Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
If landscape is understood to be an historically evolved human region, the place
of a polity and society, then the role of representation in the study of this region
changes. Landscape then ceases to be a form of space, represented on a map or
diagram, and rather is understood to be a non-representational phenomenon,
which is to say a phenomenon that exists through practice rather than on the basis
of a representation. Such a phenomenon, however, can also be represented in
various ways, and those representations can infl uence its perception and under-
standing. Such a representation can be a visual prospect, but it can also be, for
example, a representative political body. This understanding of landscape thus
eliminates the privileged perspective of space as the sensorium of God, or Nature,
or Science, or the State, and interest turns toward the properties of perception
itself. How people perceive landscape, and how this affects the way we behave
toward the perceived landscape, become central questions when landscape is
understood this way.
Though it is diffi cult for any geographer living in the modern era to avoid being
infl uenced by the conception of landscape as scenic space, a number of geographers
have focused their work upon landscape as the historically constituted place of a
polity and society. In Europe the focus upon landscape as place, and its perception,
is particularly associated with the infl uential school of the French geographer Vidal
de la Blache which took its point of departure as the historical region of the
pays
,
the root of the French word for landscape
pay
sage, and focused upon the way these
places were stamped with the culture of a particular regional polity (Buttimer,
1971). In America it was the Berkley school of historical and cultural geography,
founded by Carl Sauer, which took this approach (Sauer, 1969). For this school it
is vital to understand how differing perceptions have effected the shaping of, par-
ticular regional landscapes, and with it their nature and environment (Lowenthal,
1961; Glacken, 1967; Tuan, 1974). An important inspiration for this school was
the work of the 19th American geographer George Perkins Marsh whose 1864
book
Man and Nature: Or, Physical Geography as Modifi ed by Human Action
(1965) sought to change the perception of society's relationship to its environment
and thus contributed to the development of the subsequent conservation and envi-
ronmental movements (Lowenthal, 2000). My own approach to landscape, and to
society-nature issues, has grown out of this school, and this is why I have focused
in my work upon the historical development of actual regional landscape polities
in relationship to differing perceptions of those regions, and the consequences of
these perceptions for both society and its material surroundings (Olwig, 1984;
2002a).
Pre-Modern and Non-Modern Contemporary Landscape Polities
If one conceptualises landscape in terms of region and culture, it makes sense to
focus on the Dutch landscape paintings of the
landschap
regions that originally lent
their name to the genre (Merriam-Webster, 2000, landscape), rather than on the
central point perspective paintings of Renaissance Italy, which were usually repre-
sentations, in both form and content, of an idealised
Nature
. The Dutch paintings
were prospects of landscape regions, called
landschap
, and the English therefore
called them by the equivalent English word, 'landscape'.
2
For the Dutch painters
the important thing was the character of the regional landscapes as they had been
formed by local custom and history. The low-lying, often federated, lands of this
