Cultural geography II

Abstract

Recent cultural geographic research, located at a variety of settings (laboratory, clinic, battlefield, container port), has emphasized culture’s productive dimensions through studies of the linked construction of nature, culture, and technologies. In this second of three reports, I examine a range of scholarship that asks in different ways what it means to be formative in the production of nature, and I discuss the implications of recent efforts to rethink culture as a form of productivity. Some of this formative cultural work is scientific and intellectual, and geographers have sought to understand the practices of scientists, medical researchers, folklorists, and others engaged in the work of producing new objects of nature, culture, and the human body. Their work suggests that science and other modern forms of expertise perform a peculiar kind of cultural work in the production of nature, carving out and occupying positions of privileged, albeit still contested, ontological actors. I also note recent efforts to reconceptualize broad categories of space, surface, and ‘land’ around similarly generative cultures of knowledge and innovation, reflecting related ontological concerns for engaging with culture, ‘culturing’, and cultivation as productive processes. I argue that questions of technology remain inseparably tied to constructions of nature, and that technology still has much to disclose in terms of its cultural geographies.