Landscape was successfully reintroduced and perhaps more importantly reconceptualized in the 1970s by humanistic geographers who opposed what had marginalized landscape research: the scientific method, more specifically positivism and quantitative methods. In my first post, I pointed out that I started out with Donald Meinig’s ‘The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes: Geographical Essays’. It stands in clear contrast to Carl Sauer’s ‘The Morphology of Landscape’. The collection of essays is arguably the culmination of this era, yet at the same time only a spark to what was to come.
The title of the collection of essays itself is rather revealing of its contents: landscapes are interpreted rather than described. Meinig’s ‘The Beholding Eye’ and Yi-Fu Tuan’s ‘Thought and Landscape’, subtitled ‘Ten Versions of the Same Scene’ and ‘The Eye and the Mind’s Eye’ respectively, entail not only vision, but perception. In other words, as Meinig (34) puts it: “any landscape is composed not only of what lies before our eyes but what lies within our heads.” While this insight might not be fleshed out in great detail by the authors, or as well argued for as it could be, it is in striking contrast with Sauer’s (30-31) morphological method that is “a purely evidential system”, one that he describes as “objective and value-free, or nearly so” in which deliberate restraint or repression of prior knowledge is essential. For Sauer landscape is seen, whereas for Meinig and Tuan landscape is perceived.
Paving the way for textual accounts of landscape, three of the essay titles refer to texts: ‘Axioms for Reading the Landscape’ by Peirce Lewis, ‘The Biography of Landscape’ by Marwyn Samuels and ‘Reading the Landscape’ by Meinig. Lewis (12) likens landscape to an “unwitting autobiography”, but points out that unlike a book, reading it can be difficult as it is “like a book with pages missing, torn, and smudged; a book whose copy has been edited and re-edited by people with illegible handwriting” and notes that “unlike books, [landscapes] were not meant to be read.” Samuels (52-53) alarms us to think of the absurdity of “a human landscape lacking in inhabitants”, the lack of interest in the authors of landscape, and adds (64-65) that “landscapes without authors would be like books without writers”, existing “only as bindings filled with empty pages.” That said, he (64) notes that context, the physical environment, is also crucial alongside the author, otherwise landscapes “would be like books without pages and language.”
Among the other essays, David Lowenthal’s ‘Age and Artifact: Dilemmas of Appreciation’ is of particular interest due to its emphasis on the past, the present and the future. Lowenthal (103) notes that what is understood as history is not the actual past; it is not merely that the past is not there anymore, evidence having been lost or tampered with, or that the quest to uncover it is never-ending, but also because it is seen from the perspective of the present that is in constant flux. Relevant to language and discourse in landscape, Lowenthal (110) comments on how descriptions of landscapes on signs drown its history in trivia, as opposed to preventing it from fading to obscurity. He (110) adds that linguistic markers, such as written signs, draw our attention attention away from the landscape and force us to re-evaluate it. To him (110-112) written signs induce certain frames of mind, thus altering the view.
References
- Lewis, P. F. (1979). Axioms for Reading the Landscape: Some Guides to the American Scene. In D. W. Meinig (Ed.), The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes: Geographical Essays (pp. 11–32). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
- Lowenthal, D. (1979). Age and Artifact: Dilemmas of Appreciation. In D. W. Meinig (Ed.), The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes: Geographical Essays (pp. 103–128). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
- Meinig, D. W. (1979). Reading the Landscape: An Appreciation of W.G. Hoskins and J. B. Jackson. In D. W. Meinig (Ed.), The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes: Geographical Essays (pp. 195–244). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
- Meinig, D. W. (1979). The Beholding Eye: Ten Versions of the Same Scene. In D. W. Meinig (Ed.), The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes: Geographical Essays (pp. 33–48). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
- Meinig, D. W. (Ed.) (1979). The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes: Geographical Essays. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
- Samuels, M. S. (1979). The Biography of Landscape: Cause and Culpability. In D. W. Meinig (Ed.), The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes: Geographical Essays (pp. 51–88). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
- Sauer, C. O. ([1925] 1929). The Morphology of Landscape. In C. O. Sauer (Ed.), University of California Publications in Geography, Vol. 2: 1919–1928 (pp. 19–54). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
- Tuan, Y-F. (1979). Thought and Landscape: The Eye and the Mind’s Eye. n D. W. Meinig (Ed.), The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes: Geographical Essays (pp. 89–102). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.