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Chapter 2

THE CULTURAL APPROACH IN GEOGRAPHY : FROM THE LATE 19TH CENTURY TO THE CULTURAL TURN

As a new and coherent discipline, human geography appeared, in the last decades of the nineteenth century. From the start, it was interested in the cultural diversity of the Earth, but the development of the cultural approach was hampered because of the positivist bent of science at that time : as a result, when studying religion as a geographical phenomenon, geographers described churches, temples, mosques, stupas ; they spoke of the bells ringing in t h eC h r i s t i a nc o u n t r i e s a n do f t h em u e z z i n s c a l l i nMo s l e mo n e s ; they were fascinated by religious ceremonies, processions, by the throngs which congregated during the great pilgrimages, but they never spoke of the ten Commandments, Paradise, Hell, Revelation, Doomsday and other religious believes. It does not mean that cultural studies as conceived at that time lacked of value, but they covered only a part of the realities they are now trying to present and explain. They stressed more the material dimensions of cultures than the representations and images they built of the Cosmos, nature, society and the environment. During this first phase, the cultural approach was conceived along different lines depending on the countries : the leading ones, at that time, were Germany, France and the United States. The cultural approach began to change in the 1950s and 1960s. Geographers were increasingly conscious of the role of cultures in the geographical differenciation of space. Instead of a natural determinism, some pleaded for a cultural one : each landscape was shaped by a specific group, which imprinted its mark on the places where it lived and created specific forms of settlements and spatial organization. The modernization of the cultural approach started in the 1970s. It was a long process : it took twenty-five years before geographers became conscious of what was really at stake, i. e. a new way to conceive the study of the geographical reality : human beings do not know it directly. They only grasped it through the perception, representations and images they develop about it. In order to understand fully the problem of the contemporary orientations, it is necessary to cover in some detail the different avenues which were explored during this phase.

The early phases of the cultural approach (1880-1950)

From the 1880s to the mid-twentieth century, the prevailing conception of human geography had been best expressed by the French geographer Paul Vidal de la Blache : Geography is a science of places, not of men . The new science did not ignore human reality, but was

concerned by it only as far as it was expressed in a visible way, in the landscape. The Earth was a theater. Physical geographers analyzed the way the stage was built. Human geographers studied the painted decors which created the atmosphere.

The German contribution The idea that geographers had to focus more than they did previously on the human dimension of geography was a co n s e q u e n c e o f D a r w i n s v i e w s o n e v o l u t i o n . U p t o w h a t p o i n t human beings were shaped by the environment where they lived ? Might they act freely, as was supposed by most philosophers or moralists, or were behaviours a result of their inner drives and the external constraints they confronted ? An ecology of man was needed. It was first developed in Germany, where the term ecology had been coined by Haeckel in 1866. Friedrich Ratzel (1844-1904) was a natural scientist by his university training : he was well aware of the new way of analyzing human realities. During the years he spent in the United States as a journalist, he had become aware of the problems of ethnicity and of culture. In his first book, he analysed the Stdte und Culturbilder aus Nord-Amerika (Leipzig, Brockhaus,1876). His doctoral dissertation was devoted to the Chinese immigration in the United States (Die chinesische Auswanderung. Ein Beitrag zur Cultur- und Handelgeographie, Breslau, Kern, 1876). He published also a book on the United States, the second volume of which was intitled Culturgeographie der Vereinigten Staten von NordAmerika (Mnchen, Oldenburg, 1880). In these works, he stressed the role of culture. He introduced only later the idea of human geography (Antrhopogeographie, oder Grundzge der Anwendung der Erdkunde auf die Geschichte, Stuttgart, Engelhorn, 1882-1891). In this first presentation of the field, he crossed Darwinian themes with the Ritterian conceptions of geography : hence the dual interest in man/milieu relationships (the ecological perspective) and circulation (the Ritterian emphasis on the interplay between position and movement) ; For Ratzel, human beings were bearers of culture, but this culture differed according with the level of development of the groups in which they lived. He opposed in this way Naturvlker, the peoples of nature, the primitive ones, to Kultuvlker, the civilized ones. Because the first ones were unable do master distance and develop trade, they suffered from severe environmental constraints. Because they had invented techniques of displacement and transport, on one hand, and were able to structure States, on the other, Kulturvlker enjoyed more freedom and were less submitted to physical limitations. In this way, the cultural approach so started in geography at the same time as the interest in human geography, but the main German contributions to the early cultural studies were mainly due to other authors. Eduard Hahn (1856-1928) was trained as a zoologist. This fact explained his induring interest in a major problem of geography : the origins of agriculture and of the domestication of animals. He was the first to stress the opposition between two families of agricultures. (i) In Oceania, some remote parts of South Asia, most of Africa South of the Sahara and the Americas before 1492, farmers did not know the plough. They main tool was the hoe. They did not use draught animals. They planted seedlings. (ii) Elsewhere, in most Asia, the Mediterrranean, Europe, farmers used ploughs drawn by horses,

mules or oxen. They sown grains. Out of this fundamental opposition, different human geographies were built. August Meitzen (1822-1920) was a jurist and economist and worked as a registrar of property tax in Breslau. In 1865, he was commissionned to study the exploitation of landed property in Prussia. Later, he taught at the University of Berlin. He was the first to show the diversity of rural landscapes and the opposition between the openfields of South Germany, the small round hamlets of East Germany and the dispersed farms of the Northern part of the country. He applied these distinctions to the whole of Europe in his book on Siedelung und Agrarwesen der Westgernamen und Ostgermanen, der Kelten, Rmer, Finner und Slawen (Berlin, Hertz, 1985). His influence was considerable : he was partly responsible for the enduring interest of German (and other European) geographers in agrar structures. The weakest part of his work was the ethnic interpretation he gave to the distributions he observed. The research developed by German scholars in the 1940s definitively ruined his main thesis : the rural landscapes in Europe were not the consequences of the migrations of peoples. Their genesis occured much later from the 6th century only for the openfield systems for instance. Otto Schlter (1872-1959) gave German geography the main tool it used in its cultural approach for about three quarters of a century : its focus on landscape. The Ratzelian conception of geography broke the unity of the discipline, since i twas divided into a physical and a human parts. Focusing on landscapes avoided this division. At the same time, this drew attention on the significance of culture in the shaping of landscape. As Schlter wrote : The study of the phenomena of folk and cultural life whatever they may be to explain the geographical scene, shaped for me the persuasion that above all it was necessary in geography to find a clearly delimited area of research within its human aspects. This I perceived to be in the visible cultural landscape (Kulturlandschaft), just as the natural landscape gives us the object of study for physical geography (Schlter, An autobiography , 1952, quoted in R. C. West (ed.), Pioneers of Modern Geography, Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University, 1980, p. 69). As a result, the German approach to cultural geography focused mainly, until the 1970s, on settlement geography and the visible cultural landscape. It explained the historical dimension it often took.

The French contribution Geography developed rapidly in France from the 1870s. There was a strong national tradition, but a good part of the new orientations came from Germany : French geographers often quoted Ritter, Ratzel and other German colleagues. How to study the problem of man/milieu relationships ? This appeared as an essential question for most of the people who were interested in the discipline, but there were many ways to cover the question. Had not it be a central theme in Western thought since the time of Hippocrates, in Greek Antiquity ? Vidal de la Blache, who tried for a time to exploit this avenue, soon discovered that it was not really rewarding. He looked for another path. Emile Levasseur have showed that the relations between human groups and their environment were 3

best expressed through density maps, which pictured the number of persons and the area which had to feed them. Geographers had to study the way people exploited the region in which they lived ; their recipes varied according to their mobility ; it was not the same for nomads, who kept moving from pasture to pasture according to the growth of grass, and for sedentary farmers. In order to understand the way they earn their lives out of their fields, it was necessary to describe the time when they tilled the land, sown it, cropped it. As indicated by Vidal de la Blache in the 1880s, the analysis of man/milieu relationships involved, for the rural societies, an analysis of their ways of life, genres de vie. The emphasis was first on the technical aspects of farming, the time and tools it needed, the seasons when the work had to be done. But the analysis could not be circumscribed to purely technical matters : depending upon the time, the work was done by young people, men or women. The moves between the different parts of the cultivated area had to be coordinated. The organization depended also of the place where the farm was built, isolated or in a village. A part of the time was devoted to social relations, religious life, leisure, entertainment. The analys of genre de vie soon became an all-encompassing device. It spoke as much of social life and activities as of the ecology of the group. Ways of life, Genres de vie were developed to take advantage of the specificities of the local environment and climate, but they were not purely adaptative practices. In the same environment, possibilities varied according to the techniques used : the same North American environments in which nomadic Indian hunters and occasionnally farmers were unable to feed more than a person for each square kilometer appeared as wealthy areas to European farmers using draught heavy ploughs. One of the best examples of the analysis of genres de vie was provided by Jean Brunhes in his m o n o g r a p ho na nA l p i n ev a l l e y , V a l d A n n i v i e r s : he detailed the way men, and in some cases, whole families, moved up and down, according to the seasons, to herd the cattle towards the Alpine pastures and then down, scythe the grass of the meadows, till the fields in the valley or produce wine lower, in the Rhone valley. The elements of a way of life, a genre de vie, were tied together for other reasons : people got accustomed to the work they did, the techniques they used, the time-tables they followed. Each genre de vie was conducive to a specific array of farm productions. It was associated with specitic food, and specific food habits. Genres de vie were the expression of material cultures, but incorporated habits and mental processes. When German geographers stuck to the visible forms, French ones were freer to incorporate other elements, forms of sociability or collective preferences for instance. In his Tableau de la gographie de la France (1903), Vidal de la Blache described the ways of life associated with each natural regions. He showed also that they share many social and cultural components when they were practiced in contiguous areas. A partition in four parts could be proposed in this domain : (i) Northern and Eastern France was characterized by the predominance of villages, an intense life of relation and an opening to progress. (ii) In Western France, most farms were isolated, which was conducive to a lesser intensity of social relations and a frequent refusal of progress. (iii) In Mediterranean France, the population was concentrated in big villages, with a high level of

social interaction, but it was less open to modernity. (iv) In between these three main areas, there was a transition zone with mixed character. Because genres de vie had a cultural dimension, people stuck to it. When they migrated, they tried to safeguard the elements of their way of life which were the most meaningful to them forms of sociability, food, but also farming techniques and crops. Thanks to the tool provided by the notion of genre de vie, French geographers were able, at least in rural areas, to provide a detailed analysis of cultures. They stressed their material expression, but incorporated also in their analysis other aspects. This wider curiosity for cultural realities was also expressed by the interest of many French geographers for specific landscape features the type of roofs in rural France, for instance, for Jean Brunhes. One of the followers of Jean Brunhes, Pierre Deffontaines, was the main responsible for the development of geographical research on cultures in France. He launched in the early 1930s a sery based on a simple idea : each volume was devoted to the study of the relations between Man and Mountain, Man and Desert, Man and Forest, Man and the Plough, Man and Vine and Wine, and so on. These books were clear, well written and attractively presented. The had many readers.

The American contribution The interest of American geographers in the cultural aspects of geography developed from the 1920s, at the time when human geography became really important in the States. The whole field was dominated by a prominent figure, Carl Sauer (1890-1975). He drew a part of his inspiration from German geographers born in a family of German immigrants, he was fluent in German and completed his studies in Germany. As a result, he focused on the analysis of landscapes of cultural landscapes. He also developed strong affinities with American anthropologists, Kroeber mainly, who taught also in the campus of the University of California in Berkeley where Sauer had been appointed in the 1920s. He borrowed from them the idea that culture was an all-encompassing reality which was dropped on human beings from above (but from where ?). His contribution was, however, deeply original, due to the fact that it gave to his analyses a strong ecological content. When studying the cultures of North-American or Mexican Indian tribes, or those of traditional farmers of Latin America, he was not fascinated only by the tools they used and the techniques they mobilized. He wished to know exactly how they transformed the natural environment in which they lived. As Eduard Hahn, he had a keen interest in the domestication of plants and animals. He was the first to show that the cultural geography men built had a biological and ecological dimensions. Because of his genuine interest in nature, he was very critical towards modern civilization since it did not respect the environments it exploited. The posterity of the Berkeley school of cultural geography was exceptional. Sauer kept his role as a leading figure until his death, in 1975. Some of his followers, Denevan for instance,

developed essential contributions to the understanding of what were the landscapes, the economies, the societies and the cultures of pre-Columbian America. Even if the Berkeley school kept active, new interests developed in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s.

A period of transition (1950-1970)

Attitudes of geographers began to change all over the World in the 1940s and 1950s. The paradigms imagined in Germany, France or the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had been conceived for a World where rural populations were still dominant and agriculture the most important employment sector. They did not work in a more industrialized, urbanized and uniformized World. Hence the search for new modes of analysis. Human geography ceased to be conceived as a science of places. The landscapes which may observed and the distributions which may be read on maps were the expression of social, economic and political processes. The aim of the discipline was to analyze them in order to understand the way they were translated into space. Human geography became a discipline in space, social mechanisms and networks. Since everyone, the layman as well as the scientist, was interested in growth and development, the main innovations occured in economic geography, which was rapidly transformed into a New Geography. For many theoreticians of the new orientations, the study of cultural phenomena was a legacy of the past which would rapidly disappear. For a very active minority, it was, on the reverse, a field which needed a deeper rejuvenation and modernization than the economic one. The work was, however, hampered by the prevalent neo-positivist conceptions of the time : geographers still hesitated in analyzing what happened in human minds. They still delt with culture from the outside. One of the sub-fields were the progresses were the more significant was that of religious studies. Even if the analysis of believes was still considered by many as off limits, important progress was achieved thanks to a more thorough analysis of the behaviours promoted by religions, of religious institutions, of the role of Churches and of monastic life : Pierre Deffontaines in France or David Sopher offered good examples of these new orientations. Xavier de Planhol, a specialist of the Moslem World, showed how the preference given, in the Koran, to either nomadic or urban life, explained a part of the geographical characteristics of Islam, the limitations of its agriculture for instance. For Pierre Gourou, one of the main specialists of the tropical World, the densities varied so much within uniform environments that he considered culture as the first factor of diversification. In order to explain this diversity, he described cultures according to two perspectives : that of productive techniques, and that of social ones which meant, for him, systems of institutionalized relations. The same attitudes prevailed among most tropical geographers at the time. John Brinckerhoff Jackson was not an academic. After World War II, when demobilized in Europe, he had discovered the cultural approach through the J o u r n a l d e t h n o g r a p h i e e t d e

gographie humaine , which has been launched by Pierre Deffontaines. His interest was not in the highest achievements of culture, fine arts, architecture, classic music, opera. It was located in vernacular cultures and the way they were expressed through ordinary landscapes. Landscape, the journal he launched when back to the States, in the 1950s, had a considerable influence in geography, urban planning and architecture. Thanks to him, the rural bias whhich had characterized most of the studies devoted to cultural realites since the end of the nineteenth century came to an end. In this way, he announced one of the main orientations of the next period. The case of Eric Dardel was different. He was both a geographer and an historian and taught in a secondary school, in France. His sources or inspiration were very different frome those shared by most of his contemporaries : he knew well the orientations of anthropology, and more specifically religious anthropology, through the father of his wife, Leenhardt, and one of the friends of this latter, Mircea Eliade. He had a strond interest in Heidegger and wished to translate some of his books into French. A protestant, he was deeply involved in modern theological reflection. As a result, the small book he published in 1952, L H o m m e e t l a T e r r e , Man and the Earth, differed from the dominant books of the time. The problem which was c e n t r a l t o h i mw a s n o t t h e d i v e r s i t y o f t h e E a r t h s s u r f a c e a n d t h e w a y i t c o u l d b e e x p l a i n e d . I t was the significance of Earth for human beings. Men and women inhabit the Earth : what does it mean ? His emphasis was on the sense of place and what he called geographicity, the fact for everyone had to live at a particular moment in a particular place. Dardel was ignored for almost twenty years. He was rediscovered only at the end of the 1960s by a Canadian geographer, Edward Relph and became one of the sources of the transformations which occured from then on.

From 1970s to the cultural turn

The main changes which occured in the World during the last forty years are linked to globalization. It resulted from the development of mass transport for raw materials and energy, from the container for industrial products. It grew also out of the revolutions of air transport and telecommunication. It provoked an explosion of international trade and flows, tourism, international migrations, and an explosion of communication thanks to the cellular phone and internet. This situation stimulated cultural contacts. The standardization of many aspects of daily life progressed rapidly. In a World changing so quickly, identities lost a good part of their bases. Violent reactions against the ongoing westernization multplied. Cultural problems became more acute. The development of the cultural approach in geography was particularly rapid after 1970, but its history is rather complex. It was only at the end of the 1990s that people became conscious that all the episodes of this history had to be considered as partial formulations of a deeper change, the cultural turn in geography, which occured at the time when the other social sciences experienced a linguistic and a spatial turns. As a result, the whole geography has

been transformed. Human geography is better structured than a generation ago, and its practitioners felt closer to the other social sciences and the humanities. The New geography of the 1960s differed from that of the first half of the twentieth century because of its emphasis on social, economic and political processes. It had really become a social science but it was a social science which still ignored what happened in the mind of human beings. From 1970 on, geographers became increasingly interested in the role played by images and representations in shaping the Earth.

The 1970s : a new attention devoted to the individual, his life story and his sujectivity All the transformations which ultimately led to the cultural turn did not originate in a major change in the sensibilities of geographers. Some of the first steps were taken by people who tried only to go deeper in the analysis of spatial mechanisms. An interest in the representations the individuals developed of the real world had appeared well before 1970. As early as 1956, an economic, Kenneth Boulding, had stressed the fact that human beings grasped only reality through the image they fom of it. An urbanist, Kevin Lynch, proposed, in 1959, to explore the images people had of the city. The study of mental maps soon became popular among geographers. The geographers of the 1950s and 1960s dealt mainly with groups, economies, systems, polities. The realities they grasped were medium-scale ones. They did not speak of the individual. In 1970, Torstein Hgerstrand proposed a new way to analyze social realities. Instead of describing the insertion of men into systems of social relations or classes at a given time, he prefered to follow the itinerary of each individual through time. He imagined a volume in which the geographical space was the basis and time the vertical dimension. In this volume, the trajectory of an individual was represented either by a vertical line, when he stood in the same place, and an oblique one when he moved. Social relations developed when people met in a particular location. The procedure imagined by Hgerstrand ruined the idea of society as an overall system, and of culture as an encompassing reality. Individuals were not integrated in the same way into social life ; the limits of the social system were not identical for all of them ; the luggage they received and their culture differed also. These new research orientations still used a traditional neo-positivist foundation. What happened in the early 1970s was different. Many colleagues were tired of the generalizing approach developed in the 1950s and 1960s. They had become geographers because they were fond of forms, colours, sounds and music. What the discipline offered them was a grey and featureless description of networks and flows. In the English-speaking World, a new emphasis on the Sense of Place developed. For French geographers, it appeared increasingly important to analyze l e s p a c ev c u , the way people experienced space. In the anglophone countries, colleagues as Yi-fu Tuan, Edward Relph or Anne Buttimer based their new approach on phenomenology. In France, Armand Frmont relied more on literary evidence. In both cases, the individual and its subjectivity became for the first time one of the main research field for geographers.

From the 1930s, ethologists had developed an interest in the territoriality of animals. This curiosity was extended to human societies in the 1960s. Human geographers rapidly adopted this theme. It led them to emphasize the role of power in human relations, the strength of the feelings of territorial ownership and the rootedness of human beings. By the end of the 1970s, a fascinating new field of research had been developed in this way. It gave a fair share to culture. It attracted many young scholars. Many colleagues criticized it, however : they found that the new orientation was too short on social realities and emphasize too much the role of the individual.

The 1980s : marxist approaches, cultural studies, structurationnism and postmodernism How the representations of big areas are built ? Benedict Anderson was the first to explore this geographical problem. The building of the images of nations, for instance, was a collective task which mobilized much energy during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries : the delimitation of the area, the construction of its symbolism and its diffusion thanks to school, literature and journals. A cultural process which played a central role in the modernization of the World was in this way identified for the time. There were other ways to explore the cultural experience of space. In Britain, a historian of British literature, Raymond Williams had developed new insights in the way to conceive the relations between infrastrustrures and superstructures. Instead of mainly locating the explanation of human phenomena in the economic infrastructures, he stressed the role of cultural superstructures : for him, each social class developed its own culture. The march of history resulted for a good part of the action of these collective actors. Stuart Hall, a Jamaican who had migrated to Britain, developed a new field of enquiries, cultural studies, which included fine arts, literature and research, the matter of humanities curriculum, but also the black arts of the medias and the slightly blurred sphere of popular culture (a mixture of what was formerly called folklore) and the proletarian arts, plus sport (Kuper, 1999, p. 229). With the growing interest in genre, the specificities of feminine subcultures were also explored. As a result of the publications of Denis Cosgrove, Peter Jackson and other colleagues, people started to speak of a new cultural geography. It was rapidly popular in the English-speaking countries. It broke with the traditional conceptions of the field by its criticism of the superorganic conception of Carl Sauer (Duncan, 1980). It focused on representations and images and broke with the traditional interest in material culture. The evolution of social sciences provided the new orientation with new epistemological foundations. The 1950s and 1960s had been the time of structuralism. Its results were fascinating, but it was unable to take into account change since it ignored individuals and the role of innovation. Hence the development of a new epistemological theory : structurationnism, best examplified in Britain by Anthony Giddens and in France by Pierre Bourdieu. It was a two-level construction : the results of structuralism provided the basis for a metatheory, which explained the way systems worked for long periods ; the introduction of a

mesotheory allowed for the initiative of individuals. Giddens took advantage, on this point, of the time geography of Anthony Giddens : there was nothing like Society or Culture as metarealities, but places, locales, were experience was passed down from a generation to the next, and were iniatiatives appeared. Thanks to Anthony Giddens, a spatial turn occured in the social sciences. Since an increasingly number of scholars got conscious of the fact that reality was only known through words and images, the foundations of positivist and neo-positivist epistemology were refuted : it wass the time of the linguistic turn. During the 1980s, the critics against Western modernity became increasingly numerous. The movement had started in architecture, where the opposition to the International Movement of Modern Architecture had gained momentum during the 1960s and 1970. By the early 1980s, the faith in Progress, which was one of the basic tenets of modernity, was fading away in Western countries because of the nuclear weapons and the increasing concern with environmental preservation and sustained development. The idea that reason was conducive to universal results began to be seriously questioned. The influence of the Francfort school of sociology and its critical conception of scientific enquiry, and that of French critical philosophers, Henri Lefebvre, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida or Gille Deleuze, were conducive to a reevaluation of the whole achievements of Western science and civilization . It was the basis of postmodernism : we were entering a period when people did no more believe that the future will be necessarily better than the present hence a devaluation of time in scientific thought. As a consequence, more attention was given to space, as advocated by Lefebvre. The growth of the curiosity for the cultural dimension of geographic reality was coeval with a deep transformation of the conception of the social sciences and history.

Contemporary evolution : postcolonialism, identities, cultural wars and the cultural turn Some of the transformations which intervened since 1990 were a direct consequence of the trends observed during the 1980s. As soon as the social sciences as developed from the nineteenth century were heavily criticized, it was normal to look back in order to evaluate the scientific practices of our discipline too. The movement was partly fueled by the book Edward Said wrote in 1977 on Orientalism. Its impact was decisive on the development of postcolonial studies, based on a critical revision of the traditional scientific views on foreign countries and a new curiosity for all the forms of interbreeding which resulted from Western imperialism (Gregory, 1994). Was the cultural approach in geography mainly turned towards the past, specially the history of the relations between developed and developing societies ? No : with globalization, all the societies were increasingly concerned by the problems of identity. Because the vernacular cultures of the past, strongly rooted in the localities where they were born, had been displaced by mass cultures, diffused by modern medias and offering the same features all over the World, many people had lost a part of the material criteria upon which their identities were

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built. Because of the crisis of Western rationalism, the universalist beliefs which provided also forms of identity are disappearing. Because of easier transport and communication, cultural contacts are becoming more numerous than in the past. They are often difficult. Fundamentalisms are more influential than in the past. Religious denominations are multiplying in many countries. Are we experiencing the clash of civilizations that Samuel Huntington theorized fifteen years ago ? Are we living in a period of cultural wars , as expressed by Don Mitchell in 2000 ? The multiplication of cultural relations induced by globalization and the crisis of Western universalism give cultural problems an acuteness they had not in the past. Is multiculturalism the only way out of the present situation ? At the same time, the geographers who were reluctant in accepting the new curiosity for culture discover that economic, political and social forces are not eternal. The definition of the products that are in demand is cultural. The organization of enterprises is also largely cultural, as the difficulties of international mergers of firms have showed many times during the last thirty years. As a result, geographers are discovering that their discipline has to be rebuilt along new lines : economic, social and political forces are embedded into cultural attitudes and values ; on the epistemological ground, Western science is nos as different of the the traditional forms of knowledge that people thought a generation ago. It is for these reasons that people are speaking of the cultural turn which started a generation ago and gained momentum during the last ten years.

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