According to Edward Said
(1926), “Everything about human history is rooted in the earth, which has meant
that we must think about habitation”
In essence therefore, all landscapes are cultural and can only be fully
comprehended in specific historical settings.
A topographic unit with a clear physical boundary is the best kind of
model for learning about the formulation of mental islands and defines
landscapes as cultural ecosystems. Alex Law has taken this approach to
conceptualise Britain as a
mental island where a relatively small land mass acted as a point of departure
for Great Power projections across the open spaces of seas. Three cultural
themes recur in these projections of the British landscape: the besieged island,
the island as universal exemplar of civilization, and the navy as national
protector.
However, landscapes
are concieved on much smaller scales.
The concept of 'cultural landscapes' finds its origins in the European
tradition of landscape painting.
From the 1500s onwards, many European artists painted landscapes in
favour of people, diminishing the people in their paintings to figures subsumed
within broader, regionally specific landscapes.
The word "landscape"
itself combines 'land' with a verb of Germanic origin, "scapjan/
schaffen" to mean, literally, 'shaped lands'. Lands were then
regarded to have been shaped by natural forces, and the unique details of such
landshaffen (shaped lands) became themselves the subject of 'landscape'
paintings.
The geographer Otto
Schluter is credited with having first formally used “cultural landscape” as an
academic term in the early twentieth century. In 1908, Schluter argued that
defining a Landschaftskunde (landscape science) this would give geography
a logical subject matter shared by no other discipline. He defined two forms of
landscape: the Urlandschaft (tran. natural landscape) or landscape that
existed before major human induced changes and the Kulturlandschaft
(trans. 'cultural landscape') a landscape created by human culture. The major
task of geography was to trace the changes in these two
landscapes.
It was Carl O. Sauer, a human
geographer, who was probably the most influential in promoting and developing
the idea of cultural landscapes.
Sauer was determined to stress the agency of culture as a force in
shaping the visible features of the Earth’s surface in delimited areas. Within
his definition, the physical environment retains a central significance, as the
medium with and through which human cultures act. His classic definition of a
'cultural landscape' reads as follows:
“The cultural landscape is fashioned from
a natural landscape by a cultural group. Culture is the agent, the natural are
the medium, the cultural landscape is the result"
Since Schulter's first formal use of the term, and Sauer's effective promotion of the idea, the concept of 'cultural landscapes has been variously used, applied, debated, developed and refined within academia. This debate came to a head in 1992, the World Heritage Committee elected to convene a meeting of the 'specialists' to advise and assist redraft the Committee's Operational Guidelines to include 'cultural landscapes' as an option for heritage listing properties that were neither purely natural nor purely cultural in form (ie 'mixed' heritage).
The World Heritage
Committee's adoption and use of the concept of 'cultural landscapes' has seen
multiple specialists around the world, and many nations identifying 'cultural
landscapes', assessing 'cultural landscapes', heritage listing 'cultural
landscapes', managing 'cultural landscapes', and effectively making 'cultural
landscapes' known and visible to the world, with very practical ramifications
and challenges.
A 2006 academic
review of the combined efforts of the World Heritage Committee, specialists
around the world and concluded that:
"Although the concept of landscape has
been unhooked for some time from its original art associations .. there is still
a dominant view of landscapes as an inscribed surface, akin to a map or a text,
from which cultural meaning and social forms can simply be
read."
Within academia, any
system of interaction between human activity and natural habitat is regarded as
a cultural landscape. In a sense this understanding is broader than the
definition applied within UNESCO, including, as it does, almost the whole of the
world's occupied surface, plus almost all the uses, ecologies, interactions,
practices, beliefs, concepts, and traditions of people living within cultural
landscapes. Specific analysis and
comparisons come down to the making of ‘mind-maps’ of actual stretches of land,
as islands, countrysides, communities, heritage sites and
gardens.
Stourhead
Tintinhull
Westbury Water
Garden
White
Waltham
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