Comments on: Fisking David Brooks

By: Stentor

Stentor — Wed, 17 Aug 2005 00:34:29 +0000

I gather that the term, like “anthropology” and basically any of the social sciences, covers a wide variety of topics, united more by perspective than by research agenda.

That’s more or less right. Cultural geography runs the gamut from Carl Sauer to the farthest-out postmodernists the discipline has.

As for why there aren’t more geographers in the blogosphere, I wish I knew.

By: oneman

oneman — Fri, 12 Aug 2005 18:09:20 +0000

I read tons of cultural geography when I took an “ANthropology of Landscape” class some years ago. Interestingly, little of it resembled what I’d read in my “Intro to Cultural Geography” class some years before that — so I gather that the term, like “anthropology” and basically any of the social sciences, covers a wide variety of topics, united more by perspective than by research agenda. Brooks could have picked any social science — all of them deal with issues related to his ” why and how people cluster, why certain national traits endure over centuries” (Annalles school, anyone?) but cultural geography has the bonus, for Brooks, of being obscure enough that he could project his fantasies about his culture being the bestest culture ever, without most people being any the wiser.

As for Brooks, he is famously disengaged from the real world. Case in point is a report on a visit he made to a “blue-state” town in PA some time back. Brooks’ point was that blue-staters are all elite latte-huffing snobs, supported by the “fact” that in this town he couldn’t find a meal under $20. In response, several locals of the town wrote with lists of places he could get a cheap meal in town — and noting that Brooks seemed to have eaten the *only* place in town where a meal *over* $20 could be found. (Reporting from memory — some details, like the price, might be off.)

By: David

David — Fri, 12 Aug 2005 09:59:34 +0000

I read that piece yesterday and was puzzled by the absence of reference to anything that I know about culural geography. I mean, it’s like he stuck the two words together, decided he liked the impression it left, and decided to pepper his comments with it.

Today I read this post and begin to see why.

I’ve never paid attention to Brooks before. I hardly know the names of any two NYT editorial writers, so Brooks has no history, and no reason to be regarded suspiciously. Oneman’s shredder doesn’t give me all that much to go on, but hey, I get the idea that Brooks is not admired for his cogency, which explains the puzzlement I felt yesterday.

What I want to know now is why the matter of cultural geography is being taken up by anthropologists but not by cultural geographers. Are they all away on holiday? An absence of online discussion among geographers suggests that one could be excused for thinking that it’s a field that hardly exists. Enough so that one might appropriate the term for oneself.

By: Andrew

Andrew — Fri, 12 Aug 2005 01:44:09 +0000

Re GGS: the whole point of that book was that Diamond purposely *ignores* cultural geography and focuses on geography, period. He takes such a long view that cultural particularities are ultimately irrelevant to his explanatory framework. So the popularity of GGS actually supports Brooks’s “impolite” point, though I’m sure there are plenty of other examples that would disprove it. (Victor Davis Hanson, perhaps?)

By: The B-Log » Blog Archive » Savage Minds: Fisking David Brooks

The B-Log » Blog Archive » Savage Minds: Fisking David Brooks — Thu, 11 Aug 2005 22:56:37 +0000

[...] o tear it apart, here, but Dustin Wax over at Savage Minds beat me to the chase, and did a far better job than I would have. One of the things I’ve wanted to do here (and h [...]