On historical geographies of embodied practice and performance

Abstract

There can be little doubt that within the past two decades historical geography has succumbed to cultural geography’s siren calls. Indeed, few are the papers or books published in historical geography that do not directly refer to the manifold concepts of cultural geography or refer to works of cultural geography. Whilst it might be something of an exaggeration to claim that historical geography has been lured onto the cultural geography rocks, there is a profound need to take stock and critically consider whither “culture” in historical geography. Such a call, of course, is not new. A decade ago, James Duncan posited that culturally-informed—or rather inflected—historical geography had already fallen foul to a trait previously identified in cultural geographies of the here and now. It was, he claimed, too often derived from cultural theory as well as being detached from and resistant to empirical critique.1 Predicting later calls by Don Mitchell and Nigel Thrift in relation to cultural geographies of the here-and-now,2 Duncan concluded what was needed were more “modest” theories that reflected “complexity.”3 The problem, Thrift suggests, lies in the fact that the new cultural geography is obsessively built upon the politics of representation. The symbolic is therefore emphasised over and above the “responsive and rhetorical” and practice downplayed. Methods, he suggests, are needed which “co-produce” the world.4 Partly as a response to these critiques, a diverse range of social and cultural geographers have begun to move beyond “culture-as-language” metaphors and have begun EMBODIED PRACTICES IN HISTORICALGEOGRAPHY

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