Charting the development of social and cultural geography in Mainland China: voices from the inside *

Abstract

This article provides an overview of the recent development of social and cultural geography in China. It discusses six major bodies of work: cultural areas, cultural diffusion and cultural integration; geographies of ethnic cultures; cultural landscape and cultural economy; place and place-based cultural politics; marginal social groups; and geographies of social injustice. Although social and cultural geography is still located on the periphery of the disciplinary landscape of Chinese human geography, it is nonetheless developing into a noteworthy field of research. We start this review by calling attention to some problems in epistemologies and analytical approaches. Social and cultural geography in China often suffers from an analytical separation between environment and culture as ontologically enclosed entities. Also, it pays insufficient attention to the mutually constitutive relations between the social and the spatial. However, more recent studies have begun to engage with constructionist/poststructuralist approaches, and develop less positivist interpretations of space, social relations and cultural meanings. This review suggests that social and cultural geography in China needs to develop broader research scopes and strengthen theoretical frameworks. It concludes by calling for constructive dialogues between Chinese and Western human geographical scholarships.

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