Loading field map
Cultural geography has long been shaped by a central tension: how to account for the interplay between environmental conditions and human creativity, and how to interpret the landscapes that result from that interplay. Over the past century, five major frameworks have each offered a different answer, often by critiquing the limitations of their predecessors. The story of cultural geography is not a simple linear progression but a series of debates, absorptions, and living disagreements that continue to define the subfield today.
The first distinctive framework, possibilism, emerged in the early twentieth century as a direct counter to environmental determinism. Where determinists argued that the physical environment dictated human activity, possibilists insisted that nature sets limits and offers possibilities, but human culture and choice determine which possibilities are realized. This was a crucial shift: it restored agency to human groups and opened space for studying cultural variation. However, possibilism remained vague about how culture itself operated.
The Berkeley School, founded by Carl Sauer in the 1920s, transformed possibilism's insights into a rigorous empirical program. Sauer and his students focused on the material cultural landscape—the visible, tangible marks of human habitation such as field patterns, house types, and settlement forms. They treated culture as a superorganic force: a collective, self-perpetuating entity that shaped individual behavior and left a coherent imprint on the land. This approach replaced possibilism's abstract notion of choice with a concrete methodology of field observation and historical reconstruction. The Berkeley School's lasting infrastructure—its emphasis on landscape morphology, diffusion studies, and archival fieldwork—became the dominant tradition in cultural geography for decades. Yet its superorganic view of culture was increasingly criticized for being static, homogenizing, and blind to internal conflict and power.
By the 1970s, a growing dissatisfaction with the Berkeley School's objectivism gave rise to humanistic geography. Drawing on phenomenology and existentialism, humanistic geographers such as Yi-Fu Tuan and Edward Relph argued that cultural geography had lost sight of the subjective, lived experience of place. They insisted that landscapes are not just material artifacts but are charged with meaning, emotion, and intentionality. Where the Berkeley School saw a superorganic culture acting on passive individuals, humanistic geography centered the conscious, feeling human subject. This was not a wholesale rejection of the Berkeley School's empirical legacy; rather, it narrowed the focus to the experiential dimension that objectivist methods had overlooked. Humanistic geography revived questions of sense of place, home, and alienation, but it soon faced its own limitations. Its emphasis on the individual subject made it vulnerable to charges of ignoring social structures, inequality, and the political forces that shape landscapes.
The 1980s brought a more radical transformation. New Cultural Geography, inspired by poststructuralism, feminism, and Marxism, rejected both the Berkeley School's superorganicism and humanistic geography's individualism. Instead, it reframed culture as a contested field of power, meaning, and identity. Landscapes were no longer seen as neutral records of adaptation or as expressions of subjective feeling; they were texts to be decoded, revealing how social relations—class, gender, race, colonialism—are naturalized and contested. This framework absorbed the Berkeley School's interest in landscape reading but infused it with critical theory. It also absorbed humanistic geography's concern with meaning, but insisted that meaning is always political and produced through discourse. New Cultural Geography's methods—iconography, discourse analysis, ethnography—became central to the subfield. It remains one of the most influential frameworks today, especially in studies of cultural politics, heritage, and identity.
Just as New Cultural Geography was consolidating its dominance, a new challenge emerged in the mid-1990s. Non-Representational Theory, developed by Nigel Thrift and others, argued that the focus on representation, text, and meaning had gone too far. Cultural geography, they claimed, had become overly concerned with what landscapes signify and had neglected the embodied, pre-cognitive practices and affects that constitute everyday life. Non-Representational Theory shifted attention to performance, movement, sensation, and the non-human. It did not reject New Cultural Geography outright but coexisted with it in a state of productive tension. Where New Cultural Geography analyzed how landscapes represent power, Non-Representational Theory asked how bodies, things, and spaces are brought into being through ongoing practices. This framework revived some of humanistic geography's interest in experience, but it replaced the centered human subject with a more distributed, relational understanding of agency. It has been especially influential in studies of mobility, affect, and urban life.
Today, cultural geography is marked by a pluralism in which several frameworks remain active, each with its own strengths and blind spots. New Cultural Geography and Non-Representational Theory are the leading paradigms, and their disagreement over the primacy of representation versus practice is the subfield's most generative debate. They agree that culture is not a fixed, bounded entity but a dynamic, contested process. They also share a commitment to qualitative, interpretive methods and a suspicion of universal laws. Where they diverge is on what deserves analytical priority: the symbolic meanings encoded in landscapes and texts, or the embodied, often non-conscious practices that produce those landscapes. This is not a disagreement that can be resolved by one side winning; rather, it has spurred methodological innovation and cross-fertilization. Humanistic geography persists in a transformed form, especially in work on emotional geographies and place attachment. The Berkeley School's landscape methodology remains a staple of historical and rural geography, though stripped of its superorganic assumptions. Possibilism's legacy endures in human-environment geography, where the idea of environmental possibilities rather than determinism is taken for granted. The result is a subfield that is theoretically diverse, self-critical, and continually rethinking its core questions.