ALL THE NAMES A CROSS-SECTION IN CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY

Our first intention was to compare the names that actually have participated in the production of the ‘cultural turn’ in geography with the names which are actually available in Portuguese libraries and bibliographies. To do that we have made a very simple exercise that consisted in collecting ‘all the names’ which were present in the 4th edition of The Dictionary of Human Geography, and that were intimately correlated with cultural geography themes. The first blow was eminent: most part of them are not present in the various undergraduate courses available in Portugal, and neither in most of academic dissertations. Feeling rather alarmed with the extension of the list, we tried to make out some order of all these names by mapping them into a ‘conceptual landscape cartography’. The result is the one we can see on this map. This exercise would then consist of a sort of 'cross-section' in the conceptual landscape of cultural geography presenting ‘all the names’ arranged in conceptual spaces (the labels that structure the map) and by date: 1960s, green; 1970s, blue; 1980s, red; 1990s, orange. Being aware that this rhetorical device is subject to the same criticisms of its original exemplar, namely, that it is a freezing moment of a very complex process with differential temporalities which require a heterogeneous concept of time, that does not blur the different processes that are at work here.Vertical Themes With the aim of identifying some of the changing processes present in this ‘horizontal slice’ in time, we develop a 'vertical' arrangement of the politico-intellectual projects underlying this map. In no way it should be considered as a linear narrative nor subsume to genetic or progressive sequences. Even if the 'settlement continuity' metaphor may be appealing to us, the questions that lie behind the processes of appearance, disappearance and coexistence of research programs are of a complexity that can not be framed in simplistic notions of evolution or revolution. In science studies one may be tempted to use this simplistic notions guided by the maintenance of a certain grounded vocabulary, an entirely illusory device where the same words refer to quiet different things, as some quiet different words may refer to very similar things.