Therapeutic landscapes: medical issues in light of the new cultural geography.

Growing atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide and other trace gases are leading to climatic changes with important implications for the hydrologic balance and water resources. These “greenhouse gases” are expected to alter the radiative balance of the atmosphere, causing increases in temperature and changes in many other climatic variables. Recent hydrological research strongly suggests that this so-called “greenhouse effect” will alter the timing and magnitude of runoff and soil moisture, change lake levels, and affect water quality. Such changes raise the possibility of environmental and socioeconomic dislocations, and they have important implications for future water resources planning and management. This paper reviews state-of-the-art research into the implications of climatic changes for the hydrologic cycle and for water resources and discusses the implications of such changes for future water planning and management.

Climate change, hydrology, and water resources

A new direction for medical geographic study is suggested, the analysis of places which have attained an enduring reputation for achieving physical, mental, and spiritual healing. The reasons for the efficacy of these therapeutic landscapes can he examined by using themes derived from the traditional landscape ideas of cultural geography, humanistic geography, structuralist geography, and the principles of holistic health. These themes are categorized as inner/meaning (including the natural setting, the built environment, sense of place, symbolic landscapes, and everyday activities) and outer/societal context (including beliefs and philosophies, social relations and/or inequalities, and territoriality). By using a methodology termed an ‘archaeology of discourse’ in which written and oral documents are examined, the themes are used to investigate the healing reputation of the Asclepian sanctuary at Epidauros, Greece. Study findings have policy implications for health-care practice today.

Therapeutic Landscapes: Theory and a Case Study of Epidauros, Greece

Over the past fifteen years, a small group of scholars defining themselves as “new cultural geographers” has launched a sustained critique of “traditional cultural geography,” which they identify with the socalled Berkeley school. Commendably, these writers have advanced cultural research in several important ways, yet in the process their critique of their academic forebears has increasingly moved off-the-mark. The leaders of the new cultural geography depict the scholarship of the Berkeley school as static, empiricist, and obsessed with relict landscapes and material artifacts, when in fact it was, and is still, dynamic, predominantly historicist, and interested primarily in the relationships between diverse human societies and their natural environments. Furthermore, despite the claims of their detractors, few if any “traditional” cultural geographers have ever conceptualized culture as a superorganic structure. Cultural geography—old-fashioned or avant-garde—has always been a pluralistic ende...

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2569413.pdf

The Reinvention of Cultural Geography

are everchanging and so too, in different ways, are our ideas and experiences of femininity and masculinity. This article is prompted by an apparent interplay between changing gender identities and changing urban landscapes. More specifically, I am interested in whether it is possible to ’read’ the urban landscape for statements about, and constructions of, femininity and masculinity, and, if so, what versions of femininity and masculinity are being articulated in contemporary forms of urban change. I take gentrification as a key example of such change, both because of its high visibility within many western cities, and because of suggestions that it is, at least in part, an expression of changing gender divisions (Smith, 1987; Rose, 1989; Warde, 1991, Bondi, 1991). In so doing I seek to extend feminist analyses of urban change by considering the material significance of cultural symbols. I shall return to the issue of ’reading’ the landscape shortly, but first note that the opposition between femininity and masculinity is one of the most pervasive yet unexamined dualisms in social thinking. As unexamined discourse it entails complex and subtle shifts between different points of reference, especially between sociological categories, which refer to women and men as socially differentiated groups, and symbolic categories, which refer to cultural representations or codings of Woman and Man (cf. Moore, 1988; Poovey, 1988). Sayer (1989) has counselled against the use of sets of parallel dichotomies, arguing that ’reality’ rarely conforms to such straightforward oppositions. In a similar manner I want to argue that an adequate analysis of the relationship between gender divisions and urban change must disentangle symbolic and sociological aspects of gender, rather than assume direct correspondence. In addition, I

Gender symbols and urban landscapes

For geographers accustomed to the low, yet enduring profile shown by cultural/ humanistic geography over the decades, a silhouette that sometimes engendered a certain defensiveness by its practitioners, this last year has been characterized instead by highly visible activity: a well-known, committed and productive cultural geographer as AAG president, recognition of cultural geography as a specialty group within the association, a multitude of panels and special sessions on ’new directions’ and ’emergent themes’ in cultural geography, even multipleedition textbooks that attest to strong undergraduate enrollments in the area. Has a phoenix arisen? While we might blush from the renewed interest shown for our traditional concerns with culture, landscape and place, by both our own discipline and neighbouring fields, cultural geographers might also reflect upon and assess the positive and creative tensions resulting from the interplay between our traditional roots and contemporary social theory. I have shaped and structured this report to foreground the linkages between orthodoxy and our new directions; I write as one interested in a more ’theory informed’ cultural geography, yet also as a participant sensing that our intellectual heritage has given us far more than we normally appreciate and that it would be more constructive to build from these roots than to sever them.

Orthodoxy and new directions: cultural/humanistic geography

A review of recent activity in cultural and humanistic geography can produce several subdisciplinary snapshots. While one photo might emphasize the epistemological and methodological diversity in this traditionally eclectic endeavour and, based upon this, reach the usual conclusions tolerantly acceptant of this pluralism, another albeit a snapshot not as clearly focused, thus blurred and and imperfect in some ways shows hints of intellectual covergence and coalescence appropriate to a postpositivistic social science. To probe this second view, sampled material is sorted into broad categories of varied philosophical approaches (empiricist, humanistic and structuralist; for elaboration, see John-

Cultural/humanistic geography:

Although measured climatic records begin in California about 1850, agricultural records from the earlier Spanish period (1769–1834) can be used to develop information about annual precipitation. This historical material should be used, however, only with a full understanding of the numerous cultural variables that influenced agricultural production. A study by Lynch in 1931, which is widely cited in the literature of Pacific Coast climate reconstruction, contains serious shortcomings because of incorrect assumptions about the Spanish agricultural system, and, more specifically, the amount of climatic information expressed in yearly harvest data. In this article, mission data are analyzed more rigorously to produce a revised annual rainfall index for southern California that encompasses most of the pre-instrumental record period.

Lester B. Rowntree

Papers

Orthodoxy and new directions: cultural/humanistic geography

Cultural/humanistic geography:

A crop-based rainfall chronology for pre-instrumental record southern California