Cultural geography proposes an apparently innovative project but it actually raises a dual epistemological issue. First of all, is it a new field inside geography or a school of thought that contends to redesign the overall geography's disciplinary layout? The perspective of a "cultural geography" encompasses and endorses the ambiguity of the word "culture" in contemporary social sciences. Secondly, "culture" is predominantly used as a weak version of "society", namely in English-speaking literature. Cultural geographers address societies but do not explicitly admit it. Have cultural geographers built fresh tools to explore the spatial dimension of these societies? The answer to this question is not easy to give, even though the "cultural turn" has certainly helped social sciences to move forward in the understanding of social worlds. Two topics, which might seem peripheral, eventually turn up to be essential to enlighten the rationale of these hesitations. The first one, theoretical, is related to the possibility of a paradigm for social sciences that would pass over the concept of society. The second one can be seen as a practical output of the former. It affects the use of academic discourses that pretend fond "multiculturalism" on scientific arguments to legitimate communalism and reject a "society of individuals"
Epistemology of geography; history of geography; cultural turn; culture; society culturalism; multiculturalism; communalism