and
Christian Welzel in 2004 ,
Kulintang, and
Piphat music culture in Southeast Asia Since the 1980s, a "new cultural geography" has emerged, drawing on a diverse set of theoretical traditions, including
Marxist political-economic models,
feminist theory,
post-colonial theory,
post-structuralism and
psychoanalysis. Drawing particularly from the theories of
Michel Foucault and
performativity in western academia, and the more diverse influences of
postcolonial theory, there has been a concerted effort to
deconstruct the cultural in order to reveal that power relations are fundamental to spatial processes and
sense of place. Particular areas of interest are how
identity politics are organized in space and the construction of subjectivity in particular places. Examples of areas of study include: •
Feminist geography •
Children's geographies • Some parts of
tourism geography •
Behavioral geography •
Sexuality and space • Some more recent developments in
political geography •
Music geography • Black geography Some within the
new cultural geography have turned their attention to critiquing some of its ideas, seeing its views on identity and space as static. It has followed the critiques of Foucault made by other '
poststructuralist' theorists such as
Michel de Certeau and
Gilles Deleuze. In this area,
non-representational geography and
population mobility research have dominated. Others have attempted to incorporate these and other critiques back into the new cultural geography. Groups within the geography community have differing views on the role of culture and how to analyze it in the context of geography. It is commonly thought that physical geography simply dictates aspects of culture such as shelter, clothing and cuisine. However, systematic development of this idea is generally discredited as
environmental determinism. Geographers are now more likely to understand culture as a set of symbolic resources that help people make sense of the world around them, as well as a manifestation of the power relations between various groups and the structure through which
social change is constrained and enabled. There are many ways to look at what culture means in light of various geographical insights, but in general geographers study how cultural processes involve spatial patterns and processes while requiring the existence and maintenance of particular kinds of places. ==Journals==