SOME CULTURAL TENDENCIES BEHIND CONTEMPORARY GEOGRAPHICAL THINKING

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.