Cultural Geography

transformation of landscape and indeed of the

native environmental and spatial knowledge

necessary to initial European exploration, mapping

and settlement was largely ignored or diminished

in significance (Malcolm, 1998). Only recently

have the complex aboriginal changes and adjust-

ments to the landscape before and during the

contact phase begun to be systematically studied

by cultural geographers.

Imperial eyes gazed through European lenses,

actually as well as metaphorically. The technolo-

gies of seeing which shaped rural Europe into

landscape were applied to these ‘other’ spaces.

Soldiers, sailors and scientific explorers as well as

artists were trained in techniques of observing,

surveying and sketching landscapes. Their repre-

sentations were powerful elements in returning

knowledge of exotic, ‘other’ places to imperial

centres and they both framed and reinforced the

imaginative geographies of empire. When exam-

ined critically these landscape images are revealed

as hybrid creations, reflecting the meeting of con-

ventions of seeing shaped at home and the need to

record actually witnessed forms, phenomena and

atmospheres for which those conventions were

inadequate vehicles of expression (Martins, 1999).

This realization is reinforced when we examine the

processes of image creation rather than merely

their finished surfaces. In landscape images as

much as in the material shaping of colonial land

scapes, geopolitical and economic imperatives

often grated against moral principals, and the contra-

dictions echo into the present. Thus, contemporary

Malaysian insouciance over the disappearance

of tropical rainforest, shocking to many westerners,

can be understood in terms of the complex

patterns of ownership, cultivation, management

and conflict which shaped a plantation landscape

and its bordering ‘jungle’ (Sioh, 1998).

THE LIMITATIONS OF

LANDSCAPE VISION

The conventional emphasis on the visual and the

visible in landscape forms and expressions is a

logical outcome of its conceptual and historical

evolution in the west. Many of the research tech-

niques developed in the geographical study of

landscape, from fieldwork to iconographic inter-

pretation, maintain the focus on sight, vision and

image. But the epistemological connection between

observation, graphic representation and objectiv-

ity is now widely acknowledged to be deeply

problematic. Vision’s role in connecting knowl-

edge and power has a complex and continuous

history, and it continues to evolve. The penetrating

capacities of sight expand radically as advanced

optical technologies open new spaces of vision

and shift the boundaries of public and private

space. Thus critical landscape studies today

emphasize the duality and provisional nature of

sight: the returned gaze, the capacity of its sub-

jects to manipulate, obscure, subvert or deform

visual order. The democracy offered by modern

image-making and image-manipulating tech-

nologies promotes historical re-evaluation too.

Perhaps landscape was always a more open

prison than we have recognized.

Today’s extended prosthetics of vision parallel

increased recognition of the human eye’s embodi-

ment. Vision is never entirely disconnected from

the other sensual, cognitive and affective aspects

of human conduct. While the permeable connec-

tions between external nature and the human body

attract attention in the context of virtual worlds

and cyborg spaces, they also have deep cultural

and historical roots. Geomancy, for example, a

key element in both landscape art and the design

of gardens in China and Japan, and fundamental

to the imaginative geography of the Korean

peninsula, continues to shape the modernist land-

scape of Asian cities, even influencing modernist

engineering projects such as the damming of great

Chinese rivers (Jin, 2000). It is increasingly popu-

lar in the west as an aid to space design. Feng-shui,

literally ‘wind-water’, refers to the animating

elements of natural form, to the processes which

shape landscape rather than its visible structures

and patterns. According to this apprehension of

land and life, the body of the earth and the bodies

of those who inhabit the world should be brought

into harmony if Qiis to flow smoothly through all

things. Such concepts prompt us to move land-

scape beyond the confines of the visual towards

more imaginative and encompassing embodi-

ments that are at once sensual and cognitive.

All spatial activity is consciously or uncon-

sciously performative. The sense of sight plays a

critical but by no means exclusive role in bringing

together the human and natural actors who perform

landscape. While ‘eyeing nature’ has certainly been

profoundly significant in shaping the cultural

geography of the modern world and its study, revis-

ing the role and meaning of vision in landscape

allows a more subtle and nuanced embrace of land-

scape’s conceptual and empirical riches.

REFERENCES

Agnew, J. (1998) ‘European landscape and identity’, in

B. Graham (ed.) Modern Europe: Place, Culture and

Identity. London: Arnold. pp. 213–35.

LANDSCAPE AND THE EUROPEAN SENSE OF SIGHT 265

3029-ch12.qxd 03-10-02 5:49 PM Page 265