The Dictionary of Human Geography (111 page)

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Authors: Michael Watts

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land use and land-cover change (LULC)
A (NEW PARAGRAPH) component of contemporary studies of global environmental change that focuses on both land cover (i.e. the land?s physical attributes, such as forest, grassland etc.) and the purpose for which those attributes are used and/or transformed by human actions. Large scale international research programmes into land cover (making extensive use of data obtained via remote sensing) have been undertaken re cently under the auspices of the International Geosphere Biosphere Programme and related institutions. The goal is not only to establish the nature and pace of land use cover change, at a variety of scaLes, but also to understand its causes, thereby facilitating modelling of likely future change, in the context of searches for sustainabLe deveLopment (cf. sustainabiLity). rj (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Gutman, Janetos, Justice et al. (2005). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
landscape
A cardinal term of human geog raphy, landscape has served as central object of investigation, organizing principle and interpretive lens for several different gener ations of researchers. Through periods of both ascendancy and eclipse, landscape?s constancy lies in its function as a locus for geographical research into culture nature and subject object relations. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The etymology of the English word ?land scape? is complex. Many sources (e.g. Jackson, 1984; Schama, 1995) refer to the Dutch word landschap as having migrated into English usage through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with ?landscape? gradually coming to refer to both the visual appearance of land, most often countryside, and its pictorial depic tion via perspectival techniques for represent ing depth and space. The association of landscape with visual art, and with rural or natural scenery, is cemented in its contempor ary colloquial definition as, (a) a portion of land or scenery which the eye can view at once, and (b) a picture of it. (NEW PARAGRAPH) In partial contrast, Olwig (1996) notes that the Old Dutch landskab and the Germanic landschaft both also connote legal and admin istrative notions of community, region and jurisdiction: landscape as customary adminis trative unit. Landschaft was also the term adopted by American geographer Carl Ortwin Sauer (1963b [1925]) in his seminal mono graph The morphology of landscape. This sought first to establish a definition of geography as a field science of landscape and, second, to define landscape itself in terms of interactions between human cultures and natural environ ments (see morphoLogy). Thus landscape was conceived as a cultural entity, the distinct ive product of interactions between people and topography. Sauer?s argument that ?cul ture is the agent, the natural area is the med ium, the cultural landscape the result? (1963b [1925], p. 343), oriented several decades of American cultural geography towards the his torical reconstruction of cultural landscape forms through fieLdwork and archival study. (NEW PARAGRAPH) However, Richard Hartshorne?s (1939) influential The nature of geography notably critiqued landscape?s incorporation ofboth ob jective and subjective elements (the land and land as perceived), concluding that the term could not serve as the basis of a properly scien tific geography. The subsequent rise ofregional and then spatial science paradigms following the Second World War thus saw something of a decline in landscape?s purchase and salience as an organizing term for human geographers. In this period, most notable and innovative geographical writing on landscape appeared the journal Landscape, founded in 1951 by J.B. Jackson. Through his own extensive writings, Jackson defined landscape in terms of the ma terial world of ordinary everyday or ?vernacular? life in postwar America an often bypassed world of garages, motels, neon lit strips and backyards. Jackson?s writing also extended the empirical emphasis of Sauerian cultural geog raphy through attending seriously to the sym bolic and iconic meanings of landscape. This vision of landscape as at once an everyday, lived in world and a repository of symbolic value chimed with the agenda of North Ameri can humanistic geography in the 1970s, and found its clearest expression in a volume of essays on The interpretation of ordinary landscapes (Meinig, 1979). (NEW PARAGRAPH) A raft of innovative writing on landscape emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s, constituting a significant element of the cuLturaL turn in Anglo American human geography as a whole. The work of Denis Cosgrove (1998 [1984]) and Stephen Daniels (Daniels and Cosgrove, 1988) in particular advanced an influential definition of landscape as a way of seeing and representing the world. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Here, landscape was largely equated with Western visual traditions of landscape painting and gardening. In drawing upon and extend ing the work of cultural Marxist critics such as John Berger (1972) and Raymond Williams (1973), these cultural geographies of land scape focused upon the critical interrogation of the ideological function of landscape images, arguing that landscapes worked so as to reflect and reproduce the values and norms of socio economic elites. In pinpointing its Italian Renaissance origins, Cosgrove (1985) sought to highlight the complicity of landscape as a way of seeing with notions of objective knowledge and distanced visual authority and control. In speaking of landscape?s ?duplicity?, Daniels (1989) noted that the aesthetic func tion of artistic landscapes masked their ideo logical role in naturalizing socio economic hierarchies and patterns of land ownership (see art; iconography). In defining land scape as a text to be critically read via the principles of structuralist semiotics, Duncan and Duncan (1988) argued that landscape op erated as a signifying system for the produc tion and transmission of cultural meanings. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Gillian Rose (1993) further extended and critiqued this body of work through highlight ing how, for geographers and others, the land scape way of seeing was a particularly masculinist gaze. Thus, in addition to systems of cultural and political power and capitalist forms of social relation, landscape visually indexed specific forms of patriarchy and disem bodied, detached observation. For Rose, the academic landscape gaze involves a duality be tween an active masculine eye and a passive, ?naturalized? femininity. This eye, however, os cillates ambivalently between asserted rational observation and repressed visual pleasure, in the form of voyeurism and narcissism. This critique thus applied psychoanalytic principles to landscape interpretation, further aligning cultural geographies of landscape with work in visual and cultural theory (e.g. Mulvey, 1989; Nash, 1996: see vision aND visuality). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Work through the 1990s sought to inflect and extend the cultural turn focus on land scape images and texts by further apprehend ing landscape in terms of action, process and movement, both discursive and material. Don Mitchell?s (1996, 2003) materialist analyses aim to re invigorate Marxist understanding of landscape in terms of production as well as the cultural consumption and circulation of land scape imagery. For Mitchell, the production of actual, material landscapes such as mining towns or agricultural belts is a matter of ongoing struggle and conflict between differ ent social and economic groups within capit alist networks of violence, inequality and profit. With a similar focus upon issues of power, but in a more discursive and interpret ative vein, an influential collection edited by cultural theorist W.J.T. Mitchell (2002e (NEW PARAGRAPH) ) sought to define landscape as a verb, not a noun that is, as a process, not an object or image. Here, understood in terms of cultur ally specific styles of moving, seeing and repre senting, landscape is historically identified with European imperial discourse, the visual modus operandi of European explorers, artists and cartographers. Extending the focus of earlier work upon landscape in national con texts, linkages between the landscape gaze, science, exploration and imperialism have been extensively discussed by cultural geog raphers and historians (see Pratt, 1992; Ryan, 1996; Clayton, 2000). (NEW PARAGRAPH) A further distinctive strand of current geo graphical writing on landscape, closely associ ated with the work of David Matless (1992, 1998), places emphasis upon cultures of land scape, most often in a British context. Drawing upon Michel Foucault?s accounts ofdiscourse, power and subjectivity, landscape practices such as walking, boating and driving are ana lysed here in terms of the discursive regimes (e.g. those of health and citizenship, state plan ning, environmental activism), through which codes of proper conduct for using, appreciating and indeed creating landscape are elaborated. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Although these various discursive, icono graphic and interpretive approaches have de fined cultural geographies of landscape since the 1980s, they have of late been challenged, modulated and to some degree superseded by work advocating phenomenological, corporeal and performative perspectives. The cultural anthropologist Tim Ingold (1993, 2000) in particular has argued that the definition of landscape as a way of seeing perpetuates a duality of culture and nature, and erases first order issues of materiality, agency and embodied performance by locating landscape within a disembodied realm of cultural dis course and signification. Ingold?s remedy pro poses a landscape phenomenology, inspired by the writing of Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau Ponty, and focusing substantively upon embodied practices of dwelling and being in the world. Here, landscape is defined as a processual, material and perceptual en gagement of body and world, enacted in terms of a distinctive temporality a rich duration of inhabitation. This emphasis on bodily performance and perception is further devel oped in recent work on landscape from inter pretive archaeology and performance studies itself (Shanks and Pearson, 2000; Tilley, 2004). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Albeit with reservations regarding both the ontological principles and topical orientations implied by terms such as ?dwelling?, phenom enological and performative studies of land scape, practice and perception have emerged strongly in human geography in recent years; for example, in writing focusing on issues of inhabitation (Hinchcliffe, 2003), mobility (Cresswell, 2003), biography and memory (Lorimer, 2003) and embodied perception (Wylie, 2002a). While there has been no whole sale rejection of the critical agendas and posi tions associated with work on landscape as a way of seeing, Mitch Rose (2002a) has cogently identified the epistemological difficulty of, on the one hand, presenting landscapes as already ideologically structured, while, on the other, paradoxically retaining subjects with the ability to flexibly inhabit and interpret landscapes. At the same time, the development of actor net work theory and hybrid geographies has ar guably created a lacunae within landscape studies, through providing an alternative con ceptual platform from which culture nature issues may be apprehended. Most recently, however, in an attempt to address this lacunae, the task of producing a ?post phenomeno logical? account of landscape has been identi fied, supplementing the work of writers such as Ingold by attending to self landscape relations via ideas of affect and narrative (Wylie, 2005) and Derridean conceptions of presence and care (Rose, 2004b). jwy (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Cosgrove (1985); Rose (1993); Ingold (1993); Rose (2002); Wylie (2005). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Landschaft A German term roughly corre sponding to the English ?landscape?. The scenic, pictorial and aesthetic connotations of the latter are downplayed, however, and Landschaft is instead more usually associated with attempts by nineteenth and twentieth century German scholars to fashion geography as a ?landscape science? engaged in the task of identifying and classifying distinctive nat ural and cultural regions. In Anglophone geography, the term Landschaft is closely con nected with the work of Carl Ortwin Sauer and the berkeLey schooL. Sauer (1963a [1925]) in part adopted and modified the Landschaft approach in the development of his own morphological approach to landscape, (NEW PARAGRAPH) placing greater emphasis upon the role of human agency and culture in shaping (as well as being shaped by) landscape. jwy (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Sauer (1963a [1925], ch. 16). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
land-use survey
The investigation and cartographic representation of land use. Large scale surveys were launched in the UK in the 1930s by Dudley Stamp (1898 1966), based on extensive fieLdwork and widely used as a land use planning tool for several decades. Most surveys now deploy remote sensing and geographic information sys tems for data collection, collation, display and analysis (cf. Land use and Land cover change). rj (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Stamp (1946). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
language
Study of the changing distribution and social usages of language (including dialect/ idiolect) is an enduring yet varied tradition in human geography. Broadly, two main themes may be distinguished. In the first the geog raphy in and of language attention focuses on studying language distributions, upon spatial and social variations in linguistic form and in the origins of and changes in place names. In the second the language in and of geography consideration is given to the connections be tween language, social power and identity and the practice of geography. Although it is not appropriate to see these two themes as mutually discrete, chronologically distinct or methodo logically separate, the first is more securely rooted in certain traditions of cultural geog raphy, the second more a feature of cultural poLitics and post coLoniaLism and contem porary interests in unequal power relations and in language as a political agency (see also dis course; quaLitative methods; rhetoric). (NEW PARAGRAPH) The mapping of language areas, often in asso ciation with ethnicity, has been an established feature of anthropogeographical work since the nineteenth century (see anThropogeography). Here, language is treated as a cultural artefact, its changing distribution a reflection of the world?s shifting linguistic mosaic (and Anglicization: see Crystal, 2003), its study evident inwhat has been variously termed language geography or language mapping. In linguistic geography (sometimes termed dialect geography), the emphasis is upon local differentiations within speech areas, the variable distribution of given speech forms or the political authority and cultural identity rooted in certain languages (geolinguistics). In many such studies (but not all), the geography of language in such terms is a form of historical geography (e.g. Withers, 1984). Attempts to reverse language decline or obsolescence may involve direct language planning. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Attention to the language in and of geog raphy is more concerned with the study of language as the medium through which inter subjective meaning is communicated, and in the power relations intrinsic to such meaning. Thus understood, interest in the role and nature of language within geography is part of the ?linguistic turn? within twentieth century philosophy and social theory. It is evident in work on the politics of language, in the connections between spoken and written languages and authorial power, in attempts to ?recover? or do interpretative justice to others? words and worlds in quantitative methodolo gies (e.g. Crang, 1992), in a recognition that the limits to our understanding of the world may indeed be the limits of our language (e.g. Farinelli, Ollson and Reichart, 1996) and, for some, in practices of resistance to an Anglo American hegemony within geography evident in the dominance of English as the discipline?s lingua franca (e.g. Braun, 2003; Desbiens and Ruddick, 2006: see anglocentrism). cwjw (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Crang (1992). (NEW PARAGRAPH)

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