DEEP GEOGRAPHY

How do Geographers see landscape?

There is a long tradition of Geographers saying "there's more to landscape than first meets the eye". A good place to start is with D.W.Meinig who wrote an article called "The Beholding Eye: Ten Versions of the Same Scene" in which he identified ten different ways of looking at a landscape. Look at his list and compare it with the list you just made for Monument Valley:

Meinig's ten views of a landscape:

Landscape as Nature
Landscape as Habitat
Landscape as Artifact
Landscape as System
Landscape as Problem
Landscape as Wealth
Landscape as Ideology
Landscape as History
Landscape as Place
Landscape as Aesthetic

 

"Landscape is at once an old and pleasant word in common speech and a technical term in special professions... A simple exercise will quickly reveal the problem. Take a small but varied company to any convenient viewing place overlooking some portion of city and countryside and have each, in turn, describe the "landscape" (that “stretch of country as seen from a single point,” as the dictionary defines it)... It will soon be apparent that even though we gather together and look in the same direction at the same instant, we will not – we cannot – see the same landscape."

Meinig, D.W. (1979) The Beholding Eye: Ten Versions of the Same Scene. in Meinig, D.W. (ed) The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes: Geographical Essays. (OUP)



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