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which ideas and attitudes about people and places infused social life, and were responsible for the ways that repression and cruelty materialized’ (Gibson and Waitt 2009:415). This represented a shift towards poststructuralist approaches to understanding culture whereby it is no longer thought of as fixed or stable; it is instead fluid and constantly changing, a process of being rather than a possession. The value of poststructuralism thus “made it easier for cultural geographers to progress beyond simple descriptions, essentialist senses of uniqueness or determinist notions of construction…incorporating relativity and flux into geographical” (Shurmer-Smith 2002a:43-44)

 

The poststructural approach sought to unpack how ideas and knowledges about people are produced, maintained and circulated within societies. Culture geographers then became interested in interpretation and focused on representations of people and places for analysis. Landscapes as well as representations in books, media can all be considered a form of text from which it is possible to tease out the signs and symbols that embody meaning in all scales of life. For example, in deconstructing the map, a tool and embodiment of geography and scientific knowledge, Harley (1992:232) jolted the geography discipline by ‘challenging its assumed autonomy as a mode of representation’. Cartography and maps then are ‘ineluctably a cultural system’ (ibid). However, Derrida (in Shurmer-Smith 2002) also reminded us that what is NOT written/represented is important as well. Unpacking these representations (or the lack of) thus meant that the ‘new’ cultural geography acknowledges that culture is inherently political in nature since people have the power to choose what is represented and what is not.

 

The focus on representations can also be linked to postcolonialism since it is a close alliance of poststructuralism (Shurmer-Smith 2002b). Postcolonial discourses seek to investigate and highlight the lasting legacies of imperialism, and often similarly employ deconstruction techniques in analyzing texts and representations, in critique of foundational and structural discourses. Often thought to be the catalyst and reference point for postcolonialism, Edward Said and Orientalism uncovered the ideological disguises of Western imperialism and showed how the ‘Orient’ was created and imagined so as to dominate and justify their colonization (Gandhi 1998).

 

The ‘cultural turn’ thus discovered the immaterialities/invisibilities of humans, social life and culture – perceptions, understandings, worldviews and religion, which were previously obscured and sidelined. This focus on values, meanings and ways of constructing knowledges highlighted the importance of understanding culture as being situated. During the then-known SGSG conference whereby new directions in cultural geography were discussed, Philo (1987:179) commented how most contributors saw ‘relationships between situated cultures and myriad economic, social and political phenomena to be highly complex, extremely variable in space and time, and hence only properly appreciated through detailed empirical study’. 本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。