Cultural Geography

Anglo-American cultural geography has a long and rich history stretching back to the early 20th century in the United States and beyond that to late-19th-century German anthropogeography. Until the 1980s, there were few cultural geographers practicing in Britain. Two decades later, in a remarkable change that paralleled the “cultural turn” within the social sciences more generally, cultural geography has become one of the most popular areas of geography in Britain. We return to this development later, briefly tracing its genealogy, but first let us turn to the development of the subfield in the United States.

[Page 71]Cultural geography in the United States, from its founding during the 1920s through the 1970s, was dominated by Carl Sauer and his students at the University of California, Berkeley. Under the powerful influence of the charismatic Sauer, a coherent set of interests and approaches to research emerged under the unofficial name of the Berkeley School. Given the importance of Sauer to the foundation of the subfield, a few words are in order about his perspective. By the time he moved to Berkeley during the 1920s, he had rejected the still currently fashionable environmental determinism, which claimed that cultures were determined by nature (e.g., that hot climates produced less developed societies than did cold climates). Under the influence of cultural anthropologists A. Kroeber and R. Lowie, Sauer came to accept what was known as the “superorganic” notion of culture that treated culture as a kind of “black-boxed” entity that (rather mysteriously) shaped the behavior of different groups in different environments. He also developed a lifelong interest in Latin America and in prehistory. During the 1930s, Sauer fostered increasingly strong ties with biological scientists and pioneered research on the interaction between humans and the physical environment. He approached human–environment relations historically and focused on the human transformation of the earth.

Many of the most important ideas that Sauer introduced to the field (e.g., historical reconstruction of the impact of past cultures, the culture area or region, the diffusion of culture traits from region to region) were current at the time in German anthropogeography and American cultural anthropology. Sauer placed a greater emphasis on the human relationship with the physical environment than did the anthropologists, and perhaps this is where his most original contributions lie. His black-boxing of culture resulted from his view that geographers need not concern themselves with social, psychological, or political processes. (To be fair, much of his work was on historical cultures about which there were little data on the latter processes; nevertheless, many of his followers working on more contemporary issues had no such excuse for ignoring these.) Culture as a holistic entity was seen as a force that causes members of culture groups to act in culturally and historically specific ways. Such a broad formulation had the advantage of allowing the first generation of cultural geographers to describe the behavior of “cultural groups” without needing to invoke social–psychological or political processes. It was assumed, perhaps heuristically, that people behaved as they did because their culture made them do so. Such a simplifying assumption allowed cultural geographers to focus on the abstracted processes in which they were most interested such as the historical diffusion of cultural traits across space and how particular culture traits work (e.g., how methods of cultivation work ecologically in particular types of places). As we will see, post-1980 cultural geographers called into question the assumptions of the Berkeley School, although more recently there has been a revaluing and greater appreciation of the environmental focus of the Berkeley School, which began to be lost with the first wave of what has been termed the new cultural geography.

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