| dc.description.abstract | The journal Cultural Geographies, and its predecessor Ecumene, has provided flagship
scholarship in cultural geography for over a decade. Cultural Geographies has played this
part in a period that has witnessed both unprecedented enthusiasm for the (now not so
new) cultural turn, and an emergent scepticism around what cultural geography has
come to stand for, and specifically its apparent over- emphasis on representation. As
Catherine Nash and I have observed elsewhere, this new scepticism is evident in a
range of cultural geographical writings. For example, the recent Handbook of Cultural
Geography, itself an exemplary account of the vital contribution of cultural geography
to the discipline, opens with a picture of a tomb with the epitaph ‘Here Lies Cultural
Geography, Born 1925, Died 2002. In Loving Memory’. There could be no clearer
expression of the peculiar combination of commitment to and disenchantment with
the concept of culture in contemporary geography. It is not the only death wish that
cultural geography has had to endure recently. Don Mitchell concludes his review of
Mike Crang’s Cultural Geography with the following epitaph: ‘Despite a brief and
brilliant beginning, in the end, it never amounted to much’. A mere decade ago
cultural geography was seen as an analytic frame that could promise not only a
productive, but also a necessary, reshaping of geographical scholarship. Now it seems
we can’t decide if we want this sub-field to be dead or alive! This paper is not a
defence of cultural geography per se, nor even an attempt to police the ways in which
we might use the term ‘culture’ in our geographies, although that has been one
evident response to the confusion over the value of cultural geographical approaches.
It does, however, have something to say about things being alive or dead – and it does
presume that the approach taken, in significant and worthy ways, is indebted at least
in part to the vital novelty bequeathed by a sub-disciplinary field known as ‘cultural
geography’. Not least, the paper’s focus on building technology and building practises
self-consciously resuscitates and extends a theme common to cultural geographical
scholarship, old and new. | en |
