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. |
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