Page 28 - Cultural Studies A Practical Introduction

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Place, Space, and Geography

Culture is inseparable from location. Early human communities organized
themselves differently under the infl uence of different locations and envi-

ronments. Such ambient influences as climate, soil quality, and availability
of building materials contributed to what kinds of cultures were possible
or likely to develop. In turn, culture created and left its mark on its spatial
location, transforming the landscape in meaningful ways that embodied
the values, ideas, and needs of the particular community. Some developed
migratory communities in response to an environmental scarcity of
resources. Settlements were temporary rather than permanent; institutions
such as courts did not assume physical shape in buildings devoted exclu-

sively to the task of the adjudication of conflicts. Other communities,
relying on a greater availability of resources, were able to create urban
centers and lead more settled lives. If migratory communities maintained
civility through tribalism, patriarchy, and custom, such urban communi-
ties organized themselves around institutions such as laws and courts,
markets and government buildings, and community baths and military
barracks. Each kind of local physical world made possible a different kind
of cultural world, and in response, humans recreated a new physical
landscape, turning mud to brick, brick to buildings, and buildings to
institutions with meaning in that particular community. If you visit Rome
today, you will see stones lying about the old Forum that seem to have no
meaning, but put them back in place in your imagination, and you see
vibrant, living institutions that sustained the legal, political, and religious
culture of the ancient city. What Cultural Geography teaches us is that if
the world around us shapes our lives, we also make the world around us
over in ways that embody and embed our thoughts, imaginings, ideals, and
meanings. We turn stones into meaningful emblems of our civil agree-
ments and shared values. Cultural Geography is concerned with the way