C. Gibson et al.: Forum: Cultural Geography And Cultural Studies 423 cultural change in Australia. It was living REFERENCES through the transmogrification and rebranding Anderson, K., 1996: In the place of trans-disciplinary space. Australian Geographical Studies 34, 121Ð125. of Fremantle as a desirable ‘lifestyle product’ Dunn, K.M., 1997: Guest editorial and review. Cultural during the Americas Cup defence in the 1980s geography and cultural policy. Australian Geographical that provided me with a cultural turn on my own Studies 35, 1Ð11. ‘road to Tarsus’. Holmes, J.H., 2002: Geography’s emerging cross-disciplinary But serendipity in a more narrowly academic links: processes, causes, outcomes and challenges. Australian Geographical Studies 40, 2Ð20. context also occurred when I was allocated an Johnston, R.J., 2005: Review essay. Learning our history office next to an anthropologist who showed from our pioneers: UK academic geographers in the me that the travel and entry costs to football Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Progress in matches could be incorporated into an ARC Human Geography 29, 651Ð667. Jones, R., 2002: From the country lane to the information grant application and that they could be justified super highway and back again: a transport geographer’s as contributing to both ethnography and parti- perspective on paradigm shifts and longitudinal rural cipant observation (Jones and Moore, 1994). This research. In Holland, P., Stephenson, F. and Wearing, A. led to a long period of academic cooperation (eds) 2001, Geography, a Spatial Odyssey: Proceedings which has included the development of a team of the New Zealand Geographical Society and Institute of Australian Geographers Joint Conference The New taught, double-badged anthropology/geography Zealand Geographical Society Conference Series No. 21, unit on ‘Urban Life’. It has subsequently proved 386Ð391. to be one of the most popular undergraduate Jones, R. and Moore, P., 1994: He only has eyes for Poms’: offerings for both disciplines. The establishment soccer, ethnicity and locality in Perth, WA. In O’Hara, J. (ed.) Ethnicity and Soccer in Australia. ASSH Studies in of my university’s Faculty of Media, Society Sports History No. 10, 16Ð32. and Culture is very recent, but my geography Lampathakis, P., 2005: Mansion of ‘value’ The Sunday Times units already include guest lectures by cultural (19 June), 17. studies staff and the potential for further collabo- Matless, D., 1996: New material? Work in cultural and ration is clear. social geography. Progress in Human Geography 20, 379Ð391. In brief, I would argue that there is a contem- Sprayonmud, 2005: Sprayonmud. Retrieved 27 June 2005 porary convergence in cultural inquiry, that it is from
A Comparative Genealogy on Place: Cultural Geography and Cultural Studies
KEVIN M. DUNN School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences, UNSW, Sydney, NSW 2052, Australia. Email: [email protected]
Introduction graphy? Do they drive our work in certain, and In this paper I briefly reflect on the different slightly disparate, ways (as regards cultural intellectual roots of cultural geography and cul- studies)? Are cultural geographers in a stronger tural studies. Specifically my interest is in their position to recognise certain dangers when different intellectual lineages to the study of exploring the spatial, when talking about place? place. Cultural geography’s engagement is both Do we better recognise the potentials? Or does older and deeper. I am interested in the potential it mean that we overlook obvious and interesting implications of this. What are the enduring spatial issues too easily, while our colleagues in legacies of the older paradigms of cultural geo- cultural studies have taken up those challenges?
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Cultural geography, place and culture: inevitable nor natural; they are constructs of key points human actions past and present. Those cultural Cultural geographers have long struggled with geographers who focus on ‘ethnic and racial the relationships between place and culture. studies’ use critical race theory and social con- From environmental determinism through the structivism to deconstruct racial ideologies, and Berkeley School of geography to the ‘new’ cul- to analyse the politics of ‘race’ and the links tural geography the presumed relations between between nationalism (or localism) and racism. place and culture have changed dramatically Places, and events in places, have been found to (Dunn, 2003). In the phase of environmental be very important components of racialisation determinism, landscapes (and the environment processes. We know that environmental varia- generally) were seen as the generators of cul- tions do affect things like where our cities are ture. This paradigm was heavily influenced located, where we grow certain agricultural by socio-biological theories, including social products, and what materials we use in built Darwinism. These were manifest in work that environments (albeit to a lesser extent than was set out to identify the environmental bases of the case prior to the industrial era). Environmen- ‘races’ and of culture more generally. In tal influences do show up in our cultural traits Australia, we saw Griffith Taylor’s (1949) measur- and performances. However, this renewed ing of skin colour and skull shapes, and the linking (geographical) interest in the role(s) of place or of these to environmental patterns and changes. landscape or environment, does not equate to Of course, there is considerable and good science environmental determinism. on the link between climate and skin pigmenta- tion (Diamond, 2005). However, there is no Cultural studies, a-spatial until recently good evidence for link between the physical Cultural studies is a diverse and cross discipli- environment and any important genetic variations nary research movement which emerged from that might drive human behaviour (and therefore Britain in the 1960s and 1970s (see Hall, 1990, culture) (Human Genome Diversity Committee, 11–17). It brings together disparate influences 1993; UNESCO, 1983). and orientations. Kuhn (1990, 106) defined it as Berkeley School cultural geography funda- a ‘hybrid, semi-institutionalized academic dis- mentally reworked the presumed relations between cipline’, influenced by ‘more politicized forms culture and place. According to Carl Sauer, and of intellectual inquiry’, by ‘history from below’, those influenced by his tutelage, cultures are and by scholars of popular literature and popular deposited onto landscapes. Following this para- entertainment. Indeed, as cultural studies brought digmatic rethink landscapes came to be seen as academic analysis to popular or everyday cul- inert; they were blank sheets onto which culture ture and focussed increasingly upon subcultures was written to form the cultural landscape. For and the cultures of other subordinate groups, it this reason, the Berkeley tradition is often posi- contributed to the redefining of culture along the tioned as a form of cultural determinism. Indeed, way. there is some retrospective agreement that Sauer’s However, this inter-disciplinary field has, at approach was in fact a purposeful rejection of least until recently, been largely a-spatial. The environmental determinism (Winchester et al., strongest sense of the spatial traditionally ema- 2003). In this tradition, the emphases were on nated from its preoccupation with the everyday such tasks as the measuring and mapping of and the ordinary culture/people/culture. In ‘race’ and ethnicity, tasks that could be under- early and key texts of cultural studies, such as taken by empirical and positivist techniques ‘Culture and Society’ (Williams’, 1958) and The including the use of diffusion models and seg- Making of the English Working Class’ (Thompson, regation measures. 1968), everyday cultural forms were champi- In recent times, and under the influence of oned. Frow and Morris (1993, xxiii) commented the new cultural geography, a more reflexive that these authors ‘saw their task as one of understanding of the relation between place and validating the culture of common people’ against culture has emerged. The cultural landscape is the canonical values of a British cultural elite. It itself seen as a dynamic process. Landscapes is more than likely that it was these traditional influence cultures, and cultures influence land- emphases on the ordinary and the popular that scapes, and the cultural landscape is the cumulative steered cultural studies towards the study of place. and ongoing outcome of these inter-relationships. Of course, the pre-occupation with the ordinary These ongoing outcomes are seen as neither was likewise a strong impulse within cultural
© 2006 The Authors Journal compilation © 2006 Institute of Australian Geographers
C. Gibson et al.: Forum: Cultural Geography And Cultural Studies 425 geography a quarter of a century ago. This was It is geographers who have struggled most apparent in Donald Meinig and Peirce Lewis’ fundamentally and anxiously with the relations work on ordinary landscapes in North America between, on the one hand, place (landscape/ (1979). It was also present a little later in British environment) and, on the other, culture. Our Geography, when authors such as Jacquie intellectual history causes us to bear an anxiety Burgess and John Gold (1985) drew attention to not to replicate the problems of environmental popular cultures and their geographical mean- determinism, or to reduce space to a container ings as reproduced within the mass media. It through the cultural determinism of the Berkeley should also be noted that the two fields – cul- School. Cultural studies practitioners venturing tural geography and cultural studies Ð are not ‘into place’ show no such anxieties. I am most unrelated. Cultural geography has, simultane- concerned about the development of a social ously, been influenced by the same philosophi- determinism, in which place is just a container cal movements that have influenced cultural in these analyses. But equally there is little studies in recent decades (the insights of femi- doubt that cultural studies’ attention to place is nism, and the philosophical reflections of bringing a certain freshness and zeal, manifested post-structuralism). Moreover, Geography has as an excitement about the cultural roles of been influenced by the research orientations of place and landscape. It should also be a call to cultural studies. cultural geography, a reminder of the need to re-think again the relations between place and Recent trajectories and convergence culture, our long-held domain of expertise. My Anthropologists have always had a de facto pre- view is that it is from within poststructuralist occupation with place. For anthropologists place theory that we will find the conceptual tools to was a field site or location (a laboratory?) for do the necessary frontier thinking about place their ethnographies. In a sense, this perception and culture. Some of that corpus of theory, of the role of landscape was equivalent to the including the scholarship on embodiment and cultural determinism of Berkeley School cultural performativity, contains a strong recognition of geography. But contemporary cultural studies, the material bases of culture and, thus, a strong which has strong disciplinary links to anthropo- link to valuable insights from cultural geo- logy, is now rife with spatial metaphors and, graphy’s intellectual history. more importantly, it has developed a strong focus on cultural practices within places. A REFERENCES recent book, published as part of the Borderline Burgess, J. and Gold, J.R., (eds) 1985: Geography. The cultural studies series by the University of Media and Popular Culture, Croom Helm, Kent. Michigan Press, had the following statement on Cerwonka, A., 2004: Native to the Nation: Disciplining Landscapes and Bodies in Australia The University of the dust jacket: Michigan Press, Minneapolis. Focussing on Australia, Allaine Cerwonka Diamond, J., 2005: Geography and skin colour, Nature 435, 283Ð284. examines the physical and narrative spatial Dunn, K.M., 2003: New cultural geographies in Australia: practises by which people reclaim territory ... identity, citizenship and space. In Garner, B. (ed.) Geog- (Native to the Nation: Disciplining Land- raphy’s New Frontiers Conference Proceedings, Conference scapes and Bodies in Australia, 2004: dust Papers No. 17, The Geographical Society of New South Wales, Gladesville, 189Ð200. jacket). Frow, J. and Morris, M., 1993: Introduction. In Frow, J. and The third chapter of this very interesting book is Morris, M. (eds) Australian Cultural Studies: a Reader Allen and Unwin, St Leonards, viiÐxxxii. titled ‘Policing the body politic: mapping bodies Hall, S., 1990: The emergence of cultural studies and the and space in territory’ (Cerwonka, 2004, 151). crisis of humanities October 53, 11Ð23. This use of spatial metaphors and the stated Human Genome Diversity Committee, 1993: Human focus of much of cultural studies research is Genome Diversity Project Outline, Stanford University affirming to cultural geography Ð our peers in a Press, Stanford. Kuhn, A., 1990: Text. In Kuhn, A. (ed.) Women in Film: An cognate field are confirming that place matters. International Guide, Fawcett Columbine, New York, But there are also concerns. My concerns are 400. not, I hasten to add, about an external poaching Lewis, P.F., 1979: Axioms for reading the landscape. In of jealously guarded intellectual terrains or Meinig, D.W. (ed.) The Interpretation of Ordinary Land- scapes: Geographical Essays, Oxford University Press, domains. My overriding fear is that place will be New York, 11Ð32. apparent simply as the bounds of a case study Ð Taylor, G., 1949: Environment, Race and Migration, Univer- as a cultural studies field laboratory. sity of Toronto Press, Toronto. 3rd ed.
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Thompson, E.P., 1968: The Making of the English Working Williams, R., 1958: Culture and Society, 1780–1950. Chatto Class Penguin, Harmondsworth. and Windus, London. UNESCO, 1983: Racism, Science and Pseudo-Science: Pro- Winchester, H.P.W., Kong, L. and Dunn, K.M., 2003: Land- ceedings of the Symposium to Eexamine Pseudo-Scientific scapes: Ways of Imagining the World, Pearson Education, Theories Invoked to Justify Racism and Racial Discrimi- London. nation, Athens, 30 March−3 April 1981, Paris, UNESCO. December444 2006 Original Acticle XX
The Perils and Possibilities of Hanging out with Geographers
KATHLEEN J. MEE Geography, Centre for Urban and Regional Studies, School of Environmental and Life Sciences, University of Newcastle, Callaghan, NSW 2308, Australia. E-mail: [email protected]
In this paper I reflect on being a cultural geo- opportunities in our universities and from organ- grapher in Australia by thinking about academic isations such as the Australian Research Council groupings of geographers (which were often (ARC); and, in more recent times, participation formerly termed as departments) as neighbour- in ARC research networks (see Gibson, above). hoods, and on geography in Australia as a series Third, neighbourhoods are not just pre-ordained of interconnected neighbourhoods. I focus on by institutional conditions and connections; they the resources we gain from being ‘in’ geography are also enacted by their residents (Martin, 2003). and from associating with other geographers; I As a consequence, I consider the importance of consider how our neighbourhoods impact on the the ways in which we use our resources and practice of cultural geography in Australia; mobilise our connections to maintain and to and I reflect on the perils and possibilities, for recreate geography in changing institutional cultural geographers, of hanging out with geo- contexts. graphers. These reflections are based on my To understand these everyday interactions we autobiographical experience as a cultural geo- need to reflect on the many forms that geogra- grapher in Australia, and form a small part of my phy takes in Australian universities at present reconsideration of how geography is constituted (See Table 1). Following mergers with other dis- by the myriad career paths of academics in the ciplines over the past three decades (Holmes, discipline (see, for example, Moss (ed.), 2001; 2002), geography has a diverse range of institu- Barnes, 2004; Johnston, 2004). tional contexts. Geography programmes are located in many different faculties, but are often placed Geography as a neighbourhood either in ‘Science’ or in ‘Arts and Social Science’. In thinking through Australian geography as a In some cases geographers work in schools or number of interconnected neighbourhoods I departments that still have geography in their draw on three elements of the neighbourhood titles, where the discipline retains greater literature. First, neighbourhoods are settings for institutional recognition. In other Universities everyday interactions (Forrest and Kearns, 2001; groupings of geographers are still recognised, Kearns and Parkinson, 2001)1. Second, neigh- and groups of geographers are organised though bourhoods provide a context for connections ‘disciplines’ or ‘divisions’ of geography. These with people outside one’s own neighbourhood collections of geographers are, for the most (Kearns and Parkinson, 2001). Our important part, recognised through their representation on institutional connections include the Institute of groups such as the Australian Heads of Univer- Australian Geographers, (the IAG); the Cultural sity Geography Programmes. These local neigh- Geography Study Group of the IAG; publication bourhoods of geographers co-operate to run opportunities in geography journals2 (which are geography majors or programmes at their Uni- particularly important for human geographers, versities, and may also collaborate in research. at least in the UK (Johnston, 2003)); funding Many of the schools where geography is taught
© 2006 The Authors Journal compilation © 2006 Institute of Australian Geographers