Dreams of Presence

Drawing on contemporary debates in philosophy and cultural theory, Dreams of Presence revives the concept of culture as an existential phenomenon and explores geography’s role in making it present as an abiding force in everyday social life.

Rose Mitch :

Mitch Rose is a senior lecturer in the Department of Geography and Earth Sciences and a reader in the Graduate School at Aberystwyth University.

Paul Kingsbury, Professor of Geography, Simon Fraser University:
“If W.B. Yeats cautions ‘in dreams begin responsibility,’ then Mitch Rose reveals why these inceptions are real, precarious, and fundamental to how we desire, build, and navigate a world we cannot possess. Dreams of Presence gifts us with a remarkable new theory of culture – more a question about claiming than difference – that will not only reawaken geographical debates about subjectivity, meaning, identity, and material practice, but also rouse the stakes of theory itself.”

Christopher Philo, Professor of Geography, University of Glasgow :
“With modesty and circumspection, Mitch Rose ambitiously advances a geographical theory of culture in a volume that will attract admirers as well as critics. What will not be the case, I wager, is that it will be ignored. Anyone with an interest in cultural geography – how human and environmental geography address matters of culture and landscape – should be reading (and debating) this book. Dreams of Presence is a significant advance in state-of-the-art research and critical scholarship. It is a brave statement in many ways, and is arguably the first major restatement of cultural geography or, better, culture in geography, for some time.”

Ben Anderson, Professor of Geography, Durham University:
“Dreams of Presence is a rare gift – an inspiring and provocative book that invites you to wonder again about a concept at the heart of the social sciences and humanities. Through generous, careful engagement with a wide range of cultural traditions, Rose brilliantly reformulates the problem of culture – asking how and why people care for the worlds they build. His novel answer – that culture is a claim that responds to existential problems of living – makes Dreams of Presence essential reading.”

Devaka Premawardhana, Winship Distinguished Research Associate Professor of Religion, Emory University and co-editor of Between Life and Thought: Existential Anthropology and the Study of Religion:
“If culture as an analytical concept has fallen out of fashion, how then to address the increasing salience of culture wars and identity politics? Mitch Rose brilliantly poses this problem and urges by way of solution that culture be theorized in terms not of essential differences but rather of existential claims, cares and concerns. This book challenges us to consider how dreams and desires—elusive though they must be—enable people to make distinct worlds and thereby manage universal struggles.”