ABSTRACT
Along with Chapter 1, this chapter is about beginnings, about establishing some basic concepts that will be built upon throughout the rest of the book. Specifically, our task here is to look at two of the three concepts in our book’s title, culture and health, and link them together. We begin by defining culture, with some cautions about using this rather nebulous idea. Then, in order to provide context to the practice of cultural geography today, we briefly trace the history of the subdiscipline from ancient to modern times. In two sections we discuss both an ‘old’ or traditional cultural geography and a ‘new’ cultural geography, the transition from one to the other, and a partial reconciliation of the two. The new cultural geography is informed by social theory, which leads into a discussion of three ‘isms’: structuralism, humanism and postmodernism. Our look at structuralism includes underlying forces that create divisions and inequalities in society along racial, ethnic, gender and other lines; the role of capitalism in creating and maintaining inequalities; and the socially relevant work of structuralist geographers. The humanist approach is characterized by a focus on subjectivity, experience and meaning, informed by the so-called ‘philosophies of meaning’; practitioners employ qualitative, interpretive and ethnographic methods to ‘get inside the heads’ of the people they study. Our discussion of postmodernism examines notions of pluralism, difference and multiple voices; anti-narratives and deconstruction; and interpretive analyses of discourses. In the later part of the chapter, we turn to cultures of health, first discussing some specific ways in which cultural beliefs and practices affect the health of individuals and societies. Then we reinforce the culture-health link by showing how different aspects of health can be examined using some concepts from the old cultural geography, leaving approaches used in the new cultural geography for later chapters.
