Cultural Geography

time he calls it a ‘time–space routine’. This

describes the habits of a person as they follow a

routine path through the day – driving to work,

leaving the kids at school, going to lunch, etc.

Seamon also looks beyond the individual body

movement to group behaviour. When many

time–space routines are combined within a par-

ticular place, a ‘Place-ballet’ emerges which

generates, in Seamon’s view, a strong sense of

place. The mobilities of bodies combine in space

and time to produce an existential insideness – a

feeling of belonging within the rhythm of

life-in-place.

Where am I going with this? Thus far I have

developed the idea of landscape as primarily

visual and fixed and the idea of practice as about

fluidity and embodiment. In other words I have

provided a sketch of the contradictions implicit in

the term ‘landscapes of practice’. The word

‘landscape’ and the word ‘practice’ seem to be

poles apart. When Raymond Williams developed

the idea of a ‘structure of feeling’ he wanted to

draw the two, apparently opposite, terms together –

to make structure less fixed and certain and to

make feeling less individual and irreducible. To

end this chapter I want to do the same with land-

scape and practice. I want to make landscape

seem less fixed, less reliant on the visual, less

dependent on authoritative ‘framing’, and to

make practice seem less free-floating and more

connected to the forces that shape our lives. To do

this I explore some ways forward arising out of

recent literature on landscape: ideas of material

culture developed by archaeologists and ques-

tions of ‘moral geographies’ developed within

geography.

WAYS FORWARD: DOXIC

LANDSCAPES

W.J.T. Mitchell, in Landscape and Power,

makes an argument for landscape as a space in

which we lose ourselves – a medium for life. He

aims to absorb these approaches into a more compre-

hensive model that would ask not just what landscape

‘is’ or ‘means’ but what it does, how it works as a cul-

tural practice. Landscape, we suggest, doesn’t merely

signify or symbolize power relations; it is an instrument

of cultural power ... Landscape as a cultural medium

thus has a double role with respect to something like

ideology; it naturalizes a cultural and social construc-

tion, representing an artificial world as if it were some-

thing given and inevitable, and it also makes that

representation operational by interpellating its beholder

in some more or less determinate relation to its

givenness as sight and site. (1994: 1–2)

We might think of such a landscape as a ‘doxic

landscape’. I take the term ‘doxa’ from Bourdieu’s

theorizations of practice. I have previously writ-

ten about doxa in relation to place (Cresswell,

1996). Similar considerations can illuminate the

idea of practised landscapes. Doxa refers to the

realm of common sense – the taken-for-granted.

Doxa is a product of practice. Because people act

in certain preconscious ways, any given order

tends to get re-established and reproduced owing

to the ‘naturalisation of its own arbitrariness’

(Bourdieu, 1977: 164). In other words a world,

or landscape, that is the product of a particular

history is made to seem natural and thus

becomes an important site for the reproduction

of established ways of being. Such a landscape is

very much a product and producer of practice.

What might the concept of doxic landscapes

mean in practice?

Some of the most suggestive work on land-

scape has come from recent archaeology. Like

geography the discipline of archaeology has

gone through a reaction against a positivist

legacy. Part of this reaction is an increased inter-

est in social theory and cultural geography.

Leading exponents of theoretically informed

archaeology include Mike Shanks, Chris Tilley

and Barbara Bender. Predictably, perhaps, new

ways of thinking about landscape have emerged

from a critique of the politics of vision and an

engagement with the politics of practice.

In Shanks and Tilley’s work landscape falls

under the more general rubric of ‘material

culture’. Their argument, crudely put, is that

archaeologists studying material culture have

simply looked at pottery shards and remnant land-

scapes with a view to mapping and describing –

visualizing if you like. What they have not done is

thought about their objects of study in terms of

practice. They propose a new way of thinking

about material culture that is informed by theories

of practice. Material culture is theorized as

an important element of Bourdieu’s doxa, a represen-

tation of the given order of the world that constitutes

an environment for living; as an effective force for

social action; as ideologically informed due to its

perceived simple functionality, concreteness and trivial-

ity which facilitate naturalisation and misrepresen-

tation. (1987: 113)

Landscape, theorized as material culture in these

terms, is not a product of vision in particular but

a practised environment. Landscape cannot

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