Cultural Geography

landscape. We might even go further and say that

some humanists believe that landscape exists

only inside the heads of people as a perspective –

a way of ordering the world.

The role of vision was not lost on cultural geo-

graphers such as Denis Cosgrove and Stephen

Daniels who developed the theme of landscape

still further. They agree that landscape is a ‘way

of seeing’ but insist on the relationship between

that way of seeing and the material conditions

which overdetermine it. Cosgrove was one of the

first geographers to suggest that geographers

could benefit from the work of cultural studies

and began to mix humanism with Marxism. He

was worried that humanists had surrendered to

‘idealism and subjectivism’ in the ‘intellectual

examination of mind and matter’ (1987: 87). The

subjective reformulation of the external world

(the landscape), Cosgrove tells us, is not the

product of an autonomous mind but the product

of culture which is itself an element of an over-

determined superstructure. Landscapes as sym-

bolic systems and as ways of seeing needed to be

seen in relation to ‘social formations’.

The canonical text on landscape in recent

cultural geography is Denis Cosgrove’s Social

Formation and Symbolic Landscape (1984).

Although the term ‘landscape’ had been used any

number of times before by geographers, it had

not been fully defined within a historical context.

Cosgrove revealed the lineage of the term in a

way that defined some crucial parts of it. He

defines landscape as a ‘way of seeing – a way in

which some Europeans have represented to

themselves and to others the world about them

and relationships with it, and through which they

have commented on social relations’ (1984: 1).

This first stab at a definition is followed by many

others, all centred on a relationship between

people and the world revolving around the act of

seeing. Eight pages later, landscape is defined

as ‘the artistic and literary representation of the

visible world, the scenery (literally that which is

seen) which is viewed by the spectator’ (1984: 9)

which implied ‘a particular sensibility, a way of

experiencing and expressing feelings towards the

external world, natural and man-made, an arti-

culation of a human relationship with it. That

sensibility was closely connected to a growing

dependency on the faculty of sight as the

medium through which truth was to be attained’

(1984: 9). Cosgrove clearly agrees that the con-

cept of landscape revolves around vision but,

unlike humanists before him, he sought to place

this ‘way of seeing’ in historical and social con-

text. This contextualizing of vision is mirrored

by Stephen Daniels in his outline of the

‘duplicity’ of landscape:

[L]andscape may be seen as a ‘dialectical image’, an

ambiguous synthesis whose redemptive and manipula-

tive aspects cannot finally be disentangled, which can

neither be completely reified as an authentic object in

the world nor thoroughly dissolved as an ideological

mirage. (1990: 206)

To Daniels the vagueness of landscape makes it

an interesting term – one that holds together the

material and the ideal, the solid and the super-

ficial. It is still however primarily a visual order

whether created through paintings or through

country parks.

The other principal way of thinking about

landscape in geography has been through the

analogy of text. This is principally associated

with the work of James Duncan. Duncan (1990)

argues against the privileging of vision and sug-

gests that we might think of landscapes as being

constructed linguistically – as a signifying

system that encourages some readings rather

than others. As with a text, the producers write

some meanings into a landscape but cannot

finally control individual readings.

The landscape, I would argue, is one of the central

elements in a cultural system, for as an ordered assem-

blage of objects, a text, it acts as a signifying system

through which a social system is communicated, repro-

duced, experienced, and explored. (1990: 17)

In Duncan’s work landscape is not the detached

object of a powerful gaze but a material symbolic

system in which people live. Landscape is a rep-

resentation of particular ideas produced by

people on top of a social hierarchy. But as a text

landscape is a space in which meaning and inten-

tion get pulled apart. The meaning is unstable

because people act in it in ways that cannot be

predicted. They read it differently. A key ques-

tion for Duncan is how landscape acts as a com-

municative device to produce and reproduce a

social and cultural order. Landscapes, he argues,

can make subjects and objects appear as fixed

and reified – can make what is cultural appear

natural. They are the objectifier par excellence.

They play this role through the use of textual

devices such as metonymy, metaphor and alle-

gory. Through these devices powerful people are

able to tell morally charged stories about them-

selves, their relationships to others and their

relations with the natural world.

By becoming part of the everyday, the taken-for-

granted, the objective, and the natural, the landscape

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