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own culture on particular geographical areas." As such, Sauer and his followers
spent much oftheir time mapping material left behind by cultural groups which
once resided in certain regions." Physical artifacts like fences and cabins were
used by the Berkeley School to classify cultural traditions geographically.?°
By virtue of these practices, Sauer claimed: “culture is the agent, the natural
area is the medium, the cultural landscape is the result.”
Although embraced by scholars well into the 1990s, the Berkeley School
is now widely regarded as outdated.” Sauer and his followers. have been
accused of maintaining an “object fetish”, detrimental in that it can only
study past sedentary agricultural societies.** Research based on the teachings
of the Berkeley School has therefore come to be described as relying an
‘old’ cultural geography.** Conversely, ‘new’ cultural geographers avoid
basing their scholarship on tangible material and discernible landscapes.”
Instead, these scholars tend to understand geography as a “sophisticated
cultural construction.”*° The “symbolic qualities of landscape” (i.e. the
qualities capable of molding social meanings attached to geography) have
consequently become the main source of research for those espousing newer
forms of cultural geography.*’ Cosgrove and Jackson, for instance, use cultural
geography in order to “[give] meaning to an external world whose history has
to be understood in relation to the material appropriation of land.” Jackson
is especially interested in understanding culture as a “domain in which social
relations of dominance and subordination are negotiated and resisted, where
meanings are not just imposed, but contested.”” As such, cultural geography
has been found to serve scholars interested in postcolonial studies.*° Both
fields are said to have “intersected” in the past and will continue to do so in
the context of this paper."
‘New’ cultural geographers’ interest in the implicit meanings which
underlie geography stand in stark contrast to the explicit artifacts studied by
Peter Jackson, Maps of Meaning: An Introduction to Cultural Geography, New York, Routledge,
2003, 13.
Cosgrove-Jackson, New Directions, 96.
20 Ibid.
Sauer quote extracted from: Mario Bédard, La géographie culturelle québécoise: Rôle et
objet depuis la Révolution tranquille, Érudit, Vol. 51, No. 143 (September 2007), 222.
Price-Lewis, The Reinvention, 1-17; Cosgrove-Jackson, New Directions, 95-101.
Price-Lewis, The Reinvention, 3; Cosgrove-Jackson, New Directions, 96.
Price-Lewis, The Reinvention, 1-17.
Ibid.; Cosgrove-Jackson, New Directions, 95-101.
Cosgrove and Jackson, New Directions, 96.
27 Ibid.
28 Ibid., 95-96.
Jackson, Maps of Meaning, xi.
Catherine Nash, Cultural Geography: postcolonial cultural geographies, Progress in Human
Geography, Vol. 26, No. 2 (2002), 219-230.
31 Ibid., 219.
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