Cultural Turn in Geography and its Impacts on the Field of Political Geography

Abstract

Introduction and Background Cultural turn is a collection of intellectual development that from the late 1980s has expanded the scope of geography and it has led to the centering of cultural issues in human geography. There are two types of cultural turn: the first one refers to theorizing about the world, while the second one is more philosophical and abstract. In second type culture is regarded as “as a way of thinking and knowing”. Aims Considering the importance of cultural turn for the field of political geography, and this fact that this issue has not been touched upon in Persian, the present paper addresses the impacts of cultural turn on the field of political geography. Methodology The present study uses “analytic-descriptive” approach as it methodology. Due to the nature of the topic, data was collected through library and internet research. The required information was extracted from books and papers and categorized, and then was analyzed qualitatively. Conclusion In political geography affected by culture, “political” has a meaning beyond the conventional meaning of official politics. In this regard political geography recognizes and represents the mutual effects of cultural “signs” and “symbols” on one hand, and “political acts” on the other. In this regard, in particular, the focus is on “meaning” and the struggle for meaning and discourse. The result of paper shows that cultural turn has had three main impacts on political geography. The first one is reformulation of the concepts and subjects of political geography from a cultural lens. The second impact is focus on new issues, such as cultural politics, which were not taken into consideration before 1980s. The third effect is attention to culture from the viewpoint of generating knowledge of political geography. In this respect, the social construction of knowledge by social groups in special time-place contexts and cultures is criticized and analyzed. In other words, political geography is evaluated on the basis of the culture of individuals who have generated this knowledge.