An Anthropology of Landscape

2012

The interpretation of landscape, the significance of walking and the relationships that exist between them are rarely considered or critically examined in much of leisure research or outdoor pedagogic practice, despite their significance within other fields of academic study such as anthropology and cultural geography. This research seeks to explore how a variety of landscapes are perceived, how cultural and social interpretations influence this perception, and whether these interpretations may be reenvisioned by walking, or wayfaring, as an alternate way of making understandings and meanings with landscape. In exploring the disparate interpretations surrounding landscape, the concept of place and its specificity comes to the fore, as does the importance of the relationship between walking and how we make sense of place.

2017

European journal of literature, culture and the environment, 2015

Over the last four decades computer games have become ever more immersive and their environments ever more ‘real’ yet the environments had remained merely picturesque backdrops to the main action of the game. However, recent years have witnessed a shift with gaming software such as British Countryside Generator , which provides “aesthetically recognizable rural British landscapes” (Manaugh). Moving in the other direction is the gamification of the ‘real’ landscape as new technologies such as global positioning systems (GPS) and interfaces such as Strava gamify our athletic endeavours. Through his art J.M.W. Turner generated a new approach to ‘seeing’ nature without dividing intelligent comprehension from the sensory experience. Despite Turner’s move and the potential re-readings offered by the digital there remains a reliance on binary division and static enframing of the senses in responses to landscape in the British visual arts, all of which enforces a perceived chasm between cul...

Nordicum-Mediterraneum, 2009

The Senses and Society, 2007

During the summer of 2004, the artist Graham Lowe and I undertook a research project entitled Nurturing Ecologies 1 within the Lake District National Park 1 at Windermere. This landscape considered as an icon of 'Englishness' is re-visited through the embodied and sensory experiences of post-migration residents of Lancashire and Cumbria. This was an attempt to unravel multiple relationships embedded in visitor engagements with this landscape and thus disrupt the moral geography of this landscape as embodying a singular English sensibility, normally exclusionary of British multi-ethnic, translocal and mobile landscape values and sensibilities. The research led to the production of a series of drawings and descriptions made in visual workshops by participants, and a set of forty paintings produced by the artist. These are examined in this paper as representing the values, sensory meanings and embodied relationships that exist for migrant communities with this landscape. These groups are from the Asian community from Burnley and a 'mixed' art group living in Lancashire and Cumbria. The initial drawings and subsequent paintings produced operate as a testimony to the Lake District landscape a site for engendering feelings of terror, fear as well as representing a paradisiacal landscape.

2015

2014

This edited volume reflects on the multitude of ways by which humans shape and are shaped by the natural world, and how Archaeology and its cognate disciplines recover this relationship. The structure and content of the book recognize Graeme Barker’s pioneering contribution to the scientific study of human–environment interaction, and form a secondary dialectic between his many colleagues and past students and the academic vista which he has helped define. The volume comprises 22 thematic papers, arranged chronologically, each a presentation of front-line research in their respective fields. They mirror the scope of Barker’s legacy through a focus on transitions in the human–environment relationship, how they are enacted and perceived. The assembled chapters illustrate how climate, demographic, subsistence, social and ecological change have affected cultures from the Palaeolithic to Historical, from North Africa and West-Central Eurasia to Southeast Asia and China. They also chronicle the innovations and renegotiated relations that communities have devised to meet and exploit the many shifting realities involved with Living in the Landscape.

Alfred Wainwright was arguably the best known British guidebook writer of the 20th century, and his work has been highly influential in promoting and directing fell-walking in northern Britain, in particular in the English Lake District. His work has, however, received little critical attention. This paper represents an initial attempt to undertake such a study. We examine Wainwright's work through the lens of the landscape values and aesthetics that, we suggest, underpins it, and by an exploration of what might be called Wainwright's 'environmental identity'. We argue that Wainwright manifests a strikingly contemporary embodied landscape aesthetic and a strongly place-attached environmental identity. We consider some possible implications of this landscape aesthetic and place attached identity, including their relation to broader environmental commitments and the possibility that the endorsement of such values may have exclusionary consequences for members of 'outsider' groups.

This paper discusses Phenomenology as a potential over-arching paradigm for trans-disciplinary research on landscape as place; regarding social practices performed on/with/for/about landscape. It discusses: 'lifeworlds' and 'taskscape'; embodiment and affordance; inter-subjectivity and communalized intentionality; topophilia and other affective relations; and essences and universality of landscape concepts. It includes findings from the Manyjilyjarra landscape language case study (with linguist Clair Hill), other interactions with Yarnangu Aboriginal peoples from Australia's Central and Western Deserts and earlier Ethnophysiography studies (with David Mark). Reinforcement of community cohesion via preservation of the complexity of traditional landscape language is discussed. One practical application is to the activities, governance and reporting of Martu Ranger environmental management programs.