Cultural Geography

CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY IS a subdiscipline of HUMAN GEOGRAPHY. The founding father of cultural geography in North America is Carl Ortwin SAUER, and most of the research in cultural geography from the 1920s to the beginning of the 1980s was carried out by cultural geographers walking in the footsteps of Sauer and the so-called Berkeley School. In this tradition, cultural geography is concerned with material facets of culture. On the agenda of the Berkeley School were cultural influences on, and shaping forces of, the transformation of landscape and the natural environment. In short, the role that culture plays as an agent of these changes.

In this respect, the American tradition of cultural geography of the 20th century was a dominating and highly influential one. Since the end of the 1970s, however, cultural geography in the anglophone scientific community took on a different face. Drawing heavily on British cultural studies, focusing on interpretative and empirical methods, and refurbishing social theory, cultural geographers of that time developed the socalled new cultural geography. The mere amount of studies and research that has been carried out until today under the banner of this new cultural geography, and also the colorful, true-to-life, and rich array of topics hosted by the discipline, made new cultural geography probably the most successful subdiscipline of geography throughout the last 30 years. This boom, the beginnings of which are often referred to as the cultural turn in geography, has changed the discipline fundamentally. 

Nevertheless, recently there has been a vivid, critical discussion about the shortcomings of these new cultural geographies, which is revolving around the topics of the dangers of a holistic culturalist approach and the dematerialization and the (missing) political potential of the new cultural geography.