Cultural geography: anti-racist geographies

In Ceri Peach’s recent and final report on social geography for this journal, he returns to a theme that framed his first. That is the contrasting approaches of social geography and cultural geography, particularly with regard to work on race and ethnicity. The contrast he draws is between empirical work on migration and ethnic residential segregation in Britain, other European countries, Canada, the USA and Australia that makes use of census data, and a cultural geography ‘that teaches us that everything is nuanced, plastic and fluid, so that the analysis of census-given ethnic or racialized categories may be represented as static and empiricist ’ (Peach, 2002: 252). He reads the critique of superorganic versions of culture to suggest that cultural geographers are uncomfortable with attributing socio-economic differences between ethnically defined groups to ‘cultural ’ factors (Peach, 1999: 284).1 Cultural geographers are presented as both unhappy with essentialist categories and unwilling to use cultural explanations. In contrast, social geographers sensitive to the construction of racial and ethnic categories within and beyond the census, he suggests, do consider cultural differences in explaining the socio-economic position of different ethnic groups. His argument is that