ABSTRACT
INTRODUCTION The literary critic Raymond Williams suggested that ‘culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language’ (1983: 87). That perhaps explains why it can be hard to define exactly what Cultural Geography is about. A starting definition – referring back to the original meaning of geography as ‘the writing of the world’ that was discussed in the Introduction to this book – would be that it involves the study of world cultures, or perhaps cultural worlds, or the worlds of culture. Certainly, each of these phrasings says something about the interests of Cultural Geography, but as you may have recognized, each carries a slightly different emphasis too. To understand these emphases, their differences and continuities, we need to deal with the complexity of the word ‘culture’ head on.
