Cultural Geography

as distinct aspects of being, vision becomes the

principal channel through which intellectual

reason and the ‘reason’ or order of the sensible

world can be mapped onto one another: the eye

is rendered the window to a rational soul. These

assumptions can be traced back to Aristotle and

have been reinforced in scholastic, Cartesian and

Enlightenment thought. Feminist and poststruc-

turalist critics have challenged such dualistic

thinking as masculinist, patriarchal and Euro-

centric and have pointed both to the significance

of non-visual forms of knowing and to the cul-

turally encompassed nature of seeing itself

(Howett, 1997; Merchant, 1990; Rose, 1997).

This has forced a reassessment of the cultural pri-

macy of vision, and with it a critical rethinking of

the connections between landscape, geography

and the sense of sight.

Neither space nor vision is a conceptually

simple matter. Geographical spaces long

remained framed and defined by the coordinates

of Euclidean geometry, itself historically associ-

ated with studies of the physics of light (Kemp,

1990; Lefebvre, 1991). So long as geographical

space remained absolute, conceptually rooted in

the measurable materiality of a physical ‘envi-

ronment’ external to the human body, the purest

geographical landscapes were those outlined

theoretically in spatial science. Such landscapes

materialize collective, rational human action

influenced by the frictional effects of distance, or

describe empirically the ecological outcome of

human occupation in delimited physical regions.

‘Löschan landscapes’ of hierarchical nodal

points and polygonal territories exemplify the

former; the palimpsest of cultural landscapes

within the cadaster of the lower Mississippi

Valley is a fine example of the latter (Bunge,

1966; Corner and MacIean, 1996). But geograph-

ical study today embraces various expressions of

relative space, defined by culturally diverse coor-

dinates of human experience and intention. Simi-

larly, sight, vision and seeing – as such varied

words imply – involve much more than a simple

sense response: the passive, neutral imprint of

images formed by light on the retina of the eye.

Human sight is individually intentional and

culturally conditioned. The lover sees only the

loveliness of the loved; the city dweller from

temperate latitudes is blind to the rich variety of

snow surfaces that make up the polar landscapes

inhabited by Inuit speakers (Sonnenfeld, 1994).

Furthermore, sight in the modern world is

increasingly prosthetic, directed and experienced

through a vast array of mechanical aids to vision

which radically extend the capacities of the unas-

sisted eye: lenses, cameras, light projectors,

screens and scopes. Central to my argument will

be the coevolution in the modern west of spatial

experience and conception and of the techniques

and meanings of seeing. Cultural landscape may

be regarded as one of the principal geographical

expressions of this coevolution, whose critical

examination is a current preoccupation within

cultural geography.

To trace the connections between landscape

and the western geographical imagination, I

adopt here a broadly historical approach. Recog-

nizing the west’s long privileging of the sense of

sight, I examine modes of vision (sight, gaze,

insight, vision) and trace their connections to the

different ways that space is apprehended, such as

surface and depth, proximity and distance. I

show how landscape images construct as well as

reflect the geographical expression of individual

and social identities. This reveals associations

between landscape and such identifiers as gen-

der, class, ethnicity and age. I consider too the

territorial expression of social identities in land-

scape, exploring property, military, nationalist,

imperial and colonial relations with land and its

representations, for example in maps and paint-

ings. Throughout, I emphasize that the evolution

of landscape meanings in the west is as much a

story of changing technologies of perception

(cameras, lenses, film and screens) and modes of

representation (perspective and colour theories)

as of unmediated visual relations between the

human viewer and material space.

VISION AND LANDSCAPE

Much of the revived interest among cultural

geographers in recent decades has come from the

simple but profound recognition that seeing is a

culturally encompassed activity. We learn to

see through the communicative agency of words

and pictures, and such ways of seeing become

‘natural’ to us. But geographical dislocation

or cultural change can disrupt the taken-for-

grantedness of seeing, opening a space for more

critical reflection on what is seen. The intellec-

tual agenda of early-twentieth-century landscape

study in cultural geography was set by concern

for the urban-industrial erosion of what many

took to be ‘natural’ relations between localized

human communities and the physical environ-

ments in which they lived and worked. To many,

those relationships seemed manifest in apparently

immemorial patterns beyond city and railroad. A

human ‘ecology’ was figured, for example in the

triad ‘place–work–folk’ inherited by Patrick

Geddes from Frederick Le Play (Matless, 1992;

1997). Whether in French Picardy or English

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