Cultural Landscape In Environmental Studies Research Paper

Introduced into American geography in the early twentieth century, the importance of the concept cultural landscape has waxed and waned in relation to the shifting contours and contexts of the history of the social sciences, expressed primarily in the discipline of geography. It has taken on diverse meanings, been subject to rigorous criticisms, and emerged in the late twentieth century as a vital and politically-charged concept. This essay traces the changing interpretations and uses of the concept ‘cultural landscape,’ before analyzing contemporary and future trends.

1. Historical Development

American geographer Carl Sauer’s influential essay ‘The Morphology of Landscape,’ originally published in 1925 (1963), provided the first formal introduction of the concept of the cultural landscape into American social science, and laid a foundation on which it would build for the next 50 years. Partly in reaction to the methodological and philosophical flaws of what had become the reigning paradigm in geography— environmental determinism—Sauer attempted to situ- ate human-environment relationships more firmly as a science by putting forward the concept of the cultural landscape as its distinctive object of analysis. Sauer posited a natural landscape, comprised of land forms, climate, waterways, and vegetation, that was acted upon by human cultures to create a cultural landscape, composed of material expressions of population density and mobility, housing plan and structure, production, and communication. In his now famous phrase: ‘The cultural landscape is fashioned from a natural landscape by a culture group. Culture is the agent, the natural area is the medium, the cultural landscape is the result’ (Sauer 1925, p. 343). To make clear his position vis-a-vis environmental determinism, Sauer explicitly stated that nature is only important in that it provides the raw material that people use to fashion the cultural landscape: ‘The shaping force, however, lies in the culture itself’ (Sauer 1925, p. 343). So by positioning landscape studies in this way, Sauer was putting forward an empirically verifiable object of analysis (the cultural landscape), and was shifting the explanatory variable away from nature to culture. Sauer’s ‘Morphology of Landscape’ proved particularly influential in American geography, partly because he drew on German and French traditions which at the time were thought to be more sophisticated in conceptualizing human–environment relationships, and partly because he provided a core concept that gave geography its own object of analysis distinct from other disciplines. For the next 30 or so years, the concept of the cultural landscape as advanced by Sauer was central to the emerging discipline of geography in the USA, and to human–environment studies more broadly. Sauer and the students he trained at the University of California at Berkeley formed a particularly influential group of geographers, and the methods and approaches they used to study cultural landscapes, influenced by the anthropology of A. Kroeber and R. Lowie, became almost paradigmatic.

As former students and others attempted to ‘operationalize’ Sauer’s ideas in the 1930s and 1940s, two distinct trajectories became evident: the first stressed the enumeration of elements of the cultural landscape in order to delineate homogenous regions, while the second stressed spatial and temporal processes that created the cultural landscape. The first trajectory, often referred to as chorology, or areal differentiation, offered a way of studying the cultural landscape systematically by enumerating its various elements, looking for similarities in forms and structures (morphology), and deducing from this analysis areas or regions. The second interpretation looked at a particular cultural landscape as the end result of a set of spatial and historical processes. The significant spatial process in Sauer’s approach was that of diffusion—the movement of people, ideas and things across space— and the historical processes referred to the role of cultures in transforming a ‘natural’ landscape into a cultural landscape. For example, geographers in the 1930s to 1960s studied the origins and diffusion of agricultural patterns, house types, and fences (Zelinsky 1973), while others reconstructed sequences of past cultural landscapes leading up to the present-day, and outlined the transformations from a so-called ‘primitive landscape’ to a ‘cultural landscape.’

As these studies matured, the two trajectories became more divergent. The delineation of regions on the basis of cultural landscape elements (the first trajectory) moved away from the focus on cultural landscape elements, and more to the systematic analysis of spatial patterns. The quantitative revolution that swept through the social sciences in the 1960s was taken up by the disciplines more focused on cultural landscape, leading to diminished attention. The term ‘cultural landscape’ retained its currency for those who emphasized historical processes, and those who continued to use the three-dimensional definition of cultural landscape (the second trajectory). In these studies, the concept of the cultural landscape as an object of study and as an approach to that study converged. In other words, researchers concerned with outlining and analyzing how, over time, culture groups shaped their landscapes, and how cultural landscape forms can be interpreted as indicators of cultural norms, looked to historical and interpretive methods to answer their questions. Their emphasis on the particularities of landscapes, and of its three-dimensional qualities, was not amenable to abstract, generalizable models. The subfield of cultural geography coalesced around these studies and approaches, with the concept of cultural landscape forming an integral component.

Sauer and the students he had trained at Berkeley dominated these studies of the cultural landscape. Fred Kniffen at Louisiana State University and Wilber Zelinsky at Penn State University were particularly prolific, publishing articles on a range of cultural patterns from the New England Barn to the Covered Bridge. Kniffen presented a conceptual framework for these studies in his publication ‘Folk Housing: Key to Diffusion’ (1965), while the statements put forward by Phillip Wagner and Marvin Mikesell (also Sauer’s former students) in their introduction to the edited collection Readings in Cultural Geography (1962) provided a firm definition of the concept: ‘This term comprehends both the distinctive features that serve to set a region apart and those not confined to a particular region but occurring there. The cultural landscape, then, connotes the geographic content of a determined area, or a geographic complex of a certain type, in which the choices made and changes worked by men as members of some cultural community are manifested’ (10). By the 1960s, the term cultural landscape had become synonymous with idiographic studies of the ‘content of a determined area,’ and formed a central tenet of the subfield of cultural geography.

2. Criticisms And Reconceptualizations

Criticisms of cultural landscape as the object of analysis for cultural geography were first given voice by an Australian geographer Harold Brookfield. In his 1964 article, he questioned why cultural geography was limited to a study of the visible material elements of culture, and argued that only by examining issues on the ‘human frontiers,’ that is, those that are concerned with social, cultural, political factors, could geographers ever hope to answer the how and why of landscape patterns (Brookfield 1964). A variant on this theme was taken up in 1980 by geographer James Duncan, in a penetrating philosophical critique of the use of the superorganic form of explanation in cultural landscape studies and cultural geography more broadly. According to Duncan, these studies were fundamentally flawed since their explanations relied on a reified notion of culture that assigned it ‘ontological status and causative power’ (Duncan 1980, p. 181). By so doing, culture writ large could be said to explain landscape patterns, overlooking any in-depth analysis of the workings of cultural processes, and foreclosing the possibility of individual agency. Dun- can’s critique was particularly aimed at studies of vernacular material culture, studies that had relied on a fairly naıve understanding of ‘folk’ cultures to explain landscape patterns. According to Duncan, these studies provided rather sweeping explanations of patterns, but not in-depth understanding of process. As a result of such critiques, and of the quantitative shift in geography, the discipline that most focused on the topic, the concept cultural landscape as object of analysis and as approach was marginalized through- out the 1970s and 1980s.

This is not to say that the concept was moribund. Some of the most compelling cultural landscape studies were published during this time—essays that implicitly asked and answered questions that went beyond Brookfield’s ‘human frontiers’ and that included human agency and cultural processes in their explanations. J. B. Jackson had begun publishing such essays in the 1950s in his journal Landscape, and throughout the 1960s and 1970s scholars from a range of disciplines including architecture, history, land- scape architecture, urban planning, and geography, contributed provocative writings to the journal. Jackson was very influenced by the French school of landscape history that looked at the cultural landscape as the embodiment of a genre de vie—that is, of an economic, social, and moral order. For example, in distinction to the studies of vernacular house types that were used to delineate cultural regions, Jackson (1952) saw the house as the most significant element in the cultural landscape because it was the most tangible symbol of a people’s way of life. In this way, the cultural landscape was not simply the passive imprintment of a society, but was an active expression, both reflecting and expounding the economic, social, and moral order of a group of people. Scholars such as Grady Clay (1980) took up this idea and generally applied it to the urban built environment at large— that is, to the way everything from street patterns to commercial buildings could be ‘read’ as statements about the way of life of the people responsible for building them. Even in disciplines seemingly unrelated, such as literary criticism (Conron 1973) and photography (Corner and MacLean 1996), scholars explored the idea of the cultural landscape as a potent visible symbol of a particular way of life.

Reconceptualizing the concept cultural landscape as a symbol opened it to new arenas of analysis and new methods. Geographer Donald Meinig, in the influential group of essays he edited, The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes (1979), spoke of the cultural landscape as ‘a panorama, a composition, a palimpsest, a microcosm’ (6), and argued for historical methods of analysis. For geographer Marywn Samuels (1979), the cultural landscape could be thought of as the physical manifestation of innumerable, individual decisions, and its interpretation could take the form of a ‘biography,’ with scholars outlining the contexts in which those individual decisions had been made. Drawing on a large range of writings, from religious studies to American literary criticism, geographer Yi-Fu Tuan (1974) undertook a sustained examination of human meanings expressed in cultural landscapes, and human experiences and responses to those meanings. For Tuan, the cultural landscape was more than the sum of material artifacts; it was full of psychological, religious, aesthetic, and moral meanings that people had given to it, and it evoked those meanings to other people. For these scholars, cultural landscape studies offered a way to explore cultures and societies beyond what was offered by the quantitative work on spatial patterns that dominated the discipline at the time.

A different sort of reconceptualization of cultural landscape began in the UK in the 1980s. Heavily influenced by the cultural materialism of Raymond Williams, cultural and social geographers reconceptualized the cultural landscape as the expression of, and a constituent force within, the complex social, economic and political structures that characterize cultures. In Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape (1984), British geographer Denis Cosgrove took on the idea of landscape as a particular way of seeing, and positioned that way of seeing within its European historical context, making clear its connections to the ‘real historical world of productive human relations’ (2). Cultural landscapes were seen not only as the result of human labor, but also as cultural products that ‘expressed and supported a range of political, social and moral assumptions’ (1). In distinction to a strict Marxist view, the culture of cultural landscapes was not seen as divorced from the ‘real’ world of socio-economic formations and thereby dismissed as unimportant, but was instead regarded as an integral component of that world.

This infusion of cultural materialism into cultural geography brought new life to the concept of cultural landscape. In a statement that set the way for a reconstituted ‘new’ cultural geography (in distinction to the ‘old’ or Sauerian school), Denis Cosgrove and Peter Jackson (1987) positioned the cultural landscape concept prominently, and offered a ‘new’ way of interpreting that ‘allows us to disclose the meanings that human groups attach to areas and places and to relate those meanings to other aspects and conditions of human existence’ (96). Their suggestions of two such approaches to interpretation—using the metaphor of text to conceptualize the cultural landscape so that it could be ‘read’ as a social document, similar to what Clifford Geertz had proposed in anthropology; and using the art historian’s notion of iconography to interpret the cultural landscape as a set of visual images that can be interpreted at various levels of significance—was highly influential in the work on cultural landscapes that would follow in the late 1980s and 1990s. But perhaps more influential was their shifting of the agenda of cultural geography, and by implication of cultural landscape work, away from its emphasis on rural, historical studies of fixed and homogenous places, to the urban, contemporary scene, and to the contested nature of its production. In Cosgrove’s and Jackson’s words, the new cultural geography should be ‘interested in the contingent nature of culture, in dominant ideologies and in forms of resistance to them (1987, p. 95). These statements removed the stigma that had been attached to cultural landscape studies—as benign, but irrelevant work done by antiquarians in remote and unimportant places—and highlighted the importance of the cultural landscape, as both object of analysis and approach, in the poststructural, politically charged atmosphere of the 1980s and 1990s social sciences. With the ‘cultural turn’ that had taken hold in the social sciences, the concept cultural landscape was suddenly relevant and trendy.

3. Current Usage

The two approaches suggested by Cosgrove and Jackson—landscape as text and the iconography of landscape—have generated a host of empirical studies. Both approaches were borrowed from the humanities (iconography from art history and ‘text’ from literary criticism), and drew on what could be called a postmodern stance on interpretation, i.e., that the meanings that can be drawn from analyses of landscapes are never straightforward, nor are they un-changing. ‘Instead of providing a transparent window on a ‘‘real’’ world,’ Cosgrove and Jackson argue, cultural landscapes, like ‘images and languages are now regarded as a sort of sign that presents a deceptive appearance of naturalness and transparence concealing an opaque, distorting, arbitrary mechanism of representation, a process of ideological mystification’ (1987, p. 98). Influenced by the writings of such scholars as Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, practitioners began to see the cultural landscape as a representation (not a mimetic expression) of time and place-specific, contested cultures. The ‘cultural turn’ in the social sciences brought an awareness that landscape was, in the words of W. J. T. Mitchell, ‘a medium of cultural expression’ (1996, p. 4). But because landscape, ‘does not easily accommodate political notions of power and conflict, indeed it tends to dissolve or conceal them,’ the role of the researcher is to explore and reveal its ‘duplicity’ (Daniels 1989b, p. 196). For example, Daniels’ essay on the landscape of Georgian England points out how the ‘typical’ landscape representation of the time—the tradition of the picturesque—served both to engage some of the political and economic problems of early nineteenth-century England, at the same time that its imagery served to ‘obscure social and economic issues’ (1989a, p. 73).

Drawing on similar poststructuralist assumptions about interpretation, but with insights gained from psychoanalytic theory and film criticism, feminist geographer Gillian Rose (1993) criticized the ‘iconographic’ cultural landscape school for its implied masculinism. Rose argues that despite the progressive aim of these new cultural landscape studies, they embody an approach that by definition is implicated in power relations and oppression of women. That approach is one of an objective viewer, coded in Western thought as masculine, ‘gazing’ at and thereby in power over, a ‘feminized’ scene or cultural land-scape. These implied power relations make problematic any appreciation of or pleasure derived from the actual viewing of landscapes as image. Catherine Nash (1996) countered this criticism by showing how understanding the particular contexts of viewing and creating cultural landscape images can subvert or ‘unsettle any easy claim of oppression in any act of seeing or visual representation’ (152). Her analysis of two landscape images created by women that utilize traditional landscape genres, but intentionally conjoin landscape with images of the male body, shows how ‘to view body as land/or land as body has no essential meaning, yet neither can it ever be innocent’ (167).

In a different vein, but still informed by feminist theory, Heidi Nast (1996) ‘reads’ the cultural land-scape of the Kano Palace in northern Nigeria circa 1500 to reveal its active role in constituting and replicating the gendered and sexual politics of its time. By reading the changing cultural landscape of the Kano Palace in relationship to changes in Islam, sexual practices, and gender roles, Nast shows how spatial evidence like cultural landscapes can be used to interpret the past worlds of people who were excluded from power, and therefore were unable to leave any written record. Similarly, Lynn Stewart (1995) reveals how the cultural landscapes of Plantations in ante-bellum American South reinforced the legal codes that gave all eminent rights to the white land owners. However, Stewart also shows that within this oppressive landscape slave men and women were able to create their own social spaces that allowed for self-expression and at times forms of transgression.

Others have taken an iconographic and textual approach to studying cultural landscapes within a postcolonial framework. Rod Neumann (1995), for example, examines how the British importation of ways of seeing landscape was integral to their imperialist efforts at the turn of the century. The British appropriated lands for national parks in east Africa by constructing them as landscapes as consumption, free of human labor and visually satisfying, in distinction to the lands they developed for agricultural production. By remaking African land into one that satisfied an English landscape tradition where production and consumption were spatially separated, the British undermined indigenous land rights and land-use practices, a ‘phenomenon inseparable from the recasting of African society’ (1995, p. 153). In a related fashion, Jane Jacobs (1996) takes a postcolonial look at the changing meaning of cultural landscapes both at the ‘heart’ of British imperialism—the City of Lon-don—and at its peripheries—Aboriginal land claims in Australia. She argues that the power relations of nineteenth-century imperialism endure and are evident even in our postmodern cities, and that these relationships are articulated and negotiated through de-bates about the meanings of cultural landscapes.

4. Future Directions

If the existence of debate is any indication of intellectual currency, then the concept cultural land-scape will certainly enter the third millennium as a vital part of the geographic discipline and the social sciences more broadly. Recent controversies have centered on the ‘correct’ way to interpret and think about cultural landscapes—whether analyses have moved too far beyond materialist explanations (Mitchell 1997), and the degree to which ‘cultural’ explanations incorporate the political, economic, and social (Schein 1997). These debates signal that the concept is politically charged, both in the sense of it serving as a focal point of political debate among academics, but more importantly, as it has now come to be seen as a key concept in our understanding of power relations and potential challenges to power. Whether it concerns the actual material production and transformations of cultural landscapes, or the on-going re-interpretations of its meaning, the cultural landscape will be a key source for understanding dominant ideologies, and challenges to them. The cultural landscape embodies and expresses relation-ships of power along all of its axes—of gender, sexuality, ‘race,’ class, ethnicity, disability, age—and future research lies in explorations of these power relations as they are constituted by, and reflected in, cultural landscapes, and to the ways that a cultural landscape approach and subject matter can help us understand and articulate challenges to those power relations.

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