Cultural Geography David Atkinson Peter Jackson David Sibley Neil Washbourne Cultural Geography Cultural Geography A Critical Dictionary of Key Concepts Edited by David Atkinson Peter Jackson David Sibley Neil Washbourne Published in 2005 by I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd 6 Salem Road, London W2 4BU 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010 www.ibtauris.com In the United States and Canada distributed by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010 Copyright © David Atkinson, Peter Jackson, David Sibley and Neil Washbourne, 2005 The rights of David Atkinson, Peter Jackson, David Sibley and Neil Washbourne to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. International Library of Human Geography 3 ISBN Hardback 1 86064 703 0 Paperback 1 86064 702 2 EAN Hardback 978 1 86064 703 1 Paperback 978 1 86064 702 4 A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library A full CIP record for this book is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress catalog card: available Typeset in Ehrhardt by Dexter Haven Associates Ltd, London Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin Contents Editors’ Preface: On Cultural and Critical Geographies vii PART I: SPACE, KNOWLEDGE AND POWER Introduction 3 Post-structuralism Ulf Strohmayer 6 Representation Ola Söderström 11 Positionality/ Ian Cook et al. 16 Situated Knowledge Mapping/Cartography Denis Cosgrove 27 Travel/Tourism Mike Crang 34 Space/Place Phil Hubbard 41 Landscape Don Mitchell 49 Environment Sally Eden 57 Geopolitics Gearóid Ó Tuathail/ 65 Gerard Toal Governance Andrew Jonas and 72 Aidan While Flexibility Suzanne Reimer 80 PART II: DIFFERENCE AND BELONGING Introduction 89 The Body Robyn Longhurst 91 Identity James Martin 97 Gender Peter Jackson 103 Whiteness Alastair Bonnett 109 (Dis)ability Robert Wilton 115 Sexuality Mark Johnson 122 Moral Geographies Tim Cresswell 128 Citizenship Darren O’Byrne 135 Heritage David Atkinson 141 PART III: BORDERS AND BOUNDARIES Introduction 153 Private/Public David Sibley 155 Globalisation/ Neil Washbourne 161 Globality Postmodernism Steven Flusty 169 Colonialism/ Alison Blunt 175 Postcolonialism Diaspora Anne-Marie Fortier 182 Hybridity Katharyne Mitchell 188 Nature/Culture Steve Hinchliffe 194 Socio-technical Nick Bingham 200 Cyborg Cultures Judith Tsouvalis 207 Contributors 213 Index 215 — Editors’ Preface — On Cultural and Critical Geographies Cultural geography is an exciting, lively and diverse field, the energy and vitality of which is indicated by our decision to pluralise the term in this editorial preface. Cultural geographies, as currently practised, are now much wider in scope than developments within a single branch of human geography. As the essays that follow make clear, cultural geographers now routinely engage with complex but important questions about social processes such as identity formation, the construction of cultural difference, citizenship and belonging. These processes also challenge our understanding of such core geographical categories as space and place, landscape and environment, public and private. But cultural geographies, we argue, also link such ideas and imaginations with our changing material world. They allow us to explore how these processes are affected by increased mobility, by changes in our socio-technical environment, and by other forces that are transforming the established notions of the relationships between nature and culture. As several of the following chapters reveal, cultural geographies are also engaging with political and economic ideas about governance and flexible accumulation as the boundaries between former sub-disciplines such as cultural and economic, social and political geography, are increasingly transcended. Indeed, through its engagement with social and cultural theory, the entire field of cultural geography has been transformed, and its recent developments have prompted the rethinking of many key concepts in human geography and beyond. In addition, there are now many other social scientists as well as geographers ‘doing’ cultural geography (as contributors to this book themselves confirm). The diversity of cultural geography defies easy definition. For example, the recent Handbook of Cultural Geography elected not to define the field but, rather, described cultural geography as an unruly affair best understood as a ‘style of thought’, without clearly identifiable boundaries, characterised by the valid and urgent questions that it seeks to ask (Anderson et al. 2002, xiii–xiv). In more conventional terms, it suggests that cultural geography addresses issues of distribution (where things are and why); ways of life; systems of meaning; questions of practice; and vii CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY notions of power. In this collection we take a similar approach: allowing the individual essays and their authors to define the field, since more formal definitions immediately lead to problems of closure and exclusion. We would rather think of the essays that make up this creative and fuzzily bounded collection of cultural geographies as open-ended and post-disciplinary. This is reflected in their authorship: although the contributors to this volume have disciplinary identities including social anthropology, sociology, cultural studies and human geography, they are all producing cultural geographies and, in the process, they demonstrate theoretical convergences as well as refreshing differences in perspective. Yet one thing we did encourage from our contributors was a critical perspective on cultural geographies. By engaging with aspects of social relations, with connections between people and the material world, and between culture and nature, the authors raise questions that are central to human well-being, but that are also political. Since cultural geographies are embedded in the politics of our contemporary world, inevitably this collection is avowedly critical in places. Several essays deal with questions of cultural difference, for example, a characteristic of societies for which, as Joel Kahn (1995, 125) has argued, we now have ‘a consuming and erotic passion’. But, while cultural difference is celebrated in some realms, we must also acknowledge that difference becomes politicised when providing grounds for genocide as well as for routine, everyday oppression (as the recent history of the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda demonstrates). The political is often inescapable, and our authors reflect upon a range of political issues, such as the changing relationships between public and private space, anxieties about surveillance and the intrusion of the state into private lives, the connections between culture and nature, and environmental crises. Given the ways that power is embedded throughout society, we suggest that, in their theoretical articulation and in their engagement with social relations and questions of human well-being, cultural geographies – above all else – must be critical. Although the re-invigoration of cultural geography in the early 1980s bore a marked critical edge (Cosgrove 1983, 1984; Cosgrove and Jackson 1987; Daniels 1989), the relationship between cultural geographies and a politicised perspective has proved controversial more recently. Some argue that cultural geography has lost its original critical impetus and plead for a more politicised agenda (Mitchell 2000). For others, the intangible subject matter of some cultural geography has diminished the relevance of human geography more generally, particularly when addressing practical social issues (Hamnett 2003; Storper 2001). Sympathetic voices worry that certain strains of social and cultural geography lose sight of the material geographies that underpin social worlds (Philo 2000; Jackson 2000; cf. Anderson and Tolia-Kelly 2004), while, as several authors highlight, the politics of actually doing critical geography varies markedly around the world (Garcia-Ramon et al. 2004; Sundberg 2005). Although far from conclusive, this debate draws attention to the relations between cultural geographies, socio-political contexts, and the politics of the knowledge we produce, disseminate and consume. And, because the history of cultural geography, as we understand it, has a substantive and enduring strain of viii PREFACE critique, this collection seeks to explore the critical concepts in cultural geography further. In this respect, the book’s subtitle uses the term ‘critical’ in two ways. First, it addresses as ‘critical concepts’ those that are fundamentally important to the emergence and form of cultural geography, those that provide the foundation and building blocks of our contemporary work in this area. Second, it refers to the ‘critical’ in terms of critique. The book serves both these meanings, but, as the second is more contentious, the rest of this introduction explores the potential for ‘critical’ perspectives in relation to the production of cultural geographies. IN WHAT SENSE ‘CRITICAL’ KNOWLEDGE? The project of developing ways of thinking critically (and reflexively) about the production of knowledge has a long and contested history that draws upon various theoretical