Judging from the rather surprised and defensive responses from Denis Cosgrove, James Duncan, and Peter Jackson (below), Price and Lewis published "The Reinvention of Cultural Geography" in 1993 to start a fight. In their article, Price and Lewis identify a new strain in cultural geography called "new cultural geography," which critiqued a "traditional cultural geography" that they associated with the Berkeley School. While the authors commend the new cultural geographers (NCGs) in their adoption of cultural theory, they argue that they paint an unfair picture of the Berkeley School. Against the NCGs, Price and Lewis argue that:
- the Berkeley School was not "statist, empiricist, and obsessed with relict landscapes and material artifacts;" it was, and still is, "dynamic, predominantly historicist, and interested primarily in the relationships between diverse human societies and their natural environments."
- few if any Berkeley School geographers or even "traditional" cultural geographers have ever conceptualized culture as "superorganic;" cultural geography has always been a "pluralistic endeavor ultimately oriented to empirical issues."
Optimally, the authors would like to see the "new" and "traditional" schools merge, so that cultural geography as a whole could benefit from the awesome mind meld of social theory, empirical research, and historical depth that would likely result.
