Cultural Geography

over he returned to New Mexico and, following

a riding accident, decided to match the European

geography publications with an American

version that was to become Landscape. The

first issue was published in Spring 1951. In his

early essays Jackson outlined the importance

and pleasure of careful observation. ‘I see

things very clearly and I rely on what I see,’ he

explained, ‘And I see things that other people

don’t see, and I call their attention to it’

(Horowitz, 1997: xxiv). By 1956 Jackson was

in close contact with the Geography Depart-

ment at Berkeley, and Sauer (as well as

Clarence Glacken, Lewis Mumford, Kevin

Lynch and others) began to write for the jour-

nal, developing a multidisciplinary and maver-

ick conception of the study of landscape.

Jackson continued to criss-cross the United

States on his motorbike and in his pickup truck

and frequently wrote about the landscape from

the perspective of a mobile observer. It is in

these essays that the dualism of vision and

practice breaks down.

If the equation that links landscape to vision

has frequently erased practice, then J.B. Jackson’s

mobile view of landscape began to show how

vision is a practice. J.B Jackson’s way of looking

is so much less reliant on that distanced gaze

from above and so much more practised – more

embodied. One of the best essays in this regard

is ‘The abstract world of the hot rodder’. He

introduces us to the world of the pedestrian

Sunday. Families would leave their homes on

Sunday morning complete with all the acces-

sories of really leisurely leisure. They would take

the street car to some ‘favorite patch’ and walk

into the distance ‘strolling at a child’s pace’.

Jackson declares these Sunday excursions a lost

treasure which inspired ‘schools of painting

and writing and music ... Untold minor scientific

and artistic accomplishments came from the

same abundant source; local botanical and geo-

graphical and historical descriptions, small

books of nature verse, amateur sketches and

compositions.’ Despite this romantic notion of a

weekend stroll he declares it mere nostalgia to

think in those terms in the modern world because

the nature of viewing – the way it is embodied –

has changed.

Much more has happened to us than the advent of the

automobile; we have learned to see the world differ-

ently even on our holidays; we confront the familiar set-

ting in a new manner. Broadly speaking, the former

experience of nature was contemplative and static. It

came while we strolled (at three miles an hour or less)

through country paths with frequent halts for picking

flowers, observing wildlife, and admiring the view.

Repose and reflection in the midst of undisturbed natural

beauty and a glimpse of something remote were what we

chiefly prized. I do not wish to decry the worth of these

pleasures; none were ever more fruitful in their time; but

the layman’s former relationship to nature ... was largely

determined by a kind of classical perspective and by awe.

A genuine sense of worship precluded any desecration,

but it also precluded any desire for participation, and

intuition that man also belonged. (1997: 202)

Jackson goes on to develop the idea of partici-

pation in an ‘abstract world’ brought on by tech-

nologies of speed such as the motorbike and

increasingly popular outdoor pursuits such as

skiing. Rather then standing back and looking,

the hot rodders take part in the landscape. They

experience it through embodied practice. A

similar perspective is at the heart of his later

essay ‘The accessible landscape’ (1988), in

which Jackson describes the view through the

window of his favourite pickup truck as he dri-

ves through America’s vernacular heartland –

not the static view from on high but a moving

perspective more typical of the everyday prac-

tice of American life. Many years earlier in

‘Other-directed houses’ Jackson celebrated the

highway strip as a place of pleasure and diver-

sion for the motorist, pointing out, 16 years

before Venturi et al.’s Learning from Las Vegas,

that the buildings on the strip have to be

designed for a kind of vision that travelled at 40

miles per hour – vision as a particular kind of

historically specific practice.

Thinking Practice

‘Practice’ is a term which has begun to make

a significant impact on cultural geography. Its

origins are in critical theory, performance studies,

feminism and post-Marxist social theory. On the

whole it has been absent from landscape studies.

It is already clear that to talk of ‘practice’ can

mean quite different things to different people. I

began this chapter with the observation that the

notion of landscapes of practice was based on

oxymoronic logic. Landscape, as we have seen,

is predominantly thought of as a visual thing – as

an image. It is also thought of as material and

fixed – a kind of framing. Practice on the other

hand is most frequently seen as radically unfixed

and unfixable.

Theories of practice from Bourdieu to Judith

Butler to Nigel Thrift are indebted to the work of

Maurice Merleau-Ponty. He was particularly

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