Cultural Geography

INTELLECTUAL PROPERTIES

Landscape is not the exclusive property of

cultural geography. Like many Handbook

topics, landscape has been a subject of under-

standing for many disciplines, and the sense of

landscape as a territory with various propri-

etorial claims pertains in the academy as

beyond. Landscape becomes a matter of politi-

cal,economic and emotional value, and its

capacity to move through different regimes of

value lends it committed fascination, makes it

an object of argument and care.The chapters in

this section illustrate three variants of cultural

geography’s engagement with landscape, a

topic which has helped define the subject over

the past century. As cultural geography has

sought to define landscape, so landscape has

served to define cultural geography.

Landscape has consistently illustrated

cultural geography’s appetite for ideas of various

intellectual affiliation, and in recent years the

intellectual properties of landscape have

become the object of critical enquiry for

anthropology (Flint and Morphy, 2000; Hirsch

and O’Hanlon, 1995), archaeology (Bender,

1993;Tilley, 1994), legal studies (Darian-Smith,

1999), art history (Andrews, 1999), cultural

history (Schama, 1995), landscape history

(Muir, 1999) and philosophy (Kemal and

Gaskell, 1993), to name but a few academic

fields. An international conference in

Edinburgh in March 2001 on ‘Landscapes and

Politics’ illustrated such diversity well, cultural

geographers moving in a minority among

people from many disciplines and countries,

landscape offering a common language. The

work of organizations such as the Landscape

Research Group in the UK indicates the capa-

city for landscape to bring together scholars,

professionals and a wider band of ‘practition-

ers’ around a common ground, whether

through publications, conferences, exhibitions

or field events. Distinctions of scholarship and

practice, of academics and others, are of

course contentious here as elsewhere, sug-

gesting on the one hand that scholarship is

not itself an engaged practice, and on the

other that non-academics might somehow

lack ideas. The work of groups such as the

LRG seeks in part to traduce that distinction,

drawing together artists, architects, designers,

geographers, planners, historians in an osten-

sibly non-hierarchical fashion. Landscape can

be considered in terms of its capacity not only

to bring together different regimes of value

and move between disciplines, but to cross

supposed epistemological hierarchies.

That said, the three chapters here are by

cultural geographers, and it would be wrong

to play down their distinct geographic per-

spective in favour of a blurred interdisciplinary

terrain. If landscape crosses over boundaries,

Section 4

LANDSCAPE Edited by David Matless

Introduction: The Properties of Landscape

David Matless

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