Louis DUPONT, Sorbonne Université, France
The cultural turn had an impact in the way we conceived geography and the way we practice it, it has favored a renewal and the diversification of methodologies. It moves geography closer to the social sciences, a move that contributed to the paradigmatic shift toward the environment in physical geography. In the United States, political and social geography, both with a radical component, pre-existed the cultural turn. Yet, since many social geographers got involved into the cultural turn, what emerged from it was called “new cultural geography,” a way of differentiating it from the “traditional” cultural geography inherited from Carl Sauer. Divergences on the cultural and the social remain, but convergences existed.
In France, the cultural dimensions had been studied within “human geography.” The cultural turn, introduced by Paul Claval, one of the most important figures in French geography, gave birth logically to la géographie culturelle. Claval put into place at La Sorbonne a research center, Espace et Culture, and created in 1992 the journal, Géographie et Cultures. It went into clashes with the then flourishing social geography and political geography, also associated with two other important figures: Roget Brunet, who founded L’espace géographique in 1972, and Yves Lacoste, who founded Hérodote. Both were associated with the renewal of geography against the hegemonic human geography of La Sorbonne; they were both realist, if not somehow positivist, and engage politically to the left. The debate was, and somehow, on which of the social or the cultural has prominence in explaining the world. I would like to go back to it, in relation to Brunet’s invitation in 2004 to geographers associated with the cultural turn and Geography and Cultures, to discuss postmodernism, at a meeting of L’Espace géographique’s editorial committee (vol. 1, tome 33).
Mots clés : cultural turn|social/cultural debate|French Geography
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