KULTUURIGEOGRAAFIA
Cultural Geography

Summary/Abstract: Cultural geography as a subfield in human geography focuses on the performance of cultures in space and takes interest in both material and non-material subject fields. Cultural geography concentrates on distribution (where things are and why), ways of life, systems of meaning, questions of practice; and notions of power. In this article I discuss the multiple directions of cultural geography in the context of the traditions of Anglo-American geography and human sciences and expand on the historical development and primary characteristics of Estonian cultural geography. The American geographer Carl O. Sauer is traditionally considered as the founder of cultural geography. For decades, Sauer and the Berkeley school kept the research focus of cultural geography solely on material culture and its physical manifestations. Determining the spread of various material phenomena and practices in space (i.e. the mapping of farmsteads, the spread of certain farm types, agricultural sowing techniques, the domestication of plants and animals, etc.) became the main concern of the discipline. In all, the main agenda of cultural geography during the first half of the 20th century comprised the following topics: human-environment relationships, which were studied via landscapes; the origin and spread of agricultural and other techniques; the regional varieties of material culture on planet Earth. The qualitative turn that reached geography in the 1950s weakened the position of cultural geography in institutional geography. A number of geographers of the time attempted to find a solution to the methodological issues in researching culture and environment by resorting to simple descriptions and avoiding the application of statistical methods. Thus in the 1970s there evolved a new, counter- reactionary branch called humanistic geography – a new approach that studied human awareness, agency, consciousness and creativity. Among the most famous representatives of humanistic geography there should be named Lowenthal, Tuan, Entrikin and Bunkπe. Humanistic geography achieved a muchearned breakthrough in geography and was integrated into the new directions of cultural geography in the 1980s. Criticism against the Sauerian traditional cultural geography with its exhausted core terms of „culture” and „landscape” that had been getting in the way of science for decades initiated the emergence of a new direction in cultural geography that is even now called „new” cultural geography. „New ” cultural geography is a school of thought that asserts the centrality of culture in human affairs and is interested in the contingent nature of culture, in dominant ideologies and in forms of resistance to them. Due to this change in direction, modern cultural geography is more closely connected with social and human sciences rather than with biology or geography. The strength of cultural geography, both in the theoretical and methodological sense, lies i

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