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:� Y�dice, 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 R�e 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 Y�dice, 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 Y�dice, 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).