Pregledni rad
Culture as an Object of Geographic Research
Laura ŠAKAJA
Sažetak
The text gives a survey of the development of cultural
geography from its beginnings at the turn of the twentieth
century until today. What can first be observed in this field is
the shift from objectness, i.e. the concentration on material
elements of culture, toward subjectness, i.e. overaccentuating
the subjectivity of perception of the environment, and,
second, one can observe the shifts to the hermeneutical
standpoints of today’s ”new” cultural geography which,
making use of the interpretative approach, is attempting to
overcome the separation between subject and object.
Cardinal changes are registered in cultural geography’s
viewpoint on culture, as well as on the basic objective of
cultural geography – the cultural landscape. Culture was
understood throughout this century by geographers within
the range of superorganic autonomous structure to
intersubjective reality, i.e. within an organized system of
determinative symbols with the help of which human
communication takes place. The interpretation of cultural
landscape, however, varied from being understood as a
result of the influence of the whole human community on the
natural landscape, to a contemporary vision of the
landscape as a text in which the contexts of a polyvocally
structured society, the natural, cultural and historical
circumstances in which the landscape has been developing,
have been coded. The afirmation of society’s multi-culturality
in contemporary geography has brought into focus the
concept of space instead of the traditional concept of
environment. In space, namely, the environments of different
sociocultural groups coexist, overlap and permeate. As
currently quantitative geographical techniques are giving
good results in the research of space, the text questions the
primarily negative relationship of cultural geography with
quantitative methods of spacial analysis.
Ključne riječi
Hrčak ID:
20479
URI
Datum izdavanja:
30.6.1998.
Posjeta: 2.600 *