Cultural Landscapes and Scale

One of the confounding issues of cultural landscapes is how we deal with the issue of scale and the terminology we use to describe different aspects of a cultural landscape. Obviously, a key thing about cultural landscapes is how meaning is created in relationship to landscape. One of the problems is that there are many ways to think about landscape and we are often specific about what we mean when we use the term.

The most common way to think about landscape is through our perception of a view from a perspective; a way of seeing landscape that arose with the advent of landscape art during the Renaissance. Often that perspective has been one of an external viewer looking onto a scene. But what if we change our perspective and borrow from Tim Ingold, who borrowed from Martin Heiddeger, and think about landscape from the perspective of dwelling. Not external viewers of a scene but from the perspective of an actor within the scene. If we apply this to a cultural landscape than what makes up our cultural landscape at a point in time shifts as we move spatially about in that landscape. If we shift our perspective to that of a person dwelling within the scene than we can start to think of the multiple places that afford different views of a cultural landscape.

A cultural landscape has many vantage points as I move about within it. As I move among those vantage points the elements of which my view is composed also changes – each place within the cultural landscape affords a different meaning. The scale at which I can experience a cultural landscape is related to the range of view I have from a specific vantage point.  At some points I may be moving from one place to another on a lake that allows me a view of many things all at once.  At others I may be resting within a structure and my view is circumscribed by the walls and windows that makes up my landscape at that point in time.

Much thinking, writing and policy regarding cultural landscapes favours the abstraction of landscape as a view or a map. This has made it difficult to know how to represent and talk about landscape as experience. In part, this is because a cultural landscape is a composite made up of places and structures that are brought together by journeying between them and undertaking activities when we are at them.

As the introductory essay for this website my purpose is not to try and resolve these issues but rather to pose the problem of how we can begin to come to understand and represent cultural landscapes as experience.  What terminology can we use to discuss the different scales at which a cultural landscapes can be experienced? How do we think about the composition of a cultural landscape? What do we mean when we think of a cultural landscape as a site? What do we call the places and structures that make a cultural landscape meaningful? Is each cultural landscape that of an individual or can a cultural landscape be shared by a group of people? These questions become more and more important as the term “cultural landscape” is increasingly used within heritage policy and legislation. Such legislation often thinks about cultural landscapes as a composite view in which the structures of the view are to be conserved. In this website we would like to begin to think about cultural landscapes as a way of life of a people. Such an effort would seem to require increasing our understanding of the places and structures of a cultural landscape that make a way of life possible.  However, in order not to fall into the heritage trap it would also seem to require understanding the processes that can provide continuity between the past, present and future without loosing the authenticity of such ways of life.