Restoring the question of culture: identity, essence and the unknowability of difference
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Throughout the 20th century the question of culture was a central pillar of social scientific thought. From Durkheim to Levi-Strauss, from Stuart Hall to Dennis Cosgrove, the question of culture and cultural difference was a touchstone for understanding the structures, norms and expectations that organised society. Yet, today the concept has disappeared from the academic landscape, including geography, where it is absorbed into other debates and terms, or discarded as an antiquated essentialist construct. Despite pressing political debates about culture wars, identity politics, cultural appropriation and nativism, there seems to be little interest in discussing, debating, much less theorising, the concept of culture as a credible explanatory tool. The aim of this lecture is two-fold: first it explores what has been lost by forsaking the question of culture (in geography and elsewhere); and second, it endeavours to reframe the question of culture in terms that emancipate it from the problem of difference. Indeed, at its heart, I argue that while geographers commonly study difference as an obvious empirical fact of life, emerging and receding at various scales, the nature of difference itself is unknowable. Yet rather than seeing this as an obstacle to theorising culture, the lecture uses it as an invitation to think culture differently: culture not as an explanation for difference but as an elucidation of the phenomenon of claiming difference. The lecture will focus on explaining this distinction and how it fundamentally changes the question of culture. The plenary lecture explores and develops arguments examined in my forthcoming monograph, Dreams of Presence: a Geographic Theory of Culture (University of Toronto Press, 2024).
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".