THERES NO SUCH THING AS CULTURE - TOWARDS A RECONCEPTUALIZATION OF THE IDEA OF CULTURE IN GEOGRAPHY

The reconceptualization of 'culture' in the hew cultural geography' has been important for turning attention to processes, politics and interrelationships with other 'spheres' of social life. But for all the important theoretical and empirical advances this reconceptualization has induced, cultural geography still reifies 'culture' and assigns it an ontological and explanatory status. In this paper I argue that such a reification is a fallacy and that cultural geography would be better served by following the 'new cultural geography' to its logical conclusion: a recognition that there is no such (ontological) thing as culture. I argue instead for a focus on the material development of the idea (or ideology) of culture. Such a further reconceptualization of the object of study in cultural geography may be undertaken in many ways but, by way of example, in this paper I suggest only one: how the idea of culture functions within systems of production and reproduction in the contemporary city. Through this example and the discussion that precedes it, I show that the recognition that there is no such thing as culture allows us better to theorize the workings of power in systems of social reproduction.