also be at the heart of contests over it, and
one thereby gains purchase on the topic by
inhabiting its slippery nature. The power of
landscape may reside in it being simultane-
ously a site of economic, social, political and
aesthetic value, each embedded within and
not preceding the other; landscape can be
considered a term which productively
migrates through regimes of value sometimes
held apart (Matless, 1998). Such an argument
resonates with W.J.T. Mitchell’s suggestion that
we approach landscape as a verb rather than
a noun, ‘a process by which social and subjec-
tive identities are formed’, considering ‘not
just what landscape “is” or “means” but what
it does, how it works as a cultural practice’
(1994: 1). Indeed the question of what land-
scape ‘is’ or ‘means’ can always be subsumed
in the question of how it works; as a vehicle of
social and self identity, as a site for the claim-
ing of a cultural authority, as a generator of
profit, as a space for different kinds of living.
Landscape entails movement through a com-
plex philosophical and political field concern-
ing control of and rights to land, definitions of
pleasure and beauty, claims to authority over
public and private space. Studies such as
Lorimer’s (2000) of the cultural politics of
deerstalking in the Scottish Highlands may
involve both the interrogation of historical
claims to define the landscape as, for example,
a site of scenic value, and the use of landscape
as a way of operating through which one
might understand such specific definitions
within a wider field. Attention to the different
claims to and definitions of landscape allows
and demands a movement across physical and
epistemological space, past and present.
Landscape thereby carries a relational
hybridity, always already natural and cultural,
deep and superficial, which makes for some-
thing inherently deconstructive. In Bruno
Latour’s terminology landscape might be
regarded as a classic ‘quasi-object’, impossible
to place on either side of a dualism of nature
and culture, shuttling between fields of refer-
ence. Discussing environmental debate Latour
asks, ‘Can anyone imagine a study that would
treat the ozone hole as simultaneously natu-
ralized, sociologized and deconstructed?’, and
suggests that, ‘In the eyes of our critics the
ozone hole above our heads, the moral law in
our hearts, the autonomous text, may each beof interest, but only separately.That a delicate
shuttle should have woven together the
heavens, industry, texts, souls and moral law –
this remains uncanny, unthinkable, unseemly’
(1993: 5–6). Landscape, in cultural geography
and elsewhere, might serve as such a delicate
shuttle, weaving through matters often held
apart. This section of the Handbook offers
three versions of such a movement, demon-
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