CULTURAL LANDSCAPE

CULTURAL LANDSCAPE

The term developed on the basis of geography, where landscape (German Landschaft, French paysage) means a “complex geographical whole”, including natural and anthropogenic elements; applied, among others, in archaeology and anthropology, but also in cultural, historical studies, discourse of memory, tourism, where it refers to the area which is subject to and shaped, developed and valued by humans.

The idea of the cultural landscape indicates the processual nature of the landscape, including social and cultural phenomena taking place within its boundaries, as well as practices emphasising the mutual relationship between humanity and the environment. As a term it enters into relations with such notions as space and place. In contrast to landscape understood as a view (aesthetic landscape), the notion of the cultural landscape refers to the environment transformed by humans in a physical, material and symbolic sense, bearing traces of their activities occurring over time. In this sense, any landscape is culturally transformed.

Since the mid-19th century, research into the cultural landscape has developed in two traditions: German (Ritter, Ratzel) and French (Vidal de la Blache), focusing the attention of geographers on the socio-cultural determinants of the landscape. The studies intensified in the first half of the twentieth century, thanks, among others, to the American geographer Sauer and the Berkeley school associated with him. Their decisive development took place at the turn of the twentieth and twenty-first century thanks to researchers specializing in humanistic (cultural) geography. Since Vidal de la Blache drew attention to the need to take into account the impact of human beings on the environment in geographical analyses, the landscape has begun to be seen as the result of a meeting of culture and nature, man and nature.

One of the first definitions of cultural landscape, most frequently cited in Anglo-Saxon literature, was formulated by Sauer: “The cultural landscape is fashioned from a natural landscape by a cultural group. Culture is the agent, the natural area is the medium, the cultural landscape is the result”. As far as landscape is concerned, Sauer was interested in the relations between man and nature in a given territory and in the way in which humanity transforms the natural environment into a cultural one. He was interested in the history of settlement, agricultural colonisation and land use. Humans – through work – influence their surroundings, shaping the cultural landscape, which is dynamic in nature and is subject to transformation along with cultural and social development.

The etymological research concerning the concept of landscape made it possible to derive this term from two sources: social life and geographical conditions. John B. Jackson emphasised that it includes experience, habitation and everyday practice. Jackson and Olwig, studying the historical changes of the term “landscape”, pointed to its connotations with the land. According to Olwig, the concept of landscape contains a double meaning: “territorial’, identifying the landscape with an area of land in the sense of province, state, region, and “scenic”, meaning a fragment of land and sky appearing in the field of vision. According to him, etymological sources of the concept of landscape indicate the relations between the community (in different languages defined by the suffix: -schaft, -ship, -scape) and the customary law relating to the management and use of a specific area inhabited by a given community.

The earliest research on the cultural landscape was directed towards the relationship between humanity and the environment. It concentrated on rural areas. The development of landscape research has contributed to the extension of the issues studied to completely new areas such as landscape versus identity, landscape versus representation, landscape versus the value system, power and dominance versus landscape. In this way, the landscape has been integrated into the area of cultural research and it participates in the system of values and in the shaping of cultural traditions.

The phenomenological turn in the research on the cultural landscape in the 1980s and 1990s allowed to adapt to its needs Heidegger’s theory of inhabitation, adopted primarily in anthropological and archaeological research. Tilley and Ingold are in favour of reading the landscape in this way. According to the latter, the landscape is a living process that emerges from what is material and the routinely undertaken activities (tasks) of people and communities, contributing to the transformation of the landscape. Ingold emphasised that the cultural landscape is a process that is not finished and is never fully formed. In Ingold’s analyses, the environment is understood as an all-encompassing context and the landscape as its symbolic representation; a tree has the same meaning for him as a built house – both are elements of the landscape that changes over time. The cultural landscape becomes a record and testimony of the life and work of previous generations who lived in it, consisting of the work of many authors (Ingold).

From a phenomenological point of view, attention is drawn to the fact that landscape is a part of humanity, just as humanity is a part of landscape, to structural links, in which each component is connected with the whole and each other element (Wylie). The division into nature and culture is also rejected.

The phenomenological approach has brought together two ways of presenting landscape: as an image and as an environment, contributing to the dissemination of the notion of the cultural landscape in the sciences, which have so far stressed the aesthetic dimension of the landscape. This is particularly true of environmental aesthetics (Berleant, Carlson), which has adapted the concept of the cultural landscape, also linking it to the concept of the environment. Berleant wrote that culturally transformed landscapes have the same value as natural landscapes, and that each landscape participates in shaping traditions and acquires the characteristics of heritage that we protect in order to be able to pass them on to future generations. John Wylie’s theory of landscaping (analogous to Heidegger’s being in the world), rejecting the division into the environment and man that introduces meaning into it, gives particular importance to the landscape as a process. Cultural studies have also recognised the importance of the cultural landscape concept. According to Pietraszko, the essence of the landscape, and therefore also its concept, should be sought in the space of the human universe. The landscape has an “intersubjective subjectivity”: it expresses itself in individually perceived images, but retains a communicable, intersubjective subjectivity, creating “a special iconic community of human collectivities”.

Other theoretical positions considering the phenomenon of the cultural landscape include Cosgrove’s and Daniels’ approach, who in their book “The Iconography of Landscape” assume that the landscape is a way of seeing and a result of seeing (they come close to understanding the landscape in terms of aesthetics, but at the same time indicate that the landscape is a result of human creativity, not only a physical phenomenon, a kind of cultural representation); Mitchell writing in the spirit of Marxist theory that the basis for the landscape is work, production and practice of everyday life through movement, in which both individual and social meanings are inscribed; Matless, according to whom the landscape establishes relations of power and property as well as moral evaluations; Wylie, for whom any drawing of boundaries between nature and culture (including the natural and cultural landscape) is entangled in politics; post-structuralist theories, in which the landscape becomes a text established in a discourse (Duncan and Duncan); hermeneutical theories, treating the landscape as a dialogue (Green), feminist theories, in which attention is drawn to ideology and power relations (Rose). All these theories emphasise the process-oriented character of the landscape.

Ethnic, identity, national, colonial, gender (Rose) factors are inscribed in the cultural landscape.

[M.G., B.F.].

Literature:

Duncan, James I Duncan, Nancy. „ (Re)reading the landscape”. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 6 (1988): 117–126.

Tilley, Christopher. Place, Paths and Monuments: a Phenomenology of Landscape. Oxford: Berg, 1994.

Berleant, Arnold. Living in the Landscape. Toward an Aesthetics of Environment. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997.

Carlson, Allen. Nature and Landscape: An Introduction to Environmental Aesthetics. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009.

Cosgrove, Denis E. Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998.

Daniels, Stephen and Cosgrove, Denis E. The Iconography of Landscape. Essays on the Symbolic Representation, Design and Use of Past Environments. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Green, Nicholas. The Spectacle of Nature: Landscape and Bourgeois Culture in 19^thCentury France. Manchester: Manchester University Press,1990.

Hoskins, William G. The Making of the English Landscape. London: Penguin, 1985.

Ingold, Tim. „The temporality of the landscape”, “World Archeology”, 1993, vol. 25, 2.

Jackson, John. B. Discovering the Vernacular Landscape. New Haven – London: Yale University Press, 1984.