Page 35 - Cultural Studies A Practical Introduction

Place, Space, and Geography 19

attacking two of its of its most famous buildings – the towers of the World
Trade Center in New York City. The straight modernist lines of those
buildings and the way they projected in their verticality a sense of economic
power were signs for the attackers of the US imperial reach into their
countries and cultures by its support for Israel instead of Palestine, by its
overthrowing of democratic governments in places like Iran to install
pro - US dictatorships that made oil more accessible, and by its stationing
of armies in Arab countries in a way reminiscent of the Crusades, when
the West invaded the Holy Land. In Cultural Geography, much of what is
studied is tangled up with the West ’ s imperialist past. What languages are
spoken in a geographic region, what laws and institutions exist, and even
people ’ s relationship with their environment is related to who had power
in the past and who has power now. Physical symbols like the World Trade
Center towers are tied to issues of transnational power. If to Americans the
towers connoted beauty, grace, and human achievement, to the attackers

they signified something much more pernicious. They were less a symbol

of exalted ideals than they were a metonym, a figure or sign that was con-
nected to other realities that meant pain, disgrace, and humiliation to
Arabs and Muslims. It may seem odd to call the terrorist attack of 9/11 the
expression of a clash of cultural meanings, but considered in the frame of
Cultural Geography, that is what it was.
If quite disparate meanings can converge in built objects, the meaning
of landscape can also be changed dramatically and intentionally. Some
areas are objects of veneration because they pertain to certain religious
traditions. They cease to be a simple piece of rock. The Yellowstone River
Valley was such a place for the local indigenous people up until the nine-
teenth century, but once that natural site was taken over by Americans, it
changed meaning, became a “ national park, ” and evolved into a tourist
attraction that is sought not for its religious value but for its use as a dis-
traction from work life. The geographic change changed the economy of
the surrounding region as well.
Something similar happened in Mystic, Connecticut, in the US during
the decades of the 1990s and 2000s. The site at the mouth of a river was
originally a settlement of the local indigenous people, a group that the
European settlers who came in the seventeenth century called Pequots. The
Pequot settlement was eliminated in a massacre of the tribe in 1637. That
site today is a housing development, and until recently, a statue of the man
who led the massacre, John Mason, stood there. It was removed to a
museum after the Pequots began to revive and acquire economic resources