Introduction to Cultural Geography
Geography is nothing other than history in space, just as history is nothing but geography in time.
— Élisée Reclus
Geography has two distinct meanings.
The first is uncapitalized and often plural. It means the face of the earth and all that happens there. For instance, we might talk about the geographies of West Virginia and the role that its mountains and valleys have played in its settlement and industry. We might even talk about why snake-handling holiness churches are outlawed in every other state and what this means, as a geographic production — a specific manifestation of natural and cultural forces across generations and sometimes in oppositional relation to the larger US society.
The second meaning is singular and may be capitalized. In this sense, Geography means a very old and very rich discipline of study. This is what we will learn to do in this class so that we can begin to look more deeply and more intelligently at the fascinating material raised in the first example. Human geography is both a form of knowledge and a unique method of inquiry; it offers a specific way of answering almost any question about humans as inhabitants of earth and the worlds they create there. We study Geography so that we can do the extremely intriguing work of investigating geographies.
This course's instruction includes lectures, weekly readings, and regular discussion. The discussions are the most important of the three, but they only succeed if you have also attended class, paid attention during lectures, and done the readings. Class meetings also incorporate additional exercises and materials including film, audio recordings, maps, and other geographic artifacts, so attendance is critical.
We jump right into actively doing Geography and exploring some geographies. Although we learn to use tools like maps and other conventionally geographic artifacts, we may also use films, texts, or foods as ways to enter into these geographies. We touch on and learn something about every region in the world, but the object of our study is always active and dynamic processes — not static countries, cities, or states so much as geographic episodes taking place across different times and spaces.
No matter what you aspire to do in your own life, this course can be valuable to you. Think of geography as a modest superpower: a capacity you can develop with many potential benefits — deepening your other studies, improving your employment prospects, expanding your civic engagement, making your media consumption more intelligent. If nothing else, geographers always make excellent party guests, as there is nothing on earth that is not within our domain.
This is a Core Curriculum course in Social Sciences. It addresses these competencies:
- Global understanding and respect for difference
- Critical thinking
- Reading comprehension (especially spatial and cartographic)
- Written communication
- Lifelong learning
Course Requirements
Presentations (25%). During our first meeting, you choose an object that relates to your interests — almost anything, and not necessarily something obviously “geographic.” Over the semester, as we introduce new concepts, you use this object as a practical way to engage the course material, building toward an independent 5–10 minute presentation on a geography of your object.
Exams (40%). A midterm and a comprehensive final, focused on concepts and methods more than memorization. They test your comfort with material from lectures, readings, and additional content, and above all your ability to apply understanding on the spot. They consist primarily of short essays and one-to-three-sentence answers; you may also be asked to draw an original map.
Quizzes (15%). On Fridays, a quiz or short take-home exercise due the following Wednesday. Most focus on cartographic literacy. Based on the previous week's lectures and reading, they assess comprehension of the basic concepts critical for building a working understanding of how to do geography.
Participation (20%). Prioritized highly. We rotate through presenting every country in the world in one-minute blocks at the beginning of class. Attendance is required and monitored. This course depends on active participation: if a discussion should go in a different direction, try to take it there; if you have a strong reaction, share it. Be mindful of our differences and respectful of one another. Try to listen without judgment, and to judge ideas, not individuals.
Schedule
- Introduction · What is the World? · Nature, Space, Society
- Nature, Space, Society (cont.)
- Maps and Cartographies
- Historical and Development Geographies
- Bio-geographies
- Urban, Rural, and Social Geographies
- Midterm · Film Discussion
- Non-Representational Geographies
- Mobilities
- Securities
- Commodity Chains
- Geographies of Poppies and the Opioid Epidemic
- Territory Recognition
- Presentations
- Final Exam
Required Texts
Cloke, P., P. Crang, and M. Goodwin. 2013. Introducing Human Geographies. 3rd ed. Routledge.
Central Intelligence Agency. 2026. CIA World Factbook 2026–2027. Skyhorse Publishing.
Davis, P. R. 2001. Geographic Literacy: Maps for Memorization. 3rd ed. J. Weston Walch.
Native Land Digital. Native-land.ca.
Additional Readings
Additional selected readings from Katherine McKittrick, Jamie Lorimer, Sarah Whatmore, Nigel Thrift, and Anna Tsing.
Abstract Mountaineering
Meat is the state of the body in which flesh and bone confront each other locally rather than being composed structurally.
— Gilles Deleuze
Don't make me look at the mountains, Susana. The mountains look like big teeth.
— Alive (1993)
This seminar introduces graduate students and advanced undergraduate students in geography and anthropology to the nomadology of Deleuze and Guattari. Students in other disciplines (engineering, literature, life sciences, etc.) will also discover strong connections to the theoretical dimensions of their study while the seminar will benefit from their inclusion.
The seminar centers on the figure of the mountain. The term is broken up into a series of register shifts. Rather than beginning with the theoretical text, we build toward it, assembling a constellation of written and filmed ethnographies that make concepts sensible before they become fully legible. It opens on two films, Chen Kaige's Yellow Earth (1984) and Kelly Reichardt's Meek's Cutoff (2010), in which landscape operates as an active surface that refuses state inscription.
We then move through René Daumal's Mount Analogue and Alexandra David-Néel's Magic and Mystery in Tibet, in which the mountain functions as both a representational limit and an initiatory technology. The Art of Not Being Governed by James Scott then recasts altitude and terrain as a political strategy enabling statelessness, which is followed by Marisol de la Cadena, Earth Beings, a text that decenters the privileged human subject to argue that mountains are not metaphors, symbols, or resources but political agents. Next we move backwards — looking at Leni Riefenstahl, Bergfilm, and the role of the mountain in fascist aesthetics — then rapidly forward to Ruby Ridge and First Blood. Here the terms established earlier coalesce but also become troubled. We study a white nationalist movement that relates to the landscape more similarly to the anarchist anthropology of Scott than the scalar fascist body imagined in Bergfilm, yet failing to escape the state which striates smooth mountain space into a control grid where remoteness and altitude facilitate execution.
The interlude which follows absorbs these conflicts by presenting the indigenous Bön as it was absorbed by Tibetan Buddhism, asking what happens when a cosmology based in the experience of landscape is captured by a representational apparatus which recodes that landscape as an alternate hierarchy.
Only at this point do we finally turn directly to A Thousand Plateaus.
Bibliography
Daumal, René. (1952) 1959. Mount Analogue: A Novel of Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidean Adventures in Mountain Climbing. Translated by Roger Shattuck. London: Vincent Stuart.
David-Néel, Alexandra. 1929. Magic and Mystery in Tibet. London: John Lane the Bodley Head.
de la Cadena, Marisol. 2015. Earth Beings: Ecologies of Practice across Andean Worlds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Deleuze, Gilles. (1981) 2003. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Translated by Daniel W. Smith. London: Continuum.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. (1980) 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Dyer, Geoff. 2012. Zona: A Book about a Film about a Journey to a Room. New York: Pantheon Books.
Reclus, Élisée. 1881. The History of a Mountain. Translated by Bertha Ness and John Lillie. New York: Harper & Brothers.
Scott, James C. 2009. The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Shepherd, Nan. 1977. The Living Mountain. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press.
Films
Alive. 1993. Directed by Frank Marshall.
Everest Dark. 2025. Directed by Jereme Watt. (Canada)
First Blood. 1982. Directed by Ted Kotcheff.
Himalaya. 1999. Directed by Eric Valli. (France)
The Holy Mountain (Der heilige Berg). 1926. Directed by Arnold Fanck. (Germany)
Meek's Cutoff. 2010. Directed by Kelly Reichardt.
Monument to the Dream. 1967. Directed by Charles Guggenheim.
The Mountain / La Montagne. 2022. Directed by Thomas Salvador. (France)
Ruby Ridge: Every Knee Shall Bow. 2017. Directed by Barak Goodman.
Stalker. 1979. Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky. (USSR)
Yellow Earth (Huang tu di). 1984. Directed by Chen Kaige. (China)