6
PROSPECTS FOR LANDSCAPE
6.1 INTRODUCTION
This final chapter takes a prospective look at current work and emerging trends and agendas in cultural geographies of landscape. In terms of content, therefore, it has been the most difficult chapter to plan and write. This is because no one can know how cultural geographies of landscape will develop in the future – or even, it could be argued, if they will develop. It would have been very difficult to predict in 1980, for example, that in just over ten years a range of new interpretative approaches to landscape – landscape as way of seeing, landscape as text – would have galvanised work in cultural and historical geography in the UK in particular. Equally, from the vantage point of the early to mid-1990s, a resurgence of interest in phenomenological approaches to landscape would have seemed unlikely. Further complicating the task of assessing the present is the fact that today’s trends do not necessarily constitute tomorrow’s established research platforms. And beyond this, the fact that landscape has long been a key term and concept for geographers does not in and of itself guarantee its continuing purchase and salience in the future. But, as the preceding two chapters have demonstrated, landscape research is today very much a vibrant and evolving field and, given the diversity and scope of current landscape writing, one might quickly come to regret overly confident predictions about the future.
With all of this in mind, the tone here is necessarily somewhat circumspect. The aim of the chapter is simply to identify and document some of the main substantive foci of current work on landscape, and also to locate these in relation to cognate trends in human geography as a whole. Arguably, and interestingly, there is still a discernable geographical and cultural aspect here – that is, different understandings of landscape, and hence different substantive preoccupations, still predominate within different academic worlds, with (although this should not be overemphasised) a distinction between work in the UK and North America being especially notable. The chapter begins (Section 6.2) by commenting upon and attempting to account for this distinction, before moving on to identify a common thread in much contemporary North American landscape writing – one that emphasises the material and everyday qualities of landscape, and that focuses upon issues of memory, identity, conflict and justice. Following on directly from this, Section 6.3 discusses the relationship between landscape, life and law, a relationship brought to the fore in recent work by Kenneth Olwig in particular (Olwig, 2002, 2005a), and associated with what is in some ways a distinctively northern European and Scandinavian understanding of landscape.
Section 6.4 then returns to the forms of non-representational theory discussed in Chapter 5 in the context of landscape phenomenologies, but this time to make the argument that some of the trajectories being explored by geographers and others in this broad area are, in a way, anti-landscape, and potentially impact upon landscape’s role as an organising trope for cultural geographical writing. In particular here, and as I shall explain in more detail, work on the hybrid geographies of culture–nature relations (see Whatmore, 2002, 2006), explicitly seeks to advance a relational, vitalist and topological vision of culture and nature, and space and society, in which notions of landscape would seem to have little purchase. Section 6.5, by contrast, aims to illustrate the continuing cogency of UK-based landscape writing in the wake of non-representational theory, by discussing some examples of work that explores landscape via ideas of affect, presence, biography and movement. This is the last substantive section of the chapter, and the book as a whole. A summary conclusion follows, focusing upon the creative tensions involved in making and studying landscape.