. Class difference, for example, was critical in shaping ordinary life, and cultural development and change had its roots in such differences. Unlike Zelinsky, therefore, Williams argued that cultural change 30) could be charted over relatively fine time- and geographical-scales. To understand how this was the case, Williams developed a form of what he called "cultural materialism." At the center of this cultural materialism was a close attention to people's actions-their social practices. Drawing on Marx's famous aphorism that "it is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but 31) their social existence that determines their consciousness;" Williams sought to show how social existence and culture were inseparably entwined. In the course of producing the conditions for social existence, of course, people-people divided by class, race, gender, and nationality-both contested and reproduced the social structures that governed social existence. "Culture," then, stood both as a result of social interaction and as a means for structuring and governing social interaction. Power is crucial here, and its very invocation indicates just how much was left unstated in works like Zelinsky's Cultural Geography of the United States, which never even broached the subject of power as important in structuring and controlling culture. By placing power at the center of a materialist theory of culture, Williams was able to show how individuals and institutions were both makers and products of total "ways of life," which themselves were intricately bound up with 32) the evolving working of the political economy. This is why culture is so ordinary; everyone

participates, no one can escape it, but all have a crucial role in its determination, even if those roles are grossly uneven. Culture is both a condition for, and a product of, everyday life. It is not a realm above and beyond social life, but intimately linked to the production of social existence. The key point in Williams's writing, however, was that culture always had to be differentiated. That is, it only made sense to speak of "English culture," if one at the same time showed that such "culture" was the product of struggle between specific and more "local" cultures, like the working

class cultures of the industrial cities and the "official" culture produced by artists and professors in London, Cambridge, and Oxford. This was always and everywhere an uneven power struggle, even if that struggle was often carried out subterraneanly: even if power was rarely acknowledged

28) Introductions to the field of Cultural Studies that I have found useful include (1) During, S. (ed.), The cultural studies reader, Routledge 1993. (2) Dworkin, D., cultural Marxism in postwarBritain: history, the new left,and the originsof cultural studies,Duke University Press, 1997.(3) Grossberg, L., Nelson, C., and Treichler,P (eds.), Culturalstudies, Routledge, 1992. (4) Inglis, K., Culturalstudies, Blackwell, 1993. The best introduction to Williams work is Williams himself; see 27) (1) (3) (4). Geographical introductions are available in Jackson, op.cit.,footnote 1) and (5) Daniels, S., "Marxism, culture and the duplicity of landscape" (Peet, R. and Thrift, N. (eds.), New models in geography, volume 2, Unwin Hyman, 1989), pp. 196- 220; and (6) Mitchell, D., Cultural geography: a critical introduction, Blackwell, 2000. 29) Williams, R., "Culture is ordinary" (Gray, A, and McGuigan, J. (eds.), Cultural studies: an introductoryreader, Arnold Publishers, 1993 (essay first published 1958)),pp. 1-14 30) So too could it be charted cumulatively over long periods: see Williams, R., The long revolution, Chatto and Windus, 1961. 31) Marx, K., The German ideology, International Publishers, 1970, p. 21. 32) See 28) (6), p. 47. -44- Culture Is Not What It Used To Be (Mitchell) 45 in discourse about culture, it was clear to Williams that power was crucial to culture. Culture was political. This reorientation of culture towards questions of power had profound effects on the field of Cultural Studies that developed in Britain in the post World War II era. For Stuart Hall, for example, Williams's work led logically to a focus on questions of identity, identification, and hegemony33) Drawingon a set of influencesas diverseas AntonioGramsci and Louis Althusser, Hall encouraged Cultural Studies practitioners to understand how individuals and social formations were called into place by the social and cultural structures in which they lived, while at the same time never being fully determined by these structures. For Hall, culture was a "map of meaning," through which people and subaltern groups both understood and sought to transform their place in the world. Power and resistance were interrelated and inseparable from each other. The important thing to focus on, therefore, was not so much "culture" writ large, but sub-cultures as they fashioned, through both acquiescence and resistance, new styles and modes of living. Hall reoriented cultural studies in the so-called First World towards the actions and interactions of the subaltern, helping to create along the way a remarkably vibrant field of study that has sought to decompose all aspects of culture and expose them to critical, and perhaps even emancipatory, light. Williams developed his theories of culture in part as a reaction to the post-World War II transformation-and often destruction-of working class communities in Britain, as well as in reaction to what he saw the stultifying smugness of official or "high" culture. For his part, Hall came to cultural materialism through a wary encounter with the works of Marx in the wake of the Suez Canal crisis and the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. From there he too has sought to see culture as an axis of difference rather than homogeneity. The post-War project of Cultural Studies owes much to the sensibilities of Williams and Hall (and others like them), most particularly in its focus on difference, local meanings, on-going struggle, the role of the media, and popular culture. Cultural struggle was understood to be engaged along a range of fronts: not only the factory floor, but also the kitchen table; not just the lecture hall, but also the city streets; not exclusively within literature, but also within the organs of the media; not only in the opera house, but also in the pub and on the dance floor. Each of these realms, as site of cultural conflict and the production of meaning, was thus a site that needed careful analysis, and such analysis has become the project of Cultural Studies. Most importantly, however, the theorization of cultural difference in Williams, Hall, and Cultural Studies more broadly was a vital political project, a necessary antidote both to the Cold War nationalism of the post-World War II period and to the corrosive affects of both high and mass culture. Within Cultural Studies, the argument that culture was "a picture of one's world, of oneself and one's community" as Zelinsky phrased it, was taken as both an article of faith and a rallying cry. But it had a quite different inflection than what Zelinsky gave it. The difference was both one of scale (one's community was radically redefined and localized) and of politics: the formation of these pictures was neither innocent nor the product of some superorganic entity.

33) See Hall, S., "Introduction: who needs identity?" (Hall, S. and du Guy, P. (eds.), Questions of cultural identity, Sage), pp. 1- 17. -45- 46 人 文 地 理 第53巻 第1号 (2001)

Rather it was a product of political, social, and economic struggle between differently situated social actors with differential access to the sites of meaning production (the media, the classroom, etc.). Peter Jackson's Maps of Meaning codified this way of understanding culture for geographers and showed how, in fact, geography-relations in and across space-was crucial to the production 34) of culture and to its materialist analysis. Launched, as I said at the beginning of this essay, into a world defined by global turmoil (though written at the height of Thatcher's political hegemony in Britain) Jackson sought in Maps of Meaning to develop a geography of culture that would help us navigate both that turmoil and the social and political hegemony represented by Thatcher (and Reagan). Where Zelinsky had sought to reinforce American nationalism and patriotism in the midst of strife, Jackson sought instead to find meaning precisely within strife. He was admirably successful. Jackson made his argument by drawing on Williams and Hall to show that culture was a sphere, arena, or realm of social experience on par with society, economics, and politics. It was the realm or sphere in which meaning was constructed and contested and out of which people constructed their "maps of meaning." For James Duncan, such arguments, coupled with a close reading of Clifford Geertz's and various literary critics' work, indicated that culture could best be understood as a "system of signification" and he argued that an analysis of the politics of such 35) systems was crucial to cultural geography. Culture was thus a vital site from and within which people came to know their place in the world, and thus it was a realm of deep social importance. The study of culture was, in short, too important to be confined within the straight-jacket of the sorts of celebratory-nationalist myth-making Zelinsky promoted or the more mundane "barn type and fence post" mapping of material culture traits across the landscape. It needed to be taken every bit as seriously as the geography of the economy or geopolitics. Together, Jackson and Duncan, along with others such as Daniels and Cosgrove who were simultaneously working to reconfigure landscape studies, helped affect a full-scale re-orientation of Anglo-American cultural geography, transforming it from something of a backwater in American geography to the vita center of the whole of Anglo-American human geography. Indeed, Jackson, Duncan, Daniels, and Cosgrove helped to identify, and give shape to, what has since come to be known as the "cultural turn" in Anglophonic geography. But in doing so, they did not necessarily and finally answer the vexed question of just what culture is (and therefore how it is important), no matter how sophisticated their theories of culture have become. Indeed, one could argue that they helped install a quite empty abstraction right at the center of geography, an empty abstraction that threatens to dissipate, rather than consolidate the political power of the field. It is to that argument that I now turn.

34) I focus on Maps of meaning, but "new cultural geography" has deeper roots, beginning perhaps with Cosgrove's suggestion for a radical cultural geography ("Towards a radical cultural geography," Antipode,15, 1983,pp. 1-11),moving through Cosgrove and Jackson (1987)position paper on "New directions in cultural geography" (Area, 19, 1987, pp. 95- 101) and consolidating with a special issue of Environmentand Planning D: Societyand space,volume 6, 1988 edited by Derek Gregory and David Ley. 35) (1) Duncan J., The city as text: the politics of landscape interpretation in the Kandyan Kingdom, Cambridge University Press, 1990;(2) 23). (3) Geertz, C., Localknowledge, BasicBooks, 1983. -46- Culture Is Not What It Used To Be (Mitchell) 47

II The Cultural Turn and the Further Reification of Culture

It is not just cultural geography that has been radically transformed in the last decade; it is the whole of human geography. The "new cultural geography," somewhat surprisingly, has become the center of intellectual debate across human geography. If Maps of Meaning was launched at a propitious political moment, it was also launched at a propitious intellectual moment. Debates over postmodernism were raging, and with them more and more scholars in the humanities and social science came to distrust both the grand theorizations of Marxist political economy (and thus became interested in the more local production of lifeworlds) and what was perceived to be Marxism's focus on economic structures at the expense of the superstructure (and thus became interested in questions of ideology and meaning, in short culture). Against this David Harvey sought to show how culture was more an effect of the economy than its cause, and that the roots of what we were experiencing as rapid cultural change could be found in the global restructuring of 36) the economy since the global recessions of 1973. While Harvey's analysis was in fact right, it has nonetheless been largely ignored as geographers and others have turned more and more to understanding what-at the level of culture-is qualitatively different from the current period than previous ones. One explanation for such a move towards the cultural across geography, which is perhaps 37) most pronounced within economic geography, is that the study of culture-and the fascination with the small acts of resistance that has come with it-is in fact politically safe at a time when economic restructuring and political attack were imperiling the jobs of academics (especially in 38) Britain). It is a means to make analysis appear radical without actually challenging anything. A 39) more charitable argument might be that the "cultural turn" in geography is responding to quite real shifts in how people perceive and understand their place in the world in an era of globalization. As Crang argues, the cultural turn represents a move across the range of human geographies from a predominantly political-economic orientation to one that emphasizes "the discursive constitution of social life ... geographical representation, imaginative geographies, identity and identity politics, and the embedding of all human activities (whether economic, 40) political, medical, demographic or whatever) within culturally different ways of life." This move in geography is situated within a broader move within society marked by, for example, the rise of

36) Harvey, D., The condition of postmodernity, Blackwell, 1989. 37) (1) Barnes, T., "Political economy I: the culture stupid," Progress in Human Geography, 19, 1995, pp. 423-431. (2) Crang, P., "Cultural turns and the (re)constitution of economic geography" (Lee, R. and Wills, J. (eds.), Geographies of economies, Arnold, 1997),pp. 3-15.(3) Sayer,A., "Cultural studies and 'the economy, stupid'," Environment and Planning D: society and space,12, 1994,pp. 635-637. 38) Sayer, A., "Critical and uncritical cultural turns" (Cook, I., Crouch, D., Naylor, S. and Ryan, J. (eds.), Cultural turns/geographical turns, Prentice Hall, 2000), pp. 166-181. 39) Eagleton, T., Theidea of culture, Blackwell, 2000, comes close to making this charge for Cultural Studies as a whole. 40) Crang, P., "Cultural turn" (Johnston,R., Gregory, D., Pratt, G. and Watts, M. (eds), The dictionary of human geography (4th edition), Blackwell,2000), pp. 141-143,quotation from p. 142. -47- 48 人 文 地 理 第53巻 第1号 (2001)

culture industries as key economic and political players and the reorientation of radical social 41) movements towards "identity-based, post-colonial, and environmental." issues. That is to say, geography like other intellectual pursuits is responding to actual changes in the world and seeking a way to understand and explain those changes, without reducing them to mere "epiphenomena" of the economy. For geographers this has led to a remarkable efflorescence of critical cultural research, as scholars have sought to understand (among other things) the cultural contexts of work and the 42) 43) economy; the geographies of gender and sexuality; the cultural geographies of food and 44) 45) 46) consumption; the cultural constitution of "the subject;" resistance in cultural social movements; 47) 48) popular music; the media; the representation of others and the construction of geographical "imaginaries;"49) the cultural politics of race;50) geographies of transgression and spectacle;51) landscape

52) 53) and national identity; and the very ontology of space. Much of this is quite remarkable work. It is written at a much higher level of theoretical sophistication than earlier cultural geographies and its politics are much more explicit. As I have noted cultural difference is the key axis around which cultural theory now pivots. National identity and the rise of nationalism, for example, are not seen as effects of some unitary, relatively homogenous culture (as with Zelinsky), but as means of managing difference through a politics of inclusion and exclusion. Race, gender, and sexuality, are understood to be, in part, performances (and reproductions) of difference, that both work to

41) Crang, op.cit., footnote 40), p. 142. 42) (1) Lee, R. and Wells, J., Geographies of economies, Arnold, 1997. (2) McDowell, L., "Body work: heterosexual gender performances in city workplaces" (Bell, D. and Valentine, G. (eds.), Mapping desire: geographies of sexuality, Rouledge, 1995), pp. 75-95. (3)Peet, R., "Culture, imaginary, and rationality in regional economicdevelopment," Environmentand Planning A, 32, 2000,pp. 1215-1234. 43) (1) Bell, D. and Valentine, G. (eds.), Mapping desire: geographies of sexuality, Routledge, 1995. (2) Brown, M., Closet space: geographies of metaphor from the body to the globe, Routledge, 2000. (3) Massey, D., space, place and gender, University of Minnesota Press, 1994. 44) (1) Bell, D. and Valentine, G., Consuming geographies: we are where we eat, Routledge, 1997. (2) Jackson, P. and Thrift, N., "Geographies of consumption" (Miller, D. (ed.), Acknowledging consumption: a review of new studies, Routledge, 1995), pp. 204-237. (3)Miller, D., Jackson,P., Thrift. N. Holbrook, B. and Rowlands, M.,shopping, place and identity,Routledge, 1998. 45) Pile, S. and Thrift, N. (eds.), Mapping the subject: geographies of cultural transformation, Routledge, 1995. 46) Pile, S. and Keith, M., Geographies of resistance, Routledge, 1997. 47) Leyson, A., Matless, D. and Revill, G., Theplace of music,Guildford, 1998. 48) Morely and Robins, op.cit., footnote 19) (3) and Aitken, S. and Zonn, L. (eds.), Place, power, situation and spectacle: a geography of film, Rowman and Littlefield, 1994. 49) (1) Duncan, J. and Gregory, D. (eds.), Writes of passage, Routledge, 1999. (2) Gregory, D., Geographical imaginations, Blackwell, 1994. (3) Gregory, D., "Between the book and the lamp: imaginative geographies of Egypt, 1849-50," Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 20, 1995, pp. 29-57. 50) (1) Anderson, K., "The idea of Chinatown: the power of place and institutional practice in the making of a racial category," Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 77, 1987, pp. 580-598. (2) Anderson, K., "Cultural hegemony and the race-definition process in Chinatown, Vancouver: 1880-1980," Environment and Planning D: society and space, 6, 1988, pp. 127-149.(3) Jackson, P. (ed.), Race and racism: essays in social geography, Allen and Unwin, 1987. (4) Jackson, P. and Penrose, J. (eds.), Constructions of race, place, and nation, UCL Press, 1993. 51) Cresswell, T., In place/out of place: geography, ideology and transgression, University of Minnesota Press, 1996. 52) (1) Daniels, S., Fields of vision: landscape imagery and national identity in England and the United States, Princeton University Press, 1993. (2)Johnson, N., "Cast in stone: monuments, geography, and nationalism," Environmentand Planning D: society and space,13, 1995,pp. 51-66. 53) (1) Rose, G., Feminismand geography,University of Minnesota Press, 1993. (2) Rose, G., "As if the mirrors had bled: masculine dwelling, masculinist theory and feminist masquerade," (Duncan, N. (ed.), Body space: destabilizing geographies of sexuality, Routledge, 1996), pp. 56-74. -48- Culture Is Not What It Used To Be (Mitchell) 49

support and to undermine relationships of power between different peoples. The economy is not understood as some Manichean machine, but to be deeply conditioned through people's cultural practices and the historical "sedimentation" of those practices in particular places. And our very identities, our very bodies, are not understood to be isolated, pre-given things, but to be themselves sites of on-going cultural contest-contest of meaning-over style, over what is and is not culturally acceptable. It is obvious, from these examples, that this turn to culture from across the range of human geographies is welcome and important. What is also particularly interesting is just how celebratory much of this work is. While deeply suspicious of Zelinsky-style celebrations of national unity, new cultural geographers engage nonetheless in an exuberant celebration of difference, and of the ways that people construct their own worlds, their own realms of meaning. Yet it is also the case that human geographers deep into the cultural turn, like the broader Cultural Studies movement, have in fact avoided rather than answered the question of just what culture is, and in this avoidance they have failed to adequately temper their celebratory accounts with a careful analysis of the structural means through which "culture" is in fact produced. Indeed, for Anglo-American geographers after the cultural turn, culture is, seemingly, everything: it is style, language, discourse, art, economy, social practice, meaning, ideology, resistance, modes of 54) perception, ways of life, effects of power, etc., etc. By simply retreating to the default position that culture is everything (and everything is cultural), geographers have missed an important opportunity to better theorize culture. The problem is that despite the cultural turn, and despite all the good work being done under its name, culture is, in fact, nothing. Literally. It simply has no, and cannot have any, ontological status (as the fact that geographers are happy to lump everything under the label "culture" silently attests). Part of the problem is that geographers, in fact, remain fairly uninterested in theorizing 55) culture. In the years since the work of Jackson and Duncan, there has been remarkably little debate 56) on how best to theorize culture. The substantive content of my own intervention in 1995, while 57) drawing some immediate critiques, has been largely ignored in the years since. Instead of theorizing culture, geographers have been content to draw on Duncan's notion of culture as a signifying system and Jackson's argument about culture as a realm or sphere of meaning, without 58) questioning the ontological basis for such ways of understanding culture. This is hardly adequate. It is not adequate in the first place because refusing to treat culture with the theoretical care that it deserves threatens to return geography to a rather uncritical position. If there is any coherence to all the aspects of life that get called "cultural" by geographers these days, then it is that we tend to see "culture" as a "total way of life," and all our studies as

54) For a critique of the "flabbiness" of "culture" in contemporary Cultural Studies as a whole, see 39). 55) (1) Jackson, op.cit., footnotes 1). (2) Duncan, op.cit., footnotes 35) (1). 56) Mitchell, D., "There's no such thing and culture: towards a reconceptualization of the idea of culture in geography," Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 20, 1995, pp. 102-116. 57) See the exchange in the Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 21 (1), 1996. 58) For a sophisticated rendering see Cosgrove, D., "Culture," in Johnston, R., Gregory, D., Pratt, G. and Watts, M. (eds), The dictionary of human geography (4th edition) Blackwell, 2000, pp. 143-146. -49- 50 人 文 地 理 第53巻 第1号 (2001) means of uncovering at least a part of that way of life. Yet as Eagleton argues, understanding culture as a way of life implicitly means adopting "an aestheticized version of society, finding in it unity, sensuous immediacy and freedom from conflict which we associate with the aesthetic artefact. The word 'culture,' which is supposed to designate a kind of society, is in fact a normative 59) way of imagining that society" That is to say, while contemporary, critical human geographers seek to put difference and social struggle at the heart of their focus on culture, the very notion of culture they adopt undermines exactly that goal. The "image of the world, of oneself and one's community" that geographers are working with is normatively, and unreflexively, an image of stasis, community, and collective coherence, at the level of culture itself, even if social struggle and strife are crucial to their research. The important point is that since this image is unreflexive and unacknowledged, the means by which coherence is constructed remains untheorized-or more accurately, not even acknowledged as an important focus of geographical concern. That is, despite the important developments in cultural theory wrought by Duncan, Jackson, and others a decade ago, Anglo-American geographers seem once again to be shunning the careful analysis of the "inner workings" of culture, even as "the cultural" has become the very center of geographical discourse. This is an odd state of affairs, but one that is understandable given that to do anything else would mean finally accepting Duncan's critique of cultural reification and driving it to its logical conclusion. And to do that-to, really raise the issue of reification-would mean giving up quite a lot that has already been invested in the cultural turn, and returning instead to the more careful study of political economy. This point can only become clear by outlining, altogether too briefly, an alternative theory of culture, one that takes as its starting point that culture is nothing-that is has no ontological status. As the quotation from Eagleton above hints, "culture" is a concept whose very purpose is to stop flux in its tracks, to name and describe a unifying whole. The very idea of 60) culture thus demands that its contours, its edges and boundaries, be defined: In order to be analyzable in the first place, culture must be theorized as a bounded object that differentiates the 61) world. And yet dividing peoples "into discrete parcels of social relations" is a futile project; at least if it is attempted from the ground up-that is from people's social relations in the first place. For to do so would require an ontological basis upon which to make, a priori, judgements about where to draw boundaries between an infinite number of social relations. The search for such an ontological basis is fruitless, as the search for stable ground regresses infinitely: each bounded parcel of social relations can easily be seen to contain myriad differences as well as whatever homogenous characteristics were used to define the boundaries in the first place. Such an infinite regress cannot be halted logically, scientifically, or on the basis of people's social relations in and of themselves. And yet humanity always is parceled into discrete groups, boundaries between and among cultures continuously are thrown up (and defended). So in this sense culture does in fact exist, not as a "thing" always already out there in the world, but rather as

59) Eagleton,op.cit., footnote 39), p. 25. 60) My argument here derives from footnote 56) and 28) (6), Chapter 3. 61) Lewis, M., "Elusive societies: a regional-cartographic approach to the study of human relatedness," Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 81, 1991, pp. 605-626. -50- Culture Is Not What It Used To Be (Mitchell) 51

an imposition upon the world made by those with the power to name and enforce cultural difference. When someone, or some class, or some social formation, has the power to halt the infinite regress of culture, to stabilize it, and to make meaning stick, then "culture" does come into being. In this sense it is not culture that is important but the idea-or better yet, ideology-of culture, because the imposition of that idea allows powerful people to determine the shape of social relations and to fill the vacuous abstraction of culture with meaning and to make certain ways of living (and not others) concrete. Duncan was absolutely right that culture is a reification, but he did 62) not go far enough. The real question that needs to be asked is one of how myriad activities are reified as culture, by whom, and under what circumstances: Who reifies? To answer these questions requires geographers to turn their attention from culture per se and towards the production of culture. Just how is the reification of culture produced? Who does the producing? What rules govern its production? To answer these questions we need to understand culture not so much as a realm or sphere, but as an industry. There are specific relations of production that govern the production of culture, relations that, especially with the end of the Cold War, are more and more defined by the circulation of capital. Culture is produced more and more as a commodity to be consumed (whether in the form of the jeans you wear, the sushi I eat [bought at my supermarket in upstate New York], the music we both listen to, of even, to a very large extent, the knowledge we have come to possess). Culture is something to be consumed, and as it is consumed it is reproduced (not produced anew). Cultural life is mediated through and through by commodity production. Culture does not just happen; it is actively made. Sharon Zukin has argued, suggestively, that there are workers located in specific parts of the division of labor-workers ranging from movie critics, to waiters, to university professors, to tourism marketers to sushi chefs-whose job it is to 63) produce culture (just as others are assigned the job of producing axles for automobiles): She calls these workers the "critical infrastructure" of culture, and their job is to name, define, and give meaning to the worlds we live in, to define and bound our differences, to provide us with the very language that makes it possible to know our place in the world, to comprehend our "total way of life." The very process of demarcation, the work that the critical infrastructure specializes in, makes culture. The critical infrastructure also polices the boundaries of culture, appropriating and consolidating resistant uses of cultural artifacts and making them available for others to consume. The work of the critical infrastructure is never total and never done (since people are infinitely resourceful) but it is absolutely essential to how culture is produced in the contemporary world. The critical infrastructure adds value to culture, and adding value is what social life in capitalism is all about. The reification of culture is a means of turning it into a profitable property. Culture is now, more than ever, organized-reified-precisely so that it may be bought and sold.

62) Duncan, op.cit., footnote 18) 63) (1)Zukin, S., Landscapes of power: from detroit to Disney World, University of California Press, 1991. (2) Zukin, S., Cultures of cities.Blackwell, 1995. -51- 52 人 文 地 理 第53巻 第1号 (2001)

III Conclusion: Cultural Geography for a Corporate World

What then is the role of geographers-particularly critical geographers-in such a world? If the work we do is inescapably part of the world we inhabit (as I hope my history of Anglo-American cultural geography above has shown), then what sort of cultural geography should-or will-we create as we enter the twenty-first century? The first thing that we need to understand is that just because culture is now produced more and more only to be bought and sold-because reification has been harnessed to surplus value production-that is not the way things have to be. It is possible -though perhaps not easy-to imagine another sort of world, a world in which the production of culture is more radically democratized, in which power, including the power to name and define culture is, literally, dissipated. It is possible to imagine a world not dominated by capitalism in general and post-Cold War corporate capitalism in particular. Imagining such a world is critical to cultural geography. Why should geographers do this? Part of the answer derives from the analysis above: because of our place in the division of labor we are part of the critical infrastructure. We too name and define culture; we too have a role in its production. How we choose to play that role is the critical question. We can either become complicit with the commodification of culture -and with other forms of reification that tend to benefit particular classes, races, genders, or even whole peoples-or we can contest it. I have been attempting throughout this essay to place the historical development of key ideas in Anglo- American cultural into the specific historical contexts within which they arose. My reason for doing this has not been to indicate that the ways cultural geography is practiced is somehow straightforwardly determined by its historical context. Rather it has been to indicate that historical context provides the material with which cultural geographers work. How geographers have responded to that material has been decisive for constituting cultural geography-its theories and practices-at each historical juncture. What is the material with which we now work? It is a world of global commodity production when more and more of the everyday lives of the world's peoples are being determined from within the logic of the commodity. This is both the case as more people are brought into global production (as peasant economies continue to be ripped asunder) and as more aspects of life itself, from music making to child rearing to food preparation, is ever more fully caught up in the practices and logics of the commodity. Neither Jackson, nor certainly Zelinsky, ever predicted the scope and scale of "globalization" that would dominate the current historical moment. In particular it would have been inconceivable, even as late as 1989 to predict how much this globalization is a (reinvigorated) globalization of capital, a globalization of capital in which global geographies of class and commodity production are being reconfigured, expanded in both geographical and social 64) terms, and finding little effective opposition. We have certainly recognized that this new "globalization" has transfigured geographies of race, nationality, popular culture, migration, and so forth being transformed. But we have not yet adequately linked those transformations to a

64) See Smith, N., "The restructuring of spatial scale and the new global geography of uneven development," Jimbun-chiri, 52 (1), 2000, pp. 51-66. -52- Culture Is Not What It Used To Be (Mitchell) 53

convincing theory of global capitalism that will allow us to develop a cultural geography sized to the world we now inhabit. We need, therefore, to realize that "culture" is vital in this globalizing world to the degree that it (1) has become a chief site for capitalist accumulation. As the absolute expansion of capitalism comes to an end, its relative expansion into more spheres of life has become increasingly important. It is also vital (2) in that discourses of "culture"-the very idea of culture-become ever more important for making distinctions between people, dividing them up so that divisions of labor (as well as divisions of wealth and consumption) seem if not fully natural, than at least fully "cultural" in the sense that it is a people's own culture that determines its relative oppression and exploitation. Culturalism-the assumption that culture determines life-gains65) in importance to the degree that capitalist "globalization" shrinks the globe, linking people ever more tightly together. Culturalism makes it hard to see how differently situated peoples (Mayan peasants in Chiapas; women sweatshop workers in the Philippines; migrant farmworkers in California) have overlapping and deeply similar objective interests. Culturalism is a means of forestalling social justice. A cultural geography appropriate for the 21st century, a century that gives all appearances of becoming the century of corporate dominance and hegemony, must stand in direct opposition to the developing geographies of corporate controlled domination. It must at the same time stand in direct opposition to theories of culturalism that refuse to ask, "who reifies-and why?" Unfortunately, Anglo-American cultural geography has little interest in asking and answering such questions at the moment. It seems instead to be willing to celebrate the domination of capital and the domination of people by "culture"-or if not celebrate these, than to accept them as hegemonic and unchangeable and therefore to only look for those small ways in which people make decent lives for themselves despite these processes of domination. This, like the current theorization of "culture" in Anglo -American geography, simply is not adequate. Instead, we need to understand the historical moment we are working in for what it is and build a truly global cultural geography that not only fights on every front for a more socially just globally-interconnected world, but which also seeks to confront capital at all the scales-from the body to the whole of the world-at which it operates. A cultural geography adequate for the corporate world in which we now live must become a truly global cultural geography. And it must do so by always refusing to fall into the trap of culturalism that seems so close to swallowing whatever critical edge remains in Anglo-American geography. (Department of Geography, Syracuse University)

Key Words: cultural turn, culture, culturalism, globalization, new cultural geography

65) Eagleton, op.cit., footnote 39). -53- 54 人 文 地 理 第53巻 第1号 (2001)

文 化 は かつ て考 え られ てい た よ うな もの で はな い -イ ギ リス ・ア メ リカの 文化 地 理 学 の変 容-

ドン ・ミッチェル アメリカ合衆国 ・シラキューズ大学 ・地理学教室

本稿 は、 過去30～40年 間の イギ リス ・アメ リカにお ける文化 地理学 の変化 を、 その政治経 済的 ・社会的 コンテ クス トの なか に位置づ けようとす るものであ る。 さまざまな地理学理論 あ るい は文化 は、 どの ように して、 少 な くとも部分的 にで はあれ、 世界の大 きな政治的経済的発 展 に対す る反動 として展開 したか、 とい う点 につ いて探 求す る。 「古 い」文化地理学 の古 典的 文献の ひとつ を分析 す るなかか ら、英語圏 にお ける 「新文化地理学」の登場が、 冷戦の終結 と 時 を同 じくしつつ重要 な発展 を示 してい るこ と、 しか しこの新文化地理学がその批判力 をうし なう危機 に瀕 している ことを主張 したい。この危機 は、イギ リス ・アメリカの文化 地理学者が、 世界理解の政治化以降の動向 をあ ま りに無批判 に信奉 したことか らは じまってい る。つ ま りほ とんどの 「新文化地理学」が、 グローバ ル化 を背景 に した企業支配的 な文化形態 について、 あ ま りに賞賛 的なので ある。結論 で は、政治経済学 的研 究の内部で、 文化 地理学 を再構築す る、 文化 に関す るもうひ とつの理論 を短 く紹介す る。 これ によって、真 にグローバ ルな批判的文化 地理学、 私 たちが現在生活す る 「グローバ ル化 しつつあ る」世界 に見合 う、批判的文化地理学 へ の可能性が開かれ る。

キーワー ド: 文化論的展開、 文化、 文化主義、 グローバル化、 新 文化 地理学

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