ABSTRACT
More recent work on landscape has begun to question the visuality of traditional cultural geography, however, as part of a wider critique of the latter’s neglect of the power relations within which landscapes are embedded. Some cultural geographers suggest that the discipline’s visuality is not simple observation but, rather, is a sophisticated ideological device that enacts systematic erasures. They have begun to problematize the term “landscape” as a reference to relations between society and the environment through contextual studies of the concept as it emerged and developed historically, and they have argued that it refers not only to the relationships between different objects caught in the fieldworker’s gaze, but that it also implies a specific way of looking. They interpret landscape not as a material consequence of interactions between a society and an environment, observable in the field by the more-or-less objective gaze of the geographer, but rather as a gaze which itself helps to make sense of a particular relationship between society and land. They have stressed the importance of the look to the idea of landscape and have argued that landscape is a way of seeing which we learn; as a consequence, they argue that the gaze of the fieldworker is part of the problematic, not a tool of analysis. Indeed, they name this gaze at landscape a “visual ideology,” because it uncritically shows only the relationship of the powerful to their environment. . . .
