The Reinvention of Cultural Geography

Abstract

Over the past fifteen years, a small group of scholars defining themselves as “new cultural geographers” has launched a sustained critique of “traditional cultural geography,” which they identify with the socalled Berkeley school. Commendably, these writers have advanced cultural research in several important ways, yet in the process their critique of their academic forebears has increasingly moved off-the-mark. The leaders of the new cultural geography depict the scholarship of the Berkeley school as static, empiricist, and obsessed with relict landscapes and material artifacts, when in fact it was, and is still, dynamic, predominantly historicist, and interested primarily in the relationships between diverse human societies and their natural environments. Furthermore, despite the claims of their detractors, few if any “traditional” cultural geographers have ever conceptualized culture as a superorganic structure. Cultural geography—old-fashioned or avant-garde—has always been a pluralistic endeavor ultimately oriented to empirical issues. In the end, only a genuine acceptance of methodological and thematic diversity will allow a true revitalization, rather than a reinvention, of the field.

Key Words:

• cultural geography
• landscape
• Berkeley school
• Carl Sauer
• superorganic
• cultural ecology