ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on themes of the cultural landscape as starting points for linking the tourist place or activity to various expressions of meaning. Obvious pairings include: perception and the tourist gaze, symbolic landscapes and heritage tourism, and ecological relations with eco-tourism. The importance of recognizing such aesthetics as collectively constructed images goes beyond their use for galvanizing social cohesion and for implementation in iconic landscapes from gardens, formal and informal, to national parks. Aesthetics represent an untapped potential for illustrating the abstract societal ecosystem landscape nexus put forth in Dansereau's (1975) Inscape and Landscape. Osborne (1998, 452) argues that power "is asserted by the exclusion of, or transformation of, the commemorative practices of others". In a fuller development of the theme, Cosgrove (1986) draws more detailed links between modes of production, models of capitalist transition, and tensions between culture and landscape.
