New Axioms for Reading the Landscape: Paying Attention to Political Economy and Social Justice

It has been more than 25 years since Peirce Lewis (1979) laid out his “Axioms for Reading the Landscape: Some Guides to the American Scene.” Lewis’s axioms were designed to help us better see how, as he put it (complete with italics), “all human landscape has cultural meaning, no matter how ordinary that landscape might be” (p. 12). The axioms, Lewis suggested, “seem basic and self-evident,” even if “what seems self-evident was not obvious to me a few years ago” (p. 15). By restating what he took to be obvious, Lewis’s sought to provide a set of simple guidelines for understanding the meaning of the cultural landscape, and for using that meaning – gleaned from “reading” the landscape (that is, careful observation and inductive reasoning) – to come to some conclusions about American culture. For him, aesthetic judgments about the landscape were secondary.