HANDBOOK of CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY

Cultural geography as a style of thought is not, to be sure, a singular worldview (not one way of thinking about the world; not a fixed question and answer session, as if in the latest game show), but a place from which to ask valid and urgent questions of the world; one in which the geographical is seen as constitutive of how the world is ‘made up’. More than this, it is also a small ‘p’ politics of the object (of all possible objects of knowing and unknowing) and of geographical relationships. It intends to change our minds about how those geographies came about – and, thereby, about what possibilities there are for changing things in the present, and in the future. This may seem hopelessly naive, but it is a modest endeavour. The cultural has modified the geographical, making it possible to study more and more ‘things’, but also to bring more and more ‘things’ under critical scrutiny. In some small way, then, it is about democratizing understanding, about being able to look to the world for the different things that are going on there. And to learn lessons from it. It is therefore no accident that this book has sections that seem to belong to other books – on the economy, maybe, or on the social (and we even begin the book with these).

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