Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 15
Landscape, Culture
and Regional Studies:
Connecting the Dots
Kenneth R. Olwig
Introduction
The nexus of
landscape, culture and regional studies
is critical to contemporary
attempts to rethink the nature/culture dichotomy and the resultant divide between
physical and cultural geography. The power of this nexus lies in its formation of a
totality, or
gestalt
, that is greater than the sum of its parts. It is, however, largely
left to the imagination to connect the dots of landscapecultureregionnature
environment, and form a mental picture of what this connectivity means in terms
of social practice and power relations. The way we connect dots of this kind depend
on our world picture, or to use a fancier terms, our
cosmographic
picture of the
world as it is tied to our
cosmological
understanding of the world.
Concepts such as nature and culture are related to a given society's worldview,
and Geography
-
as both a school and university subject - has long played a
central role in educating people to
see
the world in terms of given world pictures.
I have italicised
see
because this is not just a question of the way people think,
but of the way people and disciplines perceive and know the world, which is to
say their
epistemology
. It may seem paradoxical that the most exciting state-of-
the-art writing about this nexus is often
historical, conceptual
and
interdisciplinary
in approach. The reason for this is that the verities of modernism's world-picture,
which have long been taken for granted, are now being questioned by scholars
whose focus is not just upon the 'modern' present, but upon the past, when the
idea of the modern took shape. This work is being undertaken in important
measure by non-geographers who are, in effect, questioning fundamental assump-
tions of Geography as a modern science by showing how its spatialised discourse
has its origin in older discourses of landscape and nature, which modernist geog-
raphy has long since relegated to the scrap heap of history (W. J. T Mitchell,
1994; Olwig 1996a). This naturally goes against the grain of geographers who
defi ne themselves as modernists, and this may explain why many of the key
fi gures in this critique are not geographers, even if their concerns lie at the heart
of geography.
