ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews metaphors in environmental history and cultural geography which is intended to point the way towards some new metaphorical terrain, indicated by the work of Bruno Latour and Donna Haraway. In cultural geography, the appeal of new landscape metaphors is bound up with a critique of Sauer's methodological discussions of landscape. Cultural geographers appropriated metaphors of cultural production to turn attention towards the social construction of meaning. One of the earliest and most influential applications of the Geertz's text metaphor in cultural geography is David Ley's evocative analysis of the landscapes of inner Vancouver. The metaphors of Latour and Haraway, like the metaphors of environmental history and cultural geography, enable some critical projects while they proscribe others. The chapter discusses the different ways in which their metaphors enframe nature and enable us to think about it simultaneously as an embodied material actor and as a socially constructed object.
