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Landscape in Language volume [ 191 ] presents the aims of the young fi eld of ‘eth-
nophysiography’, and these are said to include not only geographical ontology and
the precise semantics of terms used to denote landscape features, but also “ the
study of knowledge systems, beliefs and customs of a people concerning landforms
and landscapes ’ (p. 7). Finally, the recent edited volume Landscape Ethnoecology
[ 192 ] continues this theme by exploring not only people’s interactions with various
landscapes, but also their knowledge of the ecosystems to be found on different
landscape types (see especially [ 193 ] for an overview).
In addition to these language-centred questions regarding human perceptions of
landscape, there exists a large body of literature that deals with the psychological
correlates of humans’ interactions with their surroundings. The concept of ‘ cogni-
tive map s ’ has been used to describe the “ long-term memory representation of the
properties of and the components in the environment ” [ 194 ], and in spite of the
numerous competing defi nitions for this concept [ 64 ], it remains a useful heuristic
with which to probe a signifi cant domain of human language and cognition.
Kitchin [ 64 ], in his review of this fi eld, distilled existing orientations concerning
cognitive maps into four main viewpoints:
(1) Is it the case that the cognitive map is a cartographic map (Explicit statement)?
(2) Is it the case that the cognitive map is like a cartographic map (Analogy)?
(3) Is it the case that a cognitive map is used as if it were a cartographic map (Metaphor)?
(4) Is it the case that the cognitive map has no real connections with what we understand to
be a map, i.e. a cartographic map, and is neither an explicit statement, analogy or a meta-
phor but rather an unfortunate choice of phrase: ‘a convenient fi ction?’...In effect just a
hypothetical construct. (p. 3)
One notices in these competing viewpoints a faint echo of some of the issues
surrounding ethno-classifi cations: to what extent are they genuine representations in
people’s minds, as opposed to artefacts of the analyst’s methodology? It is, of
course, possible that the four viewpoints are not entirely mutually incompatible, and
that elements of each can be shown to be valid, depending on the investigatory tools
being employed. Thus, (1) seems to be a reasonable viewpoint if we consider that
so-called ‘place cells’ in the region of the brain called the hippocampus are prefer-
entially activated in response to specifi c locations, and that the level of activation
also signals the presence of familiar perceptual cues at that location (thus indicating
episodic memory) ([ 195 ], see also [ 196 ] for a review). Viewpoints (2) and (3) appear
to gain some validation from empirical studies such as that of Pocock [ 197 ], who
showed that residents of a city tended to draw more interconnected, ‘sequential’
maps dominated by roads, whereas visitors and tourists could only produce ‘spatial’
maps, dominated by buildings, landmarks or districts scattered over the map, with
incidental connections between map elements.^1 Finally, and partly in keeping with
viewpoint (4), Gärling et al. [ 194 ] argue that:
(^1) Pocock acknowledges the limitations of his fi ndings, pointing out that “ the overall correspon-
dence between possessed information and the elicited map is a function of graphicacy ”, and that it
may be unrealistic to assume equivalence between groups.
5 Landscape Terms in Solega