Geography 6742
Seminar in Cultural Geography
Spring Semester, 2006
Mondays 12:00 – 2:50 Guggenheim 201e
Oakes details
Email: toakes@colorado.edu
Web page: http://spot.colorado.edu/~toakes/
Phone: 492 3252
Office: Guggenheim 201b
Office hours: Thursdays 8:00 – 10:00
This seminar explores some critical developments and debates within cultural geography while, at the same time, introducing a sub-field of geography that remains notoriously difficult to define or characterize in any coherent way. The material reflects my interest in culture less as a social phenomenon with particular spatial expressions, than in culture as an idea and resource, with significant material and spatial implications. The seminar therefore assumes a discursive approach to culture. This said, however, I hope to resist any reduction of the discourse of culture to textual metaphors of interpretation. I thus remain consistently focused on the materialist implications of culture (not to be confused with an focus on “material culture”).
We will read one book in its entirety: Yúdice, George, The Expediency of Culture (
Requirements
Being there: The expectation of regular attendance, preparation for and complete participation in all meetings goes without saying. This doesn’t mean you have to be a blabbermouth. It is everyone’s responsibility to ensure a meeting environment in which all voices are encouraged, heard, and respected.
Facilitating: Everyone is expected to facilitate the discussion for one meeting (see below).
Writing: There will be a “mid-term” take home assignment. The specific assignment will be announced later and will depend on the nature of discussions during the first half of the semester. The primary product of the seminar is your research essay. It is expected that this paper will be submitted to a journal of your choice for publication consideration. The first draft of this paper will be due 17 April. I will get drafts back to you with comments by 1 May, and final versions will be due 11 May. I will be scheduling mandatory meetings during early March in which we will discuss you paper topic and strategies for publication.
Facilitators
Each week’s topic will have a designated facilitator (either an individual or team, depending on our numbers). Facilitating involves three separate responsibilities. 1) Write a brief position paper (see below) on the week’s reading, to be circulated no later than noon on the Thursday prior to class. 2) Facilitate discussion during the meeting. 3) Write a brief follow-up to be circulated no later than noon on the Wednesday following class.
Position papers
Your position paper should do two things. First, it should provide a succinct statement of the key arguments raised in each reading. This should be done with as much brevity as possible. Try to squeeze the gist of each reading’s argument into one sentence. Then, in no more than a paragraph, tell us what you think is important about that argument (if you think the argument is not important, then at least tell us why others might think it’s important). Second, engage the week’s reading in a critical fashion. This does not necessarily mean slaying verbally our authors (though that may be necessary on occasion), but drawing on their perspectives to raise a series of critical questions and issues for discussion, based on a coherent theme or argument. Use these papers to your advantage, by raising questions for discussion on topics of interest to your research.
Grades
Being there: 20%
Facilitating: 10%
Writing:
Mid-term: 20%
Paper: 50%
Additional Resources
For each week’s topic, readings are divided into “required” and “additional resources.” In addition to those listed in the schedule of topics, the following collections of essays on Cultural Geography may be helpful.
Anderson, Kay and Fay Gale (eds.) Inventing
Places; studies in cultural geography. (Melbourne: Longman Cheshire, 1992).
Anderson, Kay, Mona Domosh, Steve Pile and Nigel
Thrift (eds.). Handbook of Cultural
Geography (
Blunt, Alison, et al. (eds.). Cultural Geography in Practice (
Duncan, James, Nuala Johnson, and Richard Schein
(eds.). A Companion to Cultural Geography
(
Foote, Ken., Peter Hugill, Kent Mathewson, and
Jonathan Smith (eds.). Re-Reading Cultural Geography. (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1994).
Mikesell, Marvin and Philip Wagner (eds.).
Pamela Shurmer-Smith (ed.). Doing Cultural Geography (
Thrift, Nigel and Sarah Whatmore (eds.). Cultural
Geography: Critical Concepts in the
Social Sciences. Volumes 1 & 2 (
Schedule of topics and
readings:
1/23 Introductions / Assignments
1/30 Philosophy – a primer on epistemology and ontology
Required reading
Rene Descartes,
Meditations on First Philosophy,
“Dedicatory letter to the Sorbonne,” “Preface to the reader,” and “First
Meditation,” trans. by J. Cottingham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1986), pp. 3-15.
Immanuel Kant, Critique
of Pure Reason, , trans. by W. Pluhar, abridged by E. Watkins (Indianapolis:
Hackett, 1996), pp. 1-24.
Martin Heidegger, Being
and Time, Introduction Part I: “The necessity, structure, and priority of
the question of being,” trans. by J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (New York:
Harper & Row, 1962), pp. 21-35.
Additional
resources
Nicholas Bunnin and E.P.
Tsui-James (eds.), The Blackwell
Companion to Philosophy, 2nd Edition (
Simon Critchley and William
R. Schroeder (eds.), A Companion to
Continental Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998).
Hubert L. Dreyfus and Mark
A. Wrathall (eds.), A Companion to
Heidegger (
Jonathan Rée and J.O. Urmson
(eds.), The Concise Encyclopedia of
Western Philosophy, 3rd Edition (
Zalta, Edward (ed.), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (http://plato.stanford.edu/).
2/6 Culture – basics
Required
reading
Clifford Geertz, “Thick Description: Toward an
Interpretive Theory of Culture,” pp. 3-30 in C. Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973).
Edward P. Thompson,
“Community,” in The Making of the
English Working Class (New York: Vintage, 1966), pp. 401-447.
Raymond Williams, “Culture,” in Keywords: a Vocabulary of Culture and Society, rev. ed. (New York:
Oxford, 1983), 87-93.
Wilbur Zelinsky, “Process,” in The Cultural Geography of the
Additional resources
Roland Barthes, Mythologies,
trans. by J.
Clifford Geertz, Negara; the theater state in 19th
century
Marshall Sahlins, Culture
and Practical Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976).
Ellen Churchill Semple, “The Influence of Climate,” in
E.C. Semple, Influences of Geographic
Environment (Henry Holt, 1911), pp. 607-635.
Philip L. Wagner, and Marvin W. Mikesell, “The themes
of cultural geography” in Readings in
Cultural Geography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), pp. 1-29.
Raymond Williams, The Country and the City
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973).
Raymond Williams, Culture
(London: Fontana, 1981).
2/13 Culture - debates
Required
reading
James Duncan, “The superorganic in American cultural
geography.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 79:2
(1980), 181-198.
James Duncan, & Nancy Duncan. “Culture unbound.” Environment and Planning A 36 (2004),
391-403.
Stuart Hall, “New cultures for old,” in
Don Mitchell, “Culture wars: culture is politics by
another name,” in Cultural Geography: A
Critical Introduction (
Additional
resources
Lila Abu-Lughod, "Writing against culture,"
in R. Fox (ed.), Recapturing Anthropology:
Working in the Present (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press,
1991), pp. 137-162.
Clive Barnett, “The cultural turn: fashion or progress
in human geography?” Antipode 30:4 (1998): 379-394.
Denis Cosgrove, “Towards a radical cultural geography:
problems of theory. Antipode 15:1
(1983), 1-11.
Denis Cosgrove and Peter Jackson. “New directions in
cultural geography.” Area 19:2
(1987), 95-101.
Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, “Beyond ‘culture’:
space, identity, and the politics of difference” in Gupta, A. and
Peter Jackson, “The heritage of cultural geography,”
in Maps of Meaning (Boston: Unwin
Hyman, 1989), pp. 9-24.
David Matless, “Culture run riot? Work in social and cultural geography, 1994.”
Progress in Human Geography 19:3 (1995): 395-403.
Don Mitchell, “There’s no such thing as culture:
towards a reconceptualization of the idea of culture in geography,” Transactions of the Institute of British
Geographers, 1995, 20(1): 102-16.
Edward Said, “Narrative and social space,” in Culture and Imperialism (New York:
Vintage, 1993), pp. 62-80.
William Sewell, “The concept(s) of culture,” in V.
Bonnell and L. Hunt (eds.), Beyond the
Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture (
Nigel Thrift, “Literature, the production of culture,
and the politics of place.” Antipode 15:1(1983), 12-23.
2/20 Culture as resource
Required
reading
Stuart Hall, ”The centrality of culture: notes on the
cultural revolutions of our time,” in K. Thompson (ed.) Media and Cultural Regulation (London: Sage, 1997).
George Yúdice, The
Expediency of Culture (
Additional resources
Clive Barnett, “Culture, geography, and the arts of
government” Environment and Planning D:
Society and Space 19:1 (2001), 7-24.
Seyla Benhabib, The
Claims of Culture: Inequality and Diversion in the Global Era (
Tony Bennett, Culture:
A Reformer’s Science (London: Sage, 1998).
2/27 Culture as resource II
Required reading
George Yúdice, The
Expediency of Culture (
Additional
resources
See list for 2/20
3/6 Cultural economy
Required reading
John Allen, “Symbolic economies: the ‘culturalization’
of economic knowledge,” in P. du Gay and M. Pryke, eds., Cultural Economy: Cultural Analysis and Commercial Life (
Scott Lash and John Urry, Economies of Signs and Space (London: Sage, 1994), pp. 1-59,
111-144.
Daniel Miller, “The unintended political economy,” in
P. du Gay and M. Pryke, eds., Cultural
Economy: Cultural Analysis and Commercial Life (
Sharon Zukin, “Whose culture? Whose city?” in The Cultures of Cities
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 1-48.
Additional resources
Paul du Gay (ed.), Production of Culture / Cultures
of Production (London: Sage, 1997).
Roger Lee and Jane Wills (eds.), Geographies of Economies (London: Arnold, 1997).
Allen Scott, The Cultural Economy of Cities: Essays
on the Geography of Image-Producing Industries (
3/13 Landscape – vernacular and cultural
Required reading
J.B. Jackson, “The Word Itself,” in J.B. Jackson, Discovering the Vernacular Landscape
(New Haven: Yale, 1984), pp. 3-8.
Douglas W. Meinig, “The Beholding Eye: Ten Versions of
the Same Scene,” in D.W. Meinig (ed) The
Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes: Geographical Essays (
Carl Sauer, "The morphology of landscape,"
in University of California Publications in Geography No. 2 (Berkeley:
University of California, 1925), 19-54.
Additional resources
Jay Appleton, “The Problem,” in J. Appleton, The Experience of Landscape (New York:
Wiley, 1975), pp. 1-23.
Richard V. Francaviglia, The Mormon Landscape: Existence, Creation, and Perception of a Unique
Image in the American West (AMS Press, 1978).
W.G. Hoskins, The
Making of the English Landscape (London: Hoddard and Stoughton, 1955).
A.G. Isachenko, “L.S. Berg's landscape-geographie ideas, their
origins, and their present significance.” Izvestiya Akademii Nauk SSSR,
seriya geograficheskaya 4 (1976): 27-31.
J.B. Jackson, The
Necessity of Ruins (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980).
J.B. Jackson, A
Sense of Place, a Sense of Time (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994).
David Lowenthal, “The American scene,” Geographical Review, 58:1 (1968): 61-88.
Dean MacCannell, “The common landscape of John
Brinckerhoff Jackson.” Design Book Review 40 (1999): 50-56.
3/20 Materialist vs. textual readings of landscape
Required reading
Denis Cosgrove, Social
Formation and Symbolic Landscape, 2nd ed. (Madison: University
of Wisconsin Press, 1998), pp. 1-68.
James Duncan, The
City as Text: The Politics of Landscape Interpretation in the
Don Mitchell, “
Additional resources
Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels (eds.). The
Iconography of Landscape (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
W.J.T. Mitchell, “Imperial Landscape,” in W.J.T. Mitchell (ed) Landscape and Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994),
pp. 5-34.
Kenneth R. Olwig, “Recovering the substantive nature
of landscape,” Annals of the Association
of American Geographers, 1996, 86(4): 630 – 653.
Richard Peet, “Review of The City as Text.” Annals
of the Association of American Geographers 83:1 (1993), pp. 184-87.
Christopher Tilley, “The Social Construction of
Landscape in Small-Scale Societies: Structures of Meaning, Structures of
Power,” pp. 35-67 in C. Tilley, A Phenomenology
of Landscape: Places, Paths and Monuments (Oxford, U.K.: Berg, 1994).
Alexander Wilson, The Culture of Nature: North
American Landscape from Disney to the Exxon Valdez (Cambridge, MA:
Blackwell, 1992).
Sharon Zukin, Landscapes of Power: From
4/3 Dwelling and place
Required
reading
Martin Heidegger, “Building, Dwelling, Thinking” from Poetry, Language, Thought, translated by
Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1971).
Tim Ingold, “Building, dwelling, living: how animals
and people make themselves at home in the world,” in M. Strathern (ed.), Shifting Contexts: Transformations in
Anthropological Knowledge (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 57-80.
Gaston Bachalard, “Nests,” in The Poetics of Space, trans. by M. Jolas (Boston: Beacon, 1964),
pp. 90-104.
Keith Basso, “Wisdom sits in places,” in Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and
Language Among the Western Apache (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico
Press, 1996), pp. 105-149.
Additional
resources
Anne Buttimer and David Seamon (eds.), The Human Experience of Space and Place (London:
Croom Helm, 1980).
Edward Casey, Getting
Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993).
Edward Casey, "How to get from space to place in
a fairly short stretch of time: a philosophical prolegomena," in
Edward Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical
History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).
Lucy Lippard, The Lure of the Local: Sense of Place
in a Multicentered Society (New York: The New Press, 1997).
Jeffrey Malpas, Place and Experience: A
Philosophical Topography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
Edward Relph, Place
and Placelenssness (London: Pion, 1976)
Yi-fu Tuan, Space
and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of
Minneapolis Press, 1977).
Yi-fu Tuan, Morality
and Imagination: Paradoxes of Progress (Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1989)
4/10 Fantasies of home
Required reading
Peter Berger, Brigette Berger, and Hansfried Kellner,
“Pluralization of social life worlds,” in The
Homeless Mind: Modernization and Consciousness (New York: Random House,
1973), pp. 63-82.
Yi-fu Tuan, “Rootedness versus sense of place,” Landscape 24:1 (1980), pp. 3-8.
David Morley and Kevin Robins, “No place like heimat:
images of (home)land,” in Spaces of
Identity: Global Media, Electronic Landscapes, and Cultural Boundaries
(London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 85-104.
Soile Veijola “Heimat tourism in the countryside:
paradoxical sojourns of self and place,” in C. Minca and T. Oakes (eds.), Travels in Paradox (
Additional
resources
Mona Domosh, “Geography and gender: home, again?” Progress in Human Geography 22:2 (1998):
276-282.
bell hooks, “Homeplace: a site of resistance,” in Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural
Politics (Boston: South End Press, 1990).
Liisa Malkki, “National Geographic: the rooting of
peoples and the territorialization of national identity among scholars and
refugees,” Cultural Anthropology 7:1
(1992), pp. 24-44.
Biddy Martin and Chandra Mohanty, “Feminist politics:
what’s home got to do with it?” in T. de Lauretis (ed.), Feminist Studies/Cultural Studies (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1986), pp. 191-212.
Doreen Massey, “A place called home?” New
Formations 17 (1992): 3-17.
Jon May, “Of nomads and vagrants: single homelessness
and narratives of home as place” Environment
and Planning D: Society and Space
18:6 (2000): 737-759.
4/17 Traveling culture, mobile places
Required reading
James Clifford, "Travelling
cultures," in C. Nelson and P. Treichler (eds.), Cultural Studies
(New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 96-116.
Tim Cresswell, “Embodiment, power and the
politics of mobility,” Transactions of
the Institute of British Geographers 24 (1999): 175-192.
Claudio Minca and Tim Oakes, “Introduction:
traveling paradoxes,” in C. Minca and T. Oakes (eds.), Travels in Paradox: Remapping Tourism (
Georg Simmel, "The stranger," in D.
N. Levine (ed.), Georg Simmel: On Individuality and Social Forms. (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1971), pp.
143-149.
Additional resources
Iain Chambers, Border Dialogues: Journeys in Postmodernity (London and New York:
Routledge, 1990).
James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Later Twentieth Century (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1997).
Tim Cresswell, In Place / Out of Place: Geography, Ideology, and Transgression (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1996).
Tim Cresswell, “Imagining the nomad:
mobility and the postmodern primitive,” in G. Benko and U. Strohmayer (eds.), Space and Social Theory: Interpreting
Modernity and Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 360-379.
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Nomadology: The War Machine (New York:
Semiotext(e), 1986).
Chris Rojek and John Urry (eds.), Touring
Cultures: transformations of travel and theory. (London and New York:
Routledge, 1997).
Ginette Verstraete and Tim Cresswell (eds.),
Mobilizing Place, Placing Mobility: The
Politics of Representation in a Globalized World (
4/24 Politics of place
Required reading
Noel Castree, “Differential geographies: place, indigenous rights and
'local' resources.” Political Geography 23 (2004): 133-167. Available
online via Chinook.
Arturo Escobar, “Culture sits in places:
reflections on globalism and subaltern strategies of localization.” Political
Geography 20 (2001): 139-174. Available online via Chinook.
David Harvey, “Militant particularism and global ambition: the conceptual politics of place, space, and
environment in the work of Raymond Williams,” Social Text 42 (1995): 69-98.
Doreen Massey, “Power geometry and a
progressive sense of place,” in J. Bird, B. Curtis, T. Putnam, G. Robertson and
L. Tickner eds., Mapping the futures: local cultures, global change
(London: Routledge, 1993), 59-69
Additional resources
John Agnew, "The devaluation of place
in social science," in J. Agnew and J. Duncan eds., The Power of Place
(Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 9-29.
Tim Cresswell, Place: A Short Introduction (
Arif Dirlik, “Place-based imagination:
globalism and the politics of place.” Review, A Journal of the
James Duncan and David Ley (eds.), Place/Culture/Representation (London and
New York: Routledge, 1993).
Tim Oakes, “Place and the paradox of
modernity,” Annals of the Association of
American Geographers 87:3 (1997), 509-531.
Allan Pred, Place, Practice, and
Structure; social and spatial transformation in southern
Marwyn Samuels, “To rescue place,” Progress
in Human Geography 16:4 (1992), 597-604.
5/1 Place, identity, and consumption
Required reading
Jon Goss, “Once-upon-a-time in the commodity
world: an unofficial guide to the Mall
of America.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 89:1 (1999),
pp. 45-75.
Robert D. Sack, Place,
Modernity, and the Consumer’s World: a Relational Framework for Geographical
Analysis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), pp. 87-176.
Additional
resources
Jacqueline Burgess, and John Gold (eds.), Geography,
the Media, and Popular Culture (London: Croom Helm, 1985).
Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, “Millenial
capitalism: first thoughts on a second coming.” Public Culture 12:2
(2000), 291-343.
Kevin Meethan, Tourism in Global Society: Place,
Culture, and Consumption (Houndmills, Hampshire: Palgrave, 2001).
Daniel Miller (ed.), Worlds Apart: Modernity
Through the Prism of the Local (London: Routledge, 1995).
John Urry, Consuming Places (London: Routledge,
1995).