Landscape has a complex history as an organizing

and analytical concept within cultural geography.

Its usage has varied from reference to the tangi-

ble, measurable ensemble of material forms in a

given geographical area, to the representation of

those forms in various media such as paintings,

texts, photographs or performances, to the

desired, remembered and somatic spaces of the

imagination and the senses. The complicated and

contested evolution of landscape within twentieth-

century geography and its complex relations

with concepts such as place, region and area

have been well documented, and will not be

further rehearsed here (see Cosgrove, 1985;

Daniels, 1989; Duncan and Duncan, 1988;

Olwig, 1996). Here, I shall focus on a feature of

landscape which cuts consistently across all its

modern usages: landscape’s connections with

seeing and the sense of sight. Landscape,

together with its cognates in other European

languages, is by no means confined to visible

topography. Indeed, the connections between the

morphology of a territorially bounded region,

and the identity of a community whose social

reproduction is tied to usufruct rights and

obligations over that area, lie at the root of the

German Landschaftand its derivatives (Olwig,

1996). But there is a profound connection,

forged over half a millennium, between the

modern usage of landscape to denote a bounded

geographical space and the exercise of sight or

vision as a principal means of associating that

space with human concerns. This usage undoubt-

edly relates to shifting modes of social appropri-

ation and use of space, involving individual

property rights and more atomistic constructions

of self and identity (Cosgrove, 1998; Hirsch and

O’Hanlon, 1995). If geography is a discipline

that examines relations between modes of human

occupance and the natural and constructed

spaces that humans appropriate and construct,

then landscape serves to focus attention on the

visual and visible aspects of those relations.

To connect the geographical landscape with

the sense of sight is not to deny the significance

both of other human senses and of rational cog-

nition in shaping space, territory and meaning.

Geographies of visually impaired people, for

example, alert us to the significance of other

senses, as well as fantasy, memory and desire, in

shaping the relations between humans and the

spaces of the material world (Porteous, 1990).

Smell or sound can be much more powerful and

immediate than sight in shaping emotional

responses to a specific place. In the realms of

dreams or memories, mood tends to dominate

over somatic apprehension, and it may be diffi-

cult to recall or describe with precision the visual

characteristics of the spaces encountered or

experienced therein (Bell, 1997; Bishop, 1994;

Park, 1994). Given the significance of imagined

spaces and geographies for the ways that indi-

vidual and collective worlds are actually shaped,

recent theoretical dethroning of vision’s primacy

in western intellectual culture is not insignificant

(de Certeau, 1988; Deutsche, 1991; Haraway,

1991; Rose, 1993; Women and Geography Study

Group of the IBG, 1984). Western rationalism’s

tendency to align vision with knowledge and

reason, captured in the common usage of the

phrase ‘I see’ to imply both the physical act of

vision and the cognitive act of reasoned under-

standing, has been attacked as a characteristic

feature of modernity. In treating mind and body

12

Landscape and the European Sense

of Sight – Eyeing Nature

Denis Cosgrove

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