Cultural geography

Cultural geography is a subfield within human geography. Though the first traces of the analyse of different nations in addition to cultures on Earth can be dated back to ancient geographers such(a) as Ptolemy or Strabo, cultural geography as academic study firstly emerged as an pick to a environmental determinist theories of the early 20th century, which had believed that people as well as societies are controlled by the environment in which they develop. Rather than studying pre-determined regions based upon environmental classifications, cultural geography became interested in cultural landscapes. This was led by the "father of cultural geography" Carl O. Sauer of the University of California, Berkeley. As a result, cultural geography was long dominated by American writers.

Geographers drawing on this tradition see cultures and societies as development out of their local landscapes but also shaping those landscapes. This interaction between the natural landscape and humans creates the cultural landscape. This apprehension is a foundation of cultural geography but has been augmented over the past forty years with more nuanced and complex picture of culture, drawn from a wide range of disciplines including anthropology, sociology, literary theory, and feminism. No single definition of culture dominates within cultural geography. Regardless of their particular interpretation of culture, however, geographers wholeheartedly reject theories that treat culture as whether it took place "on the head of a pin".

Ongoing evolution of cultural geography

Since the 1980s, a "new cultural geography" has emerged, drawing on a diverse set of theoretical traditions, including Marxist political-economic models, feminist theory, post-colonial theory, post-structuralism and psychoanalysis.

Drawing especially from the theories of Michel Foucault and performativity in western academia, and the more diverse influences of postcolonial theory, there has been a concerted attempt to deconstruct the cultural in positioning to reveal that energy to direct or build relations are necessary to spatial processes and sense of place. Particular areas of interest are how identity politics are organized in space and the construction of subjectivity in particular places.

Examples of areas of study include:

Some within the new cultural geography score turned their attention to critiquing some of its ideas, seeing its views on identity and space as static. It has followed the critiques of Foucault presents by other 'poststructuralist' theorists such(a) as Michel de Certeau and Gilles Deleuze. In this area, non-representational geography and population mobility research form dominated. Others have attempted to incorporate these and other critiques back into the new cultural geography.

Groups within the geography community have differing views on the role of culture and how to analyze it in the context of geography. It is usually thought that physical geography simply dictates aspects of culture such as shelter, clothing and cuisine. However, systematic development of this abstraction is loosely discredited as environmental determinism. Geographers are now more likely to understand culture as a rank of symbolic resources that help people make sense of the world around them, as alive as a manifestation of the energy relations between various groups and the grouping through which social change is constrained and enabled. There are many ways to look at what culture means in light of various geographical insights, but in general geographers study how cultural processes involve spatial patterns and processes while requiring the existence and maintenance of particular kinds of places.