Environment and Planning A 2004, volume 36, pages 391 ^ 403

DOI:10.1068/a3654

Culture unbound

James S Duncan, Nancy G Duncan

Department of Geography, University of Cambridge, Downing Place, Cambridge CB2 3EN, England; e-mail: jsd24@cam.ac.uk, ngd20@cam.ac.uk Received 19 February 2003; in revised form 30 October 2003

Abstract. The key concept of culture has recently been undergoing critical reassessment, and in some cases replacement, by cultural theorists in a number of fields. Some commentators have argued that the concept of culture is too elusive and all encompassing to be of use and that it can be politically dangerous. We will argue instead that the problem is not inherent in all concepts of culture, but in the specific political uses to which particular concepts of culture have been put. We think there is a need to rethink the concept of culture. In fact, cultural coherence in the face of heterogeneity and porous boundaries, complexity, and complicity across far-reaching networks are some of the most challenging and intriguing issues in cultural theory today. Thus we explore alternative conceptions of culture that might hold some promise for cultural geography. Our view is that no one conception holds the answer. Rather, cultural geographers need to develop a critically eclectic mix of culture theories and allow sufficient time for these to be empirically grounded.

Introduction: political uses and abuses of the culture concept The key concept of culture has recently been undergoing critical reassessment, and in some cases replacement, by cultural theorists in a number of fields. In anthropology, for example, there are some who describe themselves as postculturalists, who are troubled by the use of cultural relativism to defend abhorrent practices. As Shweder (2000, page 162) says, ``they think the word `culture' is used in bad faith to defend authoritarian social arrangements and to allow despots to literally get away with murder.'' Benhabib (2002) cites many examples of courts in the USA taking into consideration cultural pluralism in issues such as the definition of rape, justifications for murder, and the rights of men to control their families in ways that contravene their wives' and children's rights as citizens. She points to successful cases of what has been termed `cultural defence', in criminal cases often involving the protection of family honour, prompting the question ``is multiculturalism bad for women?'' Some geographers have also expressed concern. Nash (2003, page 638) describes the major challenge to cultural geographers as one of critical engagement with the definition of cultural difference because ``the notion of respect for cultural difference can be recruited to reactionary projects and ideas of multiculturalism can be deployed in racist ways in the service of neo-liberalism.'' Abu-Lughod (1991) and Shurmer-Smith (2002, page 3) have argued that the concept of culture is too elusive and all encompassing to be of use and that it can be politically dangerous. The problem, we will argue, is not inherent in all concepts of culture but in the specific political uses to which particular concepts of culture have been put. Furthermore, we believe that to abandon and replace the concept of culture would be irresponsible, especially now as the idea of culture is increasingly deployed in a wide range of academic fields that had previously ignored or slighted the cultural dimensions of their research. As the boundaries between abstract notions of culture and other abstract concepts such as nature, the economy, and politics become unsettled, now, perhaps more than ever, culture needs to be rethought. More importantly, it is necessary to reconsider the idea of culture because it is increasingly mobilised by political leaders, international funding

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organisations, journalists, judges, managers in business, policy advisors, and others, in what Eagleton (2000) called `culture wars'wars that depend on culturalist explanations and justifications. The concept of culture is increasingly mobilised in struggles against what is seen as the globalisation of Western cultures. Empowering movements of cultural self-consciousness and the fashioning of locally or regionally based cultural identities have become politically significant in many places (Radcliffe, 2003). Sahlins (2000, page 197) says, ``For ages people have been speaking culture without knowing itthey were just living it. Yet now it has become an objectified valueand the object too of a life and death struggle.'' Just as the concept of culture is becoming embattled within traditionally cultural fields, the term is increasingly used, often uncritically, in other fields and outside academia. Culturalist explanations and proposals for the promotion of cultural change which posit such dangerously simplistic concepts as `development-prone' and `developmentresistant cultures' (Harrison, 2000) are increasingly deployed by government agencies in many countries, NGOs, and various international development organisations including the World Bank and US Agency for International Development. The ideas that cultural factors are responsible for poverty and that political policies can change cultures have been popularised by Putnam (1993), Fukuyama (1992; 1995), and Harrison and Huntington (2000). Although heavily criticised by academics, such ethnocentric and neoliberal theories as social capital, cultural developmentalism, cultures of poverty, and the moral superiority of the West are gaining a wide readership outside of the academy. Conflicts over citizenship, rights of noncitizens, rights to cultural difference, and integration of immigrants rage in the USA and Europe (Hansen and Weil, 1999). Nationalist, anti-immigrant movements and assimilationist regimes in Europe increasingly base their arguments on culture-based conceptions of citizenship (Feldblum, 1999). The concept of culture is mobilised not only in various movements for cultural rights and recognition and in cultural defence in US, Canadian, Swiss, and other courts (Benhabib, 2002), but also in public debates over the neutrality of the state concerning cultural and religious practices. This was exemplified in the `foulard affair' in 1989 in France, in which the government was criticised for choosing to defend Muslim girls' rights not to wear religious clothing. The government's argument was that Muslim culture was patriarchical (see Benhabib, 2002, pages 94 ^ 100; Feldblum, 1999, pages 129 ^ 145). Among the most extreme political abuses of the concept of culture is, of course, ethnic cleansing, in which ethnic groups claim essentialised or allegedly primordial cultures that are linked to territory. There can be no doubt that the idea of culture is `intensely relevant' in the world of today (Eagleton, 2000) or, as Benhabib (2002, page 1) puts it, the idea of culture is an arena of surprisingly intense political controversy. Given that the concept of culture pervades popular, official, and academic explanation today, cultural theorists need to rework the concept rather than avoid it. Replacing it will not make it go away. Placing the term in scare quotes, as is often done (Abu-Lughod, 1991; Clifford, 1986; Shurmer-Smith, 2002) signals an unconfronted ambivalence and merely displaces problems onto other concepts. Shurmer-Smith (2002) says culture is not a thing; she prefers to use the concept in its adjectival form. We sympathise with the idea that culture is often a modifying variable, an aspect (the cultural dimension) of another phenomenon; however, we reject any implication of a static ontology in which reality is made up only of discrete, internally homogeneous substances. Abstract ideas, meanings, and intangible processes of meaning-making are just as real as material things. They interact with and through objects, becoming material culture. We assume Shurmer-Smith would agree with this, and therefore

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believe she is too quick to abandon the idea of culture as a `thing'. Although it is clear that the notion of an exclusively owned culture can be politically dangerous, we are also aware that denying certain groups Australian aborigines, for example the notion that they have their own culture could further weaken their ability to resist a white, universalising Australian state. In fact, Sahlins (2000) offers compelling examples of how the `claiming' of a culture can in some cases be empowering and progressive. Robbins (2000) suggests that Western culture differentiates itself principally by its relentless self-questioning dynamic, defining its Others as traditional. Its overpowering presence offers to other cultural groups an untenable choice between assimilation and ``reversion to a spurious authenticity'' that is ``a cultural identity that is self-identical, essentially in continuity over time'' (page 81). Robbins suggests, nevertheless, that there is a possibility of destabilising this dualistic logic. He calls this possibility ``cultures in relation and interaction: interrupting identities'' (page 82). On a similar theme, Sahlins (2000, page 194) argues that to hold peoples hostage to their own histories or traditions is to ``deprive them of their history'', by which he means the logic of their cultural dynamism. He states that ``the continuity of indigenous cultures consist[s] in the specific ways they change.'' He worries that, just as various peoples are asserting the historical dynamic of their own cultures and defining this dynamic in terms of cultural specificity, ironically, cultural theorists begin to dispute the reality of the phenomenon. He says: ``Fact is, cultural difference in itself has no inherent value. Everything depends on who is making an issue of it, in relation to what world-historical situation. In the past two decades peoples all over the globe have been self-consciously counterposing their `culture' to the forces of Western imperialism that for so long afflicted them. Culture here figures as the antithesis of a colonial project of stabilization, since the peoples articulate it not merely to mark their identity but to seize their destiny'' (2000, pages 162 ^ 163). A critical review of concepts We will briefly mention various definitions of culture that we reject before going on to propose an alternative albeit eclectic mix of loosely defined theories of culture. Among the former is the Arnoldian notion of the ``best that has been thought and said'', a kind of high culture or civilisation that is seen as transcending cultures in the plural. Although we refuse the elitism and Eurocentrism of many formulations of this distinction between high and ordinary cultures, we do not entirely dismiss the moves by Benhabib (2002), Eagleton (2000, page 53), Fraser (1997), and others to argue that there may be some universal enlightened values, some of which are prominent in the European enlightenment project, but which clearly arise from many other cultures as well. The reification of culture as a black-boxed, superorganic entity with anthropomorphic powers has long been discredited in geography (Duncan, 1980). Reification entails not only abstraction but also misplaced autonomous powers of willing or deciding. Our rejection of this reified definition does not imply that culture has no ontological status or that only humans have agency. Likewise, culture as an epiphenomenal superstructure that merely reflects, but is not mutually constitutive with, an economic base has been discredited as overly reductionist and deterministic. We know of no one who wishes to fight these old battles, at least not in the original terms. These debates have moved on and become more nuanced. As Brightman (1995) argues, critics of the concept of culture often confuse the issue of abstraction with that of autonomy. Abstraction is not necessarily a problem, whereas autonomy often is. At the heart of the issue is the question of agency. A structure created by clusters of human practices can have agency, but it is not autonomous.

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Culture refers to loosely structured clusters of practices based on values and meanings that are shared, but also contested. These practices are interrelated and can produce sometimes wide-ranging or long-term effects. Cultures are emergent and collective, but only loosely coordinated and internally fractured. They involve a multitude of human actions guided in a very broad, general sense by the (sometimes enabling, sometimes oppressive) presence of the past in the form of institutions, rules and regulations, the built environment, structured inequalities, structures of power, accepted ways of acting, interpreting, and challenging these ways of relating (see Harre and Bhaskar, 2001). In short, the definition of culture should be, and should remain, broad and empirically unspecified. Some theorists worry that the idea of culture (especially discrete cultures) implies holism, homogeneity, and totalisation. But we want to stress the point that there is no reason to assume that cultures are the sort of entities that are clearly bounded or homogeneous. Rather than worrying overly about the concept of culture implying clear boundaries, homogeneity, stability, or closure, we reject the idea that any of these qualities are necessary to the notion of culture or cultures. What is important to understand empirically is how cultural stabilities and unities are produced out of complexity and conflict. We want to know how people in the wider world conceive of the coherence of cultures, of belonging to cultures, of the imagined relation of cultures to territories, and to learn more about the sociopolitical constitution of boundedness. Why are cultures as exclusionary forces desired, imagined, and practised in the face of internal heterogeneity, and despite porous, shifting boundaries and strong transcultural connections? Uneasiness with the idea of homogeneous, essentialised cultures has led to suggestions for the replacement of the concept with others such as ideology, hegemony, discourse, habitus, and governmentality (Abu-Lughod, 1991; Barnett, 2001; Bennett, 1998; Bourdieu, 1977; Mitchell, 1995). All of these are valuable concepts. However, it may be more useful to see these as included within a wider concept of culture. Theories and concepts do not give substantive answers to questions. There is no substitute for empirical research. Therefore, concepts need to be sufficiently general and open-ended to allow one to investigate them empirically. This may be especially true of complex, unbounded, and internally heterogeneous phenomena such as cultures. Furthermore, if cultural theorists hope to intervene in culture wars then it would be useful if there was a similarity in scope between the terms used and those employed in the wider world that need to be clarified or challenged. Barnett (2001), following Bennett (1998), has suggested that the concept of culture be reconceptualised through Foucault's (1978) notion of governmentality, discipline, and technologies of the self. Citing Bennett's definition of culture as cultural policy, forms of regulation, and the inculcation of values and beliefs by state agencies and civil institutions such as schools, he replaces more expansive notions of culture with the idea of culture as a set of practices that are involved in managing and regulating social conduct in the interests of liberal government. According to this view, culture is `inherently governmental', as opposed to what Barnett (2001, page 19) calls ``its historic conceptualization as a realm beyond state control''. Barnett, again following Bennett, believes that defining culture instrumentally in terms of governmentality avoids difficult questions of social psychology. But is this an advantage? Such questions, it would seem, are too important to avoid. In his recent book on culture and democracy, Barnett (2003) focuses on radio, television, and other media technologies as paradigmatic forms through which culture is deployed. His analysis of the media is extremely useful in answering the kinds of questions we raise here about mediation and diffuse responsibility when it comes to the issue of how cultures are maintained as coherent and distinguishable. Although he describes these media as multiple, dispersed, and less-tightly regulating technologies for cultural inculcation than schools and other state institutions, his view of culture is

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nevertheless still highly instrumental and narrow in defining culture purely in political terms. Although we agree that culture is not a realm separate from politics or the economy [on these inherent interconnections see Gibson-Graham (1996) and Ray and Sayer (1999)], we see no reason to restrict the definition of culture to government manipulation, publicly mediated channels of debate, or even self-regulation technologies (Barnett, 2001, page 12). Again, there is much of value in the notion of governmentality, but there should be no need for such a limited, instrumental definition of culture that would equate the two. The same is true of Mitchell's (1995) notion of culture as ideology. Either it is unnecessarily reductive or, on the other hand, if he intends to stretch ideology to include everything normally thought of as culture then such an expanded definition of ideology would be overly instrumental or functionalist. Clearly not all aspects of a culture serve dominant interests. (Who or what logic could ensure this?) Some aspects of cultures are clearly opposed to dominant interests; others are relatively neutral in political terms. The same goes for hegemony, a useful concept clearly but one which can never encompass all of culture. The exhaustive and mutually exclusive distinction often drawn between culture and nature implies a definition of culture that has been shown to be untenable by social and natural scientists and philosophers of science. Examples in geography include Anderson (2001), Braun and Castree (2001), and Whatmore (2002). Braun and Castree (2001, page xi) state, ``There has been a veritable explosion of geographical research that seeks to denaturalize nature.'' They point out that this literature moves the debate beyond asking what culture does to nature, asking instead, ``Who constructs what kinds of nature(s) to what ends and with what social and ecological effects?'' (page xi). There are almost daily reports of new reproductive technologies and the material reconstitution of nature at the atomic level by a proliferation of new, genetically modified organisms. Furthermore, as Anderson (1997) points out in her discussion of the history of domestication, such genetic modification is not an entirely new phenomenon. Marxist formulations of work, surplus value, and second nature (see Smith, 1990) have long argued that nature is social. These destabilisations are joined by more recent work that further unsettles the conventional culture/nature distinction, including Haraway's (1991; 1997) cyborgs, Latour's (1987; 1999) heterogeneous networks of human and nonhuman actants, hybrids, and quasi-objects, Whatmore's (1999) ``fluid sociomaterial networkings'', and Wilson's (1998) work on neural geographies, in which it is argued that culture is embodied. At one time many geographers had thought that these issues were of concern only to those working within the border zone between human culture and nature. But thanks to authors such as those mentioned above, it is increasingly clear that this border zone is everywhere. Any refinements on the notion of culture should thus acknowledge the hybridity of culture/nature. Toward a theory of cultural complexity Like Shurmer-Smith, Mitchell (1995, page 104) says that culture is not a thing; it has no ontological status. But he goes on to say that the idea of culture has been deployed by social actors ``as a means of attempting to order, control and define `others' ''. In saying this, however, we believe he in fact grants culture an ontological status. Elsewhere he says that culture, which he places in quotations marks, is never a thing, ``but it is rather a struggled-over set of social relations, structures shot through with structures of power, structures of dominance and subordination'' (2000, page xv). We agree that culture exists in large part because people sharing ideas, beliefs, and values, acting on these in association with other people and phenomena in the world, and believing they `have' a culture, bring it into existence through their collective practices and taken for granted assumptions.

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Although we think that there is far more to culture than people believing they have a culture or using the idea of culture to order and control others, we are basically in agreement with Mitchell that cultures are relational, contested, and sometimes deployed by being defined in dangerously essentialist terms. Through their practices and (more and less structured, more or less contested) sociopolitical, economic relations, people realise or create culture as a set of sedimented practices. Culture is an unintended but relatively coherent and continuous outcome, and condition, of collective action. As Brightman (1995, page 519) says: ``it may be argued that people exhibit qualitatively distinguishable constellations of cultural forms, identifiable zones of sameness and difference. Coextensive distributions of traits or elements thus specify cultures and boundaries between them. ... In each case, intracultural sameness and intercultural difference exceed intracultural difference and intercultural sameness, and this becomes the justification for discriminating discrete cultures.'' It is this cultural coherence as it is recognised by people who produce it through their practices as well as by academics and other cultural commentators that we wish to focus on here, while fully acknowledging the inherent fluidity, heterogeneity, complexity, and fragmentation of cultures. Benhabib (2002) proposes a normative model of democracy which permits maximum cultural contestation within the public sphere. She bases her ideas on what she sees as the contested nature of culture. Without commenting here on the possibility of her ideal model of democracy (given what we see as the difficulty of overcoming structural dimensions of power), we will, nevertheless, argue that the concept of culture which underlies her model captures the inherent instability of cultures. She thinks of cultures as ``complex human practices of signification and representation of organization and attribution which are inherently riven by conflicting narratives.'' She further states (2002, page ix): ``Cultures are formed through complex dialogues with other cultures. In most cultures that have attained some degree of internal differentiation, the dialogue with the other(s) is internal rather than extrinsic to the culture itself.'' By rejecting the idea of pure cultures, she believes that cultural explanations can be critical and subversive rather than merely conservative of traditional values. Given her goal of cultural inclusion and the expansion of democratic dialogue, she sees hybridisation, boundary crossing, blurring, and shifting as well as continuity and distinctiveness as central features of cultures. Although her valorisation of heterogeneity and hybridity is politically motivated and we agree with her position on this, it is coherence, separateness, and distinctiveness as central features of cultures that we believe need to be empirically investigated in order to understand the mobilisation of culture and culturalist explanation in political practice. Explaining the coherence of cultures: a network approach In our quest for a sufficiently complex, internally heterogeneous notion of cultural coherence, we are attracted to the idea of a nonlinear-network approach to cultural complexity that decentres human actors. Plant (1996, page 214), for example, writes: ``Cultures are parallel-distributed processes, functioning without some transcendent guide or the governing role of their agencies. There is no privileged scale: global and molecular cultures act through the middle ground of states, societies, members and things. There is nothing exclusively human about it: cultures emerge from complex interactions of media, organisms, weather patterns, ecosystems, thought patterns, cities, discourses, fashions, populations, brains, markets, dance nights, and bacterial exchanges ... you live in cultures and cultures live in you.''

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Cultures not only are heterogeneous networks, but they would appear also to fit the scientific description of complex phenomena (Byrne, 1998). Cultural phenomena are complex in the sense that nonlinear (interacting) cultural variables are nonadditive, contingent, and emergent. The relation among the factors changes their causal properties. Bifurcation in the sense of small changes producing new trajectories and therefore often vastly different, unpredictable outcomes is a pervasive characteristic of cultures. Unlike most other nonindividualistic theories that we find useful (for example, symbolic interactionism and structuration theory), complexity theory introduces the idea that individuals or singular events can cause major changes in the course of the history of a society. Descriptions are thus more about trajectories than about states; structure, stability, and networks of power are understood as contingent processes and open-ended projects. In reference to the relation between events and continuity, Thrift (2000, page 217) makes the point that ``Events must take place within networks of power which have been constructed precisely to ensure iterability.'' We agree, although we would prefer to leave both intentions and unintended outcomes of interaction effects open to empirical investigation in any particular case. Couldry (2000, page 93) argues that complexity theory is of limited use in social science analysis unless one is able to employ enormous data sets and powerful computers. However, even smaller scale qualitative research and theorisation may benefit from being situated within the framework of complexity theory. Metatheoretical frameworks need not be tailored to, or restricted by, the expertise of individual researchers. This is similar to the idea that it is inappropriate to overemphasise the autonomy of human agency simply because one's research is principally ethnographic, or, for that matter, to overemphasise the influence of cultural or economic factors simply because one happens to be a cultural theorist or an economist. The complexity and spatial scale of transnational cultures is such that social scientists might best see their research as contributing to larger, wide-ranging research projects, intersecting increasingly with biological and environmental sciences as well. Collaborative research will undoubtedly become a growing trend in social and cultural research. This is not to say that everyone should work in research teams, but it is productive to seek out connections between one's own research projects and those of others in methodologically and intellectually distant corners of the academy. Cultures can be thought of in terms of processes and flows, or as webs or networks of human and nonhuman interaction. If change, process, fluidity, heterogeneity, and transformation are our basic starting ontological assumptions then what becomes remarkable are those things that are relatively stable and coherent such as organisations and institutions that become entrenched over time and which generally hold their shape and content through time and across space. These are what need to be explained. How is coherence accomplished? Of course, assuming that cultures are always changing does not mean that we know how to articulate this dynamism. Our challenge is thus to explain how structuring as a dynamic happens. Cultural geographers need methods to study and words to describe how fluid and heterogeneous phenomena such as cultures achieve and maintain recognisable degrees of coherence over time and across space without legitimising their exclusivity. Sewell (1999, page 47) points out that the idea of culture as a system of meaning is often opposed to the notion of culture as a set of practices. The blame for this, he argues, can be laid primarily at the door of symbolic-system proponents such as Parsons and his student Geertz, who select symbols with high degrees of coherence and generalise from these, thereby producing synchronic types of analysis that systematically underplay fragmentation, eschew the diachronic, and downplay process (Geertz, 1973; Parsons, 1949). Sewell (page 47), however, argues that system and practice are not antithetical. He sees culture as having:

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``no existence apart from the succession of practices that instantiate, reproduce, or transform it ... .The important theoretical question is not whether culture should be conceptualised as practice or system of symbols and meanings, but how to conceptualise the articulation of system and practice. Although culture exists only in and through practices, it retains a systemic quality. Although people may interpret and use cultural symbols differently, they understand that it is only through collective meanings, generalisation of values, including collective oppositions that things get done.'' The issue of stability and coherence over space is an interesting problem that also clearly needs to be addressed from a geographical point of view. In this regard, Thrift (2000) is attracted to actor-network theory for its greater emphasis on spatial distribution. In his analysis of circuits of power, Clegg (1988, page 241) says: ``the stabilization and fixing of rules of meaning and membership, and techniques of production and discipline, in an organization field which is capable of extensive reproduction over space and time are the central issues.'' The question of continuity over space and how it is achieved despite the inherent unboundedness and historical dynamism of cultures is a key issue in the quest to understand the coherence of cultures. The world history of migration of people, goods, and ideas around the globe, transculturation and the increasing strength of transnational networks which contribute to the instability of the spatial dynamics of cultures, and the internal heterogeneity of even the most spatially isolated cultures are the background upon which any theory of cultural stability and coherence must be set. It would be useful to introduce more spatial complexity and spatial dynamism into the study of culture in terms of countering popular associations of culture with territorythe sacred blood ^ culture ^ nation-state nexus. Actor-network theory, with its objective of tracing complex alliances and entanglements across space and through time, may provide a useful framework. In searching for ways to bring practices into a relational perspective, Whatmore (1999; 2002) draws upon the work of Latour (1993), Serres (Serres and Latour, 1995), and others on actor-network theory as well as on Thrift's (1996) formulation of nonrepresentational theory to argue for an expansion of the notion of agency and the reconceptualisation of the relation between human intentionality and agency or joint action. Whatmore (1999, page 26) describes agency as ``a relational achievement, involving the creative presence of organic beings, technological devices and discursive codes, as well as people, in the fabric of everyday living.'' She decentres the analysis of agency from the human, offering what she terms a `materialist semiotics' with the capacity, as she puts it: ``to extend the register of semiotics beyond its traditional concern with signification as linguistic ordering, to all kinds of ... `message bearers' and material processes of inscription, such as technical devices, instruments and graphics, and bodily capacities, habits and skills.'' Although network theory has appeal, there are certain problems that have been encountered by those who have attempted to employ it. These have been acknowledged in a recent issue of Society and Space entitled ``After networks'' (Hetherington and Law, 2000). The writers, including Whatmore and Thorne (2000) and Thrift (2000), share the view that the flat metaphor of networks has trouble showing differential positioning and inequalities in terms of structured access to resources. We would perhaps go further to say that, although chaotic, deterritorialised, nonlinear, nonhierarchical theories may be attractive normatively and may even tell us something fundamental about the essential dynamism of the world, they should be seen as only beginning points. We must go on to ask about how all this flux gets shaped. It is like acknowledging that everyone is utterly unique. At one level this is true. Radical alterity has logical appeal, as do strong versions of antifoundationalism, but these are

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ultimately paralysing perspectives. It is more useful to us in our academic research to know about specificity rather than singularity. It is more helpful to explore similarities and differences that do not take the singular human being as a unit of analysis. The idea is to understand more thoroughly how structuring and stabilising happens so that one can illuminate structured inequality, exclusion, spatial unevenness, differential access, and hierarchy. We acknowledge that power is diffuse (or rhizomatic), but we are interested, given this, in explaining how centres of power nevertheless get established. Latour's centres of calculation, which are so very geographical in their implications, do not appear to have been explored as systematically by geographers as one might expect. It is widely accepted that meaning is central to the definition of culture. The challenge raised by actor-network theory is how to retain this focus on meaning while broadening the concept of agency to include the nonhuman. Answers may lie in the way that culture as meaning is produced out of human and nonhuman associations and relations. We take a central insight of materialist semiotics that objects participate in meaning-making as transporters in ever-extending networks, even though they do not do so through intentionality. Sewell's model of cultures as systems of understanding, but not of agreement or shared values, goes some way towards conceptualising cultures as structured, yet in no way homogeneous. Unfortunately, he has relatively little to say about how such a system works. Hannerz (1992) offers some direction in this regard. First, he argues that contemporary cultures are not characterised by broadly shared meanings, but by structured difference. He sees cultures as having three interrelated dimensions. The first he calls ``ideas and modes of thought''. These he sees as the entire array of ideas and ways of thinking which people in a social group carry together. He does not imply, however, that these are shared, simply that cultural meanings are more or less available. The second he calls ``forms of externalisation''. These are the various ways that meaning is made public through institutions of various sorts and the media. The third is ``social distribution'', the ways in which the collective cultural inventory of meanings and external forms is spread over a population. The point is that any individual will have easy access only to some meanings circulating in society. As Bourdieu (1977) has said of cultural capital, some of these meanings are objectified in cultural productions, institutionalised or embodied in other individual humans who practice and perform these cultural meanings. Hannerz (1992, page 44) says, ``contemporary complex societies systematically build non-sharing into their cultures.'' Cultural coherence is possible because institutions such as the media externalise certain meanings massively, circulating them widely throughout a culture. This creates asymmetries as some meanings are more widely available than others. Not only do different groups in society have different resources to externalise meanings, but also, as Couldry (2000, page 102) points out, spatial separation of groups within society reduces situations where mutual incomprehensibility would become obvious. He concludes, ``Cultural ordereven when it seems to be presentcarries with it a hidden degree of differentiation and disorder, which is spatially reproduced and spatially disguised.'' Culture as systems of meaning always instantiated in practices becomes located institutionally, incorporated in bodies and objects, and embedded into networks that are geographically located and distributed. These systems of meaning are located as concentrations or constellations where networks are densely interconnected. Cultural meanings are deployed strategically to exclude, both internally and, as Hannerz explains, externally. The very idea of having and sharing culture, of course, reinforces these processes that create the constellations of meanings which people think of as `my culture', `your culture'.

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Embodiment of culture The issue of the embodiment of culture and subjectivities has been hinted at in our discussion of nonrepresentational theory and complexity. Brains and other biological processes which are mentioned above in Plant's (1996) description of decentred, nonlinear networks are important components of a complex theory of culture. Connolly (2002) makes the point that embodiment of cultures at the level of brains is not fully appreciated in most culture theory because of overintellectualist understandings of thought. Just as cultural theory does not usually include a consideration of embodiment, (but see Geurts, 2002), much of the large and growing literature on the body does not address the age old mind ^ body question. The philosophical literature that does is really about the brain rather than about the body as a whole. Authors such as Connolly (2002) and Wilson (1998) make an effective case for looking at neuroscience to understand all the complex interrelations between the brain, the whole body, and culture. Clearly, phenomena such as affective memory (some scientists speak of an emotional brain) and visceral-level reactions are both biological and cultural. Biological substrates of emotions involve many organs and biological processes, including the endocrines and other glands, neurochemical processes, muscle responses, skin conductivity, the cortex, amygdala, cerebral blood flows, and autonomic nervoussystem patterns. They include not just the brain, but other bodily systems with complex individual histories of constitutive connections to the physical and cultural environment outside the body. There is a kind of `layering in' of culture, as Connolly (2002) puts it. The natural/cultural processes by which this `layering in' actually happens are becoming clearer and clearer as neuropsychological research advances. This research is beginning to explore the idea that this `layering in' is unstable and mobile within the brain. Re-remembering is being shown to be even more creative and productive (and social) than previous models of stored memories had suggested. If one takes as an example the production of gender, it might be possible to see how an empirical understanding of the combining (and recombining) of cultural and physiological processes will help to denaturalise gender, showing how it is neither socially constructed nor natural, but is truly a product of culture/nature. Emotions, such as long-term attachments to particular places (for example, ideas of home and belonging or patriotism) or specific emotional events (for example, responses to sudden displacement resulting from forced migration), have bodily manifestations that are translated through culturally imbued affective systems. This cultural translation process is creative, performative, social, and relational in character. It includes cultural explanations (such as Freudian interpretation, which underpins much of Western popular psychology) that produce rationalisations and justifications that can arise only in specific cultural and historical contexts, ones in which small differences in scientific thinking have produced huge cultural effects. The `cultural turn' in geography and other social sciences has been charged over and over again with overemphasising the `discursive' while neglecting the material or nonrepresentational. However, as these dimensions are not mutually exclusive, they are most profitably considered in their reciprocal formation. If we are truly to take materiality seriously then we must overcome polarising constructions and explore the mutually constitutive intersections between the affective, cognitive, psychological, neurophysiological, biochemical, cultural, political, nonhuman, and partly human.

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Conclusion We have suggested in this paper that there is a need for a theory of culture that explains how powerful centres, exclusionary structures, and cultural coherence are formed out of flux. An important goal for cultural geography might be to work towards a theory of culture that allows one to trace complicity across complex cultural/natural networks and to explore further the moral implications of such a nonindividualistic theory of agency (Kutz, 2000). The challenge will be to document how people share responsibility through heterogeneous networks of organised, structured relations, institutions, and other resources and to see how joint responsibility comes with joint action. This, we realise, will require a lot of empirical research. Most people, in effect, hide within untraceable networks, whereas more publicly visible actors are often scapegoated. Of course, because of structural hierarchy, some powerful individuals can avail themselves of structures in ways such that they are more likely than others to have a truly significant impact on a course of events. These actors may or may not be publicly visible. It is a tricky business to assign responsibility, especially diffuse, mediated, decentred responsibility. On the other hand, as complexity theory posits, sometimes small differences, such as actions on the part of seemingly uninfluential as well as more obviously powerful individuals and institutions within networks composed of human and nonhuman elements can be responsible for largescale outcomes (the proverbial straws that break the backs of camels, and butterflies that change weather patterns). In this paper we have suggested that any definition of culture should be sufficiently broad to compete with more essentialistic and deterministic models that are increasingly being mobilised by political leaders, managers, journalists, judges, policy advisors, and policymakers and by academics in fields that have begun to employ a notion of culture only recently. In reflecting upon the future of cultural geography, we hope to see more consideration of the complicity across complexly (contingently) structured networks, not flat but multidimensional networks with centres where power is jointly accomplished. Once the individual and intentionality have been decentred, we hope that cultural geographers will be able to begin to explain from this changed perspective how centring happens, how cultures become coherent, how cultures are imagined and practiced, and how powerful institutions and individuals participate in the shaping of cultures. We have pointed toward alternative conceptions of culture that might hold some promise, believing that no one conception holds the answer. Rather, we believe there is a need to develop a very broad ``pluralistic epistemology'' (Thrift, 2000, page 221), a critically eclectic mix of grounded culture theories developed through long-term, in-depth collaborative empirical study.
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