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Landscape

A landscape to a geographer consists of an area or smallregionand the features

that appear there. These features may be tangible and physically present and

observable; or the landscape may be conceptual, representing a structure of

cultural or social characteristics, such as a “linguistic landscape” or an “ethnic

landscape.” The term in English may be derived from a Dutch noun,landschap,

which indicated a specific parcel of land; or the German wordLandschaft, which

has the literal meaning of “land shape.” Various landscapes may play a pivotal role

in the establishment and perpetuation of national identity in anation-state.The

notion of “landscape” as a conceptual tool for approaching and analyzing aloca-

tionwas established in academic geography in the United States by Carl Sauer

and the Berkeley School in the early 20th century. Sauer’s seminal article “The

Morphology of Landscape” appeared in 1925 and initiated an entirely new theo-

retical framework that challenged the prevailing paradigm ofenvironmental

determinism. Sauer and his students pioneered the study ofcultural ecology,

which emphasizes the impact of culture on the physical environment, rather than

the reverse, which had been the basis for the deterministic ideas that had domi-

nated geographic thought before the late 1920s. Sauer held that the cultural history

of a place could be “read” from an examination of the landscape, and that the rela-

tionships between the features on the landscape revealed how the place had

evolved through a series of cultural influences over time. Most of the work of the

Berkeley School geographers was grounded inparticularism, and addressed

landscapes as unique phenomena that were not subject to “laws” that dictated their

nature or circumstances.

The notion of landscape is engrained in the research and ideas of many cultural

geographers. Two of the foremost thinkers who have promoted the study of geog-

raphy via the examination of landscapes are Wilbur Zelinsky and Donald Meinig.

Zelinsky earned his doctorate working under the guidance of Sauer, and land-

scapes of various scales and dimensions inform all of his research and publica-

tions, including his magnum opus,The Cultural Geography of the United States.

Zelinsky has studied and written widely on the landscapes associated withfolk

cultureandtoponymyin the United States, as well as applying the concept to

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