Introduction of the Proceedings of the Conference, 18-20th of September 2003 - Gorizia Campus

What does the cultural approach offer to geography? In order to answer this question, we have carried out two types of analyses: 1- we examined the 90 communications presented duing the Conference of our Commission in Rio de Janeiro on 10-12 June 2003; 2- we compared recents books on cultural geography : those of Mike Crang (1998) for Britain, Giuliana Andreotti (1996-1997) and Adalberto Vallega (2003) for Italy, Boris Grésillon (2002) for France and Don Mitchell (2000) for the United States. The conceptions I have personally developed served as counterpoints in this analysis (Claval, 1995-2002).

“Diversity is at the heart of geography - from the varieties in continents and climates to the interrelationships between natural resources and how people live...All of us yearn for a world in which our views, our cultures, our beliefs, our fundamental rights, are respected no matter who we are, how we look, or where we come from”. This is how Mary Robinson, then UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, addressed delegates at the 29th International Geographical Congress in Seoul, 14-18, 2000, upon receipt of the Earth and Humanity Medal 2000 by the International Geographical Union. A few weeks later, scholars from all over the world assembled in Rome to explore the potential role of universities in the quest for a “new humanism”. “Renaissance humanism”, one speaker recalled, “set up a new idea of truth as a dynamic statement, not previously defined or constructed, but something to be discovered and then applied... the joint venture of new scientific discovery with the humanistic approach to mankind's problems enabled the university to nourish innovation and offer a rigorous critique of institutions and social relations”( Bricall, 2000). It was such “airing” of university life, in his view, that was sadly lacking today. Does the “cultural turn”, evident in geography and in a variety of other fields, herald such fresh air? It has certainly sharpened understandings of human behaviour in space, time and place; it has unmasked the myriad ways in which values and meanings are socially constructed; it has undermined previous hegemonies of orthodoxy and method and evoked a more general awareness of reflexivity in disciplinary thought and practice. In many ways the cultural turn has uncovered forgotten aspects of geography, signalling a re-turn to some of the unresolved challenges of the past. Given the challenges facing the discipline at the opening of this Third Millenium, it might be useful to reflect generally on developments during the previous century, and to identify ways in which the cultural re/turn might equip us to confront these challenges.

L’espace de la relation: le réel et l’imaginaire: un cadre idéal pour se laisser séduire une fois de plus, fascinés par les géométries chargées de géographie du bocage normand, par l’ambiguë et insaisissable idée du paysage qui pour les géographes humanistes a un plus grand attrait que celui de l’espace et matérialise avec plus de précision la relation entre la réalité et l’imagination.

How can we speak about modernity? David Harvey(1970/1997) speaks of spatio-temporal experiences and social practices that bring about a break with the past. How can one represent, Harvey constantly wonders, the coexistence of the ephemeral and the fleeting with the eternal and the immutable, or better, how can these elements actually coexist? To find an answer I believe it is indispensable to re-examine the work Passagenwerk by Walter Benjamin. He proposes adopting the principle of montage in the study of history. Therefore, when he says: “the first stage in this journey will consist in adopting the principle of montage in history; in other words, in erecting great constructions out of tiny building elements, cut out with clarity and precision; in discovering, indeed, by the analysis of the single small moment the crystal (essential nature) of the whole event; in breaking, therefore, with popular historical naturalism; in understanding the construction of history as such; in the structure of the comment (515) he is reflecting on how to increase the transparency of history itself by the application of the Marxist method. His method consists in using quotations and comments on life at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. His intention is overtly declared: “This work must develop to the highest degree the art of quoting without using quotation marks. The theory behind it is closely connected with that of montage” or yet again “The method of this work is literary montage. I have nothing to say. Only something to show. I will not remove anything precious and I will not appropriate any ingenious expression. Rags and rubbish, therefore, but not in order to make an inventory of them, but to do them justice in the only way possible: by using them” (514).

In the case of geography the cultural turn can be understood in three ways and we will define it in terms of three types of cases: 1. Varying emphases in the research and study of cultural geographical subjects. 2. A new general trend affecting not only cultural geography but also geographical thinking as a whole and 3. A change in the overall intellectual attitude of geographers. In this paper we shall limit ourselves to analyzing certain tendencies in geographical thinking that are a part of the cultural turn, highlighting - in the second case - what is happening today. This turn can be understood as described by Bergson in “L’Evolution Créatrice” (Bergson, 1907; Wright, 1947) when the attributed the idea of “becoming” to qualitative, evolutionary or extensive movement. The revaluation of what is qualitative would be a welcome alternative to the unbridled cult of the quantitative that has governed the last decades. Or, as Sorokin called it, to the “quantophrenia” to which geography has been no exception ( Sorokin, 1964). The evolutionary movement is to be noted when we contrast the normal interest that has always been manifested in the diverse processes of change on the face of the Earth with the accent now laid on the idea of ecological catastrophe. And finally the extensive movement might be considered as a more interactive and global vision of the Earth, going beyond the limits of traditional geography. Cultural tendencies are those that affect what is geographical in toto, in all its branches. These include geosophy, the purely sociological approach, an ideological approach and globalization - that we shall now proceed to analyze one by one.

Both political and scientific worlds are paying growing attention to the “conceptual chameleon” - according to Morin (2001, p. 99) - known as culture, in all its multiple forms: from identity to popular traditions, from religious issues to interethnic conflict. Like a river in flood, culture draws the attention of public administrators and politicians, journalists and scientists, entrepreneurs and essayists; unexpected changes occur in people who usually focus their attention on completely different matters, using very different terms. The geographical world is not immune from this trend. It is no accident – as pointed out by Claval (2002) – that many people speak about a “cultural turning point”, with regard to the fact that the cultural approach could give a new epistemological basis to the discipline. But is it really a turning point? Are cultural phenomena, aspects and problems treated in abstract or concrete terms? Are we speaking about containers or contents? A turning point means “a radical change in the course of events” (Devoto e Oli, 1995), and therefore a revision of contents – that is to say conceptual categories – in the light of new values, and verifying the compatibility of these values to other important questions of our times, such as eco-development, social justice or human rights. Without this revision, there is a danger that contradictions, incongruities and imprudence could emerge, with a layer of rhetoric covering cultural issues, as always happens when we speak about incontrovertible concepts without considering practical implications. The most relevant danger, however, is that culture could become a mere tool for political legitimization and social consensus, both in the economic world - following the new ethnic trend of the global market, more and more focused on local tradition, typical products, handicrafts - and the political world, whose interactions are being reformed on coordinates which are still unclear. In other words, there is the concrete risk that culture could become a mere romantic and reassuring label, which speaks of traditions, historical roots, of a simple world which no longer exists, but that at the same time guarantees the continuation of the status quo, disarming the critical capacities and canceling the intrinsic innovative potential. The cultural dimension, in fact, contains elements that could usher in a turning point, at least because it is able to trigger reflections related to the existential dimension of life, the relationships between human beings, the relationship between society and environment, the realm of the meanings and the symbolic values of objects and places, beyond the materialism and individualism of the modern age. It could be an important occasion for a general review of consolidated opinions and behavior, which are part of an entire way of interpreting reality and of pursuing progress, which is in an evident state of crisis and needs to be concretely rethought. This paper deals in particular with the case of cultural identity, which is one of the most treated topics in recent scientific literature and strongly linked to other important questions, such as multiculturalism, local development and cultural diversity. The aim is to give a critical reading of these topics and to make a proposal, starting from the basic geographical concept of scale.

Our first intention was to compare the names that actually have participated in the production of the ‘cultural turn’ in geography with the names which are actually available in Portuguese libraries and bibliographies. To do that we have made a very simple exercise that consisted in collecting ‘all the names’ which were present in the 4th edition of The Dictionary of Human Geography, and that were intimately correlated with cultural geography themes. The first blow was eminent: most part of them are not present in the various undergraduate courses available in Portugal, and neither in most of academic dissertations. Feeling rather alarmed with the extension of the list, we tried to make out some order of all these names by mapping them into a ‘conceptual landscape cartography’. The result is the one we can see on this map. This exercise would then consist of a sort of 'cross-section' in the conceptual landscape of cultural geography presenting ‘all the names’ arranged in conceptual spaces (the labels that structure the map) and by date: 1960s, green; 1970s, blue; 1980s, red; 1990s, orange. Being aware that this rhetorical device is subject to the same criticisms of its original exemplar, namely, that it is a freezing moment of a very complex process with differential temporalities which require a heterogeneous concept of time, that does not blur the different processes that are at work here.Vertical Themes With the aim of identifying some of the changing processes present in this ‘horizontal slice’ in time, we develop a 'vertical' arrangement of the politico-intellectual projects underlying this map. In no way it should be considered as a linear narrative nor subsume to genetic or progressive sequences. Even if the 'settlement continuity' metaphor may be appealing to us, the questions that lie behind the processes of appearance, disappearance and coexistence of research programs are of a complexity that can not be framed in simplistic notions of evolution or revolution. In science studies one may be tempted to use this simplistic notions guided by the maintenance of a certain grounded vocabulary, an entirely illusory device where the same words refer to quiet different things, as some quiet different words may refer to very similar things.

There is no room, here, to evoke the vicissitudes that the concept of landscape has passed through from the Nineteen century, when the diptych of the ambiguous terms Naturlandschaft and Kulturlandschaft debuted in German geography, to the Vidalian concept, arisen in the French geography during the early Twentieth century, to come to the approaches to some extent inspired to the general system-based epistemology, which were designed during the 1970s. What is worth mentioning here is that this evolution has been marked by two options: on the one hand, the option of considering the landscape from rationalism-inspired perspectives, which have led to design it as consisting of sets of tangible, essentially geological and geomorphologic, features inter-linked by cause-effect relationships; on the other hand, the option of considering the landscape as a set of symbols and values attributed by human communities to nature and to human prints in the Earth surface, therefore leaving rationalism in the background and focusing on cultural, essentially intellectual and spiritualist, manifestations. Till the 1970s the history of geography had been marked by many phases during which the former, rationalism-consistent, approach prevailed, and a phase, influenced by the approach from Vidal de la Blache, during which the prospect of placing human culture at the core of the consideration arose. Nevertheless, these options didnít acquire so clear features till the 1980s, when the positivism-and general system theory-inspired approaches, presenting the landscape as the result of geosystems and ecocomplexes, were rejected by the so-called humanistic geography, supporting views tailored to represent the landscape as a sort of a theatre where the existential conditions are performed. Letís compare these two perspectives, as they arose during the 1980s, by carrying out a landscape discourse encompassing (i) the object of representation, which may be called the referent according to the semiotic language, (ii) the representation itself, which consists of what is called the sign in semiotic terms, and (iii) the values attributed to the landscape features, which may be assimilated to what, sensu lato, is regarded as the signified by semiotics.

The project of Literary Parks, which represents a new organization of space and incentive for development is becoming increasingly more important in the new territorial politics, which is oriented towards the search for more sophisticated models of development able to combine protection and transformation of the environment

"Il pellegrinaggio nasce nel momento in cui si attribuisce a un luogo uno specifico carattere sacro" (Barber, 1991, p. 11)1 et il consiste en un voyage, court ou long, individuel ou collectif, vers des lieux souvent inconnus, même très lointains, censés être sacrés, grâce à une présence extraordinaire de Dieu. Ce voyage que l’on fait dans l’espace, devrait en même temps représenter un parcours intérieur d’évolution spirituelle, puisque son but est la conversion du coeur et une rencontre plus profonde entre Dieu et l’homme, ou bien, chez les bouddhistes, la recherche de la vérité.

The perception of space, according to Kant, has a pre-eminent role in the transformation of experience into knowledge: together with time it is an a priori representation that makes it possible to order the amorphous mass of subjective perceptions. It is an absolute space, which can be represented via pure intuition, but is not the fruit of a simple mental construct: the objects and their geometry exist per se and represent the assumption on which the intuition is based. Even today we may find traces of this way of looking at space in all fields of knowledge, as well as in daily individual experience, but tendencies towards more complex models are evident and frequent. As early as in the twentieth century, according to an authoritative literature, the shift in the very paradigm of knowledge from the Modern to the Post-Modern initiated a phase of profound transformation, which also had important effects on the concept of space. What seems to be broadly accepted is that this concept depends largely on the sociocultural context of the individual that constructs it and uses it. In the following pages I propose to investigate the popularity of this concept and the use that is made of it in the scientific community of the University of Lecce. In the first section I will try to provide an outline of the conception of geographical space (social and systemic) adopted in this study, starting with a few reflections on the limits of the traditional spacecontainer and the reasons for its use. In the subsequent sections I will present the survey carried out in the field: the concept of space that seems to emerge from the various experiences of life and research is systematically compared to the parameter constituted by the concept of geographical space defined in section 1; the ultimate objective is to identify clusters of disciplines that share the same idea (or the same ideas) of space, and to attempt to evaluate the distance between them, in terms of complexity. The survey also provides information on the epistemological evolution (or "trajectories" we might say) of certain disciplines, revealing analogies, in some cases unexpected, between fields of research that have traditionally been held to be quite distant from each other, and prompting a few considerations on the way in which the interviewees interpret the great cultural changes of the last century.

If it ever really existed, the notion of the South of Italy as a cultural landscape indistinct and primitive in its atavistic and dense backwardness was an imaginary vision of distant lands on the outskirts of Europe. A “paradise populated by devils” where the aforementioned backwardness consisted of violence, individualism, familism, fatalism and so on. Or even worse, a space where atavistic customs and modes of behavior are practiced and pursued with modern instruments. The question would for the most part be one of “passive modernization” (Cafagna, 1994), which with the homologation of consumption has merely recast ancestral modes of behavior which are still present and largely still active.

Nowadays territory and climate are recognized as factors that unquestionably affect social relationships. Many scholars (Crespi, 1992, p. 196) such as Aristotle, Jean Bodin, Charles Tocqueville and the Baron of Montesquieu (1973, p. 97), just to mention a few, have been concerned with this kind of conditioning influence. In particular, Montesquieu claims that there is a straight connection between democratic, republican and despotic forms of government and the spatiality of territory. Tocqueville (1973, p. 97) had attributed the affirmation of American spirit of equality to the wideness of USA territories compared to the extension of smaller nations. One can claim that cultural mediations are bound to the environment because the environment itself is mostly the result of transformations pursued directly by men or through their technological methodologies. This would justify the intersection between sociology and human geography studies that aims at contributing to the study of socialization dynamics based on the analysis of essential elements in the development of the environment. As Mautone (2002, p. 17) states, one of the key questions posed by human geography is establishing whether an individual is passively subjected to the influence of nature or, on the contrary, the individual has a crucial function. The author observes that under the influence of Darwinian theories, a large part of geographers have conceived the man-nature relationship in an univocal way: the physical element prevails on the human element. The turning point was the contribution of Paul Vidal de la Blache1, who claimed that an individual is no longer subjected to nature but he is able to interfere with it through exact decisions that come from culture, technology and history. Lucien Febvre (1966, p. 578) embraces the circular scheme of influences in socio-environmental processes, and he states that: "transformed, adapted and modified by man, the humanized earth undoubtedly reacts on man afterwards; but first of all it is the individual who will wield his power of transformation and adaptation on the earth". Even though Febvre seems to highlight human primateship, it is now self-evident that the relationship between nature and socialized man is not unidirectional. The natural environment to Febvre is a set of possibilities: social actors act towards it selecting it. “Nothing is given nice and ready from nature to man, nothing is imposed to politics from geography: there is simply the adaptation of man to certain possibilities"; however, the sensibility towards the environmental balance is a given fact. An issue of considerable interest is the distinction between complex and simple structures, and the analysis of the environmental factors that give birth to a certain kind of structure, being a structure a relational and diversified set of elements, where every element has a significance that is related to its role in the general context. In the light of this premise, it is necessary to consider environment conditions as something external, whose existence is a given fact, independently from social actors' actions, even if these are interpreted and represented through cultural categories which they belong to. These conditions are in close connection with social forms and at the same time they can be considered as structures: the featuring elements of such structures are the relationships that bind the different factors that constitute it and that acquire a meaning only if they are valued according to their position within the structure. An appropriate distinction is the one existing between natural and social environment conditions and system structures. The latter are born from the will of the social actor on the basis of historical experience; instead, environmental conditions are obviously a fact that is external to the social group it interacts with. Specifically, this paper will analyze how and to what extent the environment and most of the factors that constitute it affect the analysis of social processes and modify the identity of the individual. The entire argumentation will pivot on the crucial relationship of mutual exchange between human geography and sociology; in particular, the discussion will focus on environmental impact and social relationship, and it will aim at giving a possible interpretation to the close bond that links identity problems with globalization: the growing need of identification (localism) and, in extreme situations, the consequent birth of forms of narcissism. Through the observation of a case study on a very small area in Southern Italy, the present study will pinpoint how demographic impoverishment can bring about an identity crisis and even lead to a possible extinction of small communities. As mentioned above, some specific dimensions have a particular position among the environmental structures that act and affect social relationships: Mineral resources are linked to the natural environment because they are produced by the environment and they represent a pivotal element for social organizations. Moreover, the environment becomes at the same time a possibility and a limit for the exploitation of its resources. Environment’s exploitation (Vallega, 1998, p. 66 ff.) for the use of natural resources depends on manifold social factors. As a matter of fact, the demand for a particular resource by a given social group will affect both the appearance that such exploitation would cause and the supply of the resource itself that will tend to drain away more cautiously than others. Indeed, the question of mineral resources involves such elements as the demographic aspect, the social stratification, and the distribution of the population on the territory by sex ad age: this points out that the shortage of a resource determines the result of human intervention on the natural environment. Natural gas, for instance, acquires economic significance when man discovers its potentiality as a resource; but above all, natural gas acquires significance as the object of a change in behavior with respect to reality, as it is linked both to social experience and to the forms of symbolic mediation. The concept of shortage allows a double interpretation: it can be considered as unwanted, i.e. as the result of control problems and imbalance; or it can be regarded as intentional, i.e. caused by political and economic elements. Shortage lacks an absolute and objective principle, therefore it will necessarily have to be related to the problems of labor organization and production cycle. Temporality features all social relationships and the connection of social relationships with material and institutional elements. The concept of time gets different functions and meanings according to the cultural environment that it expresses to the extent that time can become a constitutive factor of the entire social reality to which it makes reference. The notion of time is changeable as it varies according to historical moments and circumstances. Development has certainly accelerated the pace of life that has become faster and faster through the centuries. A time component that seems essential for the creation of a social organization is predictability, which compels to the analysis of both past and future times. The analysis of time structures requires a clarification first of all: man follows given times, which are related to the degree of technological and cultural advance that the human group has achieved; on the other hand, nature itself has its own times, either brief or extremely long, which effectively represent a physical element that cannot be ignored by human structures. Nature and communities may seem to follow two separate histories, each one with a different rhythm, which try to cross one another involving different areas, now a small one, then a very wide area, until they get to involve the whole planet. Temporality can be considered as the result of socially codified expectations. Sociologist Durkheim (1971, p. 628) has coined the concept of 'social time', which he defines as "the pace of social life which lays at the heart of time category". According to the kind of relationship that social actors establish with their environment, time can be conceived as a reversible 157 circular dimension, as in traditional agriculture-based society whose production was bound to the cycle of seasons; or it can be regarded as an irreversible dimension, as in industrial societies whose production is not bound to seasons and it is oriented towards a basically infinite development. Also the theory expressed by Merton (1984, p. 263) is interesting in this respect. Merton's theory on socially expected durations is based on those expectations that feature a wide range of social structures. A simple and immediate example is the amount of time that is necessary for an individual to reach a social status within a group. The position held by any individual within the social structure is linked to the movement in time. As a matter of fact, populations change, the relationship between men and women, between the young and the elderly evolve, and as a consequence an individual's position on the imaginary social ladder changes. In order to tackle the question of time, one should observe how natural factors, even in this case, appear to be connected to the structure of social forms and to cultural expressions, with an intent of mediation towards the experience of temporality itself. How does time actually work on human structures affecting their organization? The following example may explain the question: according to the time in which the different lithosphere layers of a territory were formed, a given type of mineral will be found. At the time in which a social group settles down in an area, it will create the means and the workmanship that can exploit that mineral. Therefore, this will affect the organization of several aspects in the life of that social group, as well as the landscape. In addition to this, the study carried out by Belloni (1986, pp. 72-73) on “time budget” highlights the ways in which time is used in everyday life. Space acquires significance by virtue of the interaction between itself and human activity. Durkheimian concept of social morphology is described by the author in the following way: space is an element that is closely linked to the study of social morphology, and it is also a subject of reflection for social morphology. (Durkheim, 1922, v. II, pp. 541 ff). Within this scope, the role of natural environment in the formation of different kinds of societies is unquestioned. Though, it is difficult to separate the natural elements from the artificial elements that result from the action of social actors. As a matter of fact, the former are perceived within the society, but they are produced by the society as well. The contribution of historical experience is crucial for reaching a result as the analysis cannot ignore past experience. In this respect, the study carried out by Toynbee (1950, pp. 31 ff.) gives a great contribution: the author summarizes man-environment relationship into a sort of challengeresponse relationship. This is based on the situation portrayed by Febvre (1966, p. 578) who suggests a 'possibilist' theory: social actors who face bonds and opportunities offered by the environment choose according their own culture and technology. Therefore, one can state that cultural models condition the structure of spaces. 'Space' in most cases means to man urban space, and surely this is even truer today than in the past. Current studies in the field of urban sociology claim that [Guidicini] it cannot be represented any longer as the prototype of Enlightenment town that considered these as key features: beauty, justice, efficiency and truth. The concept of beauty is limited within well defined spaces and times, while efficiency and justice acquire a merely economic significance with respect to the allocation of resources; truth hands over to science and technology, which rise to absolute values. The discussion will now move on to the observation of the crossing between the birth of an environment such as the urban structure and the actions that social actors perform within the structure. When a town is born it respects the functional necessities that produce social behaviors; within the town a sort of hierarchical order arranges the artificial environmental structures and affects movement, integration and actors' social space. Buildings and their symbolic character represent and strengthen the collective identity and they weigh upon the social structure, therefore they become a dominance structure. Simmel (1995, p. 94) has underlined the ambivalent character of these structures: if on one hand the town offers an increased number of choices and chances of interactions between individuals, on the other hand, the town fosters such human relationship that may provoke loneliness and alienation.

The technology of mobile telephony, wireless networks, and the use of computerized geographical systems are reshaping the relations between human populations and the places they live in, which has always been the unifying factor in the science of human geography.