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| REVIEW ON CULTURAL LANDSCAPE STUDY IN THE PERSPECTIVE OF NEW CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY |
| XIANG Lan-lin, LV Bin |
| College of Urban and Environmental Sciences, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China |
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Abstract With the ‘culture turn’ and ‘spatial turn’, the past three decades have witnessed a shift from the ‘old’ super-organic view of culture to the critical ‘new’ one in the literature of human geography. This paper examines the three core concepts which are culture, meaning and representation, as well as its background. According to the new cultural geography, culture is not an intrinsic, unified whole, but composes of different practice of representation by different power conflict. Examining meaning is the main purpose of this study. How to interpret meaning in power and social relations becomes the central issue. Representation is what the landscape appears to the human and its multiple forms-the words and images-and scales have become the central topics in the study. Furthermore, the authors classify the epistemologies into five schools. Social Marxism which relies on the art historic iconography regards the landscape as a veil. Its duplicity lies in covering the hidden ideology, and the method including the art historic iconography. Later North American Marxists understands it as an unfinished product in the process of capitalism production and a form of social regulation. Thus, they offered a wider and deeper theory than Cosgrove and Daniels'. Based on linguistic post-structuralism, cultural landscape analyzes as text. Its meaning is created during inter-textual communication. UK-based cultural geographers stress cultures of landscape. In the realm of everyday landscape practices, regulatory processes and cultural discourses, it draws upon Michel Foucault's view of subject and discourse, so landscape can be regarded as shuttle. Feminists and post-colonists criticize landscape studies as a way of seeing and treat it as a gaze upon the land, a dominant way to the Others' world, and the eyes swing between the open rationality and the latent visual pleasure. Furthermore, from the perspective of nationality, landscape also contributes to the communism and the sharing particular landscape and history help to establish collective identity. Within the shifts of the ontology and epistemology, the ‘new’ cultural geography changes to cultural politics and landscape moves from a naturally given one to a politically contested one. The turn has brought other social scientific and humanistic disciplines into the study of cultural geography and attracted increasingly attention cross the boundary of discipline.
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Received: 19 June 2010
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2010, Vol. 25 
