Introduction
This essay is concerned with the complex and often conflicting ways that the term landscape has been understood, explored and defined and how these different understandings have influenced research and writing within and between various academic disciplines including Anthropology. In Western discourse the concept of landscape is a relatively recent one since the elements that are traditionally associate with landscape – mountains, valleys, rivers, forests - were not considered collectively in pre-modern times and could not therefore be represented or thought of as such. In the Middle Ages the first form of the word. Landschaft in German. came to mean a ‘collection of dwellings built within an area of cultivated land that, in turn, is surrounded by an unknown and unknowable wilderness’ (Dean, Millar 2005:13). By the seventeenth century the Dutch landschap referred to an area of land that could be represented by either a surveyor’s map or by artist as painting and at this time in England the meaning of landskip became a ‘broad, often elevated view of rural scenes in which one can see villages and fields, woods and roads (Dean, Millar 2005:13) often associated with an elitist way of seeing, of imposing, or imposed views from the estates of the landed aristocracy which were established as a result of mercantile capital. In contemporary western societies then ‘landscape’ is transformed land either physically or by perception and ceases to exist if there is no one to look at or consider it. It becomes an ‘ego-centred landscape, a perspectival landscape, a landscape of views and vistas’ (Bender 1993: 1). As Bender (2001) says, ‘this class-driven ‘view –point’ suppresses the landscapes of those being viewed or ‘out of sight’. It ignores the labour that has gone into landscape and obscures the relationship between landscapes, for example between factory or plantation and secluded country houses and landscaped gardens’ (Bender 2001:3). Ideas of landscape have therefore been seen to have sustained and elaborated the symbolic code of bourgeois society.
In this essay I will consider how this elitist, visual, ego – centred understanding of the term landscape has been challenged and extended as a concept by anthropologists and other writers who have attempted to broaden its meaning from a particular time, place and class to enable them to incorporate the views of non – western people and how it’s meaning has changed over time. Bender says,
The landscape is never inert; people engage with it, re-work it, appropriate and contest it. It is part of the way in which identities are created and disputed, whether individual, group, or nation-state. Operating therefore at the juncture of history and politics, social relations and cultural perceptions, landscape has to be….. ‘a concept of tension’ (Inglis 1977). Bender (1993:3)
I will then relate such ideas to the use of landscape in my film and explain what I have attempted to reference and reveal in the making of it and the limitations I have encountered in trying to achieve my intentions.
Landscape as a Way of Seeing
Although the term landscape in Western discourse has been most generally defined as visual or a unit of visual space the difference between the various disciplines concerned with landscape as a theoretical construct occurs not as the seen landscape as much as in ways of seeing. John Wylie (2007), writing from a cultural geography standpoint, gives an account of ways of seeing within the cultural Marxist conception of landscape. Firstly he explains that ‘landscape is understood as being always already a representation’ (Wylie 2007: 68). It is then used symbolically, part of the cultural imagination depicted in paintings, poems and prose. Wylie turns to the cultural geographer Denis Cosgrove and his exploration of our understanding of landscape in which he argues that ‘the basic theory and technique of the landscape way of seeing is linear perspective’ or ‘visualisations constructed on the basis of perspective’ and is ‘suffused by connotations of authority, control and ownership’ (Wylie 2007: 58). For Cosgrove therefore ‘the landscape way of seeing involves control and domination over space as an absolute, objective entity: its transformation into the property of the individual or the state’ (Wylie 2007: 69). Wylie quote Cosgrove’s view of landscape painting,
One of the consistent purposes of landscape painting has been to present an image of order and proportioned control….there is an inherent conservatism in the landscape idea, in its celebration of property and of an unchanging status quo, in its suppression of tensions between groups in the landscape (Cosgrove,1985) (Wylie 2007: 59)
He sees the vision of landscape as a pastoral idyll covering up the material conditions of life as a veil, a critique that has been levelled at paintings such as Gainsborough’s Mr. and Mrs. Andrew (1748) with its proprietorial view of the countryside. This argument has been extended to parks and gardens that are considered no less ‘real’ than paintings and which are included in the Marxist a critique of the ‘perspective’ of a particular socio-economic group. Wylie says the,
Landscape way of seeing is thus understood to be the preserve of the elite, it symbolises their domination over the land in the very act of ‘naturalising’ it, in making its particular representation seem the natural order of things (Wylie 2007: 69).
Wylie argues therefore that landscape, as a particular type of visual representation, ‘mystifies, renders opaque, distorts, hides, and occludes reality’ (Wylie 2007: 69). Situated within the perspectival traditions of Western Art and synonymous with the detached observer being beyond and outside, standing aloof from what is happening in the objective world.
Landscape as a Way of Being
In opposition to a visual centred approach to landscape by a subject that defines itself in relation to the world out there, others have endeavoured to position the cultural practice of landscape within notions of embodiment, inhabitation and dwelling. These approaches are broadly phenomenological and its adherents seek to understand the point of view of the landscape’s inhabitants by actively living and participating with them and by adopting certain theoretical perspectives. They seek to show that the Cartesian biases in Western philosophy of a disembodied gaze and dualities such as subject/object, nature/culture do not truthfully describe the lived human experience of landscape. As Wylie says,
Phenomenological approaches often stress direct bodily contact with, and experience of, the landscape. They commonly aim to reveal how senses of self and landscape are together made and communicated, in and through lived experience (Wylie 2007: 141).
Remaining with art for the moment to show this different approach I turn to Wylie’s discussion of the making of the self and landscape through an example of Land Art. In his account of Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty he contrasts this type of art practice to a detached visual representation of the landscape painted on canvas and says that Land Art involves,
….a physical, tactile and dynamic relation between artist and site, one in which landscape is sensed and represented as a creative and elemental force in its own right ….body and environment fold into and co-construct each other through a series of practices and relations (Wylie 2007: 141).
Wylie uses Smithson’s work as an example of both artist and viewer being–in–the-landscape due to its ‘emphasis upon the viewer’s multi-sensory immersion within the work, and Smithson’s account of an almost primordial connection with the earth’ (Wylie 2007: 141). Landscape becomes less a way of seeing or a scene to view but rather bodily contact and experience of the world and an intertwining of self and landscape both for the artist who created it and the spectator who walks along it when it periodically appears above the surface of the lake.
Based on insights from phenomenology, ecological psychology and anthropology, Tim Ingold also criticises the notion of landscape as a way of seeing because for him this assumes and reproduces a distinction between nature and culture. In his essay, The temporality of the landscape (1993, reprinted 2000), he first explains what landscape is not and answers it is not ‘land, or ‘space’. He goes on to reject the division between inner and outer worlds of mind and matter, which he terms the ‘building perspective’ and claims that this dualistic thinking has a pernicious influence on academic disciplines. He says,
The landscape, I hold is not a picture in the imagination, surveyed by the mind’s eye, nor however is it an alien and formless substrate awaiting the imposition of human order…..neither is the landscape identical to nature, nor is it on the side of humanity against nature. As the familiar domain of our dwelling, it is with us, not against us, but it is no less real for that. And through living in it, the landscape becomes part of us, just as we part of it (Ingold 2000: 191).
Ingold claims that this dichotomy between nature and culture as a way of seeing, or rather this building perspective, has been problematic for the discipline of anthropology in its study of non – Western cultures as it positions the landscape as inert matter and that this is not always the way it is conceptualised by others who beliefs and meaning of life may be considered to arise from within landscape and nature itself, as within some Australian Aboriginal cultures.
Ingold is concerned with piecing together the two halves of Anthropology, the biophysical and sociocultural, and sees no other way of doing this ‘without taking a loop through psychology’ (Ingold 2000: 173). But he turned to phenomenology to find a solution to this Cartesian dualism and to the work of Heidegger in developing a ‘dwelling perspective’. In his essay Building dwelling living: how animals and people make themselves at home in the world (2000) Ingold recalls that he thought something must be wrong if ‘the only way to understand our own creative involvement in the world is by taking ourselves out of it’ (Ingold 2000: 173). Inspired by biology, the ecological psychology of James Gibson (1979) and the philosophical writing of Merleau-Ponty (1962) as well as Heidegger (1971) he argued that these approaches all ‘reverse the normal order of priority – normal, that is, in the history of Western thought – of form over process……..Life is… the very process wherein form is generated and held in place.’ And also these approaches ‘adopt as their common point of departure the agent-in-its-environment, or what phenomenology calls being-in-the-world, as opposed to the self-contained individual confronting the world ‘out there’ (Ingold 2000: 173). He is concerned with finding a ‘way of comprehending how human beings relate to their environments, in the tasks of making a living, that does not set up a polarity between the ecological domain of their relations with non-human ‘nature’ and the cognitive domain of its cultural construction’ (Ingold 200: 5). He gives an example of the Ojibwa of Canada’s experience that does not mediate between mind and nature, since these are not separated in the first place. It is rather intrinsic to the process of being alive in the world. This is linked to a view of personhood in which the self is seen to inhere in the unfolding of the relations set up by virtue of its positioning in an environment.’ He concludes that what the ‘Ojibwa have arrived at is not an alternative science of nature but a poetics of dwelling’ (Ingold 2000:11).
Ingold closely aligns the notion of dwelling with landscape. Wylie explains that Ingold ‘steadily unfurls a phenomenological credo regarding landscape, one rooted in everyday, embodied dwelling’ (Wylie 2007: 160). Ingold says, ‘through living in it, the landscape becomes a part of us, just as we are a part of it’ (Ingold 2000: 191). So that the ‘ocular, disengaged vision of landscape is replaced by the kinaesthetic involvement of dwelling’ and as Ingold sees landscape entwined with temporality ‘the linear, universal time of history is replaced by a temporality phenomenologically grounded in lived, corporeal experiences’ (Wylie 2007: 160). It is the world known to those that dwell in it and ‘…at its most intense, the boundaries between person and place, or between the self and the landscape, dissolve altogether’ (Ingold 2000:56).
In recent theoretical approaches therefore the shift of emphasis in landscape work has been from landscape-as-image to landscape-as-dwelling, or as landscape close at hand rather than as a spectacle that is visually surveyed ‘out there’ and it begins to merge with notions of place. Christopher Tilley also uses the phenomenological approach to landscape. In the Materiality of Stone (2004) he says,
Experience of the world always extends from the body and expands beyond the particularities of place. A more holistic perspective is required, one that links bodies, movements and places into a whole, and this is why the term ‘landscape’ has utility….Landscapes can be most parsimoniously defined as perceived and embodies sets of relationships between places, a structure of human feeling, emotion, dwelling, movement and practical activity’ (Tilley 2004: 25).
Tilley follows Barbara Bender’s view that ‘landscapes are contested, worked and re-worked by people according to particular individual, social and political circumstances. As such they are always in process,’ and like her he uses landscape as a ‘medium for the analysis of social identities’ (Tilley 2006: 8). In Identity, Place, Landscape and Heritage (2006) Tilley argues that in today’s globalized world, ‘People in places and moving in and between places constitute landscapes, which are therefore spaces of personal and social identity’ (Tilley 2006: 18). He imbues the landscape with agency when he says that, ‘It is through a detailed examination of the effects of that landscapes and places have on the way we think and the way we act that we may come to better reflect on how we understand ourselves and how we relate to others’ (Tilley 2006: 18). But at the same time Tilley seems to contradict himself and to have doubts about the landscape idea when he says, ‘Depending on your view, the landscape idea either positively provides an endless field of interpretative possibilities allowing us to integrate diverse phenomena or something hopelessly too ill defined for any satisfactory analysis or discussion: a misconceived analytical frame’ (Tilley 2006 : 20). Here he gives an example of Denis Cosgrove’s ‘heritage’ landscapes where to counteract the post-modern urban existence and nostalgic yearning for an earlier rural idyll, picturesque gated golfing communities are formed outside cities such as Los Angeles. Can landscape as an approach fully account for such an environment and its inhabitants?
Phenomenology as a mode of enquiry has been criticised as problematic for focusing on individual agency rather than theorising the role of historical and material contexts. From a critical and/or Marxist perspective this people centred approach, ‘insufficiently conceptualises and addresses the various social, economic, historical and political contexts in which individuality is….primarily shaped and determined’ (Wylie 2007 :180). And that, ‘such an approach appears to neglect the constraining and determining effects of forms of power’ (Wylie 2007:181). Also a phenomenological approach such as Ingold’s has been criticised for being ‘tainted with a certain romanticism’. … by ‘valuing of rural, pre-modern and non-Western ways of life’ (Wylie 2007 :181). Wylie say that the concept of dwelling is hamstrung by nostalgia and in maintaining a false boundary between the ‘traditional’ and the ‘modern’. He claims that from the start, phenomenology has been ‘haunted by nostalgia…for a supposedly more authentic, engaged and ‘natural’ perception of the world, one which we have, so the argument goes, lost as a result of the installation of a modern, detached perspective’ (Wylie 2007 :181). Wylie lays this critique onto anthropology as it has traditionally focused on far away non-Western cultures. The phenomenological approach can therefore project onto peoples a ‘latter-day version of the romantic fantasies of Arcadian innocence and oneness with nature which characterised many colonial and imperial representations of non-European others’ (Wylie 2007 :183). But Wylie does admit that Ingold and Tilley are aware of this issue and successfully negotiate it but in less capable hands others have not. And even though he does write from a broadly phenomenological approach to landscape himself Wylie criticise Ingold’s work for remaining ‘too subject-centred, too humanist even, in so far as it tends to replace a detached meaning-bestowing ‘cultural’ mind with an active, sturdy and involved dwelling body’ (Wylie 2007 :185).
As stated above the phenomenological approach to landscape has been critiqued as being tainted with romanticism. Paul Cloke and Owain Jones, influenced by Heidegger and Ingold, turn to the notion of dwelling as a means of theorising landscape and place in their study of a Somerset orchard and they say, this notion (of dwelling) ‘needs to be qualified and extended in a number of ways. In particular, there is a need to guard against understanding of places which are overly cosy – even romantic – which are fixed and unidimensional, and which too easily claim a sense of authority’ (Cloke and Jones 2001:650). They quote Bender (1998) in asking ‘what happens to those who are not dwelling? Perhaps not authentic?’ They quote Macnaghten and Urry (1998) who claim Ingold’s view will have to be adapted to the modern condition of landscape and nature. Ingold in his reference to Brueghel’s landscape implies oneness and rootedness and they say there is a ‘fixedness of the space in terms of bounded local space. This is the kind if idyll that Baktin (1981) considers, in which communities and their corresponding landscapes are closed…and denying change’ (Cloke and Jones 2001 : 661). They say that, ‘If dwelling is to be a serviceable concept for contemporary landscape, it needs to shed this reliance on idyllic local boundedness and instead reflect on a view of space and place which is dynamic, overlapping and interpenetrating’ (Cloke and Jones 2001 : 661). As one person’s idyll will be another’s ambivalence or exclusion. Cloke and Jones give an example of a protest in Somerset when they were doing their research against placing Kosovan refugees in the area because they were considered a potential ‘despoilation’ of an idyll. The notion of dwelling and landscape should not be from a fixed view – as the critique of Ingold’s use of Beueghel’s Harvesters has claimed - because landscapes present themselves in many ways and the view is never the same twice. I shall return to this notion below.
Historical ecology is another approach that uses ‘landscape’ as an analytic unit to understand the reciprocal relationships among living and non-living elements of the world - the term ecology coming from Greek oikos meaning dwelling. Carol Crumley writing in 1998 explained that ‘landscape’ - from the central Annales concept of landscape (passage) – ‘has been used by American researchers for the past twenty years in seeking ways to address time and space simultaneously’. She explains that ‘landscape is a common unit of analysis in several diverse fields …..and thus helps to integrate diverse evidence; and it allows changes to be traced through time’ (Crumb 1998: xiii). It is ‘reflection upon intended and unintended change that all people are moved to action’ (Crumb 1998: xiv). Historical ecology differs from cultural ecology as it conceives of relationships between nature and culture as a dialogue rather than a dichotomy. Accordingly to Kidder and Balée explain that historical ecology recognizes the centrality of the notion of history as no object of understanding is completely ahistorical. They claim that, ‘Historical ecology is one small step toward better situating ourselves in the global village. This village is one where all people and things have a history, and where that history serves as a dialogue between past and present in order to better prepare us for the future’ (Kidder and Balée 1998: 409). They see this approach with its paramount concept of landscape as transcending disciplinary boundaries.
Conclusion
In this essay I have given an account of some of the philosophical positions and political and critical approaches that underpin the notion of landscape in its use as a theoretical construct. I began with a critique of the ‘Western Gaze’ and landscape as a way of seeing the world followed by accounts of landscape as a way of being in the world or a dwelling perspective that can be a used to more broadly and cross culturally. The landscape perspective enables a move between different spatial and temporal scales. It reveals the different ways in which people’s lives and identities can be understood while connecting details of their these lives to wider traditions and processes.
In this section of the essay I will relate some of the issues explored above to my film In Arcadia and down the market. The film’s opening sequence sets the scene but deliberately references landscape as a way of seeing, rather than being, by depicting a vision of landscape from a detached single viewpoint with no panning. The first few landscape shots imply an impression of an Arcadian landscape, enchanting and timeless. Maybe the audience whom I tempt into this idyllic scene also become detached observers having no idea of where they are or know the reality of lives lived there – it was my intension not to explain as all becomes clear later. The only clue to place is the Welsh music that gradually becomes audible – but many would not know this music. I show a type of visual representation that, ‘mystifies, renders opaque, distorts, hides, occludes reality’ (Wylie 2007: 69) of what is on the ground. But even when I come down from that elevated position and enter the farms and market town – am I as the filmmaker really being-in-the-world? Does the camera that comes between the filmmaker and the subjects create another barrier or veil to reality? Can the filmmaker really engage with their subjects as flesh and blood individuals and follow action when encumbered with camera, tripod, headphones and bag? A certain detachment still inevitably exists which the audience may or may not sense.
My aim has been to explore the lived experience of a few farmers in a small corner of the Welsh Marches on the border with England. Throughout the course of filming and interviewing I discovered that the idea of ‘community’ was not a useful concept to use as it glosses over peoples individuality and differing views and implies a sense of authority on my part. Even though people speak of a ‘farming community’, I try to shows how this space as inhabited by more isolated individuals who just happen to be in the same profession. The church depicted in my film has closed and the other churches in the area hold few services attended mostly by the elderly but how to depict this change without resorting to nostalgia? Does it really matter if they close anyway? Most people in the small parishes don’t want to attend and would prefer to meet for a beer in the pub. Does a dwelling perspective allow these changes to be conceptualised? Or does it become ‘tainted with romantism’ (p.7) of an idyllic past that may never really have existed? And if this is such a rural idyll who’s idyll is it? Would an anti-idyll be more accurate?
David Bell (1997) discusses the flip side of rural romanticism in films that show the ‘hidden underbelly’ of rurality in the suffocating and repressive nature of rural small towns in America. Rather extreme slasher movies including the Texas Chainsaw Massacre or Deliverance. He explains, ‘As the huge upheavals of the 1960s were worked through in the cinematic medium, small towns and the countryside were increasingly portrayed as sites of contestation and decay, often embodied with those characters living there; ‘The motifs of disenchantment and disintegration were expressed in individuals’ loss of control…. Protagonists of small-town films have gradually lost their sense of identity and worth’ (Levy 1991: 257) (Bell 2001: 106). He goes on to say that ‘there is a delicate balance between the bizarre and the ordinary’ and always the ever-present threat of chaos’ (ibid.:260) in these portrayals of rural cultures. Here societies seem idyllic, but which are malignant, at a dead end, and viewed in the grip of their own death throes. That condition is the real horror of the rural’ (Bell 2001: 106). David Bell says that like an anthropologist stumbling across a lost tribe where his own cultural norms count for nothing, (if that ever really were the case), in these films the horror is already there and waiting for the innocent unsuspecting city dweller whose view of the idyllic countryside is forever changed. Another, less extreme, example of anti-idyll is depicted in the song by the band Blur Country House (1995) that reveals ordinary life ‘as it is’ when the city dweller escapes the rat race only to be overcome by boredom and annalist bills.
Dwelling as a concept has been employed as a way of understanding how humans are embedded in landscape and how nature and culture are bound together. In some cases this may appear as an anti-idyll or as a landscape of conflict that can be as, ‘rich, intimate and hybrid, even if the qualities are terrible in form’ (Cloke and Jones 2001:650). Does my decent from the hills to the farms really show life ‘as it is’? Do my informants consider this a rural-idyll that should be preserved? No – it is not something that they articulate or think about. They can be fatalistic and just carry on the best they can or more optimistic if they have a family to possibly inherit what is left of their business. What the farmer’s are more concerned with is the economic situation; ‘How the current government doesn’t understand the workings of agriculture at all and just sees the countryside as something that should be kept visually attractive for visitors. DEFRA (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) makes sure that farmers in the UK very strictly adhere to the law so that all the animal husbandry, animal welfare and health check regimes are strictly enforced which is very difficult, particularly with the problem of badgers and TB. But further more farmers are isolated and alone in this because in the rest of Europe, and particularly in France, those regulations are often ignored so we are not trading on a level ground with our competitors. The government also allows meat imports from other countries such as Brazil which have nothing like the same health regimes as us so the cost of their meat is significantly less than ours and we can’t compete with them’. Even our subsidies are modulated (taxed) in England which is not the case in Wales, Scotland and the rest of Europe. The local abattoirs are closed and the rising price of fuel means that the transport costs have risen and when the market closes we will have further to travel too sell stock – there is no living in farming now’ (from an interview with a farmer in the market).
An alternative argument could be put forward that farmers have been accused of abusing the subsidy regime. Some farmers became greedy and overstocked their land and moved stock about for economic gain that led to the outbreak of Foot and Mouth in 2001 and subsequent mass culling and stricter government controls and current changes in the subsidy regime. The discovery of BSE due to cattle feed processing and now Bluetongue Disease have all contributed to the decline in farming. To express these issues in film without resorting to long interviews or a voice over could be tedious? I chose to ignore this method of articulating details of economic change in favour of the purely visual inferring change in a more subtle way. In using a visual medium and I perpetuating the ego-centered visual way of seeing? – but then this is Visual anthropology.
Following a more historical ecological approach I have tried to show change and a sense of history with the introduction of old photographs and voice over in the milking scene. The photos of haymaking show the number of people needed at harvest compared to now and with mechanisation the sense of isolation has increased on the small farms. Coupled with a failing farming economy the suicide rate is high in the area. The mountains I depict in the film have the remains of farm dwellings on their upper slopes and in the current economic climate there is no doubt that other farms will close further into the valley. The topography is more suited to sheep and cattle rather than crops so that only the farms with flatter fields, good soil and access for large lorries will prosper in the future unless the world economic situation changes. Or as my informant said in the film. ‘You gotta get bigger or you gotta get out’…. but my other informant said when asked if he would be a farmer again ‘Oh yes. I’ve enjoyed being a farmer. It’s a way of life, isn’t it?’
I will end this essay with a farmer’s quote about the 1940s included a booklet published by a local historical society.
Although there was hardship, not all was doom and gloom. There was a great spirit of community, with neighbourly co-operation at times like shearing, harvest and Christmas poultry dressing. There were many opportunities for social interaction. The work was very hard at times, but it was often work shared. Nowadays mechanisation has made life much easier but at the same time farming is a much lonelier activity. Not that anyone would actually want to return to the old back breaking days of course!’
The Longtown and District Historical Society.
Extract from In the Shadow of the Black Mountains. vol II p.3
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