Cultural Geography

position for the viewer and a particular form for

that which is being seen. We have become used

to the importing of hard science into the social;

perhaps there is room here for research into the

migration of geography into theoretical physics

and urology.

It is not the vagueness of the term that is my

principal problem though. My problem with the

idea of landscape can be illustrated through the

term ‘landscapes of practice’. The term is some-

what oxymoronic. Landscape, on the one hand,

appears to encapsulate the notion of fixity – of a

text already written – of the production of mean-

ing and the creation of dominating power. Land-

scape is solid. Practice, on the other hand, is

about fluidity, flow and repetition. It is about the

negotiation between continuity and change.

Practice has been seen by social and cultural

theorists as an antidote to the representational –

as an unexamined component of the everyday.

So what could ‘landscapes of practice’ refer to?

In many ways it resembles Raymond Williams’

term ‘structure of feeling’. Williams developed

the notion of ‘structure of feeling’ in order to

simultaneously bring the notion of structure and

notion of feeling into question.

If the social is always past, in the sense that it is always

formed, we have indeed to find other terms for the

undeniable experience of the present: not only the

temporal present, the realisation of this and that instant,

but the specificity of present being, the inalienably

physical, within which we may indeed discern and

acknowledge institutions, formations, positions, but not

always as fixed products, defining products. And then if

the social is the fixed and explicit –the known rela-

tionships, institutions, formations, positions –all that is

present and moving, all that escapes or seems to escape

from the fixed and the explicit and the known, is

grasped and defined as the personal: this, here, now,

alive, active, ‘subjective’. (1977: 128)

The term ‘structure of feeling’ simultaneously

brings the fixity of structure and the flow of feel-

ing into account. In this formulation structure is

not fixed and eternal but a part of a process. Feel-

ing is not just ‘personal’ but moulded (not deter-

mined!) by the social. Structure and feeling do

not inhabit two ends of a spectrum but are inter-

connected and productive of each other. These

two terms (‘landscapes of practice’ and ‘struc-

tures of feeling’) are connected by more than

their oxymoronic logic. Williams’ language

suggests further points of contact. The ‘social’ is

notably ‘fixed and explicit’ while feeling is ‘pre-

sent and moving’. Williams relies upon an oppo-

sition of fixity and flow to make his point about

structure and feeling. Structure, the social,

institutions and formations have been, in Williams’

view, located in the past and seen as finished and

coherent – static – while present experience, the

lived, the here and now are seen as fleeting and

subjective. His argument is that neither of these

is the case. It is with this in mind that I explore

the possibility that landscape and practice can

say something to each other. Necessarily this

involves a consideration of the role of vision in

landscape studies and the tension between land-

scapes as seen (and scene) and landscapes as

arenas of practice. This chapter, therefore, is

structured around two terms and their relation to

landscape – vision and practice. The chapter begins

with a (brief) rehearsal of the use of the term

‘landscape’ in cultural geography, pointing out

the elaborations, critiques and developments of

the central role of vision in the definition of land-

scape. The tension between vision and practice is

developed in the next section with reference to

Raymond Williams, Michel de Certeau and

J.B. Jackson. This leads into an extended discus-

sion of theories of practice. The theme of land-

scape as livedis central to the final section which

focuses on the work of recent archaeologists of

landscape and the idea of ‘doxic landscapes’.

WAYS OF SEEING LANDSCAPE

Landscape is clearly one of the central themes in

contemporary cultural geography. The history of

the term hardly needs elaborating given the vig-

orous reworking of the idea of landscape by what

was once known as the ‘new cultural geography’

(now distinctly middle aged). Views of land-

scape within cultural geography can broadly be

divided into three paradigmatic movements. In

the early twentieth century, mostly under the

influence of Carl Sauer and the Berkeley School,

landscape was seen as a material artefact that was

either natural or cultural. Cultural landscapes

were made out of natural landscapes through the

agency of a mysterious and overarching culture.

Thus the landscape of an area was none other

than the material expression of the (seemingly

unified) group of people who lived in that region.

In the 1970s humanistic geographers looked

back on Sauer with some fondness (as well as

W.G. Hoskin in the United Kingdom) and refor-

mulated his view of landscape. Humanists such

as Donald Meinig (1979a), Yi-Fu Tuan (1977)

and Edward Relph (1976) argued for a view of

landscape that took the human imagination into

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