ABSTRACT
Recent studies of landscape as ensembles of material practices and their symbolic representations have emphasized the power of landscapes to reinforce and “naturalize” prevailing social ideologies (Zukin 1991; Baker 1993). Treated as a “text” laden with a multiplicity of “signs” or a “cultural form” containing a plurality of meanings, the landscape “upon interrogation reveals a human drama of ideas and ideologies, interest groups and power blocs” (Ley 1987, 41; Daniels 1989; Duncan 1990). Notwithstanding cautionary pronouncements on the dangers of privileging the representational realm at the expense of the practical in landscape studies (Jacobs 1993), these insights drawn from textural readings and interpretative analysis have richly informed the craft of cultural and historical geographers working on landscapes ranging from the everyday to the esoteric.
