Introduction

This introductory chapter of The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Cultural Geography examines the cultural geography's ever-changing contours. The chapters commissioned for this new companion to cultural geography sort through the unruliness, spatiality, and continuing centrality of contemporary cultural geography. Defining cultural geography, is tricky; and different, imbricated categorical criteria often are employed. For cultural geography, these criteria might include attention to tradition or genealogies to personalities or hagiographies of specific cultural geographers; to theoretical and conceptual paradigms and debates over their utility and appropriateness across time and space; to thematic focus on some aspect of the world; to disciplinary key words and ideas; to calls for particular research agendas. Each of these categories is represented in this volume's essays; and together, they comprise a broad introduction to cultural geography, albeit an introduction located in the Anglophone world and largely stemming from British and US traditions.