关键词: 新文化地理学, “超有机体”理论, 文化的社会建构, 话题多样性

Abstract:

This paper presents an overview and scrutiny of what is termed the "new cultural geography", which first emerged in the 1980s and has acted as a radical rethinking and subversion of traditional approaches in cultural geography. This paper summarizes the fundamental rationales and orientations in new cultural geography from two perspectives. On the one hand, this study suggests that new cultural geography, as an established field of knowledge and research, does have a relatively unified theoretical foundation. Above all, new cultural geography rejects the idea of superorganism that undergirded the theoretical edifice in traditional cultural geography, especially the Berkeley School of landscape studies. It undermines the Sauerian view of culture as an ontological entity that determines ways of life from above. In contrast, new cultural geography conceptualizes culture as a social construction that emerges, in a bottom-up manner, from everyday life and social practices. It is contingent upon social contexts and the relations of production, and is radically unstable and dynamic. Culture, in this sense, provides a system of meanings and values that grassroots social actors inhabit and, in many circumstances, also contest. Meanwhile, geographical elements, such as nature, landscape, space and place, are not merely the passive expression or container of culture. Rather, they are inherently constitutive of cultural meanings, values, norms and ideologies. In other words, the formation of culture works through geography and spatiality as medium. On the other hand, this paper also stands for the diversity of research themes and topics. Such diversity should not be understood in terms of the risk of disciplinary fragmentation, but a necessary outcome of the reconceptualization of culture per se. Because culture is viewed as emerging from actual social practices and everyday life experiences, its study necessarily covers diverse aspects of social life. New cultural geography also places a focus on multiple social groups and scales, which further adds to its richness. This article calls for Chinese geographers’ enhanced engagement with new cultural geography. Not only to grasp better understanding of the ways in which geography is constitutive of meanings and values, but also to know how the study of culture has broader implications for other sub-disciplines in human geography, such as economic geography and urban geography.

Key words: new cultural geography, theory of superorganism, the social construction of culture, thematic diversity