ABSTRACT
In an area of overlap between radical and humanistic geography a new cultural geography is emerging (Ley 1985, Johnston et al. 1986, Cosgrove & Jackson 1987). A number of features distinguish this new cultural geography from the old, from the tradition deriving from the work of Sauer. There is a humanistic emphasis on the symbolic as well as on the material dimension of culture – on painting, literature, and the mass media as sources as well as on more palpable artefacts like fences and farm buildings (Cosgrove & Daniels 1987). Moreover, the very distinction between the material and the symbolic is brought into question with the development of the analogy of all artefacts – from poems to maps to fields of crops – as cultural texts or representations (Daniels & Cosgrove 1987). There is a radical emphasis on culture as a medium of social power, in the making of élite or official authority, for example in landscape parks (Daniels 1982a) and disciplinary institutions (Driver 1985), and in the exercise of power apart from, or against that authority, for example, in urban graffiti (Ley & Cybriwsky 1974) and rock music lyrics (Jarvis 1985). As these examples suggest, there has been a broadening of the purview of cultural geography from predominantly agricultural landscapes (often by implication stable and premodern ones) to include more explicitly dynamic landscapes (modern or postmodern cities and suburbs) (Ley 1987) and an endeavour to explicate the conflict and tension in rural landscapes that seem on the face of it to have none (Daniels 1981, 1982a, 1982b). Landscape, the central concept of traditional cultural geography, does not easily accommodate political notions of power and conflict, indeed it tends to dissolve or conceal them; as a consequence the very idea of landscape has been brought into question (Punter 1982a, 1982b, Cosgrove 1985).
