Fusion or exclusion? Reflections on conceptual practices of landscape and place in human geography

Abstract

This article has its premise in two of the most cherished and complex concepts within human geography, namely landscape and place. They have been subject to both endless and some of the most significant discussions within the discipline. These concepts are also subject to some of the most confusing debates among human geographers – they clearly overlap and are frequently conflated. It is argued here that present conceptualizations and wider discourses of landscape and place are very similar within strands of the discipline. Furthermore, it is argued that it is particularly due to recent theorizations of (embodied) practice that landscape and place become conflated. Practice may then inform our understanding of present uses of both terms. An obvious, but ultimately populist, ahistorical and sidetracking conclusion to draw from the arguments presented in this article is that human geography can do away with one of the concepts. The article concludes by suggesting that the disciplinary practices of landscape and place can be seen rather as struggles over disciplinary vocabulary serving to hold certain academic communities together while keeping others apart.

Keywords:

• conceptual practice
• conflation
• human geography
• landscape
• place

Acknowledgments

I thank Michael Jones and two anonymous reviewers for their constructive criticism and suggestions for how to clarify my arguments.

Notes

1. This comment was made in a reviewer's report prior to the publication of Setten 2003. (See also Setten 2004a for a similar comment.)

2. It is interesting to note that Cresswell has a problem with landscape because of its everyday nature when he favours place on the same grounds.

3. I realize, however, the dangers involved in designating something as Nordic and anglophone. I risk underestimating, simplifying and even ignoring details and specificities within Nordic or anglophone contexts. However, Nordic and anglophone conceptions of landscape and place have historical relevance and thus feed into present practices. At the same time, current conceptual practices do not fall easily into these spatial categories and one of the aims of this article is to discuss some of the effects of increasingly spatially blurred understandings and usages of the concepts in question. Consequently, designations such as Nordic or anglophone are used with caution in the present article.

4. I thus risk denigrating the multifarious nature of human geography, regardless of it being Nordic or anglophone. However, given the enormous body of literature on both landscape and place, it is not possible to address these issues unless certain heuristic choices are made.

5. Addressing considerations about the relationship between landscape and place ‘outside’ the discipline of geography is beyond the scope of this article, however.

6. It is hardly possible to isolate the concepts of landscape and place from key geographical concepts such as nature, space, region, and territory. However, it is beyond the scope of this article to cover the relationship between all these concepts. My intention is rather to employ The Dictionary of Human Geography as a starting point for a more sustained outline of the disciplinary ordering and practice of landscape and place.

7. This duplicitous meaning of landscape set in motion Richard Hartshorne's (1939) critical attack on landscape as the focal point of geography: ‘The central problem for Hartshorne was that the American concept derived from the German geographical term Landschaft, which unlike the English word, had an essential double meaning. It had a specifically German meaning as “a restricted piece of land” (Hartshorne 1939, 150, 250–284) [i.e. as territory]. It was, however, in English used to refer to the “appearance of a land as we perceive it,” e.g., “the section of the earth surface and the sky that lies in our field of vision as seen in perspective from a particular point.” [i.e. as scenery] … Confusion resulted, Hartshorne argued … Hartshorne's solution to the problem of landscape was essentially to abandon it in favour of geography as a science of region and space’ (Olwig 1996, 630).

8. Place as locale is not purely representational, i.e. places also have material qualities. It is common to study places through representations, however, e.g. poems, films, paintings, and television, in order to come to know about people and place relationships (Holloway & Hubbard 2001). If we broaden the understanding of representation to include also people's performances or practices in place, there is nevertheless a tendency in much literature to treat places as the representation and outcome of social relationships, placing the emphasis on the social relations rather than the material place produced through such relations. I believe that the crux within the context of this article is that the representational emphasis contributes to keeping certain place and landscape discourses apart.