Everything about Cultural Geography totally explained
Cultural geography is a sub-field within
human geography. Cultural geography is the study of cultural products and norms and their variation across and relations to spaces and places. It focuses on describing and analyzing the ways language, religion, economy, government, and other cultural phenomena vary or remain constant from one place to another and on explaining how humans function spatially
Areas of study
The area of study of cultural geography is very broad. Among many applicable topics within the study are:
- Globalization has been theorised as an explanation for cultural convergence.
- Westernization or other similar processes such as Americanization, Islamization and others.
- Theories of cultural hegemony or cultural assimilation via cultural imperialism.
- Cultural areal differentiation as a study of differences in way of life encompassing ideas, attitudes, languages, practices, institutions, and structures of power and whole range of cultural practices in geographical areas (see also Cultural region).
- Study of cultural landscapes
- Other topics include Spirit of place, colonialism, post-colonialism, internationalism, immigration, emigration and ecotourism.
History
Though the first traces of the study of different nations and cultures on
Earth can be dated back to ancient geographers such as
Ptolemy or
Strabo, cultural geography as academic study firstly emerged as an alternative to the
environmental determinist theories of the early Twentieth century, which had believed that people and 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
Carl Sauer (called the father of Cultural geography), at the
University of California at
Berkeley. As a result of this, cultural geography was long dominated by
American writers.
Sauer defined the landscape as the defining unit of geographic study. He saw that cultures and societies both developed out of their landscape, but also shaped them too. This interaction between the 'natural' landscape and humans creates the 'cultural landscape'. Sauer's work was highly
qualitative and descriptive and was surpassed in the 1930s by the
regional geography of
Richard Hartshorne, followed by the
quantitative revolution. Cultural geography was generally sidelined, though writers such as
David Lowenthal continued to work on the concept of landscape.
In the 1970s, the critique of positivism in geography caused geographers to look beyond the quantitative geography for its ideas. One of these re-assessed areas was also cultural geography.
New cultural geography
Since the 1980s, a "new cultural geography" has emerged, drawing on a diverse set of theoretical traditions including
Marxian political economy,
feminist theory,
post-colonial theory,
postmodernism, and
poststructuralism.
Drawing particularly from the theories of
Michel Foucault and
performativity in western academia, and the more diverse influences of
postcolonial theory, there has been a concerted effort to
deconstruct the cultural in order to make apparent the various power relations. A particular area of interest is that of
identity politics and construction of identity (see
feminist geography).
Examples of areas of study include:
Feminist geography
Children's geographies
Some parts of Tourism geography
Sexuality and space
Some more recent developments in Political geographyFurther Information
Get more info on 'Cultural Geography'.
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