Culture Is Not What It Used to Be: the Transformation of Anglo-American Cultural Geography Don Mitchell
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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.