Landscapes Beyond Land: Routes, Aesthetics, Narratives

By Andrew Whitehouse

Land is embedded in a multitude of material and cultural contexts, through which the human experience of landscape emerges. Ethnographers, with their participative methodologies, long-term co-residence, and concern with the quotidian aspects of the places where they work, are well positioned to describe landscapes in this fullest of senses. The contributors explore how landscapes become known primarily through movement and journeying rather than stasis. Working across four continents, they explain how landscapes are constituted and recollected in the stories people tell of their journeys through them, and how, in turn, these stories are embedded in landscaped forms.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Release date: Sep 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9780857456724

Book preview

Contents

List of Figures

Preface and Acknowledgements

Introduction

Jo Vergunst, Andrew Whitehouse, Nicolas Ellison and Arnar Árnason

1. Walking the Past in the Present

Christopher Tilley

2. ‘A Painter’s Eye Is Just a Way of Looking at the World’: Botanic Artist Roger Banks

Griet Scheldeman

3. Encountering Glaciers: Two Centuries of Stories from the Saint Elias Mountains, Northwestern North America

Julie Cruikshank

4. Fences, Pathways and a Peripatetic Sense of Community: Kinship and Residence amongst the Nivaclé of the Paraguayan Chaco

Suzanne Grant

5. Elements of an Amerindian Landscape: The Arizona Hopi

Patrick Pérez

6. Thalloo My Vea: Narrating the Landscapes of Life in the Isle of Man

Sue Lewis

7. Cairns in the Landscape: Migrant Stones and Migrant Stories in Scotland and its Diaspora

Paul Basu

8. Beholding the Speckled Salmon: Folk Liturgies and Narratives of Ireland’s Holy Wells

Celeste Ray

9. How the Land Should Be: Narrating Progress on Farms in Islay, Scotland

Andrew Whitehouse

10. Visible Relations and Invisible Realms: Speech, Materiality and Two Manggarai Landscapes

Catherine Allerton

11. The Shape of the Land

Tim Ingold

Notes on Contributors

Figures

2.1   A generous splash of vodka has just livened up the sauce.

2.2   The ‘real’ Roger Banks with pet pug in front of Lobster Cottage, Crail.

6.1   Green hills by the sea; looking towards the Stacks from Stroin Vuigh. © Peter Killey. Reprinted with permission.

6.2   A Manx tholtan, near Cashtal yn Ard. © Peter Killey. Reprinted with permission.

6.3   A tractor at work on a farm near St John’s. © Peter Killey. Reprinted with permission.

6.4   The Mount Murray development, Santon. © Peter Killey. Reprinted with permission.

7.1   ‘The moon looks abroad from her cloud. The grey-skirted mist is near; the dwelling of the ghosts!’ J. S. Cotman, ‘Moonlight’, 1803, inspired by Ossian’s Temora. © Trustees of the British Museum.

7.2   Clach-an-éig in the foreground, with Torr-an-riachaidh to the right in the middle distance. Kildonan, Sutherland. © Paul Basu.

7.3   ‘Culloden Field’ c. 1890, showing the clan grave markers and memorial cairn prior to the felling of the conifer plantation and rerouting of the B9006 road. © Francis Frith Collection.

7.4   Stone-clad panels interpreting the cairn-like settlement remains at Rosal, Strathnaver. The township was ‘cleared’ between 1814 and 1819. © Paul Basu.

7.5   The surviving fragment of the Duke of Gordon cairn, which recalls the emigrants’ farewell on St Columba’s Day, 1838. Kingussie, Inverness-shire. © Paul Basu.

7.6   Unveiling of the ‘cairn of remembrance’ at Badbae, Caithness, November 1912. © Highland Council.

7.7   The Grandfather Mountain Memorial Cairn, MacRae Meadows, Linville, North Carolina. © Grandfather Mountain Highland Games.

7.8   Members of the International Clan Macpherson Association gathered around the memorial cairn dedicated to Cluny Macpherson of the ‘45. Glentruim, Badenoch, Inverness-shire. © Jerome LeRoy Lewis.

9.1   A typical Islay hill farm, with the rougher hill ground in the distance and improved pastures in the foreground.

9.2   The Islay Creamery after closure.

9.3   Freshly cut grass for making into silage.

10.1 An agricultural ritual in a new field, with flat stone and tripods on which to place offerings.

10.2 Katarina sowing corn in a kinswoman’s field.

Preface and Acknowledgements

Landscapes beyond land? Do we mean far away or stretching out over the horizon? Or beyond the surface properties of land, into the social and cultural realm that anthropologists are so famously interested in? Well, neither. The landscapes described in this book are sometimes picturesque and certainly infused by social and cultural processes, but for us they are defined by neither of these. Instead they go beyond land to involve the relations between people, animals and plants – ultimately between beings and ways of being – in a variety of locales. People tell stories, hold to aesthetic values and engage in political activity through their relationships to land, and, while building on previous work in the anthropology of landscape, this book shows how they do so.

Our book draws together papers from a series of three two-day seminars that we ran with funding from the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council’s programme on Landscape and Environment. We also ran an opening seminar at the 2006 European Association of Social Anthropologists conference in Bristol, UK, entitled ‘Landscapes for Life: Integrating Experiential and Political Landscapes’. Of the AHRC-funded seminars, ‘Routes, Boundaries, Journeys’ and ‘Landscape and Narrative’ took place at the University of Aberdeen, while ‘Ecological Perception and Landscape Aesthetics’ took place at the Collège de France. We thank Philippe Descola in particular for hosting us in Paris. The seminars were extremely lively affairs and we hope that the spirit of discussion and debate has been transferred to this book. Although it has taken some time to come to fruition, it has been a pleasure to work with these chapters and we hope readers will enjoy them too. We thank all the seminar participants and contributors to this book for their efforts.

Arnar Árnason, Nicolas Ellison, Jo Vergunst and Andrew Whitehouse Aberdeen, February 2011

Introduction

Landscapes beyond Land

Jo Vergunst, Andrew Whitehouse, Nicolas Ellison and Arnar Árnason

‘Landscape’ has been one of the keywords of anthropology and allied disciplines over the last twenty years. As anthropologists sought to move beyond what they saw as troublesome Cartesian dichotomies, ‘landscape’, along with ‘the body’ and ‘emotion’ amongst others, was put forward as a concept and focus that necessarily brought together the physical and the cultural, the mental and the material. When inviting the contributors to this collection to demonstrate how they are exploring landscape in their ethnographic research, our starting point has been Pierre Bourdieu’s insistence that anthropological accounts should be truthful to individual or subjective experiences while at the same addressing the question of how these particular experiences are possible in the first place, that is as ‘a science of the dialectical relations between the objective structures to which the objectivist mode of knowledge gives access and the structured dispositions within which those structures are actualised and which tend to reproduce them’ (1977: 3, emphasis in original). The contributions to Landscapes beyond Land show that it is through activities – and in particular, making routes, forming aesthetics and narrating – that landscape emerges as an experience, as a category, as a target of political projects and as the subject of judgements. The direct, experiential qualities of these activities, their performance in the world, need to be understood as being at the heart of landscape, yet, as we argue here, activity also gathers up symbolism and objective structures and processes into the landscape.

The emphasis on activity in this book follows from Kenneth Olwig’s investigations into the etymological and political history of the concept of landscape, and specifically its links to the Germanic Landschaften. These were small, place-based political entities within modern-day Germany, the Netherlands and Denmark in the Middle Ages. Laws were customary and so were not written down but practised within the landscape: ‘The physical manifestation of that place was a reflection of the common laws that defined the polity as a political landscape’ (Olwig 2002: 9). As such, land and polity shared common traits and could not be thought of in isolation from each other. Olwig (2002: 16) draws a sharp contrast between the ‘quantitative geometric, spatial, rationality of the map’ and the ‘qualitative logic based on an analogic platial imagination’ of the Landschaften, yet shows how discourse and practice based on both may be present today. For us, the possibility of landscape being intrinsically ‘political’, or ‘dwelt-in’ in the latter of these senses focuses us on landscape as emergent in relation to the activities of those that live there.

Despite Olwig’s reevaluation of the etymology of ‘landscape’, in modern English usage it often appears to hover between a natural-science ‘form of the environment’, and an art-historical concern with how the environment is represented. One purpose of this book, then, is to move beyond such narrowly prescribed conceptualisations to explore different landscape traditions in ethnographic and theoretical terms. In the seminar series that this book is based on, we began by considering the differences between British and French traditions of landscape study. In French, as in other Latin languages, paysage was a neologism coined within new artistic canons of landscape painting. ‘Landscape’ came to denote a progressive distancing between subject and object (or person and environment) through the influence of perspectival art and centralised nation-state authority in Europe and its colonies (Olwig 2002). This understanding is reflected in Daniels and Cosgrove’s influential collection The Iconography of Landscape. Daniels and Cosgrove begin their introduction by stating: ‘A landscape is a cultural image, a pictorial way of representing, structuring or symbolising surroundings’ (1988: 1). In both Germanic and Latin languages the different meanings have become conflated in common speech, and paysage has also come to mean the physical landscape for physical geographers in France.

Anthropologists and cultural geographers agree that the European aesthetics of perspectival art is far from universal and should not ethnocentrically be projected onto other people’s relations to the environment or landscape. Augustin Berque has demonstrated that the latter pictorial and aesthetic landscape sensibility developed in China in the 4th century AD, as well as in Renaissance Europe, so this notion of landscape needs to be understood as emerging in particular cultural contexts (Berque 1995, 1999; see also Roger 1997; Descola 2005). French anthropologists and some cultural geographers have therefore chosen to discard the use of paysage in talking of more general relationships, instead favouring other terms such as environment, milieu or von Uexküll’s concept of Umwelt. Such choices are aligned with different research agendas. Illustrating the latter position, Descola’s research on landscape consists in asking the following: if paysage or landscape in the European art tradition expresses Western naturalism (the nature-culture and subject-object divides) in depiction, then, how are other forms of relation and identification with the environment (such as animism and totemism) expressed in depiction? And how do these ‘symbolic’ expressions relate with people’s practical engagement in the environment?

In anthropology written in English, however, ‘landscape’ has been kept as a general term which, once its limited meaning in European art history is recognised and set aside, seems productive because of its very ambiguity in presenting both material interactions and cultural understandings. We have decided to follow this general usage while underlining the possible misunderstandings this can create in conjunction with more specific notions of landscape, such as the scenic paysage. Without imposing one usage of the word throughout the book, we have asked authors to specify their understanding and use of landscape when necessary.

Probably one of the most convincing implications of the ‘all-encompassing’ approach to landscape, closer to that developed by Olwig, is the theoretical basis it provides for doing away with such dichotomies as between culture and nature (Ingold 2000). In a phenomenological mode, we may investigate how the propensity to dwell, to make one’s way through the world and to make oneself at home in it, is tied up with relationships to one’s surroundings. This is to treat landscape not as an object of study, but as a way of reckoning – summing up – the temporal, relational qualities of the world. It goes without saying of course that cultural diversity of relations with the environment is tremendous, as other ethnographic collections have shown (e.g., Bender 1993; Hirsch and O’Hanlon 1995; Voisenat 1995; Bender and Winer 2001; Ellison and Martínez Mauri 2009). In this book we aim to explore the multifarious cultural potentialities of landscape (Hirsch 1995: 4), without losing the activities, perceptions and sensual interactions that are at the heart of lived experience.

A formulation that became particularly influential for us is derived from Martin Heidegger’s suggestion that landscape is the earth ‘gathered’, for example by a ‘thing’ that draws its relations in time and space into its being. His example in the essay ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’ is a bridge that crosses a river and in doing so gathers the two banks and their hinterlands together (Heidegger 1978: 354). A thing is present through its relations and associations in the world rather than as a neutral or free-floating entity: the bridge is a bridge because it affords passage from one bank to another. Importantly, this sense of being denies any separation of the ‘essence’ of a thing from its ‘expression’ as a symbol. For Heidegger a thing gathers together within its essence all that belongs to it. In practical terms, this means that the user of something deals with it directly rather than as a before-and-after perception followed by understanding or symbolising.

Such reasoning surely works for landscape itself as much as for any identifiable ‘thing’ within it. If we were to take such an approach, then landscape has a being in itself. To say that a landscape ‘is’ thus necessarily refers to this gathering of relations within itself that is apparent to those who live and move in a place. What follows from this is not a disentangling of the symbolic from the physical aspects of place, or the subjective from the objective, but an inquiry into how, for different people and in different ways, paths of relations serve to open up the complexity of landscape, while recognising that only partial views and transient sounds are possible. Christopher Tilley in this volume uses the idea of gathering to ground his account of walking in landscape: ‘Walking gathers known past histories, practices and traditions as for the most part, following a path, I am walking where others have walked, in the footsteps of previous generations, the ancestors’. The walk is above all about bringing the landscape together, rather than sectioning it up.

This seems to require a holistic approach to person-and-environment, fundamental to phenomenology but that can result in a separation of life-world and ‘structure’. We would rather conceive of landscape in such a way that it contributes to the broader issue of engaging with both personal experience and social structure. An example of the alternative approaches that authors contributing to this volume have taken to this challenge arises from the different ways in which Ingold and Basu discuss the effects of cairns and mounds in the landscape. For Ingold a mound, such as a cairn, is fundamentally not designed but emergent – a kind of living and growing earth that is quite different to the ‘structurally coherent’ and complete monument that might be envisaged by the heritage industry. Basu, on the other hand, argues that cairns are ‘material metaphors’ that draw together connections and meanings through time and space. The experience of the cairn is thus structured by this distilling of narratives of ‘Scottishness’ into the emergent form of stones. There is in both these chapters an oscillation between experience and structure – a point we will return to later.

For the people our contributors have worked with, the activities of landscape take place in the phenomenal world, yet have gathered within them the potential for symbolised discursive mediations. Contributors centre their analysis ethnographically on how people actively bring their worlds together through such processes of landscape. The contributors thus explore landscape as a process that arises from activities in addition to investigating many different landscapes.

We set our contributors the initial task of responding to three more specific themes in the anthropology of landscape: the ways that routes are made, senses of aesthetics are formed and depicted, and land and experience are narrated. The rest of this introduction explores how these activities become significant as linked ways of knowing through which people engage with landscape. While some of the chapters focus mainly on one of these activities, most articulate their interrelatedness. Contributors emphasise how landscapes may become known through movement and journeying rather than stasis (in particular Tilley, Grant, Basu and Ray). They explore the depiction and aesthetics of landscape as they happen on the ground, describing the diversity of landscape not only from the ethnographic evidence but also in the variety of uses that scholars make of the concept, such as from ‘representation’ to ‘lifeworld’ (in particular Scheldeman, Pérez and Ingold). And they investigate the relationship of narrative to landscape: how landscapes are constituted and recollected in the stories people tell of their journeys through them and how, in turn, these stories are embedded in landscaped forms (for example, Cruikshank, Basu, Lewis, Whitehouse and Allerton). In a number of chapters the theme of ritual as an activity in landscape also emerges, particularly in the form of pilgrimage (Allerton, Pérez, Basu and Ray). Crucially, the book examines how these activities are interwoven as ways in which people engage with and come to know the world around them.

Routes, Boundaries and Journeys

Routes are the ways we go, and the ways we think we can go. ‘Ways’ in English, in common with other Germanic languages, has a very appealing ambiguity in referring both to the path and the manner of movement along it. The same is true by analogy for ‘route’, which connotes both the established (routine) direction of someone moving along a road or path, and the potential for finding a way to somewhere new. A necessary implication of a route is therefore the maintenance or creation of a path. Landscape with routes is about paths, or possibilities, lines that come together and diverge and tie together places (Ingold 2007a). But we have to equally consider the manner of moving. For Basu, for example, there is both the movement of a landscape form – the cairn – and the movement of the Scottish diaspora, as both appear and reappear in proximity. For Tilley walking is the means of embodying the material experience of landscape par excellence. Ray, meanwhile describes the ritual movement of pilgrims through a landscape of holy wells, which themselves are more mobile than one might at first assume.

Boundaries, on the other hand, are the limits, the end of the way, and where we cannot go without making some kind of transgression. Where a landscape of routes is made by links, a landscape of boundaries is about fixity, a delimitation of inside and outside and, often, a cartographic rationality (see Grant’s chapter in this volume). This is the contrast between the line of a route, which is travelled along, and the line of a boundary, which curtails movement. Boundaries can affect the area between them as well, by inducing a kind of homogeneity. A farmer’s fence could be an archetypal boundary, describing the land within it as field to be managed by the farmer, and outside it as hillside for free and open ranging. The field, of course, is an internally uniform area that is available for working on, and this set of meanings has methodological implications for ethnographers as well, which have been the subject of critique (Gupta and Ferguson 1997). As Grant points out, for the Nivacle of the Paraguayan Chaco, their past and present culture is divided in the landscape by fence lines that have ordered the arid landscape into fields and enclosures. We also suggest that it is the interaction of routes, boundaries and indeed journeys that form what we come to know as our research fields.

If crossed, boundaries are, as Heidegger notes, the beginning of something new. Beyond the edge of the map is the place for exploration, or for trespassing or poaching. Overcoming a boundary in one’s life, in a rather different sense, might relate to entering a new kind of personhood or status. Boundaries are often mediated by rituals that happen as much in places, or in landscape, as they do in the life course. Here we find the possibilities of liminal stages, limited or exclusive access and secret places. The narratives and archival sources about the St Elias Icefields in Yukon studied by Cruikshank give a particularly vivid ethnographic example of how peoples’ lives and landscapes are interwoven precisely in liminal stages. This can be a case of life and death, as in ritual prohibitions when approaching a glacier. Many boundaries and liminal changes are juxtaposed here: the liminality of the colonial encounter, international and subnational state borders as well as the moving boundaries of receding icefields. In these narratives, liminal stages and the dangers they entail, as in the case of the collapse of glacier dams, appear to be an inherent part of the movement of both people and glaciers.

Journeys are what actually happens as we go along. They are the unfolding moments of movement that do not so much link together past and future as expand the present. We are in a journey, the entire course of which is ‘now’ in the sense that we are leaving somewhere and we are getting somewhere else, in a continuous present. The exception of course is when we cross boundaries, and there we may have definitive points of departure and arrival. But to experience a journey in its entirety is about a rather different kind of temporality to past-present-future. It also questions the notion of landscape as a kind of receptacle for the past where we can ‘read history’, perhaps. A journeyed landscape is about the temporal and spatial co-mingling of all sorts of presents, which leave their traces for others to find, as Tilley describes through his own practice of archaeology. According to Allerton, for villagers in Manggerai in eastern Indonesia, settlements coalesce the history of ancestral journeys into the present.

We can then consider the techniques that enable the journey to continue. Some of the most interesting of these are found in the contact between the traveller and their surroundings. Footsteps, for example, get formed through the textural interaction between foot (and perhaps a shoe) and the ground, where landscape is about grip and slipperiness, solidity and crumbliness, where we may sink in or have to swim through. So, as both Tilley and Ingold argue herein, it is through footsteps that walkers come to know vital things about their environment. As Grant points out for the Nivacle, journeying is a means to become knowledgeable, and also to create and maintain kinship relations. In other cases we may have to deal with maps, clothing or modern technologised transport systems (Urry 2007).

There may also be distinctive kinds of vision that allow journeying to carry on. Rarely, it might be a gaze or a sighting on afar, a static view on to landscape. More likely, it might be a pause to look around, a particular kind of ‘gathering’ with the eyes to recognise or become familiar with the land. Vergunst is reminded of a story he was told by a walker who trekked across Scotland in the company of a donkey who lived at the children’s charity where she worked. The donkey would stop every few minutes and look back at where they had just come, as if remembering how to get home. This kind of looking itself makes and remembers a route through the landscape, to progress the journey. Vision during movement is not a singular gaze, but involves glances, distractions, and a specific and lively being-aware rather than the generalised awareness of consciousness. That is, by being careful and by looking out for the tree roots or cracked paving stones, we are paying attention rather than falling into the reverie that the rhythms of journeying can so easily bring on.

Finally, while roads and routes structure the ways in which we can move through landscape, we also have to be aware of the possibilities for improvisation in all of this. As the journey moves on, the route can be made or remade in a new direction. Even commuters, whose movements are otherwise so controlled by the need to reach their destination and by the environments they journey through, have the opportunity to try things differently and sometimes are forced to do so by circumstances outside their control. It might even be that these improvisational moments, where we are faced with the unexpected, the unwanted or the newly opportune, provide a rich seam for understanding the gathering of ‘structural’ phenomena into the lived reality of landscape.

The Aesthetics of Landscape

Landscapes can be powerful. The chapters in this book describe how people are affected by the places that they inhabit in all kinds of ways. To take a few examples, Ray and Pérez show how ritual behaviour can be oriented by the landscape through sacred sites, while Cruikshank describes life amongst glaciers that are sentient and able to engage in social relationships that demand respectful behaviour. No less vividly, Whitehouse’s farmers on the Scottish island of Islay have a clear notion of how the land ought to be that is shaped by previous work in it. We might think of the land imprinting this notion onto the farmers as much as the other way round. Might these all be examples of the aesthetics of landscape?

A way towards answering this question is through Howard Morphy’s discussion of the categories of ‘indigenous’ and ‘contemporary’ art. Morphy notes the tension in how indigenous art is presented between the art market, where an anthropological approach to exhibiting is eschewed because of its ‘othering’ of the objects, and anthropologists who decry the ethnocentrism of including such objects within the Western category of art in the first place (Morphy 2007: 175). Part of the problem as Morphy describes it is that art is often held to be a ‘unitary category of objects … to be viewed together as an exclusive set specifically for their aesthetic effect’ (2007: 174). Tied to the realm of art objects, aesthetics is just a judgement of beauty or ugliness of an object within this category. It is a distanced appreciation reliant, in a Kantian metaphysics, on the rational and disinterested judgement of the mind (recalling Olwig’s rationality of the map).

But if it is grounded in relations with landscape, aesthetics might be thought of as being much closer both to the embodied person and the flows of sociality within which they are living. To take a farming example that some of Lewis’s informants on the Isle of Man might recognise, judging the straightness of a ploughed furrow is not to do with an ‘object’, but is instead a practice, an expression of how well the plough has been set and pulled, of the farmer’s history of working the land, and of the care with which they look after their machinery. Indeed, a furrow cannot be an object – it is rather a folding over of the land onto itself by way of the plough. Unpacking the idea of the gaze in landscape, John Wylie (2006), following Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty, describes at a conceptual level how ‘folding’, which might be glossed as the implication of self and landscape in each other, works along with ‘depth’ as ‘the potentiality or incipiency of the actualised situation of gazing’. Our surroundings have within them the potential for engagement, the coming-together of person and landscape. Wylie continues: ‘Thus landscape is neither simply seeing nor seen, neither an object seen by a gaze nor a particular way of seeing. It concerns the immanent relation which inspires these orders’ (2006: 531).

Aesthetics, as just such an immanent relation in landscape, is a term that gets us closer to the affects and sensibilities described ethnographically by our authors. The meanings and moralities that our authors describe through aesthetics are immanent in the engagement of people and landscape. A clear contrast has therefore to be drawn between the aesthetics of landscape art, which is what influences the gaze and creates a demand for the picturesque, and an aesthetics of the land embedded in an active engagement with the environment through daily practices. These contrasting aesthetics can be seen in Lewis’s study on the Isle of Man, with on one hand the demand for scenic views in property developments for newcomers on the island and on the other the farmers’ and local inhabitants’ aesthetics of specific places that are charged with meaning through daily practices, such as farming or journeying, and that are also recounted in stories of the past about these same places. If, therefore, the notion of aesthetics can be pulled away from the qualities of an art object, and especially those defined within Western fine art, then these possibilities are available. Furthermore, if we extend aesthetics into the nonvisual realms, as Cruikshank, Lewis and Allerton do, then the concept can be made richer still.

A distinctive emphasis that a number of our contributors develop concerns the relationship between landscape aesthetics and ethics. What this makes clear is that for many people their ideas about how landscape should be are bound up with ideas of appropriate relations and actions. Whitehouse, for example, describes how for farmers in Islay an ethic of productivity that could alter the appearance of the landscape was not perceived as a change but as marking continuity with previous generations of farmers who shared the same ethic. A productive farming landscape was thus a means through which appropriate relations with the land and the past were made and expressed. Grant, meanwhile,