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  • Everyday America: Cultural Landscape Studies after J. B. Jackson
  • Matthew W. Roth (bio)
Everyday America: Cultural Landscape Studies after J. B. Jackson. Edited by Chris Wilson and Paul Groth. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Pp. x+385. $49.95/$19.95.

J. B. Jackson (1909-96) was the rock star of cultural landscape studies in North America, and, like Jimi Hendrix or Elvis Presley, new releases bearing his name have continued to appear since his death—first, a book of his essays, Landscape in Sight, in 1997, and now this collection, based on a 1998 conference held to consider the Jackson legacy. A salient part of his legacy is that the field of cultural landscape studies does not fit neatly into any of the traditional disciplines. Instead, it coheres around an interest in actual places and, for most participants, the application of the direct-observation methods championed by Jackson. This volume boasts an appropriately multidisciplinary cast, drawn from scholarship (geography, history, American studies) and professional practice (architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning, journalism).

The contradictions in Jackson's life animate the personal reminiscences by Patricia Nelson Limerick, Jeffrey Limerick, Denise Scott Brown, and Grady Clay. A scion of wealth whose youth was a series of Grand Tours, Jackson's main interest was the landscapes of working people. A professor at the most ivory of towers, Harvard and Berkeley, he delighted in puncturing academic pomposity and withdrew from the university to a life of manual labor (leavened, it can be inferred, by family assets). Fluent in French, he read Marc Bloch and Fernand Braudel before they were translated, but, far from parading his erudition, he purposely obscured his many precedents, inspirations, and appropriations.

In their introduction, editors Chris Wilson and Paul Groth deftly outline the context ofJackson's approach: he reveled in heterogeneity (of landscapes and of ideas) as a counterweight to the sweeping totalities of social theory in the mid-twentieth century. Undeterred by Jackson's theoretical opacity, Wilson and Groth describe him as sympathetic to phenomenology, with "its emphasis on a 'sense of place' as a way of putting individual experience back into the agency side of the agency-and-structure debate" (p. 15). They trace how this impulse played out through subsequent approaches to landscape study, including the elaborations of structuralism; the Marxist critique of "culture" as a superorganic concept that masks the operation of political economy in the creation of landscapes; and structuration theory, which sees in everyday actions and places the reflection of power relations. Historian Gwendolyn Wright discerns in Jackson's work not the repudiation of theory but the goal of transcending disciplinary boundaries: Jackson sought nothing less than a new intellectual lingua franca, an attempt to translate among disparate fields, based on "accessible language, abstention from pretense, and an openness to all sorts of unexpected alternative forms of wisdom" (p. 177). [End Page 859]

Two geographers nonetheless find much to be concerned about in the Jackson approach based on direct observation of places. George Henderson regrets that analysis of the landscape as it exists can overwhelm any consideration of the "social imagination," or a sense of how things ought to be, particularly with respect to social justice. At the same time, detailed attention to vernacular landscapes "without a meaningful political compass" entails a risk: we could "lose ourselves in the terra incognita of relativism" by reading resistance into every action undertaken by nonelites (p. 196). To judge from the essay by urban planner James Rojas, Henderson need not worry. Rojas applied Jackson's observation-based methods to analyze the yards, sidewalks, and streets of a Latino neighborhood in East Los Angeles. While Rojas identifies the departures from the spatial practices of the dominant Anglo culture, he does not paint the neighborhood as a site of resistance but rather in terms of sociospatial innovation. He points out that the vibrant street life of East Los Angeles exhibits all the desirable characteristics extolled by the New Urbanists, observes that this particular "ought to be" of lively, multiple-use public places is a matter of adaptation rather than design, and suggests that a viable model exists where no one is looking for it.

Geographer Richard...

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