"Recovering the Substantive Nature of Landscape"

"Recovering the Substantive Nature of Landscape" (Dec. 1996)
By Kenneth R. Olwig, (article in Annals)

Synopsis: Shows that the concept of "landscape" in geography is seen as both its most important contribution, andone of its more contested ones. He argues that the term can still be useful today, and is perhaps best understood as "a nexus of community, justice, nature, and environmental equity" (631). Spends a lot of time on the etymology of "landscape," especially as connected through the German Landschaft, and also traces its use in Old Europe. Main argument seems to be that even landscape as scenery is never devoid of cultural and historical meaning. Viewing landscape both reflects and shapes out views of the world. Argues that the American geography use of "landscape"is a mix of the British scenic idea and the "German romantic ideas concerning the relation of culture to nature as expressed in the physical landscape" (645). We should study landscape as more than a scenic text - we need a substantive understanding that recognizes the interplay of city and country, culture, law, etc.

Interesting Specifics:
Excruciatingly dull

The origin of "landscape" is Landschaft (German).

The construction of landscape in art influenced the way the English court saw itself in relation to the country (636).

The science of surveying helped pave the way for the commodification of land into private property parcels (638).

"Rural landscaping created the scenic image of the country community ideal, while helping to undermine the customary law upon which it was based" (640).

"The scenic concept of landscape provided both the template for the transformation of l and into natural parks and the world view or picture that became the mark of education for the ruling elite" (640).

The "Jena circle" was a group of German artists "characterized by a 'universal romanticism' that sought a holistic conception of art, science, and natural law" (641).

Interacts With:

Says new cultural geography is British oriented.

Supposedly, Landschaft geography is very important to the field, and Sauer started this ball rolling.

Seems to interact with Price and Lewis's little squabbling piece about the methods and approaches of geography today. Also interacts with the articles that were in response to that one.

[Apparently I thought that this article seemed to defend Sauer against New Cultural Geography attacks.]

The Lie of the Land: Migrant Workers and the California Landscape

The Lie of the Land: Migrant Workers and the California Landscape (1996)
By Don Mitchell

Synopsis: "This book explores...the connection between the material production of landscape and the production of landscape representations, between work and the 'exercise of the imagination'..."(1). It basically seeks to "connect the shape of the CA landscape to the process of work that made it...and to wed a literature on landscape with that on labor history" (ix). One of main purposes is to interrogate the difference between representation and reality, and to put the reality of labor specifically back in to our understanding of landscape. Book begins around 1913 and travels through to 1930s through a series of vignettes and discussions of various bad working conditions, workers revolts, and the various attempts to disempower workers. Argument is that in order to make something a landscape, the work and labor behind it must be erased (and this has been particularly true of California which was created as a rural agricultural idyll). Landscape is thus inseparable from capitalist geographies based on commodifications of the land. Pain and work is hidden to produce a pretty image. California is shorthand for American Dream. Mitchell wants to reinsert workers' lives into the landscapes, highlighting their struggles. This is a Marxist labor history of California.

Interesting Specifics:

This book is essentially a labor history of the California landscape.

Follows Denis Cosgrove's line of thinking in that the history of landscape was "inseparable from the construction of capitalist geographies based on the full commodification of the land...and the subsequent need to represent ownership (or non-ownership) as a natural order of society" (4).

Says New Cultural Geographers have gotten too wrapped-up in representation and have abandoned "traditional concerns of geographers with material form" (5).

Landscape is "both a work and an erasure of work" (6).

Takes a very Marxist approach in his belief in labor as one of the defining features of humanity.

[I don't fully understand why the production of landscape should specifically hide labor more than other types of goods. Isn't the labor process hidden from the everything?? I guess this alienation is the central point of Marxism - but anything you don't make yourself is a repository of hidden labor.]

Has a great explanation of Carl Sauer and his view of landscape, that landscape "was the sum of its morphological components" - i.e. its buildings, populations, etc - and that one could understand a people by interpreting the landscape they created (24).

Says Denis Cosgrove led the shift in geography toward ideology and image (26).

Landscape as both a thing and a process/struggle (30).

Wheatland Riots of 1913 resulted when Durst farm workers rioted due to horrid living and working conditions; served to made workers visible and to bring labor problems to the public eye. Led to the formation of the California Commission of Immigration and Housing. The CCIH also held to the belief that bad environments led "triggered" innate bad genetic behavior, so they sought to "environmentally correct" for any such "outbreaks." Sought to hinder the anonymous mobility of workers (so common to the rotating crop pattern of CA) by watching them and increasing their feelings of accountability. A way to strip the power of mobility.

In CA, workers have to remain extremely militant in order not to be naturalized into the landscape.

Interacts With:
Ed Soja, Denis Cosgrove, William Cronon (Changes in the Land), "The Reinvention of Cultural Geography,"
This is a corrective both of "new cultural geography" and its focus on image, and of the "old" cultural geography of Sauer and its obsession with untheoretical morphology.

In Place/Out of Place: Geography, Ideology, and Transgression

In Place/Out of Place: Geography, Ideology, and Transgression
By Tim Cresswell (1996)

Synopsis: Looks at the ways space and place are used to construct normativity and "common sense," and shows that transgression of space can be a tool with which to question the normative world. This book is thus an examination of the "the way in which ideas about what is right, just, and appropriate are transmitted through space and place" (8). Place and geography are thus crucial in out understandings of social relations as "social power and social resistance are always already spatial" (11). Prefers the term transgression to "resistance" as resistance implies intentionality. Focuses on three case studies: graffiti in NYC in the 1970s (representing disorder and madness and disease); hippies converging on Stonehenge (transgressive mobility, blurs line between home and work and leisure, indecent because decency implies property ownership); Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp (a group of women set-up a protest site outside a military base and weapons site; media focused on the "horrible stench" and "dirtiness" of the women there - clearly they had transgressed social bounds in some way). Basically, "transgressive events prompt responses that define and seek to reproduce established geographies" (104).

Interesting Specifics:

"Society produces space and space reproduces society" (12).

Cresswell considers himself part of the new cultural geography.

"'Dirt,' then, is a mismatch of meanings - meanings that are erroneously positioned in relation to other things" (38). "Dirt" is something that is out of place.

"Mobility as a way of life involves being permanently out of place" (95).

"...place, as a phenomenological-experiential entity combines elements of nature (elemental forces), social relations (class, gender, and so on), and meaning (the mind, ideas, symbols)" (157). Place always combines all three elements, in that it links action and thought, concrete and abstract.

"The unintended consequence of making space a means of control is to simultaneously make it a site of resistance" (163).

"The Reinvention of Cultural Geography"

"The Revinvention of Cultural Geography"
By Marie Price and Martin Lewis (1993)

Synopsis: This article started a series of arguments and responses, and is basically refuting the "new cultural geographers'" claim that the "old" Berkeley School style was highly problematic and that the "new" people are doing something totally different. Feels that new cultural geographers critique the Berkeley School for only being concerned with artifacts, and for being anti-ethnographical and very conservative. Price and Lewis say no, that Berkeley School is not just about artifacts. and that Sauer never really did embrace the problematic superorganic model. Denis Cosgrove responds by saying he doesn't consider himself part of any school, and maybe Price and Lewis are pissed because geography is more about the city now. James Duncan replies that Sauer must have had an implicit theory of culture, and maybe is did fit superorganic model. Peter Jackson says fuck off, there is no coherent "new cultural geography" group, so stop policing the boundaries. Bottom line question: Has cultural geography split from its Berkeley roots, or has it simply broadened?