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Cultural Geography. By MIKE CRANG. London: Routledge, 1998, 215pp. 10.99 (pbk). ISBN 0 415 14083 8
The rise in the popularity of cultural geography following the so called 'cultural turn' has been perhaps somewhat slow to produce a comprehensive, introductory text. Mike Crang has managed to fill this gap admirably, by providing us with a new book which not only stimulates interest in the subject, but manages to explain the intricacies of the inter-relationships between space, place and culture in an accessible way. The book explores the complex and diverse concept of culture from the position of the geographer, by focusing on culture as a locatable, real-world phenomenon which varies across space and time. One of the key ideas that Crang threads through the book is that culture is a politically and contested notion, meaning different things to different people in different places.
The Introduction sets the scene by firstly defining what is meant by 'culture', and then by 'positioning culture' to show the importance of space to its articulation and reproduction. As Crang makes clear from the outset of the book, cultural geography is not simply the study of the spatial distribution of different cultures, but also and crucially the study...