当代西方“新文化地理学”知识谱系引论

INTRODUCTION ON KNOWLEDGE GENEALOGY OF NEW ‘CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY’

当代西方人文地理学在“后现代地理学”之后蓬勃发展起“新文化地理学”。新文化地理学是地理学的“文化转向”和“文化研究”以及社会科学普遍的“空间转向”之后的学术互动产物,它与地理学以往的知识遗产包括传统的文化地理学既有联系也存在从研究议题、概念、认识论和方法论的重大差别,是走向批评范式的人文化和理论化的知识体系。本文立足丰富庞杂的理论文献,全面综述和分析了新文化地理学的知识谱系和未来的发展走向。

New cultural geography is now at the central stage in contemporary western human geography after the post-modern geography. New cultural geography is the consequence of inter-academic influence between 'cultural turn' in geography and 'spatial turn' in social sciences. However, the production of knowledge and research in current Chinese geography is still dominated by the epistemology and methodology of scientific approaches, empiricism and positivism. New cultural geography is hardly known in China. This paper is trying to make a primary introduction and perspective on new cultural geography esp. its development after 1990s. On the one hand, the basic knowledge system of new cultural geography is introduced through comparison between new cultural geography and traditional cultural geography. On the other hand, the discussion is linked with geography's whole development process and its academy heritage's continuing and changing so as to grasp the genealogy of new cultural geography's philosophy, epistemology, methodology, conceptions, discourses, theories and themes. in a deeper and broader level. The whole paper consists of four parts. The first part is about the emergence of new cultural geography in the context of the history of geographic thoughts by indicating the break and connection between new cultural geography and the old one. The second part is about the background of new cultural geographies including post-modern social background and culture turn academic background. The third part represents eight thematic issues in new cultural geography covering cultural theory, landscape studies, local-global research, space and scale, geographies in representation and media, intertextuality and identity study in geography, theory of human-nature relationship, epistemology and methodology. The final conclusion part is a short discussion on the future trends of new cultural geography esp. what should be done in current Chinese human geography. Two theoretical tasks, which are named as the construction of special theory in cultural studies and the human-earth relationship theory beyond dualism, will be the future main issues in future development of new cultural geography. constructing the genealogy and mapping of terms and theories of western new cultural geography should be the main focus of Chinese geography in near future.