Abstract
Is the nature of landscape something that can be mapped, or is the landscape itself a thing or creature of the map? Or perhaps even a “monster” of the map? These are questions around which landscape studies have revolved in recent years. In this chapter I trace the two sides of the question and provide a capsule history of contemporary geographical scholarship, focusing on the contributions of Carl Sauer and European geographers. This landscape approach still dominates much of continental and especially German geography , but in Anglo-America it has declined and landscape has come to be seen not so much as some thing you can map, but rather as a thing of the map, that is, a creature born of cartography. I suggest a third alternative, which opens up new ways of thinking about things, nature, landscape and mapping. Maps are foundational pieces in the study of traditional and also postmodern and “non-modernist” landscape which in contemporary geography is concerned with the social bases for things governing and historically developing inter-relationships between society and nature—this is the thing about lansdscape.
Keywords
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsReferences
Abler, R., Gould, P., & Adams, J. S. (1971). Spatial organization: The geographer’s view of the world. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall.
Berman, M. (1982). All that is solid melts into air: The experience of modernity. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Corner, J. (1999). Recovering landscape: Essays in contemporary landscape architecture. New York: Princeton Architectural Press.
Cosgrove, D. (1984). Social formation and symbolic landscape. London: Croom Helm.
Cosgrove, D. (1993). The palladian landscape: Geographical change and its cultural representations in sixteenth-century Italy. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press.
Cosgrove, D. (2001). Apollo’s eye: A cartographic genealogy of the earth in the western imagination. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Cosgrove, D. (2004). Landscape AND Landschaft [lecture delivered at the Spatial Turn in History Symposium, German Historical Institute, February 19]. German Historical Institute Bulletin, 35, 57–71.
Cosgrove, D. (2006). Modernity, community and the landscape idea. Journal of Material Culture, 11, 49–66.
Cosgrove, D., & Jackson, P. (1987). New directions in cultural geography. Area, 19(2), 95–101.
Harley, J. B. (1988). Maps, knowledge, and power. In S. Daniels & D. Cosgrove (Eds.), The iconography of landscape (pp. 277–312). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hartshorne, R. (1939). The nature of geography. Lancaster, PA: Association of American Geographers.
Hartshorne, R. (1958). The concept of geography as a science of space, from Kant and Humboldt to Hettner. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 40, 97–108.
Hartshorne, R. (1959). Perspective on the nature of geography. Chicago: Rand McNally.
Heidegger, M. (1971). The thing. In A. Hofstadter (Ed.), Poetry, language, thought (pp. 165–182). New York: Harper & Row.
Ingold, T. (2000). The temporality of landscape. In T. Ingold (Ed.), The perception of the environment: Essays in livelihood, dwelling and skill (pp. 189–218). London: Routledge.
Johnson, S. (1755 [1968]). A dictionary of the English language. London: W. Strahan.
Krauss, W. (2010). The ‘Dingpolitik’ of wind energy in northern German landscapes: an ethnographic case study. Landscape Research, 35(2), 195–208.
Latour, B. (1993). We have never been modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Latour, B. (1999). Pandora’s hope essays on the reality of science studies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Latour, B. (2004). Why has critique run out of steam? From matters of fact to matters of concern. Critical Inquiry, 30(2), 225–248.
Latour, B. (2005). From realpolitik to dingpolitik or how to make things public. In P. Weibel & B. Latour (Eds.), Making things public: Atmospheres of democracy (pp. 4–32). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Leighly, J. (1937). Some comments on contemporary geographic method. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 27(3), 125–141.
Lowenthal, D. (1961). Geography, experience and imagination: Towards a geographical epistemology. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 51(3), 241–260.
Lowenthal, D., & Prince, H. C. (1964). The English landscape. Geographical Review, 54(3), 309–346.
Lowenthal, D., & Prince, H. C. (1965). English landscape tastes. Geographical Review, 55, 186–222.
Mayhew, R. J. (2004). Landscape, literature and English religious culture, 1660–1800: Samuel Johnson and languages of natural description. Basingstoke, England: Palgrave Macmillan.
Merriam-Webster. (1996). Collegiate dictionary. Springfield, MA: Merriam-Webster.
Olwig, K. R. (1984). Nature’s ideological landscape: A literary and geographic perspective on its development and preservation on Denmark’s Jutland heath. London: George Allen & Unwin.
Olwig, K. R. (1996). Recovering the substantive nature of landscape. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 86(4), 630–653.
Olwig, K. R. (2002). Landscape, nature and the body politic. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.
Olwig, K. R. (2004). This is not a landscape: Circulating reference and land shaping. In H. Palang (Ed.), European rural landscapes: Persistence and change in a globalising environment (pp. 41–66). Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Olwig, K. R. (2007). The practice of landscape ‘conventions’ and the just landscape: The case of the European landscape convention. Landscape Research, 32(5), 579–594.
Olwig, K. R. (2008a). Has “geography” always been modern?: Choros, (non)representation, performance, and the landscape. Environment and Planning A, 40, 1843–1861.
Olwig, K. R. (2008b). The Jutland Cipher—Unlocking the meaning and power of a contested landscape terrain. In M. Jones & K. R. Olwig (Eds.), Nordic landscapes: Region and belonging on the northern edge of Europe (pp. 12–49). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Olwig, K. R. (2010). The ‘British Invasion’: The ‘new’ cultural geography and beyond. Cultural Geographies, 17(2), 175–179.
Olwig, K. R. (2011a). All that is landscape is melted into air: The “aerography” of ethereal space. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 29, 519–532.
Olwig, K. R. (2011b). The earth is not a globe: landscape versus the “globalist” agenda. Landscape Research, 36(4), 401–415.
Sauer, C. (1925). The morphology of landscape. University of California Publications in Geography, 2(2), 19–53.
Sauer, C. (1969a). The education of a geographer. In J. Leighly (Ed.), Land and life: A selection from the writings of Carl Ortwin Sauer. Berkely: University of California Press.
Sauer, C. (1969b [orig. 1956]). The education of a geographer. In J. Leighly (Ed), Land and life: A selection from the writings of Carl Ortwin Sauer (pp. 389–404). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Thrift, N. (2007). Non-representational theory: Space, politics, affect. London: Routledge.
Tsing, A., Faire, L., Hathaway, M., Inoue, M., Satsuka, S., & Choy, T. (2009). A new form of collaboration in cultural anthropology: Matsutake worlds. American Ethnologist, 36(2), 380–403.
Tuan, Y.-F. (1974). Topophilia: A study of environmental perception, attitudes, and values. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Whatmore, S. (2002). Hybrid geographies: Natures, cultures, spaces. London: Sage.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Olwig, K.R. (2017). Landscape: The Thing About Landscape’s Nature: Is It a Creature/Monster of the Map?. In: Brunn, S., Dodge, M. (eds) Mapping Across Academia. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-1011-2_11
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-1011-2_11
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-94-024-1009-9
Online ISBN: 978-94-024-1011-2
eBook Packages: Earth and Environmental ScienceEarth and Environmental Science (R0)