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Cultural/humanistic geography
David Ley
Prog Hum Geogr 1981 5: 249
DOI: 10.1177/030913258100500205
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What is This?
Cultural/humanistic geography
by David Ley
If there is one feature distinguishing human geography on each side of the Atlantic
then it is surely provided by the enigma of cultural geography. In France it appears
that the passing of the subject has been sounded (Kofman, 1980), in Britain its
popularity has been slender and its survival is uncertain (Area, 1980), but in North
America cultural geography remains a major focus of research and teaching; in 1979
more than one in six members of the Association of American Geographers identi-
fied themselves as a cultural geographer. Until the 1970s, the subject remained
closely tied to Carl Sauer’s Berkeley tradition, perhaps the major research school
that has arisen in North American geography (Leighly, 1979; Parsons, 1979). How-
ever, during the 1970s the humanistic movement added a disparate and lively con-
tribution which has included both endorsement and challenge to conventional work
in cultural geography. In this first review of cultural and humanistic work, we shall
range more broadly through its development and emerging themes during the
1970s; subsequent commentaries will provide a narrower discussion around a
smaller focus of research priorities.
in North America, particularly on the West Coast (Parsons, 1977; Spencer, 1978).
However, evenamong its adherents there is a sense that perhaps the best years are
past, that there are important shortcomings and omissions to the perspective, that
a redefinition is required (Wagner, 1975). The traits of Berkeley geography include
an historical orientation, an emphasis on man’s agency on the physical environ.
Despite the association of some of its major contributers, such as Yi-Fu Tuan,
with the Berkeley tradition, humanistic work did not initially set out to reform
cultural geography. Rather, in a classic opposition between thesis and antithesis, it
represented a reaction against the quantitative juggernaut of spatial analysis as it
gathered speed in the 1960s. The determinism, economism, and abstraction of the
early quantitative publications seemed to abolish human intentionality, culture, and
man himself. At best human variability, where it entered the analysis at all, was cast
in the uncomplimentary guise of Brownian motion, random perturbations around
a basic pattern. Bronowski’s unflattering characterization of society ’like a stream
of gas’ and the individual ’like an atom of gas’ (Haggett, 1965, 25-26) was not
allayed by the reassurance that because stochastic uncertainty existed in the phy-
sical sciences it might also be admitted to human geography. Not only the form
but also the logic of such a philosophy appeared profoundly dehumanizing.
In such an intellectual milieu it is not surprising that a counter current would
emerge which would highlight the distinctively human components of mind,
consciousness, values, or more briefly perception, which would seek affinities with
the humanities, including artistic and literary endeavours, and which would adduce
explored the sense of place of geographical settings both ancient and modern.
The subjectivity of landscape was carried a stage further in the revival bf J.K.
Wright’s geosophy (Wright, 1966) by cultural and historical geographers in their
examination of the geographic dogmas and fantasies which have influenced the
course of geographic exploration and settlement (Lowenthal and Bowden, 1976).
To evoke perception and values as major influences upon thought and action im-
plied that for the analysis to be consistent it should also be directed at geography
and geographers themselves (Ley, 1977a). In an important monograph, Buttimer
(1974) introduced the sociology of knowledge to human geography, asking re-
flexively what were the dominant values embodied within academic geography.
Were they values of self-awareness, of environmental harmony, or of technical
’
A third issue concerns the vexed oppostion between understanding and ex-
planation. Humanists have correctly criticized the instrumental approach to ex-
planation by geographic positivists which blurs the distinction between prediction
and explanation. But neither is the humanist quest for understanding the intents
and perceptions of decision-makers, necessary though this is, always identical with
the uncovering of causal relations. Action is a product of a set of inner and outer
contexts which may well carry explanation beyond the conscious intentionality
of a single individual or group. Among humanistic geographers, Samuels (1978b;
1979) has stressed as much as anyone the intentionality of a key individual in
reflecting geographic change, by applying the great man of history thesis to what he
calls the biography of landscape. But even a sympathetic analyst, studying the
impact of Mao Tse-tung, the ’Great Helmsman’, upon the remaking of the Chinese
landscape, has to make reference to contingency in, for example, the constraints of
historic precedent and geographic context, as well as to the will of a powerful and
self-conscious leader. Moreover, the construction of place is rarely as self-conscious
as the Chinese landscape ethic; it may also be unintentional, or at least the express-
ion of an individualistic or collective ideology which is not self-consciously articu-
lated or understood. Even here we have not exhausted the limits to the model
of purely intentional action, for the consequences of any act may not be com-
patible with the intent which brought it into being. Several studies of elite urban
and regional planning have stressed the deflection of initial aspirations by un-
foreseen events, so that as a result of unanticipated contingencies the outcome
of the planning exercise is unintended and even counterintuitive - at least to the
actors whose values gave the plan its substance (Ley, 1980b; Gibson, 1978).
What these empirical studies of place emphasize is the incompleteness of a
purely voluntarist model of human action, which exaggerates the role of the inten-
tionality of the individual or group. Methodologically what this means is that
understanding and explanation need not be synonymous. The explanation of an
action will usually need to pass beyond the intentions of the actors to include also
factors of which they may have been unaware, as well as constraints of which they
may have had some knowledge. The nature of place and the character of social
relations are negotiated realities, a social construction by a group of actors, who
although motivated by more or less well defined intentions, are neither all-knowing
nor all-powerful.
Consequently current work is beginning to develop-in areas concerned with the
constraints of group interaction rather than with the voluntarism of a single group
in isolation. Illustrative is the study of Kariya (1978) on the interface between
Canadian Indians and the federal Department of Indian Affairs, as he examines how
the identity and status of the Indian are socially constructed realities, emerging as
’
approach to the geography of crime which treats law and law enforcement as in-
dependent variables, commonly with unintended consequences in the incidence of
criminal acts. The themes of intergroup conflict and power relations are more
explicit in a study of not only the meaning but also the struggle for homeowner-
ship (Holdsworth, 1980), and an interpretation of locational conflict which em-
phasizes sociopolitical context, as urban development is regarded as the negotiated
outcome of competing interest group values (Ley and Mercer, 1980).
Research directions
’
[V .
fortified such traditions by giving them a more critical and philosophically and
theoretically informed orientation. The aim is to integrate the humanities and the
social sciences, to introduce the empirical and literary strengths of Vidal’s or
Sauer’s geography to the scholarship of social theory and the philosophy of science,
as well as to the historical context of an advanced and urbanized industrial society.
Major priorities within this work include a more penetrating analysis of culture
itself, and particularly the dominant culture of our times, the culture of consump-
tion. The lack of theoretical treatment of consumption in geography has been as
notable as the overcommitment to theories of production, but there are now several
useful starting points in social science for the development of a geography of
consumption (Hirsch, 1977; Diggins, 1977; Leiss, 1978). Secondly, and linked to
this, will be greater attention to the semiotics of landscape, the interactions be- .
tween place, identity, and social context (Godkin, 1977; Duncan, 1978; Rubin,
1979; Harvey, 1979). Thirdly, the place and nature 01 theories of power within a
humanistic perspective need to be- clarified. This is a major problem within social
theory, and is unlikely to be easily resolved within human geography. To date
much humanistic writing has followed an implicit Weberian line, akin to the mana-
gerial position in urban geography which stresses the role of institutional (espec-
ially government) decision-makers (Saunders, 1979; Ley, 1980c). These connec-
tions need to be examined more explicitly, and it is likely that they will be joined
by alternative materialist positions centred about the views of culture and society
found in the eclectic writings of Raymond Williams (1977) and E.P. Thompson
(1978). No doubt these developments will require detailed attention in later
reviews.
V References
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1977: The bicentennial landscape: a mirror held up to the past. Geographical
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Lowenthal, D. and Bowden, M. 1976: Geographies of the mind
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Lowman, J. 1979: The geography of crime: a critique of the analytical separation
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