Landscape (II)

Week 5: Landscape (II)

Landscape - an 'anthropocentric' term?

• Anthropocentrism is the concept discussed.

• Definition of Anthropocentrist Humanism:

  • According to Weitzenfeld and Joy (2014: 5), humanist thought since the Enlightenment is anthropocentric.

  • It conceptualizes human being over and against animal being.

  • It privileges human consciousness and freedom as the center, agent, and pinnacle of history and existence.

Landscape – an ‘anthropocentric’ term?

• Landscape approaches focus on how humans interpret their environment.

• Iconography:

  • Landscape is symbolic, a ‘way of seeing’ shaped by culture and power.

• Phenomenology:

  • Landscape is an embodied entanglement with the environment shaped by culturally mediated habits of perception.

• The central focal point in both approaches is a human relationship to the environment.

• However, what about nonhuman relationships?

From landscape to ‘naturecultures’

• ‘Nature’ and ‘culture’ are complex terms.

• Often understood dualistically:

  • Human culture vs. Non-human nature.

• This opposition has recently been critically examined by geographers.

• A question is posed: Are categories like culture and nature, human and nonhuman, easily separable in today’s world?

• This poses a challenge to humanist tradition and the concept of landscape!

From landscape to ‘naturecultures’

• Potter and Hawkins (2009) argue that humans and non-humans have always been interconnected in everyday life, blurring the nature/culture binary.

• Many non-western cultures have long acknowledged this interconnectedness.

From landscape to ‘naturecultures’

• ‘Nature’ within ‘culture’:

  • Haraway suggests that humans are always in company with other beings.