Cultural geography
The cultural geography as a traditional part of geography deals with the influence of the human mind to the shape of geographical space. The name is also used as a synonym for human geography or anthropogeography.
background
This usage derives from the traditional geography of the 19th century. Culture was thought of as something essential that could be identified and demarcated for geography. In doing so, it faced physical geography (natural geography). In the second half of the 20th century, the concept of culture in German-speaking human geography increasingly took a back seat to social science concepts in the narrower sense - instead of cultural geography, people now spoke of human or economic and social geography .
Traditional cultural geography
As is widespread in Anglo-American countries, the term cultural geography traditionally encompasses the investigation of the interaction between man / society and landscape / environment in the sense of Carl Ortwin Sauer (1889–1975). Its ideas were primarily shaped by traditional German and French geography (e.g. by Otto Schlueter , Paul Vidal de la Blache ) - and hardly by British geography, which Sauer rejected. In some cases there is overlap with content that in Europe would be understood as a social geography in the sense of Hans Bobek or Wolfgang Hartke .
Post-structuralist "New Cultural Geography"
In the course of the reception of post-structuralist approaches and the cultural turn , which indicate that all social categories are ultimately made by society ( constructivism ) and thus also changeable, parts of human geography have experienced a conceptual reorientation since the 1990s under the concept of " New cultural geography ”. The " new cultural geography " or new cultural geography - which is sharply demarcated from traditional, materialistic cultural geography - sees itself less as a sub-discipline of human geography, but rather as a certain perspective that aims at the made-up of geographies, i.e. is interested in it what role the production of certain spaces plays in the production of certain social realities.
relationship
Both the post-structuralist approach of the “new cultural geography” ( discourses , deconstruction ) and the empirical- hermeneutic traditional cultural geography and its object of experience of the material cultural landscape exist side by side in the present, but hardly interact with each other due to ontological and epistemological differences.
See also
literature
- New cultural geography . Special issue PGM, Petermanns Geographische Mitteilungen , Issue 2/2003, ISSN 0031-6229 , Klett, Stuttgart 2003, ISBN 3-623-08102-7 .
- Christian Berndt, Robert Pütz (Ed.): Cultural Geographies. To deal with space and place after the cultural turn . Transcript, Bielefeld 2007, ISBN 978-3-89942-724-0 (= culture and social practice ).
- Hans Gebhardt (Ed.): Cultural Geography . Spectrum, Heidelberg / Berlin 2003, ISBN 3-8274-1393-1 .
Web links
- Conference series “New Cultural Geography” Since 2004, conference series taking place at the end of January. The website documents the development of the German-language “New Cultural Geography” in recent years via a conference chronicle.