The Cultural Geography Reader (review)

Cultural geography as a branch or subfield of human geography in North America emerged in the 1920s as a counter to the prevailing determinist ("geographic" or "environmental") currents of preceding half century. Carl Sauer, once in his Berkeley encampment, helped steer geography in general away from determinisms and the emergent cultural geography toward conceptual alliances with anthropology and practical engagements with Latin America as a main site of archival and field-oriented investigation. As a result, Latin America (including the Caribbean) figured prominently in the research, field experience and publications of the first two generations of North American cultural geographers. For example, nearly half (18) of the thirty-seven dissertations Sauer supervised at Berkeley were on cultural and/or historical Latin American topics. Subsequent research and publication by the other half often included Latin American items. From the 1930s through the 1970s Latin America (along with North America) was the site of much of the representative work by cultural geographers. Since the 1980s, cultural geography's visible centers of gravity have shifted radically away from earlier orientations. These disjunctions include: from rural to urban settings, from empirical findings to social theoretical formulations, from genetic/diachronic excavation to survey, analysis, and critique of contemporaneities.

The volume under review puts these interrelated shifts in clear focus. It joins several other collections published in the past few years celebrating the "new" cultural geography (Cultural Geography in Practice 2003, Handbook of Cultural Geography 2003, A Companion to Cultural Geography 2004, and Cultural Geography: Critical Concepts in the Social Sciences, 2004) as well as two earlier efforts to present cultural geography in all its plenitude (Readings in Cultural Geography 1962 and ReReading Cultural Geography 1994). In addition, since 1980s there have been a number of single-authored treatises as well as lesser collections on the nature and salience of a revisionist cultural geography. In this collective library's several thousand pages of text, Latin America in any guise or reference is almost non-existent. Out of 120 chapters in four new cultural geography collections mentioned above, only one is "about" Latin America, and this one only obliquely. It is a critical science studies meditation by Bruno Latour on the practices of Amazonian soil science. The earlier collections did somewhat better. Wagner and Mikesell's Readings included Lowenthal on Caribbean societies and Sauer on Middle America. Foote et al. ReReading also included two: Nietschmann on the Western Caribbean and Zimmerer on highland Peru. Clearly, Latin America has been read out of these more recent cultural geography readers. One might ask: "what to make of all this?" The easy answer is that the majority of editors and authors are from the U.K. or Commonwealth countries where Latin America is not a strong regional focus among geographers. But perhaps equally important is the relative weakness of anthropology, history or the natural sciences in the new cultural geographers' perspectives or practices. This is in stark contrast with traditional Latin American-focused cultural geography. While The Cultural Geography Reader joins the recent collections in an erasure of cultural geography's significant Latin Americanist roots, it does manage to include one reading by a Latin Americanist anthropologist, Arturo Escobar. Even this reading is pitched more at the global than regional scale, though he draws examples from his work in Northwest Colombia.

If only one out of fifty-two reading in this collection touch on Latin America, what then, does it offer the Latin Americanist geographer? Directly, not much. But as a source of readings on both traditional and current conceptions and executions of cultural geography, it has much to offer. The readings are divided into eight sections: "approaching culture"; "cultural geography: a transatlantic genealogy"; "landscape"; "nature"; "identity and place in a global context"; "home and away"; "difference"; "culture as resource." Each section is begins with an introduction that discusses the key concepts, its history and relation to cultural geography and connections to other disciplines and...