Page 30 - Cultural Studies A Practical Introduction

14 Place, Space, and Geography

same location. Someone living on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in a
luxury high - rise apartment will have different cultural experience from
someone living homeless on the streets below.
Culture is also spatial in that it provides us with a mapping mechanism
that allows us to move through space as we live. It provides a means to
assign meaning to events and things in the world so that we can negotiate
our way through life, knowing what stop signs mean, for example, or par-
ticular kinds of gesture, dress, and words. Such means of interpretation
also vary geographically, as when the same cultural artifact (a movie like
Rambo , for example) means quite differently in different locations because
different cultural grids or schemas of interpretation are applied to it. In a
western interpretive context, the movie might mean “ heroic western male
successfully exercises violence against Asian nemeses, ” while in an Asian

interpretive context such as Tonga, it means “ heroic fighter against oppres-

sors, ” with “ Asian ” disappearing as a significant meaning. In this sense,
culture is always perspective, the place from which we view the world, and
that place will always be spatially limited and geographically circumscribed.
It embodies our gender, our personality, our community, and our race to
the degree that those manifest themselves as languages for knowing the
world. To know as a White Western European living in the US as I do is
to see the world from one location, not another, to give expression to the
schemes of one culture and not another. Culture, then, is always situated,
always located, always spatial, and always geographic. It is the expression
of where we are. Finally, culture is geographic and spatial in an economic
sense. When International Monetary Fund loans to countries like Jamaica
mandate that local onion farmers must accept competition from low - cost
corporate producers like Dole, the spatial and cultural world is trans-
formed. Small farms disappear as income disappears, and the culture of
entire Jamaican valleys is erased because there is no longer a market for
their products.
Culture transforms the physical world. It is the tool with which we
impose civility on a natural world that is inherently uncivil, violent, and
meaningless. Landscape can thus be said to be a distillate of culture. Every
time we modify a natural landscape by building on it or reshaping it, we
invest it with our intentions, our ideas, and our meanings. A landscape
comes to have meaning when it ceases to be a simple physical object and
is invested with our needs, designs, and imperatives. It becomes like a sign,
something that can be read as having an idea behind it, much as a stop
sign, while being a red metal physical object, also contains embedded