Cultural Geography

there is nevertheless a value in attending to

the particular perspectives which proceed

from differently situated academic knowl-

edges. What then does cultural geography

bring to the discussion? Landscape is one

of the many transdisciplinary concerns of

cultural geography, and here as elsewhere it is

a matter less of claiming territory for a disci-

pline than of showing how thinking geographi-

cally may alter the field, and of recognizing that

the current disciplinary structure may dispose

cultural geographers towards particular

productive ways of thinking.

THE THREE CHAPTERS

The chapters here can be read as symptomatic

and interrogative of particular perspecti-

ves within geography over recent decades.

Don Mitchell extends his earlier Marxian analy-

ses of the California landscape (Mitchell, 1996)

to put forward a sense of landscape articu-

lated through labour, in its production on the

ground and as an analytic concept. Mitchell

emphasizes ‘the work of landscape’ (2000:

91–119); the labour required to produce the

Californian landscape, and the work done by

certain visions of landscape to efface that

labour from schemes of scenic value or pro-

motional imagination. Mitchell’s work here

recalls John Berger and photographer Jean

Mohr’s (1967) study of an English country

doctor and his patients,A Fortunate Man,a

book beginning with a daytime photograph of

a bucolic scene, over which Berger writes:

‘Landscapes can be deceptive. Sometimes a

landscape seems to be less a setting for the life

of its inhabitants than a curtain behind which

their struggles, achievements and accidents

take place.’ On the next page, over a darkened

landscape with only the white paint of homes

showing in the gloom, Berger continues: ‘For

those who, with the inhabitants, are behind

the curtain, landmarks are no longer only geo-

graphic but also biographical and personal’

(1967: 12–15; on Berger see Daniels, 1989).

Mitchell’s chapter in this volume works along-

side his ongoing ‘People’s Geography Project’

(www.peoplesgeography.org; cf. Samuel, 1981),

which might be seen as an attempt to move

the word ‘geography’ from the connotations

of Berger’s first remark – distance, neutrality –

to the next – connection, engagement,

intimacy – while holding to the analytical

framework offered by a geographical Marxism,

with relations of power and interconnections

of scale always to the fore.

Denis Cosgrove was a key figure in bringing

such analyses into cultural geography, an issue

reflected upon in his introduction to the 1998

edition of his Social Formation and Symbolic

Landscape1984. In his chapter for this volume

Cosgrove focuses on the eye, and the close

relationship in the western imagination

between landscape, sight and geographical

imagination and power. The analysis parallels

Cosgrove’s (2001) recent study of the earth

in the western imagination, understanding

how viewing the earth as a whole has figured

the western sense of self, and informed cos-

mological, imperial, visionary geographical

imaginations. Cosgrove brings out strongly the

complexity of the visual, the many varieties of

power it may bring, and its central place in

landscape’s epistemological field. Cosgrove

here develops an argument strong in cultural

geography over the last 20 years, namely the

centrality of the visual to discourses of land-

scape and its implied relations of power, but in

doing so acknowledges the critiques of earlier

formulations of this analysis, in geography and

beyond (Nash, 1996; Rose, 1993; and see Jay,

1993), drawing out the historical and political

complexities of seeing.

Landscape in Sightis the title of a posthumous

collection of writings by J.B. Jackson (1997),

whose way of ‘Looking at America’ offers

another visual culture of landscape, central to

Tim Cresswell’s chapter here. Jackson’s emphasis

on the ordinary, vernacular landscape has long

been influential in cultural geography, especially

in the USA (Groth, 1998; Groth and Bressi,

1997; Meinig, 1979), and provides a counter-

point to Cosgrove’s discussion of power and

the visual, and Mitchell’s exploration of the

landscapes of labour. Jackson provides a less

evidently theoretical purchase on landscape; no

obvious major social theory walks through his

essays on garages, suburbs and highways. It is in

part this sense of the vernacular and the ordi-

nary, differently theorized though no less

thoughtful, that draws Cresswell to Jackson’s

work. As for other figures such as English land-

scape historian W.G. Hoskins (Matless, 1993;

228 LANDSCAPE

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