Studying Cultural Landscapes

Robertson, Iain, and Penny Richards, eds., Studying Cultural Landscapes, (London: Arnold, 2003)

The introduction and first chapter of Robertson and Richards survey of developments in the study of Cultural Landscapes gives a  useful overview of this emerging subject since the 1950's. Such 'a precis' is invaluable for interdisciplinary scholarship as it provides summaries which enable researchers to grasp the 'big picture' across differing areas of knowledge.

The introduction covers developments in studying landscape as 'cultural product' and 'cultural processes'. Rather than simply summarise these I have decided to illustrate the content by choosing a number of key quotes.

1. Cultural Products.

Landscape is never simply or purely aesthetic, but it is also ideological: that is to say the ideas of beauty we have inherited [...] in fact encode deep social needs, sometimes asserting and sometimes obscuring relations in power and wealth. (p.1)

In viewing landscape as cultural product a number of approaches can be noted. The earliest scholars such as Sauer (1925) defined landscape as: ' a land shape in which the shaping is by no means thought of as simply physical .... an area made up of distinct association of forms both physical and cultural'. (p.2)

Whilst acknowledging that Sauer does not concentrate wholly on the physical aspects of landscape, the editors assert, that along with many early landscape historians, Sauer understates the significance of symbolic elements within landscape. The starting point for their survey is the approach taken by English cultural geographers, Cosgrove and Daniels, developed further in the Work late last century by Everson and Williams, Hooke and Muir. Whereas landscape historians purport to take an objective view, the approach of cultural geographers is subjective, treating both real and imaginary landscapes as representations. Like Raymond Williams in the groundbreaking The Country and the City, landscapes are perceived as cultural products.

As such landscape is a political as well as cultural product:

Landscapes, then, reveal, represent and symbolise the relationships of power and control out of which they have emerged and the human processes that have transformed them and continue to transform them...and hide the social, political, economic and spiritual behind a placid surface.

It is important that in the same way that the meanings and values of the dominant group are visible in the landscape, then the meanings, values of resistance and alternative cultures can also be written.
(p. 4)

Theorists adopted methodologies developed in the mid twentieth century in art history - iconography and iconology - and applied them to the analysis of symbolic landscapes.

Critically, this symbolic methodology does not deny the visuality of landscape but seeks to reveal values and meanings written into these visual images by a culture group. (p 5)

Some theorists have developed this further, drawing on literary and media theory to interpret landscape as a text, and introduce, particularly in the work of Duncan and Duncan, the notion of intertextuality, which acknowledges that existing material and other texts influence the reconstruction or reading of the landscape text.

Work within literary theory, particularly relating to polyvocality lead to the notion of polyvisuality being proposed by Kinnaird and Seymour (2000). Feminist scholars have sought to decode 'gendered landscapes' asserting that landscape is capable of being interpreted simultaneously in different ways depending upon the cultural or gender bias of the interpreter.

Debates relating to the relationship between mental and material landscapes have lead some commentators such as Mitchell to criticise seeing landscape as a cultural product as being too static, and an alternative theoretical framework has been proposed which explores landscape as a cultural process.

2. Cultural Process.

Whilst we can recognise within cultural geography 'a shift from textual interpretation of the working of these texts to an interpretation of the working of these texts in popular cultural practice' (Crouch,2000) it is within the fields of archaeology and anthropology that the notion of landscape as a cultural process finds its most consistent expression. (...) This leads commentators such as Ingold (1993) to reject the notion of landscape as a cultural or symbolic construct as it falsely separates the mental and material world. (p. 7)

For Ingold  landscape is a product of 'dynamic dwelling'; he coined the phrase 'taskscape' to capture this notion, a term taken up by other scholars who assert 'the landscape is never built, it is always work in progress.

Tilly (1994) then goes on to develop a sophisticated understanding of landscape which draws in 'the spirit of the place, the social and individual times of memory, paths and narratives in order to conclude 'a landscape is a series on named locales,. (p.8)

For Seymour (2000) 'Landscape does not simply mirror or distort the underlying social social relations but needs to be understood as enmeshed within processes which shape how the world is organised, experienced and understood. (p.8)

3. (Re)reading architectural landscapes.

In chapter one Iain S Black sketches the broad outline of the way architecture has been regarded as a key element within landscape.

Whereas the 'Berkeley School' concentrated on architectural history, largely ignoring the social and cultural function of buildings - particularly houses - during the 1980's and 1990's the work of Cosgrove and Jackson focused on the social and political aspects of buildings and increasingly treated them either as 'texts' or configurations of symbols and signs.

Applying Barthes idea of revealing layers of ideological sediment, Duncan and Duncan (1988) analysed landscapes in order to reveal power relations and cultural codes: 'landscapes serve to neutralise asymmetrical power relations and cultural codes thus serving to stabilise variation through hegemonic practice. (p.23)

Baker in Ideaology Landscape in Historical Perspective (1992) defines three purposed for landscape:

a. Quest for order - assertion of a world view through simplification
b. Assertion of authority - struggle for power between conflicting groups.
c. A project of totalisation, whereby ideologies offer an overall representation of society and, in consequence a reconstruction of existing power relationships (via Utopian planning projects, for example).

Having set out in the opening sections the broad currents within the study of cultural landscapes the remainder of the book applies these approaches to different disciplines and areas of study - poetry, film, identity, diaspora for example.

The book concludes with a useful subject related glossary.

It is summarised on Amazon as follows:

The land in which we live both shapes us and we shape it: Physically, by means of cultivation and building, and imaginatively, by projecting onto it our aspirations and fantasies of wealth, refuge, well-being, awe, danger and consolidation. From the earliest civilisations, humans have exhibited a need to connect with the world around them by transforming land into landscapes.


Studying Cultural Landscapes combines a collection of lively and engaging essays covering the symbolic reading of a wide variety of landscapes. It offers historical, cultural, political, visual and poetic perspectives, offering analyses of landscape forms from the rural to the celluloid.