Cultural Landscape

The cultural landscape, the imprint of people and groups on the land, has long been of interest to geographers. The practice of “reading” and interpreting the landscape can prove difficult because most people are not used to taking a critical look at what they see. Geographers such as Carl Sauer and Peirce Lewis believe that most of our marks on the land could be considered unconscious or subliminal. More recently, however, landscape scholars such as Don Mitchell have proposed that human action on the land is quite purposeful and controlling in an effort to convey particular messages. The initial 20th-century Sauerian approach to landscape studies focused mostly on description of rural areas and was centered around cultural products (artifacts), rather than the processes that created those products. The social movements of 1960s and 1970s, however, brought about a change in the way geographers studied the landscape because of the highly urbanized nature of society. Scholars realized that urban areas now held as many or more clues to modernizing culture as did rural ones. It was also during this time that representational cultural geography emerged in an era where sign, symbol, and meaning in the landscape and the processes of cultural landscape creation became important considerations. Furthermore, the study of cultural landscapes was deemed an interdisciplinary pursuit. The post-1960s era was also the beginning of the cultural turn away from positivist empiricism. Beginning in the mid- to late 1990s, cultural geography experienced another shift, this time toward nonrepresentational approaches to studying people and place. This shift emphasized the importance of practices and experiences rather than things and called for a consideration of social reproduction and context in the process of landscape analysis. Scholars who criticized the nonrepresentational approach for assuming experiences could be isolated from images proposed the rerepresentational approach, where things, theories, and experiences are all considered equally. These shifts, however, were anything but seamless. Each shift came with arguments contesting new ideas and rethinking old ones. Today, scholars of the cultural landscape consider both the theories of landscape creation, the physical objects in the landscape, and how issues of power, inequality, and social justice play out in the landscape. Furthermore, it is assumed that one cannot study the cultural landscape without considering how humans have shaped the land and the neo-environmentalist approach that considers how the environment impacts people.