Cultural Geography Mark Paterson Cultural geography is a subdiscipline of human geography that explores the human organization of space and the impact of human activities and culture upon the natural environment. Human geography is one of the most active and interdisciplinary areas within the social sciences. There is a crossover in methodological and theoretical approaches with disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, and cultural studies. But cultural geography in particular retains its focus on culture and its signifying practices of self, groups, the creation of “others” and of worlds of experience while maintaining an emphasis on environment, space, and place. According to one of its most politicized proponents, its focus “includes the investigation of material culture, social practices and symbolic meanings, approached from a number of different perspectives” (McDowell 1994: 146). Broadly, the development of cultural geography arises in dynamic opposition to positivist themes in geography. We must remember that the roots of academic geography lie in colonial exploration and “discovery” (see, e.g., Driver 1992), which explains its strong predilection for “the empirical,” with fieldwork across sites, of going “out there” into the “field,” developing mostly descriptive accounts and seemingly hostile to theoretical innovations from outside (see Anderson et al. 2003: 8). Despite – or perhaps because of – geography’s colonial heritage, there is a critical edge to cultural geography that asserts its relevance, especially in the “new” cultural geography, by being radically interdisciplinary and by being influenced by, and in turn influencing, other disciplines and subdisciplines across the humanities and the social sciences. The story of cultural geography starts in the United States in the 1920s with the Berkeley School and the idea of the “cultural landscape,” but on its adoption in the United Kingdom the pathway diverges and the notion of cultural geography diversifies. Nevertheless, we can identify two clear historical waves in this story. Generally, the notion of “culture” that cultural geographers employ is comparable to notions of culture elsewhere in the humanities and social sciences, so that cultural geography shares with cultural studies and with cultural anthropology the interest in problematizing the very concept of “culture.” The influence of the Berkeley School persists in cultural geography in the US. This