Jordan Brasher

Reading the Cultural Landscape: Perspectiveson the Study of Visual Culture

Option 4: The advantages and disadvantages ofvisual culture as a source of informationabout the social production of cultural

meaning.

Seminar in Cultural Geography, Dr. AlysonGreiner

Oklahoma State University

October 28, 2014

The study of cultural geography in America developed

and was nurtured by a few scholars who pointed the

discipline in the direction of understanding culture through

its visual, material aspects. Carl Sauer, Fred Kniffen, and

Wilbur Zelinsky “read” the landscape like a storybook. For

each of them, the visual, material culture always had an

intriguing story to tell about people’s relationship with

the natural environment and the ways they understood the

world and conducted their “way of life,” (Sauer 1987, 161).

It was scholars like these, among others like Terry G.

Jordan-Bychkov and John Fraser Hart, who formed much of what

has been called the “traditional” or “Berkeley” school of

cultural geography, for Sauer’s time teaching and

researching at the University of California at Berkeley. In

the 1960s, concurrent with the quantitative revolution in

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geography and its push to begin to make predictive

mathematical models, pressure began to build from other

scholars within geography to “go beyond” tracking and

tracing these diagnostic cultural markers on the visible

landscape to explore the less-visible underlying structures

that uphold social and political power relationships (Wagner

& Mikesell 1962; Mikesell 1978; Duncan 1980; Jackson 1989).

Among those in this academic resistance movement were

Phillip Wagner, Marvin Mikesell, and Denis Cosgrove. An

examination of the arguments for and against a “traditional”

cultural geography renders the Berkeley school with its

merits in the context of understanding the origins and

historical diffusion of culture traits and institutions, but

does not get at the underlying forces and structures that

uphold these traits or institutions. This critique makes up

much of the argument for what will be called the

“postmodern” school of cultural geography.

The Berkeley school’s catalyst, Carl Sauer, sought to

determine “successions of culture,” (1962, 34) that take

place in an area. The premise for this approach to cultural

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geography was founded on the idea that groups of people who

shared the same culture constituted a “culture area,” that

could be systematically explained or “diagnosed,” (Wagner &

Mikesell 1962). While it may have been too ambitious to

assume cultures could be diagnosed materially, it was

nevertheless a valuable practice to begin to get at

systematic understandings of groups of people. The intention

of this study was to understand this culture’s “way of life

by a particular people in a particular habitat,” (Sauer

1987, 161). A strength of this type of study is the attempt

to systematically and comprehensively understand a group’s

way of life. For Fred Kniffen, this was manifested in what

he termed “folk housing,” (1965). The study of folk housing

used forms of architecture to trace the diffusion of

settlement patterns. For example, a type of barn known as

the Pennsylvania barn was traced to German-Dutch origins

diffused from the influx of Germans to Pennsylvania.

Documenting these visual aspects of culture allowed for an

understanding of the diffusion of people across space based

on the culture they brought with them. Cultural geographers

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like Terry G. Jordan-Bychkov were convinced that the barn

could be an accurate indicator of a culture group.

Visual culture also allowed for an understanding of the

way of life of a group of people by defining visible,

tangible cultural characteristics. Terry G. Jordan-Bychkov’s

The Upland South incorporates this idea by defining notched-

log carpentry, the dogtrot house, the transverse-crib style

barn, the “Shelbyville” courthouse square, and the covered

graveshed as “diagnostic” of a region he called the “Upland

South,” the upper portion of the southern United States

(Jordan-Bychkov 2003). In this work, the author provides

these defining characteristics of the region in order to

give a picture of its character. These visual

characteristics were highly mappable, however deteriorating

they may have been at the time from the landscape, and this

mappability made a strong case for defining the extent of

culture areas. Carl Sauer would go so far as to call this

type of work “science, in the more traditional sense, and an

attempt to give a true picture,” (Sauer 1987, 155, emphasis

mine). While there would be much pushback against this loose

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use of the term “science” to describe this type of work,

Sauer’s idea was keen on its attempt to give a true picture.

This true picture, for traditional cultural geographers, was

often found often through ways of knowing that excluded the

formulaic, rigorous, modern definition of “science.” One

most often had to simply go out to the places and the people

to understand them. This “muddy boots” geography, mapping

these features, was an attempt at being scientific by

working with geographic data.

This concrete, tangible mapping of culture areas has

its inherent limitations. Culture groups often mix traits

along boundaries; this blurs the lines we can draw to

delineate these groups. Wagner and Mikesell argue that this

traditional cultural geography is not “concerned with

explaining the inner workings of culture or with describing

fully the patterns of human behavior,” and that the “culture

area” concept, when seen as the cultural landscape itself,

greatly limits our view of the landscape (1962). For

instance, The Upland South does not examine the colonial power

structure that enabled the European settlers to build the

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very houses and barns and courthouse squares in the places

they did. This is a limitation of the work of understanding

only the visible landscape without taking into consideration

the often invisible processes and events that occurred to

set up these visual characteristics as diagnostic. The

reference to the covered graveshed in the Upland South area

by Jordan-Bychkov as having its origins in Choctaw culture

stop at that description, rather than exploring some ways in

which that visible, diagnostic cultural marker could have

made its transition into the European-settled Upland South

(Jordan-Bychkov 2003). What patterns, processes or events

lead to the adoption of this burial practice by European

settlers from those Choctaw natives? Were they peaceful?

Were they not? It is these questions that remain unanswered

and are the largest source of critique for the postmodern

geographers of traditional cultural geography. The answers

simply lie beyond the visible landscape.

Wilbur Zelinsky famously described culture as a

“superorganic entity living and changing according to a

still obscure set of internal laws,” (Zelinksy 1992). In

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doing so, this reified notion of culture serves to

perpetuate the need to observe its material byproducts. When

culture becomes a living, moving entity in itself, beyond

and apart from the individual, visual culture serves as the

most natural way to understand it. Take for a metaphor the

idea of a ravaging tornado. Understanding its impact is most

often done by calculating the amount of damage it has left

in its wake, as opposed to necessarily how fast its winds

blew. When culture is seen as larger than life, the

institutions that uphold it are peripheral to the

superorganic entity itself. In this way, the superorganic

model of culture serves not only to limit our understanding

of it, but also to further mystify the nature of it by

obfuscating and reifying it.

Carl Sauer was accused by James Duncan (1980) as

subscribing to the superorganicist theory, but Marie Price

and Martin Lewis (1993) refute this accusation thoroughly

and accurately. Lumping Sauer in with Zelinsky in this way

does not adequately describe Sauer’s work; however, Duncan’s

refutation of the superorganic theory of culture lends some

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insight into some reasons visual culture was so highly

valued by Zelinsky and any scholar who may have worked under

the presumptions of superorganicism. Because this theory

lends to the individual only the capacity to execute

“cultural forces” imposed on them, the theory inherently

denies the need to understand the underlying forces that

uphold the institutions of culture since those institutions

are relieved of their agency in favor of a reified,

mystified, unknowable, “other” force affecting culture. This

leaves superorganic scholars with tracing the material

remnants of “culture areas” to understand “successions of

culture” as the only viable means for explaining the

destruction and imprint that this tornado-like entity left

in the wake of the landscape.

Superorganicism, in this sense then, is a deterministic

tautology. Culture begins to be understood and explained as

being produced by Culture. Jackson (1989) described this as

“culturalism.” This is of no value to academia or to

broadening our understanding of groups of people. The key

role that the superorganic plays in perpetuating the need

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for studying visual culture is by its implicit assumption

that scholars are picking up the pieces, so to speak, of a

reified entity that is always acting and moving several

steps ahead of the scholars, not readable or knowable until

its impacts have been left behind and can be visually

assessed. This historic approach to the appraisal of culture

is indeed why the study of cultural geography for some time

was equated synonymously with historical geography. The two

went hand in hand because cultural geography was being done

in a way that it could only understand and explain

historical cultural phenomena.

Let not this example of material cultural studies cloud

good judgment as to its usefulness even in the postmodern

era. The study of material culture is still entirely useful

and viable in a foundational sense. Tracking the origins and

diffusion of cultural institutions and traits enables and

begs more questions to be asked about the underlying forces

that uphold them. For example, implicit in the notions of

European settlement patters is a particular way to settle on

a land. The observable, visual patterns of settlement can

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and should query the institutions in Europe that deemed

these settlement patterns proper. What Foucauldian

pantoptigonal structures are in place at different visible

scales in early settlement patterns? Were centrally located

markets only for trade and social interaction, or was there

an element of power involved? Examining the visual, material

culture of village settlement can, and to remain relevant—

should, lead to some of these more postmodern questions.

Indeed, Price and Lewis argue that traditional cultural

geographers ought to “grapple with some of the sophisticated

and social-theoretical constructs now being offered by the

new school,” (1993, 12).

Some additional weaknesses to traditional material

landscape studies include its assumptions of the material as

a concrete and characteristic product of the culture (Wagner

& Mikesell 1962), a neglecting of a “multiplicity of

components and dimensions that cause phenomena of interest,”

(Zelinksy 1992); Aase’s (1994) ideas of symbolic space and

multiple simultaneous conceptions of it; and Holdsworth’s

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(1997) notions of its inadequacy in describing industrial,

consumer-driven societies.

The cultural landscape simply must be viewed as more

than a “concrete and characteristic product of the

complicated interplay between a given human community and a

particular set of natural circumstances,” as Wagner and

Mikesell suggest (1962, 11). Taking the cultural landscape

at visible, material face value greatly limits our ability

to understand abstract concepts of political, social,

cultural, and other forms of power that exist in space.

Landscapes of Privilege (Duncan & Duncan 2004) provides remarkable

insight into those abstract forms of power that are visible

on the landscape but not understood visibly. By conducting

interviews and surveys and performing discourse analyses on

legal documents about zoning laws in a rural New York City

suburb, the authors illuminate the power structures at work

in the landscape that cannot be seen by merely looking at

and recording the visible features of the landscape. One of

the ideologies revealed is the European-American notion of

pastoralism that requires open space for grazing livestock,

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but has morphed in this community into a mere

aestheticization of open space itself that serves to

marginalize those who cannot afford to buy lots of open land

or exist in a very expensive open space. Traditional

landscape reading cannot infer this openness as inherently

marginalizing without the analysis of aspects of the

landscape and the culture that are not visible.

This same work illuminates multiple lines of causation

for certain outcomes of social and political power

structures. The concept of open space is revealed as not

only aesthetic, but as derivative of multiple forms of

pleasing aesthetics. Interviews revealed that people liked

the open view for reasons like safety, security, recalling

of a particular favorable time period, and more. The

landscape itself does not tell you this. In the words of

Holdsworth ,“we do not simply read,” (1997, 55).

Next, traditional material landscape studies can by no

means convey notions of symbolic space. In order to

understand this weakness, it takes a radical shift in

thinking from our Greek and European origins of dichotomies,

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absolutes, and black-and-whites, to a more Eastern and

particularly Chinese way of thinking, that encompasses

differences as complements rather than competitors. This

idea is embodied in the familiar yin and yang concept,

wherein two apparently contradictory ideas do not mutually

exclude each other, but rather coexist and strengthen each

other. In the same way, conceptions of symbolic space must

be considered not as dichotomous, or in viewing an absolute

versus relative concept of space, but take into

consideration numerous conceptions of space at once. Tor

Aase illustrates this by describing the way Tamils construct

space, noting that “Tamils do not conceive of an ontological

distinction between idea and substance, between nomen and

phenomen; everything consists of substance,” (1994, 53).

Quite notably, it is impossible to conceive of these notions

of space simply by inventory of the material landscape.

These complex, multiple dimensions of space must be examined

through a lens that does not look only at material culture,

but at its conceptual culture, too. Aase sums up symbolic

space representation in the following way:

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“Space is what people make it to be. Let me therefore temporarily be a relativist and leave the question of what space is to the culture in question. Rather than speculatingon the impossible question of what space really is, the taskof geography should rather be to ask how symbolic space is socially produced.”

(Aase 1994, 53, emphasis in the original)

The abstract, subjective nature of some cultures’

conceptions of space must be taken into account in ways

other than by observing material culture only. Aase’s

brilliant essay on symbolic space offers some insight into

ways of breaking our traditional Greek dichotomous ways of

viewing space and looking beyond the material landscape for

the truth about spatial phenomena.

Holdsworth (1997) claims, “the link between house and

culture, between artifact and individual, has always been

much easier to define in preindustrial, folk communities

than in a consumer-oriented industrial society.” This, too,

serves as a weakness of traditional, material landscape

studies. As cultures, economies, and societies become more

and more complex, the connection between the artifact and

the process(es) that produce it becomes more and more

complicated. As more events are incorporated into the

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process of the production of the house, for example, the

relationship between the house and its inhabitants is

weakened. In the year 1800, maybe each family in a study

area built their own house with the resources available to

them, but in 2000, each family had little to no involvement

with the construction of their house because the more

complex economy now houses businesses that lay brick,

businesses that lay shingles, businesses that install

insulation, so on and so forth. The more complex these

connections become, the weaker the tie between the home and

its inhabitant, or any artifact of material culture and the

people with which it is associated.

While Holdsworth was right to describe the limitations

of the traditional cultural landscape approach as “rooted in

a rural, premodern, noncorporate world,” he was simply wrong

to go on to describe the tradition as “ahistorical,” (1997,

49). Indeed, I have argued that it has been largely

historical in that the traditional study of material culture

has relied on historical cultural institutions and traits

for its strength in illuminating historic ways of life. The

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objective of the tradition itself was strictly linked with

historic questions about the evolution of technological

applications like corner notching, fence and barn types and

the like, as well as the historic diffusion of those traits.

Jackson (1993) has asserted that the traditional versus

new cultural geographers idea is a false dichotomy in

itself, and that there is no group of scholars who has or is

calling themselves “new” cultural geographers. Jackson may

well be right in his assertion that no one is calling

themselves by this moniker, but he is misguided in asserting

that this correlation implies that there does not still

remain a great gap between some of the more traditional

landscape scholars and some of the more postmodern cultural

geographers. There is a marked difference in the way the

landscape is studied between the works I mentioned

previously, The Upland South and Landscapes of Privilege. These

works were not merely discussing different topics, but

actually discussing in different planes of reality. Each had

a case study area, but the former was focused on defining

material characteristics that help illuminate the character

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of a place, while the latter was concerned with the non-

material characteristics that defined, in a similar sense,

the “character” of a place. Those non-material

characteristics arguably proved largely more defining of

Bedford, New York, than those material characteristics

defined the character of the Upland South.

In sum, traditional, material or visual studies of

landscape and culture are typically more useful for

understanding the origins and historical diffusion of

culture traits and institutions, but do not get at the

underlying forces and structures that uphold those traits

and institutions. This deficiency greatly attributes to its

fading out of academic cultural geography in favor of

research that addresses more direct questions about social

and power relations. For traditional cultural geography to

remain relevant in the era of postmodernism, lengths must be

taken to “grapple with some of the sophisticated social-

theoretical constructs now being offered by the new school,”

(Price & Lewis 1993, 12). The survival of the tradition

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hinges on scholars’ ability and willingness to address more

complex social issues.

References

Aase, T. 1994. Symbolic space: Representations of space in

geography and anthropology. Geografiska Annaler. Series B,

Human Geography, 76 (1): 51-8.

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Duncan, J.S. 1980. The superorganic in American cultural

geography. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 70

(2): 181-98.

Duncan, J.S. and N. G. Duncan. 2004. Landscapes of Privilege: The

Politics of the Aesthetic in an American Suburb. NY: Routledge.

Holdsworth, D. W. 1997. Landscape and archives as text. In

Understanding Ordinary Landscapes, ed. by P. Groth and T. W.

Bressi, 44-55. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Jackson, P. 1993. Berkeley and beyond: Broadening the

horizons of cultural geography. Annals of the Association of

American Geographers, 83 (3): 519-20.

Jordan-Bychkov, T. 2003. The Upland South: The Making of an American

Folk Region and Landscape. Sante Fe: Center for American

Places.

Kniffen, F. 1965. Folk housing: Key to diffusion. Annals of the

Association of American Geographers, 55 (4): 549-77.

Mikesell, M. W. 1978. Tradition and innovation in cultural

geography. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 68

(1): 1-16.

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Price, M. and M. Lewis. 1993. The reinvention of cultural

geography. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 83

(1): 1-17.

Sauer, C. 1987. “Now this matter of cultural geography”:

Notes from Carl Sauer’s last seminar at Berkeley. ed.

By J.J. Parsons. In Carl O. Sauer: A Tribute, ed. by M. S.

Kenzer, 153-63. Corvallis: Association of Pacific Coast

Geographers.

Wagner, P. L. and M. W. Mikesell. 1962. Introduction: The

themes of cultural geography. In Readings in Cultural

Geography, ed. by P. L. Wagner and M. W. Mikesell, 1-

24. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Zelinsky, W. 1992 [1973]. Process. In The Cultural Geography of

the United States. Rev. ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-

Hall.

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