Cultural Landscape Readings

A bibliography from Mary Corbin Sies, Gilda Anroman, Claudia Rector, and Krista Park...

...and an excerpt from my qualifying exam "Place and Space in Anthropological Perspective" Hasbrouck, 2001:

A great deal of work addressing place and space has also been generated within cultural landscape studies. Although many of its contributors are cultural anthropologists (c.f., Bender, ed. 1993, Cohen and Odhiambo 1989, Cruikshank 1990, Hirsch and O’Hanlon, eds. 1995, Myers 2000, Olwig 1997, Strathern 2000) and cultural geographers (c.f., Appleton 1997, Barnes and Duncan, eds. 1992, Cartier 1997, 1999, Conzen, ed. 1990, Cosgrove 1993, 1997, Cosgrove, ed. 1999, Cosgrove and Daniels, eds. 1988, Holdsworth 1997, Lai 1997, Lowenthal 1997, 2000, Meinig, ed. 1979, and Norton 1989, Walker 1997, Zelinsky 1997), the field also includes significant works from archaeologists (Cunliffe 2000, Thomas 1993, Tilley 1993, 1994, Ucko and Layton, eds. 1999), sociologists (Zukin 1991), historians (Borchert 1997, Groth 1997, Porter 2000, Ritvo 2000), art historians (Green 1995, House 2000), architects and planners (Hayden 1997, Howett 1997, Rainey 1997, Riley 1997, Swentzell 1997, Upton 1997), and others as well (Armstrong 2000, Jackson 1997, A. King 1997, Schama 1995, Vitek and Jackson, eds. 1996). This highly interdisciplinary field has obvious roots in cultural geography and cultural anthropology, but its works tend to focus explicitly on “the history of how people use everyday space—buildings, rooms, streets, fields, or yards—to establish their identity, articulate their social relations, and derive cultural meanings” (Groth 1997: 1).

"Landscape denotes the interaction of people and place: a social group and its spaces, particularly the spaces to which the group belongs and from which its members derive some part of their shared identity and meaning. All human interaction with nature can be considered as cultural landscape…" (Groth 1997: 1).

This perspective, then, moves decidedly away from the traditional privileging of abstract space in social sciences, or a concept of landscape divorced as much as possible from the subject. Instead, it argues that culture and landscape are mutually implicated, and multiply interpreted. Hirsch states: “There is not one absolute landscape here, but a series of related, if contradictory, moments—perspectives—which cohere in what can be recognized as a singular form: landscape as a cultural process” (1995: 23). Similarly, Morphy and Flint (2000: 1, 13) argue that “[t]he environment we inhabit is inseparable from human culture, [and]…culture is part of a dialogic process which involves human action in a world that is subject both to local trajectories and external forces.”

Common themes in many of these works include understanding indigenous non-Western interpretations of landscape, issues of class and political economy, neo-phenomenological explorations of cultural relationships to the landscape, post-colonialism, environmental consequences of various culture/landscape configurations, and globalization as it relates to local contexts and cultural understandings of landscape.