For geographers accustomed to the low, yet enduring profile shown by cultural/ humanistic geography over the decades, a silhouette that sometimes engendered a certain defensiveness by its practitioners, this last year has been characterized instead by highly visible activity: a well-known, committed and productive cultural geographer as AAG president, recognition of cultural geography as a specialty group within the association, a multitude of panels and special sessions on 'new directions' and 'emergent themes' in cultural geography, even multipleedition textbooks that attest to strong undergraduate enrollments in the area.Has a phoenix arisen? While we might blush from the renewed interest shown for our traditional concerns with culture, landscape and place, by both our own discipline and neighbouring fields, cultural geographers might also reflect upon and assess the positive and creative tensions resulting from the interplay between our traditional roots and contemporary social theory. I have shaped and structured this report to foreground the linkages between orthodoxy and our new directions; I write as one interested in a more 'theory informed' cultural geography, yet also as a participant sensing that our intellectual heritage has given us far more than we normally appreciate and that it would be more constructive to build from these roots than to sever them.
I Thinking about Carl Sauer's influenceBecause so much of the practice of contemporary North American cultural/ humanistic geography is linked to Carl Sauer and the 'Berkeley School'; an appropriate starting point is with recent works in 'Sauerology', the unpacking of and critical reflection upon the intellectual history, context and influence of that pioneer. In a posthumous article, John Leighly, who accompanied Sauer to Berkeley in 1923 and died in 1986, writes that Sauer used the term 'ecology' sparingly and, when he did, apparently only as metaphor and analogy in order to emphasize the moral responsibility humankind has towards the environment (Leighly, 1987: 406). He (Sauer) used this metaphorical power to move the study of human-environment relationships away from the morally neutral, mechanical at MICHIGAN STATE UNIV LIBRARIES on February 5, 2015 phg.sagepub.com Downloaded from
