Culture, geography, and the arts of government

In this paper I endeavor to prise open the theoretical closure of the conce ptualization of culture in contemporary human geography. Foucault's later w ork on government provides the basis for a useable definition of culture as an object of analysis which avoids problems inherent in abstract, generali zing, and expansive notions of culture. The emergence of this Foucauldian a pproach in cultural studies is discussed, and the distinctive conceptualiza tion of the relations between culture and power that it implies are elabora ted This reconceptualization informs a critical project of tracking the ins titutional formation of the cultural and the deployment of distinctively cu ltural forms of regulation into the fabric of modern social life. It is arg ued that the culture-and-government approach needs to be supplemented by a more sustained consideration of the spatiality and scale of power-relations . It is also suggested that this approach might throw into new perspective the dynamic behind geography's own cultural turn.