(Braun, 2000), and to social historical studies
which stress the spatial knowledges and prac-
tices of workers within wider cultures of
labour (Revill, 1994). Reading across the grain
of these essays begins to reveal other connec-
tions of landscape.
If knowledge offers one running theme, time
gives another. While all three chaptersdeploy
a primarily spatial imagination, their concerns
could be recast in terms of temporality and
historicity, emphasizing the role of narratives
of landscape history in informing present
action, the matters of memory and history
making up and triggered by visions of land-
scape, the emergent histories of doxic land-
scapes which enfold senses of past time into
dreams and anxieties for the future. If in his
recent Progress in Human Geographyreport on
landscape Don Mitchell (2001) could look to
the work of art historian Lucy Lippard (1997)
to prompt thoughts on the ‘lure of the local’
and the relations of scale in landscape, Lip-
pard’s earlier work on contemporary art and
the art of prehistory,Overlay(1983), equally
prompts speculation on the theme of land-
scape as palimpsest, on issues of time, ritual
and gender, and on the ability of aesthetic
intervention to open up and regather the
imprints of history. The issue is here not one
of space against time, of the need to focus on
one rather than the other, but of the ways in
which landscape works through enfolding the
spatial and temporal. One could argue that all
studies of landscape entail historical geography,
in all senses of that term.
Time is also present in contemporary geo-
graphical arguments over landscape in terms of
the ways in which history may put the present
into gear. In his essay on ‘Recovering the sub-
stantive nature of landscape’, Kenneth Olwig
(1996) intervenes in current debates through a
different genealogy of the term. Olwig begins
by noting the confusion over landscape
detected by Richard Hartshorne in The Nature
of Geography (1939), whereby landscape’s
double meaning of land and its appearance
implied a slippery concept best abandoned.
Olwig responds not by embracing such double-
ness but by offering a different history of land-
scape which asserts and cements its substance
as a site of contested human habitation,
‘a nexus of community, justice, nature, and
environmental equity’ (1996: 630–1). Ratherthan the Renaissance Italian and Dutch origins
of the term stressed by Cosgrove (1984),
Olwig draws out a northern European concept
expressive of custom, community and identity,
and of independence from centralized power.
Landscape for Olwig carries a substantive air
of communal, independent thought and prac-
tice, a meaning he holds to have been usurped
both historically and in contemporary cultural
geography by a taste for and/or fascination
with a classical ideal of landscape linked to new
forms of landed and imperial power.Through a
revised history of the word ‘landscape’, Olwig
challenges current critical priorities, and
reclaims Sauerian Berkeley School cultural
geography as concerned with ‘a substantive
landscape in which issues of environment, eco-
nomics, law, and culture are all important’, a
way of thinking in tune with the ‘predominant
American reality’ of ‘a vernacular landscape
that tends to violate the visual aesthetics of
perspective and harmony’ (1996: 645).
Olwig’s is an intriguing essay, a fine example
of putting historical geography into play in
contemporary academic context, and its
historical nuances could be the subject of
detailed discussion. A different history implies
a different landscape, and a different way for-
ward. Here though I would highlight and ques-
tion Olwig’s opening argument, which shares
Hartshorne’s suspicion of landscape’s slipperi-
ness in order to propose something more
substantial. One could instead view the
doubleness of the term as a virtue, as some-
thing which is both analytically productive and
makes landscape so important a matter
beyond the academy. If Olwig presents land-
scape’s ‘duplicitous meaning’ (1996: 630) as a
problem, others have seen it as an opportu-
nity, as the defining feature of a powerful con-
cept. Stephen Daniels suggests that it is the
‘duplicity of landscape’, as a cultural term
carrying meanings of depth and surface, solid
earth and superficial scenery, the ontological
and the ideological, that gives it its analytical
potential, ‘not despite its difficulty as a com-
prehensive or reliable concept, but because of
it’ (1989: 197); ‘We should beware of attempts
to define landscape, to resolve its contradic-
tions; rather we should abide in its duplicity’
(1989: 218). Doubleness – representation and
materiality, financial and emotional value – may
make landscape hard to pin down, yet may230 LANDSCAPESection-4.qxd 03-10-02 10:36 AM Page 230