Cultural Geography

of male reason and ingenuity is a consistent

trope. Feminist critics and artists have sought to

rework modernist associations between land-

scape, the body and femininity, emphasizing the

body as a social construction and its creative

potential, and pointing out the possibilities of

revisioning nature in terms of male bodies and

alternative masculinities (Bunn, 1994; Norwood

and Monk, 1987; Pratt, 1992).

LANDSCAPE: TERRITORY

AND IDENTITY

If the social processes incorporated into land-

scape are normalized through its ‘natural’ quali-

ties, the visible scene does more than simply

reflect the imposition of prior cultural distinc-

tions; it serves to regulate and order social

relations. This disciplinary aspect of landscape

has been intensively studied. It is most apparent

in military or carceral landscapes, which involve

the explicit threat or exercise of violence.

J.B. Jackson (1984: 131–8) has written of the

military landscapes he experienced as an intelli-

gence officer in wartime France during 1944.

Landscapes delicately limned by Vidalian geog-

raphers as medals struck in the likeness of their

peasant cultivators were reduced to simplified

sectors and zones, identified by the colour coding

of flags and emblems. They came to be ‘seen’ by

soldiers precisely in that way, and in many cases

to be reduced by bombardment to little more than

that (Clout, 1999; Gold and Revill, 1999). In

twentieth-century colonial wars, in South Africa,

Malaya, Vietnam and Kenya for example, a con-

sistent practice on the part of colonial forces was

the removal of subject rural populations into the

protective custody of ‘defended’ villages in order

to prevent their infiltration by guerrilla troops

and to clear space for conventional warfare

(Sioh, 1998). This entailed removing villages,

farmhouses and natural ‘cover’ in order to give

advantage to vision and sight-based military

technologies. ‘Conventional’ warfare actually

refers to forms of military engagement devel-

oped on the agrarian landscapes of western

Europe (whence the word ‘campaign’ is

derived). Military landscapes might be regarded

as the rawest expression of the characteristically

modern landscape whose forms are determined

by clearly marked linear spatial divisions, uni-

form vision and exclusionary practices. The most

consistent expression of such territoriality is the

nation-state, whose initial foundation was a concept

of social collectivity expressed in an ecological

concept of nationhood rooted in land. Its global

spread is largely a result of European imperial-

ism and colonization. As a geopolitical entity,

the nation-state has drawn heavily upon both

the naturalizing and the disciplinary powers of

visible landscape.

Nature, nation, landscape

While the territorial state remains a primary basis

of social identity for most of the world’s peoples,

contemporary processes such as decolonization,

262 LANDSCAPE

Figure 12.8 Caspar David Freidrich, ‘The Cross in the Mountains’(The National Gallery)

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