英美文化研究与新文化地理学

Anglo-American Cultural Studies and the New Cultural Geography

自20世纪80年代中期以来,中国内地文化地理学是在引进国外文化地理学基础上发展起来的,审慎地借鉴国外文化地理学的发展经验,无疑会促进中国文化地理学的发展。作者从两个方面介绍了英美新文化地理学的两个特点,第一方面涉及景观分析的视角,首先新文化地理学不再侧重景观的形态研究,而是试图将景观的概念与其历史发展联系起来;其次,它注重分析景观的符号学意义,研究景观是由哪些符号构成了可供阅读的文本;第三,传统文化地理学对景观的研究集中在乡村地区,而新文化地理学则更多地研究城市的文化景观;第四,新文化地理学的景观研究具有很强的文化政治倾向。第二方面涉及文化的空间性。新文化地理学还将文化视为空间过程的媒介,强调文化渗透在生活的每个过程中,并决定着我们生活的空间性实践。所以新文化地理学重视空间,认为文化是通过空间组成的。作者还介绍了英美文化研究,并将之作为新文化地理学出现的学术背景。最后提出一个观点供读者讨论,即文化地理学是人文地理学的流派,而非人文地理学的一个分支。因为它以文化理论作为分析所有人文现象空间性的分析工具。

Cultural geography is an essential part of human geography. Its introduction to China's Mainland has fostered it embedded in Chinese geographic academy since the mid 1980s. It would be of benefit to Chinese cultural geographic study by borrowing the development experience of foreign cultural geography prudently. This article aims to give a brief introduction to New Cultural Geography which emerged in the two countries. The author took the Cultural Studies as its background. This paper presents two features in Anglo-American New Cultural Geography. The first is its new angle of view for human landscape study. New Cultural Geography has been trying to relate human landscapes to their evolution rather than emphasizing their morphology. It pays more attention to the symbolic meanings of human landscape and what made human landscape to be a reading text. Comparing with the traditional cultural geography, New Cultural Geography put more emphasis on the human landscapes in metropolitan area than rural area, the latter was the area to be concerned more by Suaurians. New Cultural Geography has a strong trend of cultural politics while it looks at human landscapes. The second distinct feature of New Cultural Geography is the spatiality of culture and the locality of culture. It takes culture as a media of spatial process. New Cultural Geography stresses that culture was infiltrated in all the processes of human life and guides our practice in the living spaces. So that New Cultural Geography implies culture is composed by places. Finally, the author would like to launch an associative discussion of the following topic. Cultural geography performances like a school of human geography rather than a branch of human geography, for it takes cultural theories as its analysis tools to study the spatiality of all human phenomena.