The study of the impact of human culture on the landscape; ‘the ways in which place and identity are embedded in a range of cultural landscapes, and the ways in which those social and material landscapes have reflected and influenced various experiences and notions of movement’ (Mains (2004) J. Cult. Geog. 22, 1). Cultural geographers emphasize the symbolic dimension of human activities and the relevance of historical understanding of societal processes, and are committed to an interpretative epistemology, that is, a philosophy that investigates the origin, nature, methods, and limits of human knowledge as perceived and experienced by people and organizations, rather than as perceived only by social scientists. As things travel, their meanings and material nature can change; ‘things themselves therefore have complex cultural geographies’ (Crang in P. Cloke et al., eds 2006). Kirsch (2012) PHG 1 believes that cultural geography is currently suffering ‘something of an identity crisis’, a theme also expressed by Wylie (2010) Cult. Geogs. 17, 211.

Mitchell (2002) Antipode 34, 2 gives a breezy account of cultural geography, later writing that ‘inequality, domination, oppression, exclusion, and power (and still the possibility for good lives despite all this)—at all scales from the household to the globe—are the true object of cultural geographic study’ (2004, J. Cult. Geog. 22, 1). Lorimer (2005) PHG 29, 1 writes, somewhat diffusely, on the tendency for cultural analyses to cleave towards a conservative, categorical politics of identity and textual meaning, which can, he argues, be overcome ‘by allowing in much more of the excessive and transient aspects of living’. See Lorimer (2007) PHG 31, 1 and K. Anderson et al., eds (2004).