Anthropologists have been slow to appreciate the potential of landscape studies. They have tended to think of landscape either in terms of ‘landform’ — something already in place — or ‘land-use’, whereby something is done to the land. Either way, the land is thought of as neutral and passive. It is only since the 1980s that anthropologists have begun to recognize the way in which people’s perceptions of their world and their material engagement with it are intimately bound together and are creative of, as well as created by, the landscape. Such an approach makes it clear that the separation of ‘nature’ from ‘culture’ and the passive role given to ‘nature’ form part of a quite specific Western ‘viewpoint’. This alternative way of thinking about landscape owes much to the work of literary critics, cultural geographers, historians, sociologists, philosophers, and novelists.
There is, however, one area of the world where there has been a longer anthropological commitment to landscape, and this is Australia. It could be argued that the total intermeshing of Aboriginal ^sociality and landscape more or less forced anthropologists to think more creatively about the meaning of landscape. Thus, for example, Aboriginal birch-bark and sand paintings provide important insights into the tpoly-semic nature of landscape — the way in which it works simultaneously at a number of levels. The representation of landscape is at one and the same time a topographic map, a cosmological exegesis, a ‘clanscape’, and a ritual and political landscape. Moreover, people differentiated by age and gender will have different understandings of the land, and some will be empowered by their knowledge of sacred sites and associated rituals. These landscapes, which appear timeless and unchanging, are, in fact, constantly renegotiated, as government agencies have found to their cost in land-claim battles.
Outside of anthropology, landscape studies have moved in several different directions. Already in the 1950s Hoskins explored landscapes as palimpsests, and showed how, in a British context, a history of occupation and land-use materializes in the shape of a hedge or the angle of a road. ‘One could write a topic about every few square inches [of the Ordnance Survey map]. It is like a painting by Brueghel or a major symphony’ (Hoskins 1985: 3). Alternatively, Raymond Williams’s seminal The Country and the City (1973) explored ‘structures of feeling’ in the context of English literature and analysed the way in which people’s engagements with the landscape were, and are, rooted in historically constituted social relations. Again, at any given time and place, people’s attitudes will vary according to who they are and how they are placed. Williams noted that while Jane Austen, William Cobbett and Gilbert White all lived in the same area at the same time, they perceived the land in very different ways. "Edward Said (1993) took the analysis of Mansfield Park a stage further and explored the wider context of colonial exploitation. Not only are people differently placed, but, as Naipaul showed brilliantly in his novel The Enigma of Arrival, the same person may hold many and often contradictory and changing notions of the world.
Geographers and sociologists have also worked on the hermeneutics of landscape: the way in which people’s understanding of who they are is created – and negotiated and subverted – by spatial constraints. Bourdieu’s classic study of the Berber house created a gendered world of social relations; while Giddens has explored movement – the intersection of time and place – at the level of the locale and the larger region, and also worked with Goffman’s notion of backstage and frontstage, private space and public space (Giddens 1985; Bourdieu 1990). Recently, archaeologists have mapped the increasing constraint on movement and vision within the Neolithic and later Bronze Age landscapes and monuments of southern Britain (Barrett 1994).
Many of these studies have focused on the engagement with landscape in the Western world. Thus, for example, Cosgrove and Daniels (1988) concentrate on a Western iconography of landscape that, from the sixteenth through to the nineteenth century, moved from landscape as a particular form of painting, to landscape as a class-defined way of seeing — an ego-centred, perspectival, patrician gaze — and then to the active creation of landscaped parks and gardens. The Western ‘gaze’ also formed part of the colonial enterprise, and both the iconography of maps and the variable guises of Orientalism have recently been deconstructed.
In recent years anthropologists have not only extended discussions of the ‘imperial eye’, including the accounts by explorers of what they ‘saw’ in Africa or South America, but have also used landscape studies to map the politics of unequal encounter. Moreover, in many contemporary contexts, both Western and non-Western, the ‘imperial eye’ transmutes into the ‘tourist gaze’ and the politics of ‘heritage’.
Anthropologists have also begun to explore in greater depth non-Western ways of seeing and being in the landscape (Bender 1993; Hirsch and O’Hanlon 1995). Landscape, too, has finally begun to be gendered.
Landscape is never passive. People engage with it, rework it, appropriate and contest it. It is part of the way in which identities are created and disputed, whether as individual, group or nation-state. Operating at the juncture of history and politics, social relations and cultural perceptions, landscape is a concept of high tension. It is also an area of study that forces the abandonment of conventional disciplinary boundaries and creates the potential for innovative cross-fertilization.
