Families and food: beyond the 'cultural turn'?

摘要

This paper provides some personal reflections on the "cultural turn" inhuman geography including a tentative chronology of events. It outlines someof the characteristics of the "cultural turn" and some of the criticismsthat have been levelled against it. In the body of the paper, I attempt toassess the value of the "cultural turn", conceptually and methodologically,as applied to two recent research projects on the geography of food andfamilies. The paper concludes that the "cultural turn" greatly enriched thestudy of human geography through its analysis of discourse, representationand practice. But other approaches are required to explain broader changesin political-economy and the materiality of nature. While the "cultural turn" contributed to our understanding of materiality and our place in amore-than-human world, geographers are now also embracing other approachessuch as those informed by actor-network theory and geographies of emotion,embodiment and affect. The paper concludes with an agenda for futureresearch on the political and moral economies of food, focusing oncontemporary consumer anxieties at a range of geographical scales.