Here, landscape was largely equated with
Western visual traditions of landscape painting
and gardening. In drawing upon and extend-
ing the work of cultural Marxist critics such as
John Berger (1972) and Raymond Williams
(1973), these cultural geographies of land-
scape focused upon the critical interrogation
of the ideological function of landscape
images, arguing that landscapes worked so as
to reflect and reproduce the values and norms
of socio-economic elites. In pinpointing its
Italian Renaissance origins, Cosgrove (1985)
sought to highlight the complicity of landscape
as a way of seeing with notions of objective
knowledge and distanced visual authority and
control. In speaking of landscape’s ‘duplicity’,
Daniels (1989) noted that the aesthetic func-
tion of artistic landscapes masked their ideo-
logical role in naturalizing socio-economic
hierarchies and patterns of land ownership
(see art; iconography). In defining land-
scape as a text to be critically read via the
principles of structuralist semiotics, Duncan
and Duncan (1988) argued that landscape op-
erated as a signifying system for the produc-
tion and transmission of cultural meanings.
Gillian Rose (1993) further extended and
critiqued this body of work through highlight-
ing how, for geographers and others, the land-
scape way of seeing was a particularly
masculinistgaze. Thus, in addition to systems
of cultural and political power and capitalist
forms of social relation, landscape visually
indexed specific forms of patriarchy and disem-
bodied, detached observation. For Rose, the
academic landscape gaze involves a duality be-
tween an active masculine eye and a passive,
‘naturalized’ femininity. This eye, however, os-
cillates ambivalently between asserted rational
observation and repressed visual pleasure, in
the form of voyeurism and narcissism. This
critique thus applied psychoanalytic principles
to landscape interpretation, further aligning
cultural geographies of landscape with work in
visual and cultural theory (e.g. Mulvey, 1989;
Nash, 1996: seevision and visuality).
Work through the 1990s sought to inflect
and extend the cultural turn focus on land-
scape images and texts by further apprehend-
ing landscape in terms of action, process and
movement, both discursive and material. Don
Mitchell’s (1996, 2003) materialist analyses
aim to re-invigorate Marxist understanding of
landscape in terms of production as well as the
cultural consumption and circulation of land-
scape imagery. For Mitchell, the production of
actual, material landscapes such as mining
towns or agricultural belts is a matter of
ongoing struggle and conflict between differ-
ent social and economic groups within capit-
alist networks of violence, inequality and
profit. With a similar focus upon issues of
power, but in a more discursive and interpret-
ative vein, an influential collection edited by
cultural theorist W.J.T. Mitchell (2002e
[1994]) sought to define landscape as a verb,
not a noun – that is, as a process, not an object
or image. Here, understood in terms of cultur-
ally specific styles of moving, seeing and repre-
senting, landscape is historically identified
with European imperial discourse, the visual
modus operandiof European explorers, artists
and cartographers. Extending the focus of
earlier work upon landscape in national con-
texts, linkages between the landscape gaze,
science, exploration and imperialism have
been extensively discussed by cultural geog-
raphers and historians (see Pratt, 1992;
Ryan, 1996; Clayton, 2000).
A further distinctive strand of current geo-
graphical writing on landscape, closely associ-
ated with the work of David Matless (1992,
1998), places emphasis uponcultures of land-
scape,most often in a British context. Drawing
upon Michel Foucault’s accounts of discourse,
power and subjectivity, landscape practices
such as walking, boating and driving are ana-
lysed here in terms of the discursive regimes
(e.g. those of health and citizenship, state plan-
ning, environmental activism), through which
codes of proper conduct for using, appreciating
and indeed creating landscape are elaborated.
Although these various discursive, icono-
graphic and interpretive approaches have de-
fined cultural geographies of landscape since
the 1980s, they have of late been challenged,
modulated and to some degree superseded by
work advocating phenomenological, corporeal
and performative perspectives. The cultural
anthropologist Tim Ingold (1993, 2000) in
particular has argued that the definition of
landscape as a way of seeing perpetuates a
duality of culture and nature, and erases first-
order issues of materiality, agency and
embodied performance by locating landscape
within a disembodied realm of cultural dis-
course and signification. Ingold’s remedy pro-
poses a landscape phenomenology, inspired by
the writing of Martin Heidegger and Maurice
Merleau-Ponty, and focusing substantively
upon embodied practices of dwelling and
being-in-the-world. Here, landscape is defined
as a processual, material and perceptual en-
gagement of body and world, enacted in terms
of a distinctive temporality – a rich duration
of inhabitation. This emphasis on bodilyGregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_L Final Proof page 410 31.3.2009 2:44pmLANDSCAPE