Cultural Geography

has none of the dogmatism of the theatrical performance,

or architectronics and that distanced aesthetic – framed

up, laid out for our pictorial inspection and approval. So

that the very inauthenticityof the performance allows

room for manoeuvre, allows stances, of ownership,

identity and interpretation, to be confirmed, challenged,

confounded at the same time. (2000: 146)

The integration of landscape with practice

inherent in the performances and writings of

Shanks and Pearson is also a feature of some

recent work on tourism. Tim Edensor’s Tourists

at the Taj (1998) considers the often-looked-at

Taj Mahal as a landscape of practice. Four

practices he focuses on are walking, gazing,

photographing and remembering. Consider

walking. Walking is a fairly basic feature of

most people’s lives – a routine and mundane

practice. It is also a practice central to tourism.

Most of us, I would guess, have spent time

walking around sites while on holiday. Edensor

suggests that in tourism ‘Landscapes are criss-

crossed and imprinted with the bodily presence

of the visitor, and symbolic sites are negotiated

via various paths’ (1998: 105). The movements

of tourists, he suggests, become sedimented in

the landscape as a kind of ‘place-ballet’. Indeed

the places of most frequent passage become

worn and grooved in the most material sense.

The way these practices get to be sedimented

is through repetition. Indeed, in the Taj, it

seems, most walking is highly organized and

choreographed.

At the Taj, obeying the instructions of guides and tour

organisers, most package tourists follow prescribed

paths, moving towards certain valorised spaces and fea-

tures and not others. The performance of these disci-

plined collective choreographies constitutes a quite

precise and predictable ‘place-ballet’. Bodies are

tutored and disciplined, kept together and directed by

assumptions about what is deemed ‘appropriate’, by

group norms, and principally by the orders of the guide.

(1998: 107)

Edensor goes on to distinguish these kinds of

regulated tourist practices from other ways of

walking. Backpackers, apparently, are more

likely to wander fairly randomly and unguided,

while local visitors make a point of visiting the

mosque as part of the itinerary. In each of these

cases, though, his point is that the landscape is

practised – it comes alive – in both regulated and

unregulated ways.

It is notable the degree to which the work I

have just summarized looks back to Merleau-

Ponty for its inspiration. The habitual and

embodied is used to critique a particular form

of disembodied gaze. Edensor speaks of ‘place-

ballets’ – a term which must have found its way

from David Seamon into tourism studies by

some circuitous route. Cultural geographers long

ago enacted a trenchant critique of the idealism

to phenomenology with its seeming inability to

intuit power relations in the process of transcen-

dental reduction. So while a rediscovery of for-

gotten strains of thought is always welcome, it is

necessary to also pay attention to power and its

relation to practice.

I think I am in agreement with Don Mitchell

here. He has argued, as I do here, that landscape

is very much a lived phenomenon. Cultural

geography, in its turn to the world of representa-

tion, has looked away from material spaces and

seen landscape as ideology, as representation.

This critique has been framed as a critique of

looking at landscapes as merely material forms.

Landscape, in the process, has been turned into a

rarified realm of art and gardens. By refocusing

on the materiality of landscape it is possible for

cultural geographers to interpret the role of land-

scape in the world of practice. As W.J.T.

Mitchell has argued, ‘an account of landscape

has to trace the process by which landscape

effaces its own readability and naturalizes itself ’

(1994: 2).

Recent work has connected the issue of land-

scape to that of ‘moral geographies’. Very simply

put, moral geographies concern the normative

relationship between space and behaviour. What

and who belong where and when? Such consider-

ations necessarily bring together the landscape

and body through practice. Cosgrove’s landscape

was not one to be in but one to be outside of.

Landscapes were moral in so far as they could be

read as a diagram of a particular ideology or

social formation, whether that be feudalism, mer-

chant capitalism or Buddhist kingship. David

Matless’ work on Landscape and Englishness

(1998) is quite different. His landscapes are prac-

tised landscapes. He asks what practices are

appropriate for an English landscape. He con-

nects the way of seeing inherent in landscape to

ways of dressing, of bodily comportment, of tres-

pass and of mountain climbing. In this way the

English landscape is connected to forms of prac-

tical belonging such as citizenship. The English

landscape signified proper ways of being through

the propaganda of a diverse range of interest

groups such as ramblers, scouts, mystics and

dancers. The practice of people in the English

landscape was not divorced from questions of the

visual. As Matless puts it:

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