Landscape Interpretation
Authors: Mels Tom 
Published: February 2019

In geographical research, the interpretation of landscape has been theorized in a number of ways. The work considered in this article concerns primarily interpretations emanating from socio-cultural relations rather than interpretations of environmental processes. Classic works on landscape, both throughout Europe and the United States, characteristically took the historical transformation of physical forms by culture groups as their main interest. Landscape interpretation amounted essentially to the explanation of how natural and cultural forces combined in shaping environments. From the 1970s onward a number of important maneuvers away from this tradition can be identified, and they emanated as much from changes in postwar planning, environmental degradation, and social upheaval as from theoretical debate. Under the influence of a humanistic surge, largely initiated within American geography, landscape interpretation moved closer to the philosophical and methodological concerns of phenomenology, existentialism, and modern hermeneutics. Attention to the importance of the human subject and cultural values stimulated a wide-ranging scholarly engagement with interpreting landscapes within their shifting societal contexts as places of, inter alia, aesthetic pleasure, cultural value, spiritual refuge, ordinary experience, or alienation. As a critical response to both the theoretical proclivities of traditional landscape studies and the humanistic understanding, landscape interpretation became more heavily influenced by developments in social and cultural theory. While classic interpretations of landscape were perceived as lacking in theoretical understanding of culture and social struggle, humanistic work was questioned for a limited attentiveness to power and the politics of landscape. Inspired by literary theory and semiotics, landscape was interpreted not only through various literary texts and discourse, but also as a text with authors, authority, and audiences. Other influential work in art history emphasized the importance of landscape as a visual space, shaped through social processes and expressing shifting ways of seeing. Crucial to the new cultural geography of the late 1980s and 1990s was that landscape needed to be considered in terms of practices of representation, and, by implication, landscape interpretation entailed tracing the expressions of social power as much in the outdoors and the built environment as in the discursive spaces of images, maps, and texts. Against the increasing sway of postmodern thinking in such work, a considerable amount of scholarly attention was directed to transcending the limits of discursive, symbolic, and visual approaches. By the mid-1990s, a steadily rising interest arose in landscape as polity and place of justice, in particular in the Nordic counties. In reclaiming a Marxian vocabulary for the interpretation of landscape, attention also turned to the ways in which capitalism produces landscapes characterized by inequalities, ideology, hegemony, and alienation. Another affirmation of geographical materiality, including the attention to embodied practice, emotion, affect, and the nonhuman, emerged more recently in the wake of nonrepresentational theories.