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Running parallel to this acknowledgement of this ‘situatedness’, was a shift away from positivist and scientific methods that dominated the 1960s with the quantitative revolution that utilized mathematical modeling and focused upon spatial patterns. The key methodological axis of the cultural turn thus focused instead on qualitative methods like textual analysis and ethnography which were borrowed from literary studies and social anthropology respectively.

Current Concerns: ANT and NRT

A critique of the cultural turn was that the focus upon the immaterial and invisible facets of culture meant the loss of interest in material phenomena as well as the abandonment of material social relations. Similarly, Thrift (2000:1) suggested that the cultural turn has become ‘culturalist’, for “ignoring the gritty aspects of life like poverty”. While this may suggest that cultural geographers have been caught up in a web of texuality, representations, deconstructions and meanings, and thus drifted away from the material world, Scott (2004) suggested that the material was by no means forgotten. Jackson (2000) proposed for a rematerializing of social and cultural geography and argued that the material world and culture provided a critical window to view globalization and its cultural impacts. This is because while globalization has resulted in the spread of particular cultures, local contexts still matter and that the interaction between local and global is mutually constitutive in complex webs of relations rather than unilaterally. Drawing upon some of his own works, Jackson (2000:10) then showed how the “meaning of material objects is embedded in specific cultural contexts as people use things to objectify social relationships…” through his studies on shopping, men’s lifestyle magazines and South Asian commodity cultures, arguing that importance of materiality is when it makes a difference, rather than assuming its universality. This reclaiming of materiality can be seen in recent development and adoption of the Actor-Network Theory (ANT) in the late 1990s in human geography, with its grounding in material relationalism that recognizes the possibility of both humans and non-humans as actors. Objects and material thus are not passive components of our world but rather constantly work in relation with human actors in assembling social order (Johannesson and Baerenholdt 2009).

“On the whole, cultural geographers’ use of theory remains resolutely representational…[and] dominated by tired constructionist themes” (Philo 2009:449). In recent years, there has been a shift away from representation, and towards performativity as the central focus of cultural geography. This came about with the recognition of the impossibility of objective representations of the world, despite researchers’ efforts to be reflexive, since we are all coming from particular backgrounds and positions rather than disembodied and objective beings. There is thus a ‘crisis of representation’ (Marcus and Fischer, cited in Bennett and Shurmer 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。