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Maps of Meaning
This innovative book marks a significant departure from tradition anlayses of the evolution of cultural landscapes and the interpretation of past environments. Maps of Meaning proposes a new agenda for cultural geography, one set squarely in the context of contemporary social and cultural theory. Notions of place and space are explored through the study of elite and popular cultures, gender and sexuality, race, language and ideology. Questioning the ways in which we invest the world with meaning, the book is an introduction to both culture's geographies and the geography of culture.
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First published January 1, 1989
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About the author
Peter Jackson
14 books2 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.
Peter Jackson is Professor of Human Geography at the University of Sheffield where he leads theCONANX research group which focuses on consumer culture in an 'age of anxiety' with a particular interest in consumer anxieties about food.
Peter Jackson is Professor of Human Geography at the University of Sheffield where he leads theCONANX research group which focuses on consumer culture in an 'age of anxiety' with a particular interest in consumer anxieties about food.
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October 25, 2020
This is virtually a textbook on cultural geography. Although the edition I read was published in 2003, this book was first published in 1989 – so, it is getting quite old now. I’m not entirely sure if that matters, but it is worth noting.
While it is pretty obvious that ‘culture’ might be a contested term, it only occurred to me recently that geography might be too. I got into trouble early in my PhD when I said ‘feminist geography?’ It hadn’t occurred to me that geography could come in different flavours.
What the author is seeking to move beyond here is a ‘cultural geography’ of landscapes – where you might count how many telephone booths there are or supermarkets you can find in an area. Not that this might not be useful, but rather that this shouldn’t be the limit of your observations. He also wants to move beyond Marxist materialism as the geography of space being a matching of economic social relations as exemplified by the spatial conditions that facilitate those relations – you know, ‘oh look, there’s a factory, oh look, there’s a road’.
In particular, I think he wants to leave room for how space impacts upon and is used by people of different genders, sexualities, races – as well as by people of different social classes. I first became interested in these questions when I read some books on how students use school grounds – basically, how children interact in spaces during their recreation times during the school day. Different students are likely to use different areas and materials – whether playing sports, reading, talking, eating. Most of the space is likely to be taken over by boys playing – and the potential roughness of their sport is likely to exclude others – push them to the margins. The girls’ spaces are likely to be confined and highly policed simply by this boys’ play – the boys not really letting them enter these boys only spaces. This is also likely to be true of non-Anglo boys and particularly non-Anglo girls – a book I read years ago spoke of how Latino children gird themselves before they walk through these white-only parts of school grounds, and leave these spaces as quickly as they can. That none of these areas are labelled as ‘white boys only’, say, is at least part of the reason they continue to be allowed to exist. Some schools note this and so enforce areas on their sporting grounds where only girls can play, for instance.
Space is anything but the unmarked, absolute stage that Newton required it to be. The relativity of place ultimately depends on fields of power – so that one person walking through a space that seems neutral and completely non-threatening can be anything but for someone else. You know, the archetypal example being a woman walking down a dark laneway at night as something significantly different to a man doing the same thing. Or, the fact that no white boy is likely to be murdered for eating Skittles in the way that Trayvon Martin was – and if a white child was murdered eating Skittles, their murderer would be unlikely to be found not guilty. Space isn’t value free – who you are matters in spaces and who you are determines what you can and cannot do in those spaces. Contesting those limits is the pathway to change, you know, think Rosa Parks.
Spaces exert pressures upon us too. They have cultural meanings that we respond to and not just in ways that imply we always accept the rules imposed by those spaces as they act upon us and as these are defined by those in power. Different groups might respond in ways that contest the implied power relations of spaces – even if they do this surreptitiously – prostitutes and gay beats, for instance. These responses seek to change the taken-for-granted ways space is expected to operate.
I was talking to a friend today about this and in trying to explain it I mentioned a couple of different spaces in Melbourne that had many aspects in common, but that required fundamentally different responses from people interacting with them. One was the State Library and the other the Shrine of Remembrance. There are lots of commonalities in these two spaces, both have domes, guards, books, inscriptions. You are expected to be silent in both spaces, but the silences have significantly different meanings and ‘feel’ different too, I think. You are also meant to be ‘respectful’ in both spaces, even when not being totally silent, but this too is different in both spaces.
The differences are interesting as well. The Shrine doesn’t really have a purpose outside of a symbolic one of remembrance and ceremony. It is an inside space, but feels more ‘outside’. There may be no time limit for being in the Shrine, but there is nowhere to sit or make yourself comfortable, either. The library can be used for ceremonies too, but it is really a place of work. The books in the Shrine have the names of all of the Victorians who participated in the First World War. They are stored in glass cabinets that no one can access other than the person who turns a single page each day in each book. As such these books aren’t really for ‘reference’. There is a sense in which the point of the books in the Shrine is that they are not to be read, but that their unreadability is part of the meaning – containing far too many names to be read – is actually the point.
How silence is used and maintained in the two spaces is another important difference. Every hour in the Shrine there is a kind of ceremony that replicates the ‘real’ ceremony for which the building was literally constructed. This is the moment that occurs at 11am on the 11th of November when the light from the sun streams through a hole placed in the wall in the Shrine so that a beam of light moves across the grave of the unknown soldier, illuminating the word Love at the exact moment of Remembrance Day. However, because the Shrine was built prior to daylight saving being introduced, the light from the sun now needs to be redirected by mirrors to achieve the same effect an hour earlier. The hourly mock version of the ceremony may not have the full significance of the annual one, but it is still observed in reverent silence.
While silence is expected at the State library, the space is recognised as a workspace, and so silence cannot be mandated in quite the same way. Young students use the space and there are often the sounds of flirting in multiple languages. Homeless people sleep in some of the chairs in the library. People met and wonder about, tourists take photographs, the space’s purpose and purposes are multiple and sometimes conflicting. Contesting the official purpose of the library is much more likely and much more evident than contesting the official purpose of the Shrine.
All the same, recent demonstrations at the Shrine to protest the State Government’s Covid-19 restrictions have been met with a very strong police presence, something unlikely to have been the case, at least since some of the restrictions have been lifted, if the protests had occurred elsewhere. That is, the protesters focused on the Shrine so as to attract more attention that would not be available in other spaces.
As I said, the Shrine has a confined purpose – but this can bring it into conflict with groups other than those designated as appropriate to paying remembrance of war in society. In my 20s, feminist groups used to protest during the ANZAC Day parade against rape in war. I always thought this presented an interesting dilemma – since the real problem was the unsubtle implication that the veterans themselves had been rapists. But it is all too clear that rape occurs in wars and that no civilised society could reasonably excuse it. No one that I remember ever argued against the women protesters that rape in war was a good thing. The forceful suppression of women making this protest tended to reinforce their point, I’ve often thought.
I read a book a while ago called ‘In the Meantime: Temporality and Cultural Politics’ – basically the time version of cultural geography. The point made in that book was that a business person and a taxi driver need to end up in the same place at the same time, and that this is true virtually by definition – except a business person’s relationship to time is quite different to that of the taxi driver, since everyone makes efforts so as to ensure the business person isn’t held up in any way. Whereas, the taxi driver (as Tom Waits sings in one of his songs) ‘combs the snake trying to rake in that last night’s fare’. The taxi driver is constantly inconvenienced, but is put out in the hope of making life slightly more convenient for the business person. Because that is what the taxi driver is paid for. Their relationship to time is significantly different – but so is their relation to space. Every action is made to make passage for the business person through space as convenient and quick as possible – for the taxi driver, space is a system of signs and hopeful coincidences, perhaps linked in the drivers mind to rituals and superstitions.
I keep coming back to books on this topic – I feel there is something I’m missing or perhaps not missing, but not quite getting in it all – it is all like an itch I keep scratching. The author starts by mentioning that he won’t be talking about advertising, and that he recognises that this is a problem – given how important advertising is in most cities, how it impacts the point of spaces. The big change since this book was written, however, is the datafication of space – from vending machines that register your gender, your likely ethnicity, what you bought, what time you bought it, and so on – down to Google tracking your movement through space and any other data they can scavenge along the way. Imagine, there was once a time when Google’s motto was ‘Don’t be evil’ – it’s like some cosmic joke now.
This review probably looks like less of a review than it actually is, but as I said at the start, this is a bit of a textbook, and so covering it in detail was never really going to be an option. I’ve tried to apply some of the ideas I’ve learnt – I’m not sure if that will help or not.
While it is pretty obvious that ‘culture’ might be a contested term, it only occurred to me recently that geography might be too. I got into trouble early in my PhD when I said ‘feminist geography?’ It hadn’t occurred to me that geography could come in different flavours.
What the author is seeking to move beyond here is a ‘cultural geography’ of landscapes – where you might count how many telephone booths there are or supermarkets you can find in an area. Not that this might not be useful, but rather that this shouldn’t be the limit of your observations. He also wants to move beyond Marxist materialism as the geography of space being a matching of economic social relations as exemplified by the spatial conditions that facilitate those relations – you know, ‘oh look, there’s a factory, oh look, there’s a road’.
In particular, I think he wants to leave room for how space impacts upon and is used by people of different genders, sexualities, races – as well as by people of different social classes. I first became interested in these questions when I read some books on how students use school grounds – basically, how children interact in spaces during their recreation times during the school day. Different students are likely to use different areas and materials – whether playing sports, reading, talking, eating. Most of the space is likely to be taken over by boys playing – and the potential roughness of their sport is likely to exclude others – push them to the margins. The girls’ spaces are likely to be confined and highly policed simply by this boys’ play – the boys not really letting them enter these boys only spaces. This is also likely to be true of non-Anglo boys and particularly non-Anglo girls – a book I read years ago spoke of how Latino children gird themselves before they walk through these white-only parts of school grounds, and leave these spaces as quickly as they can. That none of these areas are labelled as ‘white boys only’, say, is at least part of the reason they continue to be allowed to exist. Some schools note this and so enforce areas on their sporting grounds where only girls can play, for instance.
Space is anything but the unmarked, absolute stage that Newton required it to be. The relativity of place ultimately depends on fields of power – so that one person walking through a space that seems neutral and completely non-threatening can be anything but for someone else. You know, the archetypal example being a woman walking down a dark laneway at night as something significantly different to a man doing the same thing. Or, the fact that no white boy is likely to be murdered for eating Skittles in the way that Trayvon Martin was – and if a white child was murdered eating Skittles, their murderer would be unlikely to be found not guilty. Space isn’t value free – who you are matters in spaces and who you are determines what you can and cannot do in those spaces. Contesting those limits is the pathway to change, you know, think Rosa Parks.
Spaces exert pressures upon us too. They have cultural meanings that we respond to and not just in ways that imply we always accept the rules imposed by those spaces as they act upon us and as these are defined by those in power. Different groups might respond in ways that contest the implied power relations of spaces – even if they do this surreptitiously – prostitutes and gay beats, for instance. These responses seek to change the taken-for-granted ways space is expected to operate.
I was talking to a friend today about this and in trying to explain it I mentioned a couple of different spaces in Melbourne that had many aspects in common, but that required fundamentally different responses from people interacting with them. One was the State Library and the other the Shrine of Remembrance. There are lots of commonalities in these two spaces, both have domes, guards, books, inscriptions. You are expected to be silent in both spaces, but the silences have significantly different meanings and ‘feel’ different too, I think. You are also meant to be ‘respectful’ in both spaces, even when not being totally silent, but this too is different in both spaces.
The differences are interesting as well. The Shrine doesn’t really have a purpose outside of a symbolic one of remembrance and ceremony. It is an inside space, but feels more ‘outside’. There may be no time limit for being in the Shrine, but there is nowhere to sit or make yourself comfortable, either. The library can be used for ceremonies too, but it is really a place of work. The books in the Shrine have the names of all of the Victorians who participated in the First World War. They are stored in glass cabinets that no one can access other than the person who turns a single page each day in each book. As such these books aren’t really for ‘reference’. There is a sense in which the point of the books in the Shrine is that they are not to be read, but that their unreadability is part of the meaning – containing far too many names to be read – is actually the point.
How silence is used and maintained in the two spaces is another important difference. Every hour in the Shrine there is a kind of ceremony that replicates the ‘real’ ceremony for which the building was literally constructed. This is the moment that occurs at 11am on the 11th of November when the light from the sun streams through a hole placed in the wall in the Shrine so that a beam of light moves across the grave of the unknown soldier, illuminating the word Love at the exact moment of Remembrance Day. However, because the Shrine was built prior to daylight saving being introduced, the light from the sun now needs to be redirected by mirrors to achieve the same effect an hour earlier. The hourly mock version of the ceremony may not have the full significance of the annual one, but it is still observed in reverent silence.
While silence is expected at the State library, the space is recognised as a workspace, and so silence cannot be mandated in quite the same way. Young students use the space and there are often the sounds of flirting in multiple languages. Homeless people sleep in some of the chairs in the library. People met and wonder about, tourists take photographs, the space’s purpose and purposes are multiple and sometimes conflicting. Contesting the official purpose of the library is much more likely and much more evident than contesting the official purpose of the Shrine.
All the same, recent demonstrations at the Shrine to protest the State Government’s Covid-19 restrictions have been met with a very strong police presence, something unlikely to have been the case, at least since some of the restrictions have been lifted, if the protests had occurred elsewhere. That is, the protesters focused on the Shrine so as to attract more attention that would not be available in other spaces.
As I said, the Shrine has a confined purpose – but this can bring it into conflict with groups other than those designated as appropriate to paying remembrance of war in society. In my 20s, feminist groups used to protest during the ANZAC Day parade against rape in war. I always thought this presented an interesting dilemma – since the real problem was the unsubtle implication that the veterans themselves had been rapists. But it is all too clear that rape occurs in wars and that no civilised society could reasonably excuse it. No one that I remember ever argued against the women protesters that rape in war was a good thing. The forceful suppression of women making this protest tended to reinforce their point, I’ve often thought.
I read a book a while ago called ‘In the Meantime: Temporality and Cultural Politics’ – basically the time version of cultural geography. The point made in that book was that a business person and a taxi driver need to end up in the same place at the same time, and that this is true virtually by definition – except a business person’s relationship to time is quite different to that of the taxi driver, since everyone makes efforts so as to ensure the business person isn’t held up in any way. Whereas, the taxi driver (as Tom Waits sings in one of his songs) ‘combs the snake trying to rake in that last night’s fare’. The taxi driver is constantly inconvenienced, but is put out in the hope of making life slightly more convenient for the business person. Because that is what the taxi driver is paid for. Their relationship to time is significantly different – but so is their relation to space. Every action is made to make passage for the business person through space as convenient and quick as possible – for the taxi driver, space is a system of signs and hopeful coincidences, perhaps linked in the drivers mind to rituals and superstitions.
I keep coming back to books on this topic – I feel there is something I’m missing or perhaps not missing, but not quite getting in it all – it is all like an itch I keep scratching. The author starts by mentioning that he won’t be talking about advertising, and that he recognises that this is a problem – given how important advertising is in most cities, how it impacts the point of spaces. The big change since this book was written, however, is the datafication of space – from vending machines that register your gender, your likely ethnicity, what you bought, what time you bought it, and so on – down to Google tracking your movement through space and any other data they can scavenge along the way. Imagine, there was once a time when Google’s motto was ‘Don’t be evil’ – it’s like some cosmic joke now.
This review probably looks like less of a review than it actually is, but as I said at the start, this is a bit of a textbook, and so covering it in detail was never really going to be an option. I’ve tried to apply some of the ideas I’ve learnt – I’m not sure if that will help or not.
April 1, 2021
Couple of useful stuff, but after reading this book the "cultural geography" turned out to mean many things. It was the representation of space in literature, it was in the language, it was which cultures were in which part of the New York, it was here and there. And suddenly, I felt like it didn't exist at all. Also, it's always in the cities and, of course, always in big cities of America of Great Britain. God forbid that the rest of the world even exists in these stuff, but yeah, they fighting against racism and this and that.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews