Cultural Geography

Meinig, 1979) and earlier ‘aesthetic geographer’

Vaughan Cornish (Matless, 1996), Jackson’s

work indicates that the engagement of cultural

and historical geography (Williams, 1989) with

landscape has a rich and complex social history

in its own right, though engagements with that

history have often been written to defend past

writers against present trends (Muir, 1998).

Detailed critical cultural historical geographies

of cultural geography’s engagement with land-

scape remain to be written; each chapter here

provides a partial account within geographical

literature through its particular focus, and ele-

ments of the story have been the subject of

considerable dispute (on Sauer and contempo-

rary cultural geography see Price and Lewis,

1993, and the subsequent responses by

Cosgrove, Jackson and Duncan). Attention to

earlier studies in geography and beyond can

often show not only their difference to today,

but the uncanny resonance of past and present

concerns (Matless, 2001); we should certainly

beware of having undue faith in our own

historical novelty, and allow the past to give us

pause. To briefly note one example, in a 1975

essay on ‘Roads, office blocks and the new

misery’ the sociologist Fred Inglis critiqued

certain forms of public and private development

by asking:‘What, then, are the manifold relations

between capital and landscape? Put the question

in a more everyday fashion. More bluntly. What

do you most notice these days about the English

landscape as you travel it?’ (1975: 172). The

concerns of Mitchell and Cresswell, David

Harvey and J.B. Jackson, appear adjacent in an

argument for townscape from England in the

1970s. Histories of the landscape idea pertinent

to cultural geography stretch well beyond

Berkeley, indeed well beyond cultural geography.

Unlike Mitchell and Cosgrove, Cresswell

writes here as one not known for publication

on landscape. Cresswell’s chapterextends his

work on the social spaces of mobility and

transgression (Cresswell, 1996), most recently

developed in The Tramp in America(2001), to

produce a sense of landscape emphasizing

movement and practice. Cresswell uses earlier

work on landscape and vision as a counter-

point to emphasize the practical aspects of

seeing, moving away from oppositions between

the visual and the practical, representation and

embodiment, to stress instead the embodied

and everyday ‘doxic landscapes’ which emerge

from Jackson’s work on the one hand, and

phenomenology on the other.What is striking

here as in the other two chapters is the wide

frame of reference informing cultural geo-

graphic study. Readers will also note recur-

rent themes, particular problematics, which

crop up in landscape as elsewhere in cultural

geography. Thus Cresswell ends with an issue

one could also trace in Mitchell and Cosgrove’s

work, namely relationships of representation

and experience, imagination and being (see

also Crang, 1997).The implication would seem

to be that oppositions between such terms

become ever less helpful in understanding

how landscape works; while we should always

attend to how such dualities have come into

play and had practical effects, they may be less

useful in providing a prioristructure for our

analyses.

SHUTTLING THROUGH

If the three chapters exemplify and interrogate

particular formulations of landscape within

cultural geography, it is also possible to read

across all three, against their grain, to draw

out other questions of landscape.Two may be

highlighted here, beginning with the issue of

knowledge, which runs through each in differ-

ent ways. The issues raised by Cosgrove sur-

rounding the practice of representation,

specifically the act of painting, may be seen as

concerning the production of geographical

knowledge, a matter taken up in another fash-

ion by Crouch and Toogood (1999) in their

work on the painter Peter Lanyon, seeking to

understand his abstract landscapes in terms of

the making of such knowledge through the

processes of art. Cresswell’s attention to

phenomenological understanding is similarly

echoed in recent work emphasizing knowl-

edge of landscape through embodied experi-

ence, such as Foster’s (1998) study of John

Buchan and Wylie’s (2002) study of Amundsen

and Scott in the Antarctic, works which effec-

tively attend to the historicity and spatiality of

experience (Foucault, 1986). Mitchell’s story

of landscape and labour could be recast in

terms of the power–knowledge of the various

actors involved, thereby connecting to work

linking landscape, science and governmentality

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