Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
According to the French anthropologist and student of science Bruno Latour
(1993), modernism, as it emerged from the Renaissance and Enlightenment, bore
the promise that science, by isolating nature as an object of study, would be able
to transform and control that nature to the benefi t of society. The contemporary
environmental crisis, however, suggests to Latour that this separation and objecti-
fi cation of nature in relation to culture may be a source of environmental problems,
rather than their solution. A solution for scholars like Latour is thus to question
the philosophical foundations of modernity itself, and to do this many scholars have
gone back into history to re-examine the way that modernism's world picture, which
we now take for granted, was originally constructed. Thus, if we want to know
why it is that geographers often claim that their discipline forms a bridge between
the natural sciences and social sciences, and why it is that geographers nevertheless
often do not cross that bridge, one needs to go back to the origins of the modernist
tendency to split nature from culture. An important clue to how this dichotomisa-
tion occurred can be found in the work of students of landscape, who have shown
how the construction of a pictorial concept of landscape in the Renaissance, which
was based on foundational work by geographers of both the Renaissance and
ancient Greece, played a central role in the development of modernism's world
picture. This world picture, in turn, helped shape the modern concept of region in
relation to culture and environment.
Landscape is often loosely thought of as meaning more or less the same as envi-
ronment or nature. It would be more correct to say, however, that the way one
defi nes landscape has a great deal to say about the way one connects the dots
between culture and region and between environment/nature. Discussions of the
concept of landscape are complicated by the fact that it embodies two somewhat
contradictory meanings, each of which connects the concepts of landscape, culture
and region in different ways. The two meanings are well expressed in the defi nition
of
landscape
in Dr. Samuel Johnson's classic 1755 dictionary (note that neither defi -
nition specifi cally mentions either nature or environment) (Johnson, 1755[1968]):
1. 'A region; the prospect of a country'
2. 'A picture, representing an extent of space, with the various objects in it'
In Johnson's dictionary defi nition (1) is the oldest, whereas defi nition (2) is the most
modern. Defi nition (2) is arguably a quintessential expression of the modern world-
picture. Since I am concerned here with the contemporary critique of modernism, I
will begin by examining defi nition (2) before returning to defi nition (1) as the pos-
sible source of a 'non-modern' alternative to understanding landscape, which does
not dichotomise culture and nature. This reversal of the temporal course of history
contradicts, of course, the mentality of modernity, which casts history as a progres-
sive linear movement that continuously relegates the past to obsolescence, and
privileges the present (Olwig, 2002b).
Landscape Two: Modern, Scenic, Pictorial Space
The tendency to conceptualise the world in terms of an extent of space, with the
various objects in it, is a characteristic of the rise of a movement of thought in the
Renaissance and Enlightenment that can be said to mark a beginning of the ideology
modernism. As one student of the Renaissance writes:
