Cultural geography is the study of place and space and how these particular places hold different cultures that are composed of everyday interactions and meanings. This study demonstrates how parts of locations are peoples lived experiences and is a representation of particular places and spaces. Cultural geography looks at how these places can affect our identities and how our identity effects the people within different cultures.
To study cultural geography you have to look at three concepts and how they contribute in making up the complex system of cultures, identities and meanings. These concepts are: space, place and landscape. Each one of these concepts are the main way to comprehend this study and relate to peoples everyday life experiences and how people live their lives in completely different ways.
Space: this is the idea of things, an area, existing somewhere. This is an area without any form of meaning. This is often a an area that has no connection to a human and is a space that simply just exists completely without any form of meaning.
Place: this involves particular locations within space that are given meaning by people. This often can be depicted by how people interact, create lifestyles and cultures within this location which end up making it a place. This concept of a place is full of human experiences, representations and identities. Places are experiences differently depending on the persons identity and history such as Mexico’s Day of the Dead also known as Día de los Muertos which is a symbolic celebration and represents a day or mourning and a way to show respect for deceased family members, so for people within this culture celebrate along with honour people and is a deep rooted tradition. Whereas this event is simply a celebration of festivities, face paint and is a representation life and death to most of the rest of the world and doesn’t hold much meaning, which shows that different places have different lived experiences and meanings.
Landscape: A representation of a place or space. This is often shown as themes such as skylines, countrysides and city-lines. This can be represented through paintings, photos or through an actual location.
This can involve a more virtual version, social media apps has not gone
unnoticed (Cresswell,2015), which would then link to digital geographies. However, one of the main theorists Cresswell talks about the difference between the two geography concepts and both the positives and the negatives of mapping out the world in digital, ‘Recognizing the danger in Google mapping the world, others are producing an open source map‘ (Cresswell, 2015).
Struggle over virtual place reflects longstanding struggles over place by protest movements around the world.
T. Cresswell, 2015
Human geography is study of people relationship with places and can often involve peoples relationship with places, health and human interactions with their environments. ‘Human geography is therefore all about understanding why the spatial nature of ‘social things’ matter.‘ (Jones, 2012), which demonstrates that this concept of human geography heavily links to social aspects.
Place names have high levels of importance and are often a necessary when it comes to cultures. Examples of this would be Canada’s history of colonization exertion of nation and power building, with the use of shared meanings such as them decolonizing place names which will shift a shared meaning.
Other ideas of cultural geographies involve around identities within cultures and how this aspect likes to places such as the highly popularised film: Black Panther, which has high representation African landscapes and places. Another example would be Coco which is based on the culture of Mexico and the festival of el Día de los Muertos.
Undoubtedly, this reversal in geography’s fortunes reflects a wider recognition that many of the current and ‘big’ challenges that face the world today are well addressed by the subject: globalization, climate change, sustainability, economic development or poverty reduction.
A. Jones, 2012
References:
Cresswell., T. (2015). Defining Place, ProQuest Ebook Central, https://files.coventry.aula.education/ce980315f83da93d9cb62306de166a61creswell___defining_place_in_place___an_introduction.pdf
Jones, A. (2012). Human Geography : The Basics. ProQuest Ebook Central,. https://files.coventry.aula.education/b6a3641cd1074a3cd3ab9454ba8e80e1jones___introduction__human_geography___the_basics.pdf
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