Cultural geography
From Wikinfo
Cultural geography is a sub-field within human geography. For much of the twentieth century, Anglophone research in cultural geography was dominated by the work of the "Berkeley School" associated with Carl Sauer, emphasizing the study of human transformations of the physical environment. Since the 1980s a "new cultural geography" has emerged, drawing on a diverse set of theoretical traditions including Marxian political economy, feminist theory, post-colonial theory, postmodernism, and poststructuralism.
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Areas of Interest
History
Template:Sect-stub Cultural geography emerged as an alternative to the environmental determinist theories of the early Twentieth Century, which had believed that people and societies are controlled by the environment in which they develop. [1] Rather than studying pre-determined regions based upon environmental classifications, cultural geography became interested in cultural landscapes. [2] This was led by Carl Sauer at the University of California at Berkeley. As a result of this, cultural geography was long dominated by American writers.
Sauer defined the landscape as the defining unit of geographic study. He saw that cultures and societies both developed out of their landscape, but also shaped them too. [3] This interaction between the 'natural' landscape and man creates the 'cultural landscape'. [4] Sauer's work was highly qualitative and descriptive and was surpassed in the 1930s by the regional geography of Richard Hartshorne, followed by the quantitative revolution. Cultural geography was generally sidelined, though writers such as David Lowenthal continued to work on the concept of landscape.
In the 1970s, the radical critique of geography caused geographers to look beyond the quantiative regional geography for its ideas. One of these re-assessed areas was cultural geography.
Scientific journals
Journal of Cultural Geography - published since 1980, currently at Oklahoma State University.
Cultural Geographies - (formerly Ecumene) flagship journal of "new cultural geography."
See also
- Landscape pictures the nation: Cultural Geography publication, Oxford University
References
- Adapted from the Wikipedia article, "Cultural_geography" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_geography on August 11, 2006, and used under the GNU Free Documentation License
