Cultural Turn

The term cultural turn refers to an intellectual recognition, within human geography and the wider human sciences, that all claims about the world and knowledge are mediated by culture. The logic of the cultural turn centers on the argument that no representation merely reproduces what it claims to represent. Representations construct, as much as they claim to explain, the person, place, or thing to which they refer.

The implications of the argument that knowledge produces the world, rather than simply mirrors it, are profound. The argument entails that to make, and/or accept, any claim, we need to attend to two interrelated terrains. First, we need to attend to how knowledge claims are complex products of particular contexts and specific perspectives and are shaped by forces such as history, gender, class, race, and location. Second, claims about objects and the world affect both the possibility of identifying objects as such and the ways objects and the world are made meaningful. Never simply passive, knowledge emerges from, and brings into being, dynamics of difference, power, effect, meaning, and influence. Questions of language, politics, history, identity, and interpretation (i.e., culture) are thus central to the knowledge and constitution of “reality.”

It follows that careful scholarship must reflexively attend to the interpretive and complex constitutions of knowledge. Denying the influence of culture on what and how claims are made excludes how knowledge and meaning making are enmeshed within practices of power. Arguments made from the cultural turn entail the impossibility of objective knowledge, for claims to objectivity elide their contingency and partiality. Naturally, claims about the world can be made in the realms of science, ethics, and politics, but they must self-consciously recognize their embeddedness within multiple and situated positions. Imperatives of heightened reflexivity render knowledge making not only more complex and humble but also more attentive to its construction and effects. Debates surrounding the cultural turn have shaken, fundamentally, the academic humanities and social sciences for the past three decades. While the turn to culture and its epistemic implications has been enormously influential in shaping the possibilities of humanities and social science research, the repercussions of acknowledging the close relationships of language, power, and knowledge continue to be ardently felt and debated.

The turn to culture emerges out of a history of thought whose lineages can be traced through the influence of both the social writings of Karl Marx and the perspectivism of Friedrich Nietzsche. Significantly for the cultural turn, the work of Marx and Nietzsche was central, in the 1960s, to poststructuralism, which argued that language is necessary for thought. If language and text are the constitutive apparatuses by which the world can be known, there is nothing that can be said of the world that is outside of, or beyond, language and texts and, hence, culture. This view, and its effect on philosophy and social theory, became known as the linguistic turn. The cultural turn extends the insights of the linguistic turn to thinking about how cultural practices shape both our being in the world and the possibilities of responding within discourses of power, subjectivity, governance, and accumulation. From these possibilities, understood as opportunities, the interdisciplinarity of cultural studies emerged. For human geographers, the influence of cultural studies is most keenly felt in cultural geography, although the cultural turn has also transformed how subdisciplines such as economic, social, political, and environmental geographies are framed and engaged.

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