Culture and Space: Conceiving a New Cultural Geography

"Culture and Space" provides an engaging introduction to the ideas of Joel Bonnemaison and to his distinctive approach to cultural geography. Bonnemaison spent thirty years in the western Pacific and it was his unique understanding of the region and its islands that forms the basis for his rich, alternative approach. Through an examination of key concepts such as culture and civilization, and the idea of a cultural system, he moves from a critical appreciation of established notions of human and cultural geography to a focus on territory as the centrepiece for his cultural geography. The result is a work that explores fundamental questions about the geography of culture and the anthropology of space, as the author attempts no less than a recrafting of cultural geography.