Cultural geography III: The concept of ‘culture’

Abstract

2020) 'Cultural geography III : the concept of culture.', Progress in human geography., 44 (3). pp. 608-617.The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details.In my third report I argue that three versions of the concept of culture coexist in cultural geography in the wake of an interest in life and living: culture as assembled effect, culture as mediated experience, and culture as forms-of-life. All three break with one of the versions of culture in the 'new' cultural geography -culture as 'signifying system'whilst retaining its focus on mediation. By expanding what counts as 'life' and the forms relations take, each version reworks a second concept of culture present in the 'new cultural geography' -culture as 'whole way of life'. Cultural Geography 3: The Concept of Culture"A concept exists only as long as it maintains an element that has not been conceived yet, which is still unattained and is perhaps unattainable, which is summoned by a question and which itself summons new questions".(Adi Ophir, 2005, np, emphasis in original)Culture as a concept is absent from contemporary human geography. In the wake of the cultural turn and the associated 'culturalisation' of multiple fields of inquiry, an interest in culture and its geographies has, for a long while now, been everywhere in human geography. And in the midst of the emergence of the geohumanities, nonrepresentational theories, and continued concern with the politics of difference, cultural geography has recently been animated by an enlivening proliferation of new problematics, concepts, methods, and modes of inquiry (as summarised in my previous reports Anderson 2017; 2018). Despite or perhaps because of this, and as has been noted in passing elsewhere (Bartolini, Raghuram, Revill 2017; Wylie 2010), culture as a concept has been subject to little explicit reflection in geography over the past 20 years.The last sustained engagement concerned the ontological status of the term, in the midst of emerging criticisms of some trajectories within the 'new' cultural geography (see Mitchell 1995). Since then, mostly silence; apart from occasional hints that existing concepts of culture might be being unsettled and new ones emerging (e.g. Duncan and Duncan 2004; Domosh 2014; for an exception see Rose (2010;).This situation is unsurprising. A series of partially connected trajectories have left cultural geography with an ambivalent, strained, relation to culture as a concept, even as culture continues to function as a placeholder term that enables the various tendencies within cultural geograp...

The question of culture in cultural geography: Latent legacies and potential futures

“…To help clarify this dual problem of culture, I draw upon a recent commentary by Ben Anderson (2019), where he similarly (though implicitly) identifies two essential questions residing within the question of culture. The first question of culture is one that begins from 'the proposition that we are involved with the world through all manner of practical (dis)connections before we represent the world to ourselves and others (i.e.…”

“…With the advent of non-representational theory and the dominance of process ontologies, it has been difficult to discern what exactly is cultural about contemporary cultural geographic work and whether the question of culture still has relevance within the discipline (Tolia-Kelly, 2016). As Anderson (2019) puts it, 'a series of partially connected trajectories have left cultural geography with an ambivalent, strained relation to culture as a concept, even as culture continues to function as a placeholder term' (p. 2). Similar Wylie (2016) states that 'the question of "culture" seems to have fallen into abeyance [ .…”

Lexical Semantics: Mapping Gender and Cultural Geography in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Speculative Fiction

“…In this fashion, geography can be contextualized on several scales of reasoning: physical geography, human geography and cultural geography. As per Anderson (2019) culture is moresoever a "mediated experience" if one were to consider how discourses, ideologies and narratives subtly blend with "geo-historical processes" that edify the value of embodied experiences (pp. 608-617).…”

Elemental worlds: Specificities, exposures, alchemies

“…It signals how worlds are formed from multiple associations between and attachments across humans and non-humans (de la Cadena and Blaser, 2018). It also allows us to avoid privileging either of the latter two terms while recognizing that attachments to worlds, even those that gravitate towards ‘human’ concerns, remain part of how different versions of the elements surface (see also Anderson, 2020). The third matter of concern – alchemy – is less analytical and more speculative.…”