126: Groth & Bressi's Understanding Ordinary Landscapes

The essays in Paul Groth and Todd Bressi's collection Understanding Ordinary Landscapes are compiled from a two-day symposium at Berkeley in 1990 called "Vision, Culture, and Landscape" that was intended to both celebrate and critique JB Jackson's version of cultural landscape studies.  In general, while the essays underscore Jackson's reliance on and use of visual and spatial information as a way to understand past and present cultures, they grapple with ways to deal with the realities of social and cultural pluralism and their effects on the landscape.  While in many ways Jackson's work was radically subjective and Postmodern before its time, in others it is distinctly Modern, particularly in its emphasis on underlying universals, empirical research, and continuity.

According to Groth, cultural landscape studies defines landscape as the combination of people and place, with an emphasis on the history of how people have used everyday or vernacular space - buildings, rooms, streets, fields, yards - to establish and articulate identities, social relations, and cultural meanings.  When JB Jackson started publishing Landscape in 1951, he also emphasized the activist mission of cultural landscape studies: the more people know about ordinary environments, the more they will become attached to them and the less likely they will be to wantonly destroy them.  Groth and Bressi build on cultural landscape studies via a 6-part framework updated for the 1990s:

1. focus on ordinary landscapes to get at cultural meaning and environmental experience
2. shift from a rural emphasis to both rural and urban landscapes, as well as landscapes of production and landscapes of consumption
3. continue to study diversity and uniformity, but emphasize difference, fragmentation, intertextuality and hybridity instead of a single, unifying narrative
4. continue to write for the intelligent lay reader
5. support a broad notion of interdisciplinarity that includes cultural, human, social, critical, landscape architecture, art history and other approaches
6. engage with visual and spatial information, either in support of or in direct opposition to it; the landscape must remain the primary object of study.  Respect JB Jackson's argument that "landscape... must be regarded first of all in terms of living rather than looking."

This collection includes many heavyweights: David Lowenthal, Peirce Lewis, Dolores Hayden, Wilbur Zelinsky, and more - all folks who are contributing to and thinking about what a new cultural geography might mean and how it might be updated to include social difference and PoMo cultural theory.  It also holds up JB Jackson as the methodological exemplar of cultural landscape studies - which makes sense, because as far as I know, he invented it.