Cultural Geography

account. Rather than provide accounts of

distinctive regional material landscapes, geogra-

phers began to see landscape as residing within

the minds and eyes of beholders: landscape as a

way of seeing. Finally, in the mid 1980s geogra-

phers such as Denis Cosgrove (1984; 1985;

1987), Stephen Daniels (1990; 1993) and Kenneth

Olwig(1984), fired by the ascendancy of Marx-

ist and radical accounts of the world, particularly

those of Raymond Williams, argued that land-

scapes were material productions within which

were coded particular ideologies. Landscapes

were diagrams of power and influence that

helped to reproduce the very power structures

that produced them in the first place. In Daniels’

(1990) terms, landscapes were duplicitous in that

they could not be reduced to either their brute

materiality or the more ideological notion of

‘ways of seeing’.

Central to this potted history has been a criti-

que of thinking of landscapes as purely material

topographies. While there is no doubt that Sauer

had a broader agenda than the straightforward

mapping and description of different landscape

morphologies, it is equally clear that the major-

ity of work by his followers has been centred on

just such projects. To Sauer landscape was geo-

graphy’s naively given phenomenon. We often

forget that Sauer looked to phenomenology to

construct his view of the discipline. ‘Every field

of knowledge is characterized by its declared

preoccupation with a certain group of pheno-

mena,’ he declared, ‘which it undertakes to iden-

tify and order according to their relations’ (1965:

316). No other discipline could be said to have

landscape as its ‘object of consciousness’, and it

was (in Sauer’s eyes) the unique and privileged

role of geography to describe and understand

(which amount to the same thing in much of

Sauer’s work) this phenomenon:

The task of geography is conceived as the establishment

of a critical system which embraces the phenomenology

of landscape, in order to grasp in all its meaning and

color the varied terrestrial scene. (1965: 319)

Importantly Sauer was keen to emphasize that

landscape was not just a scene for the activities of

people but something which included the works

of people as a defining element. It was in this way

that Sauer rejected the determinism of his prede-

cessors, Semple and Huntingdon, and it is for this

reason that Sauer’s geography became known as

‘cultural geography’. Unfortunately the activities

of humans on the landscape became conflated

with the action of an overarching and superor-

ganic ‘culture’ on the land (Duncan, 1980).

Humanistic geographers inherited the concern

with the issue of landscape but turned their atten-

tion away from the ‘morphology’ of landscape

and towards the ‘experience’ of landscape. An

important link here is J.B. Jackson (in many

ways the hero of this story). Jackson followed

the Berkeley line in his interest in the cultural

landscape and his distrust of formal theory. But

Jackson also began to explore the ‘symbolic’

aspects of landscape:

[A] landscape is not a natural feature of the environ-

ment, but a synthetic space, a man-made system of

spaces superimposed on the face of the land function-

ing and evolving not according to natural laws but to

serve a community. A landscape is thus a space delib-

erately created to speed up or slow down nature.

(1984: 8)

Jackson recognized the importance of art and

emotion in the study of landscape as he attempted

to teach his students to ‘read’ the landscape as a

kind of text full of symbolic clues to the meaning

that lies behind the bare morphology. In this sense

his work influenced humanistic geographers, as

is clear from the long dedication to him in the

book The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes

(Meinig, 1979b). The overwhelming theme of

Meinig’s volume is the way in which culture

provides a lens to focus our idea of landscape.

The attention throughout is on the way we see

the landscape rather than what we see in the

landscape. Vision becomes the central way of

getting at landscape. Meinig’s well-known paper

‘The beholding eye’ outlines 10 views of the

same landscape which depend on the particular

way in which individuals with different interests

will interpret the same physical features.

We may certainly agree that we will see many of the

same elements –houses, roads, trees, hills –in terms of

such denotations as number, form, diversity and color;

but such facts only take on meaning through associa-

tion, they must be fitted together according to some

coherent body of ideas. Thus we confront the central

problem: any landscape is composed not only of what

lies before our eyes but what lies within our heads.

(1979a: 34)

The same point is repeated by Yi-Fu Tuan in his

essay ‘Thought and landscape’. ‘Landscape,’ he

argues, ‘is not to be defined by itemizing its

parts. The parts are subsidiary clues to an inte-

grated image. Landscape is such an image, a con-

struct of the mind and of feeling’ (1979: 89). To

many humanists landscape is an image. The

focus is turned away from the form of the mate-

rial landscape and towards the way we see

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