Geographers speak of the cultural turn to describe what happened during the last ten years in our discipline. The old naturalistic and functionalist paradigms developed in geography have still an interest, but the new...Geographers speak of the cultural turn to describe what happened during the last ten years in our discipline. The old naturalistic and functionalist paradigms developed in geography have still an interest, but the new one is opening original perspectives on the significance of geography for everyone. It is this new field that the cultural approach has now to explore. The cultural approach opens new perspectives for research.The analysis of cultural processes has still to be deepened .As a result of the cultural turn, the role of culture ceases to concern only a sector of life: it permeates whole geography, which means that the reconstruction of social, economic, political, urban of rural geographies has to take into account the weight of culture in all these sectors and to insist on the fact that culture is unable to explain by itself geographical reality: it allows for an understanding of choices and behaviors; it influences social, economic or political processes, which means that culture weights on their results since it structures them, but not explain them by itself. Until the cultural turn, geography was mainly interested in present situations and in the constraints created by the natural environment and the past of the group under scrutiny. The role of time is essential in the new perspective. It explains the new interest for the relations between geography and ethics, induces the analysis of the different forms of temporality present in social life and reintegrates planning, as a form of normative thinking, in the sphere of geography. In its first phase, the cultural turn was responsible for the concentration of research on micro-scale cultural realities: this was useful to explore cultural processes, but cultures exist also as social macro-scale representations and have to be studied in this perspective. Geography existed before the development of science: hence the interest in the vernacular geographies of primitive or traditional societies, and the learnt geographies which were present in most of historical civilizations. The study of ethnogeographies is fundamental in order to understand what is geography and what are the new forms it takes because of the irruption og new technologies. The cultural turn gives more relevance to contemporary geography and insure it a more important role and a higher status in the concert of sciences.展开更多
文摘Geographers speak of the cultural turn to describe what happened during the last ten years in our discipline. The old naturalistic and functionalist paradigms developed in geography have still an interest, but the new one is opening original perspectives on the significance of geography for everyone. It is this new field that the cultural approach has now to explore. The cultural approach opens new perspectives for research.The analysis of cultural processes has still to be deepened .As a result of the cultural turn, the role of culture ceases to concern only a sector of life: it permeates whole geography, which means that the reconstruction of social, economic, political, urban of rural geographies has to take into account the weight of culture in all these sectors and to insist on the fact that culture is unable to explain by itself geographical reality: it allows for an understanding of choices and behaviors; it influences social, economic or political processes, which means that culture weights on their results since it structures them, but not explain them by itself. Until the cultural turn, geography was mainly interested in present situations and in the constraints created by the natural environment and the past of the group under scrutiny. The role of time is essential in the new perspective. It explains the new interest for the relations between geography and ethics, induces the analysis of the different forms of temporality present in social life and reintegrates planning, as a form of normative thinking, in the sphere of geography. In its first phase, the cultural turn was responsible for the concentration of research on micro-scale cultural realities: this was useful to explore cultural processes, but cultures exist also as social macro-scale representations and have to be studied in this perspective. Geography existed before the development of science: hence the interest in the vernacular geographies of primitive or traditional societies, and the learnt geographies which were present in most of historical civilizations. The study of ethnogeographies is fundamental in order to understand what is geography and what are the new forms it takes because of the irruption og new technologies. The cultural turn gives more relevance to contemporary geography and insure it a more important role and a higher status in the concert of sciences.
