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, 121–125. 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, 1–11. ‘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, 2–20. context also occurred when I was allocated an Johnston, R.J., 2005: Review essay. 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But, most Studies 40, 58–70. satisfyingly from our discipline’s perspective, Yarwood, R., 2005: Beyond the rural idyll: images, country- geography has at least as much to teach as it has side change and geography Geography 90, 19–32. to learn from this process. December444 2006 Original Acticle XX 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? © 2006 The Authors Journal compilation © 2006 Institute of Australian Geographers 424 Geographical Research • December 2006 • 44(4):418–434 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