PLACES AND LANDSCAPES

October 18, 2019

LECTURE: LANDSCAPES
INVESTIGATING LANDSCAPES
 Most encompassing meaningful unit of space
 Some kind of network or region of places in a middle position between the extension of physical
space (beyond their perception)
 The individual locales or places created in daily experiences
LANDSCAPE THEMES
 Political aspects of landscapes
 Representation of Landscapes
 Multiple co existing landscapes
 Visual perception landscapes
 Time and Landscapes
LANDSCAPE AS A ‘PROCESS’
 Hirsch (1995)
- Attempts to mediate a foregrounded ‘place’ against a backgrounded ‘space’
- Introduces a dichotomy within landscape itself, of which nature vs culture is only one
component
- Considers landscape as representation, this plays out as a dichotomy between ‘image’ and map
TEMPORARILITY OF LANDSCAPES
 Bender (2002)
- Landscape as time materializing
- Landscape as subjective, an aspect of subjectivity. Never neutral or distanced from those who
inhabit them
 Subjective means “engagement with the landscape and time is historically
particular”
 The historical specificity of landscape fits in with Heidegger’s notion of dasein
 Ingold (1993)
- The process that is being and becoming of landscape
- Employ Hirsh and Merleau – Ponty, the analogy of “figure and ground’ (foreground,
background, point and horizon)
- Equivalent to “embodiment” for the body
- Devises the concept of the taskscape
 Power relations, past and present, focused in and of the landscape – de Certeu’s strategies and
tactics, places and spaces
 Thomas in Bender (2002)
- The privileging of visions in the ways different peoples comprehended and thus construed
their landscapes
- Tools of wisdom were maps, photos and GIS
- Surveillance form of looking at landscape with Heidigger’s dwelling and de Certeau’s tactics
 Nancy Munn in Man
- Her ethnographic data is often cited with regard to her ideas of the extension of
intersubjective space – time beyond the local into the larger landscape.
- How do individual persons in historical contexts create their own connections between places
as if forming an ego centric region?