Cultural Geography

What is Culture?

One of the most vexing aspects of cultural geography is the difficulty of defining its object of study: culture. In this, cultural geographers and cultural anthropologists share a similar dilemma, with the result that various attempts to define culture have long crossed disciplinary boundaries between geography and anthropology. In fact, it was the anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1973), drawing on earlier work by the sociologist Max Weber, who famously asserted, “believing… that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs” (p. 5). Culture has been defined as a whole way of life, a manner of thinking and doing things that encompasses an entire group of people. A more restricted definition of culture is synonymous with the tangible things that particular groups of people produce: material culture. Culture can be used in a way that indicates high culture, a society's artistic and intellectual output. Finally, culture can have a temporal meaning, as opposed to being a static phenomenon, when the term is used to indicate the progressive advancement of a group.

In several of these definitions, culture is a thing. According to some understandings, culture is an attribute or a set of distinct qualities possessed by a group of people; in others, culture is literally things, the distinct material, artistic, spiritual, and intellectual output of a particular society. Definitions of culture as a thing have at least three problematic aspects associated with them. First is their tendency to accrete just about [Page 635]anything. Even the design, technology, and location of the proverbial kitchen sink can be thought of as cultural. There is a loss in analytical precision when the definition of a term can potentially include everything. Second, if culture is a distinctive attribute of specific human societies, it is tempting to view the world as a patterning of diverse cultures that are juxtaposed side by side, as with a jigsaw puzzle. Such definitions cannot account for the persistent mobility, intermixing, and fluidity of culture. The third problem with approaches to culture as a thing is that culture is relegated to an intermediary role. Cultural output merely provides clues to deeper patterns: social, economic, political, and so on. Culture is thus epiphenomenal, rather than a powerful force in its own right.

In other definitions, culture is approached as a process. Culture is understood to involve ways of communicating, expressing, making meaning, and representing external reality to ourselves and others. Some scholars view cultures as languagelike in their interactive and symbolic structure. Others have a less structured view of culture as a process, emphasizing instead culture's unstable fluidity. These approaches have been critiqued for at least two reasons. First is their tendency toward “realm-ness,” for lack of a better term. In these approaches, culture is viewed as an arena in which activity occurs, distinct and separate from other arenas, such as the political, economic, environmental, and so on. Thus, culture is artificially cordoned off and reified as a separate realm, when, in fact, there are cultural aspects to many activities not typically seen as having a cultural dimension. Indeed, it is in the apparently obvious, but misguided, notion that some activities are acultural that culture can work in extremely powerful ways. To assume that politics or economics exist apart from culture, even in the abstract, is naive. Second, approaches to culture as a process often provide too vague answers to the straightforward question “What is culture?” Not only does this make research difficult, it can render practices deemed cultural difficult to hold accountable.

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