Cultural Geography

225 Pages·1998·11.995 MB·English

by  Mike Crang

Cultural Geography
How does culture shape the everyday world?
The so-called 'cultural tum' in contemporary geography has brought new
ways of thinking about geography and culture, taking cultural geography
into exciting new terrain to produce new maps of space and place.
Cultural Geography introduces culture from a geographical perspective,
focusing on how cultures work in practice and looking at cultures
embedded in real-life situations, as locatable, specific phenomena.
Definitions of 'culture' are diverse and complex, and Crang examines a
wealth of different cases and approaches to explore the experience of
place, the relationships of local and global, culture and economy and the
dilemmas of knowledge.
Considering the role of states, empires and nations, corporations, shops
and goods, literature, music and film, Crang examines the cultures of
consumption and production, how places develop meaning for people,
and struggles over defining who belongs in a place.
Cultural Geography presents a concise, up-to-date, interdisciplinary
introduction to this lively and complex field. Exploring the diversity and
plurality of life in all its variegated richness, drawing on examples from
around the world, Crang highlights changes in current societies and the
development of a 'pick and mix' relationship to culture.
Mike Crang is a Lecturer in Geography at Durham University.
Routledge Contemporary Human
Geography Series
Series Editors:
David Bell and Stephen Wynn Williams, Staffordshire University
This new series of 12 texts offers stimulating introductions to the core subdisciplines of
human geography. Building between 'traditional' approaches to subdisciplinary studies
and contemporary treatments of these same issues, these concise introductions respond
particularly to the new demands of modular courses. Uniformly designed, with a focus
on student-friendly features, these books will form a coherent series which is up-to-date
and reliable.
Forthcoming Titles:
Techniques in Human Geography
Rural Geography
Political Geography
Historical Geography
Theory and Philosophy
Development Geography
Tourism Geography
Transport, Communications & Technology Geography
Routledge Contemporary Human
Geography
Cultural Geography
Mike Crang
London and New York
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Contents
List off igures vi
List of boxes vii
Acknowledgements viii
Chapter 1 Locating culture 1
Chapter 2 People, landscapes and time 14
Chapter 3 The symbolic landscape 27
Chapter 4 Literary landscapes: writing and geography 43
Chapter 5 Self and other: writing home, marking territory and
writing space 59
Chapter 6 Multiply mediated environments: film, TV and music 81
Chapter 7 Place or space? 100
Chapter 8 Geographies of commodities and consumption 120
Chapter 9 Cultures of production 142
Chapter 10 Nations, homelands and belonging in hybrid worlds 161
Chapter 11 Cultures of science: translation and knowledge 177
Glossary 188
References 195
Index 206
List of figures
2.1 Anders Zorn's Gammelgaard, Dalarna, Sweden 19
3.1 Abraham Bosse, L'esprit en la virilite, c. 1630 30
3.2 Plan of a Kabyle house 32
5.1 Jan van den Straet, allegorical etching, Vespucci landing in
America, 1619 64
5.2 Lecomte du Nouy, Rhameses in his Harem, 1855 68
5.3 Tourism advertisement for Morocco, 1994 70
5.4 Chums magazine for boys, 1902 74
6.1 Still from Fritz Lang's Metropolis, 1926 85
8.1 Brochure for Hartlepool quayside redevelopment 129
8.2 Advertisement for Ethical Consumer magazine, 1994 132
8.3 J. Sainsbury's 'Taste of Mexico' advertisement, 1995 135
List of boxes
1.1 Defining culture 2
2.1 Cultures, their material and reproduction 17
4.1 Light, power and planning 50
5.1 Relational identity 61
5.2 Tropes 62
5.3 'Objective' science and race 78
7.1 Territorial control and urban policy 111
8.1 Simulating places 126
8.2 Commodity fetish: learning from the banana 133
9.1 Just-in-Time (JIT) 149
9.2 Cultural capital 159
10.1 Public sphere 164
Acknowledgements
Putting this textbook together has been the result of many conversations,
questions and encounters both with colleagues and students. I should first
say that my prime guides have been tutees here at Durham and this book
is in large part a response to their questions, problems and comments. I
should also thank Emma Mawdsley and Peter Atkins for reading through
drafts and pointing out the unclear passages that were merely hiding
behind poor phraseology. David Bell as editor of the series has been with
this book from the start and I should thank him and Sarah Lloyd at
Routledge for bearing with its hesitant progress.
Permission to reproduce pictures here is gratefully acknowledged from
the following:
Fine A.C.
Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris
Ethical Consumer Magazine
J. Sainsbury plc
Morocco Tourist Board
Teesside Development Corporation
Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders and we
apologise for any inadvertent omissions. If any acknowledgement is
missing it would be appreciated if contact could be made care of the
publishers so that this can be rectified in any future edition.
. . Locating culture
What do we mean by culture?
• Why is it studied?
• What sort of things will it involve?
It seems obvious that a book introducing students to cultural geography
must start with a definition of what it is about. Obvious, but almost
unfeasibly difficult. Defining the word culture is a complex and difficult
task which has produced a range of very different definitions. In some
ways 'cultural geography' is easier to grasp than simply trying to define
either of its component parts. This is because, despite occasionally
sounding the most airy of concepts, this book will argue that 'culture',
however defined, can only be approached as embedded in real-life
situations, in temporally and spatially specific ways. This book focuses on
how cultures work in practice. The philosophy of this book is that this is
the contribution of geography-insisting on looking at cultures (plural) as
locatable, specific phenomena.
There seem to be two typical reactions to the idea of cultural geography
by new students. The first is to think of the different cultures around the
globe, to think of the sort of peoples presented in documentaries such as
Disappearing World. In this vision, cultural geography studies the
location and spatial variation of cultures; it is a vision of peoples and
tribes echoed in National Geographic magazines and travel stories. The
second reaction is to associate culture with the arts, with 'high culture',
that is, and is normally followed by a slightly perplexed look as to what
geography can have to do with that. Both versions capture only a tiny part
of what is dealt with as 'cultural geography'. It has been one of the fastest
expanding, and, in my admittedly partisan view, one of the most