Cultural Turn

The cultural turn summarily represents a critique of traditional cultural geography by a group of scholars starting in the late 1970s. This group of geographers sought to redefine cultural geography with a critique of the so-called Berkeley School, the founding school of thought in cultural geography. The cultural[Page 79] geography of the 1980s and 1990s offered a two-step reassessment of core elements of traditional cultural geography. First, it sought to tackle and rewrite the problematic definition of culture as the central object of geographic analysis. Second, it supported the shift of cultural geography away from a static and empirical analysis of human–environment interactions and the examination material landscape to a more reflexive practice that involved a wider range of research techniques and more interaction between the researcher and his or her subjects of study.

Traditional cultural geography before the cultural turn is often referred to as based on the superorganic theory of culture. This means that cultures are composed of geographic units such as culture groups that are represented as collectives in which individuals have very little power or agency but rather are socially conditioned to act, behave, and express meaning in fixed ways. The superorganic concept of culture assumes that cultures (or aspects of culture such as religion and language) are largely independent of individuals and their behavior; individuals do not cause a culture to be formed, but culture is the agent that causes people to behave as they do. In such a concept of culture, values, beliefs, and meanings operate independently of individuals; they are not created and shaped by them, but individuals receive and are influenced by culture in the same fashion that their bodies and anatomies are the result of genetic codes. Whereas genetics controls people from within, culture controls people from without. Traditionally defined, then, cultural geography describes the spatial patterns of culture but not the cultural patterns of individuals within a culture. Culture as an agent—not individuals within a culture—is of primary interest to geographers. They examine cultural landscapes as if culture is the agent and nature is the medium that is geographically shaped, patterned, ordered, and transformed by it. Thus, the spatial organization of cultural patterns is the result of the collective internalization of cultural values by individuals who are characterized as passive recipients of information. Individuals and their cultural habits, beliefs, and traditions are simply representatives of cultural regions that express a certain character. Many prominent proponents of the superorganic view of culture often stereotype a region (and the individuals within it) as having a certain heart, soul, character, psyche, and/or personality. For example, stereotypical expressions such as “the soul of Germany lies in its love of discipline” and “the core element of the American psyche is its strong sense of individualism” were characteristic of regional character types described by traditional cultural geographers.

The new cultural geography that instigated the cultural turn focused its critique on the limitations of superorganicism as it was promoted and popularized by the Berkeley School under Carl Sauer. Beginning in the late 1970s, two strands of critique of this limited concept of culture emerged. First, cultural geographers have increasingly moved away from the superorganic concept of culture and replaced it with one that takes into account the active role of humans as agents of cultural change. Culture no longer is conceptualized as something imposed on passive humans from without anymore; rather, it is delineated as a system of distinguishable practices, symbols, tools, and texts by which people attach meaning to experiences and events in their lives. Also, culture was redefined as socially constructed and malleable. Individuals were reconceptualized as agents of social change who could actively reshape cultural geographies; they were not helpless recipients of cultural traits. In short, culture emerged as a more or less coherent signifying system—as a set of ideas, texts, and symbols that give human lives meaning and that they express in public and private spaces. A second critique of traditional concepts of culture emerged in the work of Don Mitchell, who not only challenged the superorganic theory but also regarded the idea of culture as a signifying system as a problematic approach. Mitchell argued that the division of humanity into distinct, spatially recognizable culture regions is in itself a fallacy. Rather than a discrete reality, these geographic units of culture always affix a sense of uniformity to a certain group of people or a region as it does not really exist. Culture is multifarious and always changing; it cannot be defined simply along geographic lines. To capture the true diversity of cultural experience, and to decode the ways in which definitions of certain cultures have silenced such variety, the new cultural geography also includes a methodological critique. Whereas the Berkeley School was often accused of passive fieldwork, little interaction of researchers with their surroundings, and inadequate archive work, the cultural turn signified an embrace of a wider range of techniques. Influenced by feminist critique of geographic fieldwork, the 1990s saw a[Page 80] surge of scholarship that explored a wider variety of qualitative methods such as interviews, focus groups, participant observation, and discourse analysis.

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