This is not to say that theories of culture were entirely ignored by American cultural geographers. Indeed one of Sauer's own students, Wilbur Zelinsky, took great pains 36 The development of contemporary cultural geography has been most directly influenced by the cultural geographic tradition Sauer established; cultural ecology has been less important (though by no means absent) as an influence in "new cultural geography." For that reason I concentrate more on cultural geography than cultural ecology in this and the next chapter.
to theorize culture as "superorganic" in his influential Cultural Geography of the
United States (1973). And, as one survey of the discipline has commented, most
American cultural geographers implicitly deployed similar assumptions of superor- ganicism in their work and seemed quite content to do so (Rowntree et al. 1989). "Superorganicism" refers to the belief in a force larger than and relatively indepen- dent of the lives of humans themselves. "Superorganic culture" therefore refers to the ontological assumption that culture is a real force that exists "above" and indepen- dent of human will or intention. "Obviously, a culture cannot exist without bodies and minds to flesh it out," Zelinsky (1973: 40-1, original emphasis) wrote; "but culture is also something both of and beyond the participating members. Its totality is palpably greater than the sum of its parts, for it is superorganic and supraindividual in nature, an entity with a structure, set of processes, and momentum of its own, though clearly not untouched by historical events and socio-economic conditions."
He did not shy away from the implications of theorizing culture as superorganic, arguing at one point (1973: 70-1) that
the power wielded over the minds of its participants by a cultural system is hard to exaggerate. No denial of free will is implied, nor is the scope for individual achievement or resourcefulness belittled. It is simply that we are all players in a great profusion of games and that in each cultural arena the entire team, knowingly or not, follows the local set of rules, at most bending them slightly. Only a half-wit or a fool would openly flout them. But as in chess, the possibilities for creativity and modulation are virtually infinite.
Writing in the early 1970s, Zelinsky was reflecting the progressive, liberal hopes of his generation of American scholars.37 So by conceptualizing culture thus, Zelinsky (1973: 38) was able to proclaim, as regards the United States, that:
1 useful nonstereotypic statements can be made about the cultural idiosyncrasies (that is, national character) of an ethnic group taken as a whole;
2 the population of the United States does indeed form a single large, discrete ethnic group; 3 statements about the character of the larger community cannot be, indeed should not be,
transferred to individuals because of sharp discontinuities of scale.
But consider the context within which this statement was published. The year 1973 saw the full flowering of the Watergate scandal, which threatened the political unity of the country. The previous years had seen growing, and increasingly violent, dissent over the USA war against Vietnam, culminating in the National Guard murder of 37 Zelinsky is a remarkable person. He was the first member of the Union of Socialist Geographers to be elected president of the Association of American Geographers, the major organization of academic geographers in the US. He used his presidential address (published in 1975) to attack "scientism" in geography, thereby prying open the door for the full entrance of humanistic modes of knowing. Yet the opening pages of Cultural Geography, published almost concurrently, are a stirring call for a more scientific approach to culture. An ardent assimilationist, in academia and in the United States, Zelinsky was an early advocate for greater inclusion of women in the discipline; yet he has shown himself reluctant to accept the changes in research focus women have brought with them (see Zelinsky 1987). In some senses, this latter position is not contradictory. Assimilationism, after all, implies assimilation to a larger, hege- monic whole, and thereby little disruption to "business as usual."
C U L T U R E W A R S 31
four students at Kent State University in 1971. In Berkeley (where Zelinsky did his PhD in the early 1950s), a militant "Third World" student strike had kept National Guard soldiers on campus throughout the 1968-9 school year, and it, coupled with thel bloody confrontation over People's Park in May, 1969, had propelled Ronald Reagan (then governor of California) to national political prominence. Concurrently, in a number of cities around the USA, militant Black Panther organizations had been set up to make good on Malcolm X's promise that African American equality would be achieved "by any means necessary." And throughout the summers of 1967 and 1968, city after city witnessed severe rioting in African American ghettos as blacks saw gains made during a decade of civil rights protest increasingly threatened by a militant white backlash. In California, and throughout the Southwest, Chicano activists were creating their own militant movements to throw off more than a century of oppression at the hands of a political-economic system dominated by Anglo-Americans. During the same period, the women's movement reinvigorated itself, militantly developing a new brand of feminism that explicitly sought to chal- lenge the patriarchal structure of contemporary society. These years too saw the development of the American Indian Movement and the confrontations it engen- dered on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay and at Pine Ridge and Wounded Knee, South Dakota (figure 1.5). And they saw the rise of a quite distinctive Asian American civil rights movement. Couple all that with a rapid increase in the numbers
Figure 1.5 Wilbur Zelinsky was celebrating the unity of American culture in his book The
Cultural Geography of the United States, right at a moment of peak political and cultural dissent.
From the Civil Rights Movement and urban riots of the 1960s to the anti-war, women's, and American Indian movements of the early 1970s, the United States was marked by violent struggle over questions of social inclusion, citizenship, and justice. Here, American Indian activists affiliated with the American Indian Movement stand guard at the Sacred Heart Catholic Church after occupying the reservation town of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in March 1973. Photograph courtesy of UPI/Corbis; used by permission.
of foreign nationals immigrating to the United States, the wars of independence heating up throughout Africa and Asia, continued USA adventurism in the countries of Latin America, and the beginnings of the end of the USA global economic and political dominance that had marked the postwar years, and a simple sense of American insular unity seemed a particularly perverse notion to more and more people.
So in this regard, Zelinsky's Cultural Geography of the United States is a clear intervention into the "culture wars" (and the Cold War!) of his time - unabashedly reasserting the essential unity and exceptional peculiarity of the United States, seeking to show that commonalities between the peoples of the country were greater than the differences prominent at the moment, and that despite the globalization of politics and economics, the United States remained culturally unique (even as it exported its own cultural products and imported many others). But there is a difference between Zelinsky's intervention and the sorts of cultural wars that mark the current scene: Zelinsky's was a self-consciously liberal plea, that sought to find room for all under the common tent of America. His last lines in the book make this abundantly clear:
We live in a period of rapid structural change in terms of ongoing cultural processes in the United States and of penetrating the most fundamental questions concerning human thought and behavior, as they are constrained within the cultural matrix. We can also anticipate a period of almost revolutionary insights that will vastly enrich our understanding of what we have been, who we are now, the most likely forms for future cultural dealings among people, places, and things, and even how they can be manipulated so as to give ourselves a fighting chance for survival and salvation. (Zelinsky 1973: 140)
Most simply, Zelinsky (1973: 70) asserts that in "its ultimate, most essential sense, culture is an image of the world, of oneself and one's community"; and Zelinsky's image is that of an essential unity that is more important than all the factious differences that might separate us. He stakes a lot on this claim, for it is precisely this essential unity that will lead to salvation and survival.
The mechanisms that make culture "work" are quite complex for Zelinsky, since it is a "thing" greater than the sum of its parts. It will not do, Zelinsky warns, to either read up from individual to culture, nor to read down from culture to individual. Individual behavior cannot predict cultural structure any more than cultural pro- cesses can predict individual behavior. Culture is thus theorized first as "an assem- blage of learned behavior"; second (and more importantly) as a "structured, traditional set of patterns for behavior, a code or template for ideas and acts"; and
third (and most importantly) as a "totality" that "appears to be a superorganic entity
living and changing according to a still obscure set of internal laws" (Zelinsky 1973: 71-2). The focus of cultural geography, then, should be on the study of how culture
itself works itself out across space and in place.38 Subcultures can be recognized in the 38 For Zelinsky (1973: 71-2), this sense of culture was entirely idealist: "The nation-state idea is perhaps the neatest illustration of the transpersonal character of cultural systems Whatever the genesis of the idea [in the case of the USA], it was certainly not the conscious fabrication of any identifiable cabal of nation-builders, but rather a spontaneous surge of feeling that quickly acquired a force and momentum of its own Individuals who entertain the nation-state idea are born and die, and some may even have
C U L T U R E WARS 33
landscape (or in other artifacts of culture), but we need to understand, according to Zelinsky, how they are related to the autonomous (but still changeable) whole of American culture. And it is precisely in this effort that geographers can make an important contribution. Zelinsky's project, then, turns out to be a cultural geography determined to support and maintain cultural unity in the face of the factiousness that defines the modern world (for in that unity lies our salvation). In this regard, Zelinsky's geographical theory of culture, seeking to posit the essential unity of humans that remains despite and because of all the cultural differences that mark them, is firmly in the Boasian camp. As with Boas, the definition of culture Zelinsky develops is as much a reflection of his political goals and ambitions as it is a faithful description of reality. And that term "faithful" is apt, for reading Zelinsky more than 25 years after his book was published, the cultural theory reads, especially in the light of his own contemporary history and all that has happened since, like an incredible (and in many ways admirable) act of faith. But it is also obvious that such a grand, assimilationist theory provided very few tools for understanding the volatile world within which Zelinsky was writing. In this regard it seems to depart in some ways from the Boasian ideal of cultural relativism, and accord much more strongly with the sort of relativism Herder advocated as a program of nation building.
Think back to the controversy of Barbara Revelle's mural with which I opened this chapter. Many of those whom Revelle pictured in her celebration of what she under- stood American culture to be were precisely those who were willing to go against the grain of the dominant and domineering trends of their times, seeking exactly to "flout the rules of the game." Zelinsky, seemingly, would declare such efforts to be the efforts of "half-wits' ' and "fools." 39 Zelinsky's equation of "culture" with the level of the nation is telling in this regard. If "useful, non-stereotypic statements" can be made about "national character" in the way that Zelinsky suggests, then French nationalist attempts to rid France of Algerians or Moroccans are seemingly excused: how can they possibly be part of the culture of France, without surrendering all that is part of their own (separate) traditions?