This interest in culture and meaning eventually drew me, in my postgraduate years, to Cultural Anthropology, to Cultural Sociology, and to Cultural History, each of which, after all, I realised, made culture--not the high culture of literary and art historians, but the broad culture of societies--the glue that, rightly according to social scientist Emile Durkheim held societies together--central to what they studied.
Culture has, ever since, remained central to my intellectual and scholarly life. It was at the heart of my essay in New York History on the culture war over the Woodstock Festival of 1969 and it was at the heart of my book on Mormon intellectual culture, Mormon Studies: A Critical History (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2021).
I don't recall exactly when I first discovered Cultural and Historical Geographer Wilbur Zelinsky's book on the culture of the United States (The Cultural Geography of the United States: A Revised Edition, Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1993). It had to have been sometime during my undergraduate years at Indiana University in Bloomington, a university that had one of the leading undergraduate and graduate programmes in Folklore and in Ethnomusicology, both of which explored aspects of American culture. I recall picking up a used copy of the 1972 edition of the book and diving into it sometime in the late 1970s and was impressed by it for it seemed to me to be an excellent syntheses of cultural anthropology (of a complex modern society and culture), cultural history, and historical and cultural geography.
Recently, I picked up the revised edition of The Cultural Geography of the United States as I wanted to revisit Zelinsky's seminal monograph and read his more recent thoughts on the subject of the cultural geography of the United States. In the revised edition of the book Zelinsky has left the first four chapters of the monograph as they were in the 1972 edition adding only a substantial fifth chapter titled "America in Flux", a chapter that extends Zelinsky's analysis of American culture and American cultures through the postmodernist 1990s, a period which saw increasing economic, cultural, and demographic globalisation, an era that saw the extension of global forms of communication, an era that saw deindustrialisation, and an era that saw increasing fragmentation and crises of identity across the Western world.
There are a number of things I like about Zelinsky's book. Zelinsky does a excellent job of exploring the origins of American culture (English, British, European, African, Indigenous, Immigrant), the statics of American culture, the dynamics of American culture,
and the complexity of American culture. He does an excellent job of exploring the concept of culture, if rather later in the book than I expected. I expected Zelinsky's general discussion of culture to be in the introduction rather than in chapter two of the monograph. He explores the debate over whether the United States had and has a civil religion, a public religion, or a common civic culture, answering, like Durkheim and Robert Bellah before him in the affirmative. He nicely explores American regional cultures, specifically the American traditional regional cultures associated with New England, the South, the Midland, the Middle West, and the Middle West. He nicely explores the issue of whether a regional culture of the American West can be delineated. He excellently explores American regional subcultures like the Mormon culture of the Mormon cultural region of Utah and parts of Idaho and Arizona, the Rio Grande subculture of the Southwest, the Southern California subculture, and the subculture of historically Baptist and Methodist parts of Texas. In the added chapter Zelinsky nicely returns to the terrain he trod earlier and brings the text up to theoretical and empirical date by reflecting on what postmodernism means for the study of the cultural geography and cultural history of the United States and what has changed and not changed about American culture in the intervening decades. I particularly appreciated his discussion of the complexities of American culture, with its subcultures, and countercultures and the many and sundry ways American culture and American cultures are expressed.
The Cultural Geography of the United States should be mandatory reading for cultural and historical geographers, cultural historians, cultural sociologists, and cultural anthropologists interested in the culture of complex societies and particularly the historical cultural geography of the United States, those interested in culture, subcultures and countercultures, cultural diffusion, and cultural innovation. All this makes Zelinsky's The Cultural Geography of the United States a model study of American historical and cultural geography. Highly recommended.
