Cultural Geography

The so-called 'cultural turn' in contemporary geography has brought new ways of thinking about geography and culture. Work on landscape, ethnography and iconography, on popular culture, and on the interface of critical, cultural and geographical ways of seeing, has taken cultural geography into exciting new terrain to produce new maps of space and place. Cultural Geography introduces culture from a geographical perspective, focussing on how cultures work in practice and looking at cultures embedded in real-life situations, as locatable, specific phenomena. Definitions of 'culture' are diverse and complex. Crang presents no single answer but explores a wealth of different cases and different approaches people have taken to various issues and ideas. Looking at how cultures are spread over, and make sense of, space, this book tracks the ideas, practices and objects that together form cultures - and how these cultures form identities for individuals and populations. Crang examines a range of scales as he considers the role of states, empires and nations, firms and corporations, shops and goods, books and films, in creating identities. Cultural Geography looks at the way different processes come together in particular places and how those places develop meanings for people, whether at a global scale or the intimate scale of everyday life. Exploring the diversity and plurality of life in all its variegated richness; how the world, space and places are interpreted and used by people; and how those places then help to perpetuate the culture, Crang develops the relationship of change and the possibility that current societies may develop a more pick and mix relationship to culture. Cultural Geography presents a concise, uptodate, interdisciplinary introduction to this lively and complex field, for students from a wide range of disciplines.