Research Progress and Implication of Cultural Memory Space from the Perspective of Geography

Cultural memory is a spiritual, inner, and middle world composed of self-consciousness, memory, and behavior that expresses the cultural phenomenon, local emotions, and identity generated by human practice in the present world space. Geography pays more attention to the human-land relationship and spatial perception in the formation of cultural memory and constructs a unique cultural memory space. This space is the agglomeration of figurative cultural relics in space, as well as the spiritual representation of non-figurative places, such as art, text, and folklore in space. By systematically analyzing the theory of cultural memory, this study summarizes the process of evolution and development context of cultural memory. Based on 1,527 key domestic and international studies on geography, this study analyzes the main content and progress of global cultural memory space research from the perspective of keyword co-occurrence clustering, theme path evolution, and research trend, with the assistance of CiteSpace—the bibliometrics and visualization tool. By reviewing the frontier hot spots of cultural memory space research at home and abroad, this study aims to construct a research paradigm of cultural memory from the perspective of geography, improve the research methods of cultural memory, and provide a reference for the local application and multidisciplinary integration of cultural memory theory. The analysis results focus the research topics of foreign cultural memory space primarily on: 1) the memory representation of the landscape of daily life; and 2) political and ritual studies in memory. Domestic research topics primarily include: 1) cultural and local studies in collective and social memory; 2) research on urban and rural memory carried by space; and 3) research on heritage memory reproduction, promoted by cultural tourism. The literature on cultural memory space at home and abroad has gradually increased in recent years, as has the attention paid to memorial landscape, heritage buildings, ritual celebrations, war trauma, and national memory; however, the research on cultural memory space has not formed a specific theoretical paradigm. Most of the literature only focuses on the integration of cultural memory and other fields, and relatively few studies address the connotation of cultural memory space, media conversion mechanisms, and spatial identification methods. The perspective of the content and trends in domestic and foreign research indicates that Western scholars pay more attention to the study of migration, rights, free will, women, power politics, and war trauma. The focus on space is mainly on cities, emotions, and rights. Domestic geographers focus on deconstructing regionalized and China-seized cultural memory and local identity from the intangible carrier of memory. Most studies are based on obvious policy orientations. War sites, red tourist sites, traditional villages, characteristic folk customs, and festival ceremonies have become important themes in the study of cultural memory space. In the future, geography research should depict the practical process of text, ritual, and language through non-representational means and re-introduce memory into human research in a materialized way. Simultaneously, the connotation of urban and rural cultural memory should be clearly defined, and heritage, immigration, and tourism should be adopted as the new themes of cultural memory space research through digital images.