Intercultural Geography

TERRITORIAL STUDIES

MASTER COURSE in Planning and Management of Tourism Systems

Prof. STEPHANIE PYNE, Carleton University Ottawa (Canada)Prof. FEDERICA BURINI, Università degli Studi di Bergamo

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INTRODUCTION: FROM HUMAN TO CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY: EMERGENCE OF A DISCIPLINE

1. Emergence of cultural geography

2. The German school

3. The French school

4. The American school

Carl Otwin Sauer

Friedrich Ratzel

Paul Vidal de la Blache

Anthropogeographie

Genre de vie

Possibilisme

Morphology of landscape

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CONTEXT : THE AGE OF « DISCOVERY »

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* Culture : The idea that the humanity of human beings is expressed in the distinctive practices that

they adopt as solutions to the challenges of existence, and of their environment.

* There are infinite varieties of solutions to the challenges posed by human existence.

* Paradox of englightment : Human dignity is understood to be rooted in the universal human

capacity for reason. Yet when people engage in cultural practices that are unfamiliar or disturbing to

the European observer, they appear irrational and thus undeserving of recognition and respect.

Encounter with new cultures poses a series of philosophical questions to Western society…

* Timucua Indian men meeting settlers in Florida

(circa 1562)

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CRITIQUE : THE SUPERORGANIC APPROACH TO CULTURE

* Culture belongs to human groups, not individuals

* Culture, as an entity, stands above individuals

* The whole, not the part, is the determining factor in culture

« The superorganic mode of explanation in cultural geography reifies the notion

of culture assigning it ontological status and causative power. This theory of

culture was outlined by anthropologists Alfred Kroeber and Robert Lowie during

the first quarter of the twentieth century, later elaborated by Leslie White, and

passed on to Carl Sauer and a number of his students at Berkeley. In this theory

culture is viewed as an entity above man, not reducible to the actions of

individuals, mysteriously responding to laws of its own. Explanation, it is

claimed must be phrased in terms of the cultural level not in terms of

individuals. »

The Superorganic in American Cultural Geography (1980)

Jim Duncan

University of Cambridge

NO SUCH THING AS CULTURE?THE « NEW » CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY

INTERCULTURAL GEOGRAPHY

The Cultural Turn

Context

The 1973 oil crisis and the “new wave of neo-liberal ‘globalization’”

These economic and political changes “permeated into the recesses of ordinary people’s lives. Not only in universities, but also in the media and in private encounters, virtually everyone, everywhere became increasingly conscious of the problem of creating meaning in situations in which so many of the parameters of economic, political and social life had shifted”.

“It was in this climate of general consciousness of the problem of finding meaning and value that the so-called ‘cultural turn’ occurred amongst intellectuals in all of the social sciences, and not only in the West”. (1)(Doing Cultural Geography, 1)

The Cultural Turn

General Trend in Academia

“By ‘cultural turn’, it was implied that the accumulations of ways of seeing, means of communicating, constructions of value, senses of identity should be taken as important in their own right, rather than just a by-product of economic formations” (Doing Cultural Geography, 1).

““Suddenly ‘culture’ became intellectually fashionable as a starting point for interpretation, whereas it had hitherto been seen as lacking in rigour” (Doing Cultural Geography 1).

The Cultural Turn

Geography

“Through the 1980s, all of the sub-disciplines of human geography came to be conscious of the ‘cultural’ dimensions of their field of study: more concern with practices, identity, exclusion and inclusion, and the notion of

: economic geographers ‘discovered’ embeddedness of local economies in local social practices; political geographers became aware of new nationalisms and notions of identity in boundary formation and exclusion; urban geographers turned their attention to lifestyle and they became enthusiastic about cultural regeneration of cities; the countryside was rethought as a cultural construction, as was itself.” (Doing Cultural Geography 2)

“The study of “race” and ethnicity in historic and contemporary contexts […] shifted from an emphasis on spatial mapping to an exploration of cultural representations of “race,” which merged conventional concerns in social geography with more explicitly cultural interpretations” (Anderson 1988; Jackson 1987; Ley 1974)”(Companion to Cultural Geography, 2)

Race and Ethnicity

New Cultural Geography Themes

“In particular this is contributing to reestablishing stronger theoretical links between human and physical geography and has prompted a critical analysis of the basis of science. Cultural geographers’ examination of the ways in which “scientific knowledge” has been deployed to support a range of colonial, imperial, and other economic and political projects has served to advance the notion that sociologies and histories of science may be inadequate without a cultural geography of scientific investigation” (Companion to Cultural Geography, 2-3)

Interest in the cultural geography of science and of strengthening theoretical links between physical and social sciences

Science (as a social practice)

Nature

“Cultural geographers’ traditional concern with human/environment relationships has continued, and over the past decade renewed debates about how nature is constituted and understood across different human societies have been particularly vigorous. Ranging from considerations of situated knowledges, environmental ethics, popular understandings of environmental issues to the unsettling of the nature/culture divide, cultural geography has been central in efforts to reconceptualize nature and critically examine environmental policy (Whatmore 2002; Fitzsimmons 1989; Castree & Braun 2001; Wolch & Emel 1998)” (Companion to Cultural Geography, 2).

Feminism

“Feminist geographers too have had a marked impact on contemporary cultural geography by highlighting the prevalence of the detached male gaze in the study of landscape and other cultural phenomena (Rose 1993; Nash 1996)” Companion to Cultural Geography, 2

Subjective and Subaltern Voices

The promotion of a geography which wouldvalue the subjective, subaltern voices and cultural specificity, and which would employ a range of source material not normally used by geographers, would open up the discipline to methods and debates prevalent in philosophy, literary theory, cultural studies, and anthropology (Ley & Samuels 1978; Duncan & Duncan 1988; Gregory 1994; Doel 1995)

Definitions of Culture

Jordan and Rountree: “a total way of life held in common by a group of people”.

Shurmer-Smith critiques this view:

No one shares everything with everyone in their group.

Not clear what “total way of life” is.

“Does it mean that everyone has to act and think the same way, or does it mean that some, unspecified, degree of (recognized) difference is permitted? How does ‘a way of life held in common’ cope with change: does everyone have to change in the same way at the same time?” (Doing Cultural Geography, 3)

Sperber: Culture is a ‘polythetic term’ (1996, p. 17): a condition in which there is ‘a set of features such that none of them is necessary, but any large enough subset of them is sufficient for something to fall under the term’ (he simplifies this a little by suggesting one thinks of this as family resemblance’)” (Doing Cultural Geography, 3)

Definitions of Culture

“The very idea of culture as a possession of bounded groups of people is divisive and dangerous as it underpins unnecessary oppositions and enmities.

Shurmer-Smith does not believe there is any such thing as culture:

“Like Don Mitchell (1995; 2000) I have insisted (Shurmer-Smith and Hannam 1994) that , not owned. It is what people do, not what they have, and they keep doing different things in different ways, with different people all of the time” (Doing Cultural Geography, 3).

Definitions of Culture

Culture as something that a specific group of people possess.

Wendy James (1996) : Culture as adverbial rather than nominal ( a modifier of a verb rather than a noun): Culture, then, is the communicating, sense-making, sharing, evaluating, wondering, reinforcing, experimenting qualifier of what people do.” (Doing Cultural Geography,3)

Sperber: “’Culture is made up, first and foremost, of contagious ideas’ (1996, 1), which leads him to think in terms of epidemiology” (Doing Cultural Geography, 3)

Class exercise: Small group discussion on aspects of “culture”

Definitions of Culture

“Cultural geography as a style of thought is not, to be sure, a singular worldview; not a fixed question and answer session, as if in the latest game show), but a place from which to ask valid and urgent questions of the world; one in which the geographical is seen as constitutive of how the world is ‘made up’.

More than this, it is also about a small ‘p’ politics of the object (of all possible objects of knowing and unknowing) and of geographical relationships. It intends to change our minds about how those geographies came about – and thereby about what possibilities there are for changing things in the present, and in the future […]

The cultural has modified the geographical, making it possible to study more ‘things’, but also to bring more and more ‘things’ under critical scrutiny. In some small way, then, it is about democratizing understanding, about being able to look to the world for the different things that are going on there. And to learn lessons from it.

Handbook of Cultural Geography - Preface

Multidimensional Understanding of Culture

Culture As:

A distribution of thingsA way of lifeMeaningDoingPower

Who I am and Where I Come From

Intercultural Geography 2017 Overlay of the Travels in the Making of the Atlas Map Module of the Lake Huron Treaty Atlas:

https://lhta.ca/index.html?module=lakehurontreaties.module.TravelsInAtlasMaking

If you de-select the other overlays, you will see the overlay for who we are and where we come from.

Please email me at sapyne@gmail.com if you are not on the Intercultural Geography 2017 overlay, and / or to find out more about submitting a photo or two of your city/town of origin.