সংস্কৃতি এবং পরিসর : নতুন সাংস্কৃতিক ভূগোলের ধারণা : ভূমিকা Culture and Space : Conceiving a New Cultural Geography : Introduction

Nurunnabi Shanto

doi:10.64242/bijbs.v20i24.21

Authors

Nurunnabi Shanto Author

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.64242/bijbs.v20i24.21

Abstract

Joel Bonnemaison’s Culture and Space : Conceiving a New Cultural Geography provides a foundational theoretical framework for understanding the intricate relationships between human societies, cultural practices, and geographical environments. For Bangla-speaking readers, the work is especially significant as it encourages a move beyond conventional, utilitarian views of geography toward a culturally grounded understanding of human experience. In Bonnemaison’s conception of cultural geography, humans—along with their beliefs, emotions, memories, and everyday practices—occupy the center of spatial analysis. Space is not treated as a neutral or passive backdrop, but as an active medium through which culture is produced, experienced, and transmitted.

Challenging the notion that society merely constructs space, Bonnemaison argues that space itself plays a formative role in shaping social structures, values, and collective imaginaries. Using the metaphor of islands, he demonstrates how human communities interact with natural environments to generate culturally meaningful spatial orders. In Oceania, the principal region of his fieldwork, practices such as canoe building, navigation routes, settlement patterns, and mobility networks function not only as practical adaptations, but also as expressions of cultural knowledge, symbolic meaning, and social organization. Space is thus understood relationally—as a network of paths, connections, and shared meanings—rather than through fixed hierarchies of center and periphery.

Methodologically, Bonnemaison combines rigorous empirical fieldwork with symbolic and interpretive analysis. His studies in Madagascar, Vanuatu, and other Pacific regions reveal how agricultural systems, social networks, and migratory movements are shaped by both environmental constraints and cultural imperatives. The persistence of rice cultivation by the Merina farmers in Madagascar’s highlands, despite ecological limitations, illustrates how spatial practices are guided by ancestral obligations and cultural identity rather than economic rationality alone.

Central to Bonnemaison’s thought is the concept of “original space,” a foundational spatial consciousness emerging from the interaction between natural landscapes and cultural myth. For Bangla-speaking scholars and readers, Culture and Space : Conceiving a New Cultural Geography offers a powerful lens for reinterpreting familiar landscapes—such as the Bengal Delta, hill tracts, and urban spaces—as culturally resonant environments where human life unfolds with symbolic depth. This Bengali translation is based on the English translation by Translated by Josée Pénot-Demetry.

Author Biography

Nurunnabi Shanto

Joël Bonnemaison (born August 2, 1940, in Toulouse, France; died July 6, 1997, in Nouméa, New Caledonia) was a French geographer and anthropologist renowned for bridging geography, culture, and social anthropology. Educated in Paris, he completed his studies in history and geography before beginning fieldwork in Madagascar in the mid-1960s. He spent most of his career at ORSTOM (now IRD), where he conducted extensive research in Vanuatu, particularly on the island of Tanna, producing pioneering ethnogeographical studies that linked landscape, social organization, and cultural heritage. Later in his career, he held the chair of Cultural Geography at the University of Paris IV, where he continued to explore the interplay between culture and space. His early work, New Hebrides / Vanuatu (1980), blended photography and text to offer a vivid portrait of the islands. In 1986, he published L’arbre et la pirogue (The Tree and the Canoe), the first volume of Les fondements d’une identité (The Foundations of an Identity), which examined the intricate relationships between territory, cultural history, and social organization in Vanuatu. That same year, he released La dernière île (The Last Island), exploring the dynamic interplay of culture and landscape on Tanna. In 1990, he published Culture et espace (Culture and Space), a major work reflecting on the theoretical and methodological links between geography and anthropology, emphasizing how human culture is inscribed in and shaped by the landscape. Among his later works, Gens de pirogue et gens de la terre (People of the Canoe and People of the Land, 1996) stands out as a major study of Vanuatu’s cultural geography, and he co-edited Arts of Vanuatu (1996), a multi-author volume celebrating the archipelago’s artistic and cultural richness.

Nurunnabi Shanto is a Bangladeshi short fiction writer, essayist and translator. His published books of short-fiction are Gramey Procholito Golpo (2009), Raasta (2011), Megher Oparey Akash (2014), Priyo Dusswopno (2016) and Morar Matha (2022). His Prantokotha is the collection of his selected newspaper articles. He is the co-author of Food Consumption of Baul Communities in Bangladesh–towards the goal of zero hunger. His translation works include Interpreting Folklore by Alan Dundes, Call Me Dr. Bhai (Ami Tomader Dactar Bhai) by Kate Dey, When Ganga Becomes Padda by Kazi Khaleed Ashraf, Ethnomusicology : a Very Short Introduction by Timothy Rice, and The Songs of Monomohan Dutto. He is honorary Executive Director of Vabnagar Foundation, and Programme Development Team Leader of RDRS Bangladesh, a non-government organization.