Landscapes Beyond Land
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Landscapes Beyond Land

Routes, Aesthetics, Narratives

Arnar Árnason, Nicolas Ellison, Jo Vergunst, Andrew Whitehouse, Arnar Árnason, Nicolas Ellison, Jo Vergunst, Andrew Whitehouse

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eBook - ePub

Landscapes Beyond Land

Routes, Aesthetics, Narratives

Arnar Árnason, Nicolas Ellison, Jo Vergunst, Andrew Whitehouse, Arnar Árnason, Nicolas Ellison, Jo Vergunst, Andrew Whitehouse

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About This Book

Land is embedded in a multitude of material and cultural contexts, through which the human experience of landscape emerges. Ethnographers, with their participative methodologies, long-term co-residence, and concern with the quotidian aspects of the places where they work, are well positioned to describe landscapes in this fullest of senses. The contributors explore how landscapes become known primarily through movement and journeying rather than stasis. Working across four continents, they explain how landscapes are constituted and recollected in the stories people tell of their journeys through them, and how, in turn, these stories are embedded in landscaped forms.

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Year
2012
ISBN
9780857456724

1

Walking the Past in the Present

Christopher Tilley
In this essay I want to reflect on a form of research practice that I have been undertaking for the last ten years or so to understand the relationship between prehistoric and contemporary landscapes (Tilley 1994, 1999, 2004, 2008; Bender, Hamilton and Tilley 2007). This is the humble art of walking. Walking the landscape is an attempt to understand it at a human scale. The limits of this knowledge are essentially the limits of my own body and the manner in which this body both limits and facilitates my perception. The objective is to gain an ‘insider’s’ knowledge of archaeological places such as megalithic monuments and settlements in their landscape contexts as opposed to a knowledge acquired by mediated representations that can only provide an ‘outsider’s’ perspective.
I understand the term ‘landscape’ anthropologically. For me it refers to the richly nuanced contextual surroundings in which people move and think and dwell in opposition to notions of landscape as scenery or as environment and topography. It is the case that the vast majority of landscape research is thoroughly mediated by various representations and technologies of abstraction. By the former I mean the representations provided by texts, photographs, paintings, sketches, maps or in other words the entire discursive panoply by which we normally inform ourselves about places and landscapes while sitting at our desks. The effect of this is that we tend to perceive landscape through the minds and eyes of other people. Such representations are inevitably selective, framed (often quite literally in the borders of the painting, photograph or map) and ideological. We encounter the landscape through its always partial representation, and such an encounter encourages us to build new texts and representations on the basis of old ones in an endless series of repetitions of the same. This is never a lived landscape but is forever fixed in the words or the images, something that becomes dead, silent and inert, devoid of love and life. By ‘technologies of abstraction’ I refer to statistical analyses of landscape involving measurement and quantification, computer simulations and the creation of virtual landscapes you might walk around in with your cursor, together with the use of various forms of Geographical Information System technologies for landscape analysis that like all new technologies are popular largely for their newness rather than for the kind of interpretative information that they are actually capable of providing.
The problem I have with all such mediated approaches to the landscape is firstly that they obviously constrain and limit my possibilities for perception in that I do not need to leave my desk in order to learn. Secondly, such textual and visual representations tend to encourage the highly suspect view that landscape and landscape research is just about representation. Taking this view we recognize that landscapes are being represented in a particular manner within a particular cultural or historical context but that these are only representations and might always be different. We recognize that such representations are therefore essentially arbitrary and ideological and we set about investigating this. Ultimately in a Foucauldian sense we end up talking about the discursive construction of landscapes, of landscapes of power. The danger of such a view is that the landscape itself becomes inert, a blank slate upon which culture is written. Such a relativist and ‘postmodern’ view makes perfect sense when we study the landscape through mediated forms in which stone and wood; grass and trees; the sun, the moon and the stars; the heat of the day or the coolness of the evening become words and images. The literary turn in anthropology (e.g., Clifford and Marcus 1986; Hastrup 1992; James, Hockey, and Dawson 1997) in which ethnographies become just forms of writing has undoubtedly promoted an involuted style of thinking that rather than encouraging a meaningful encounter with landscapes has operated as a means of escape from them. This has frequently been combined with an ocularcentric view of landscape as image.
The approach that I undertake demands by contrast that I immerse my body in the landscape and allow it rather than texts, images or diagrams to mediate my encounter. When I feel the sun or the rain on my face, landscape becomes anything but representation – it becomes part and parcel of my lived sensual experience, of my carnal being. The sensuous character of this human experience is absolutely primary. There are three reasons why this is the case: (1) the material character of the walking; (2) walking as an act of gathering; (3) the temporality of walking. I shall consider each of these in turn.

Walking and Materiality

Walking, and under this term I also subsume other modes of movement such as crawling, climbing, jumping, stumbling etc., involves embodied experience. The character of the walk is such that it is thoroughly mediated through the effects of the weather and the qualities of the light on perception. The landscape alters according to the time of the day, the day of the week or the months and seasons of the year, whether the rain falls, the sun shines or the wind howls, whether it is misty or clear. All these affect how I sense and relate to the qualities of the landscape. To walk is to adopt different bodily postures, sometimes upright, sometimes bent, sometimes looking up, sometimes looking down. This is in turn related to the surfaces on which I walk and their characteristics: hard or soft; dry or slippery; even or stony; flat, rising or falling; firm or boggy. In a stony landscape I must look down most of the time or I will fall over and bump into things; in a bog I must test every step; on a flat pavement I can move less tentatively and look straight ahead. My calf and leg muscles sense and register various degrees of energy and strain. These direct sensory relations engage my body as part of the landscape. I may feel that it has been very easy to reach this place and very difficult to reach that one. This directly affects the manner in which I think about places, landscapes, relationships. Sometimes on the walk I may find myself high up on a hilltop with a panoramic view of the world with a circular horizon. I can see a great deal of the sky. I will be exposed to the wind and the elements. At other times I might be in a sheltered valley. My lateral vision will be restricted by the valley sides as will my view of the sky, my senses of sight and sound and smell will reach out before and behind me to a further horizon line. The power of the wind and rain may be broken. I feel that I am in a different world to that of the hilltop.
Perceptive experience as mediated by the body in this manner is processual and always changing. It inevitably has profound effects not only on what I can perceive but what I am able to think and emotionally feel. My body becomes the measure of all things in relation to me and the possibilities, or affordances, and constraints that the landscape provides. I am a part of that which I seek to describe and understand. I rapidly learn that in order to inhabit a landscape I need to know how to walk in it and that certain practices of walking are appropriate in particular places at particular times and seasons. After a while they become routinized and embodied; the landscape becomes part of me in a way that is never possible if I encounter it from a car or a train or an aeroplane where my experience is more or less limited to the visual appreciation of something shut away and distantiated from my physical being.

Gathering

Walking is always a gathering together of places encountered along the way and the sequences in which they are encountered and the effects these have on my body. A walk is thus a material journey and a temporal narrative. A walk gathers together the landscape in relation to my body: it collects together continuous visions, smells, tactilities, sounds and tastes in relation to my body always in various degree of association and intimacy: it has synaesthetic effects. We take on board Tim Ingold and Ken Olwig’s critique of the multiplication of ‘scapes’ especially when this use is based on an etymology of ‘scape’ understood as ‘scope’ (as visual) whereas it actually comes from forms such as skap/skip that relate to quality as in ‘fellow-ship’ (Olwig 2002: 19; Ingold personal communication).
A walk not only gathers together and mediates places and their material properties, including the weather, along its path but also events, things that take place, social encounters with people and plants and animals. It was Bergson’s (1991) fundamental insight that there is no perception that is not replete with memories. Such memories are almost always path bound, and place bound. Everything is always somewhere and in process, in some place with its thresholds, boundaries and transitions to other places along paths. The changing human and nonhuman horizons of the walk continually alter my understanding of place and landscape so much so that one walk will provide a whole series of expectations of what may be encountered on another. My expectations may be fulfilled or continually surprised. Thus to walk is to fuse past with present with future. Walking gathers known past histories, practices and traditions as for the most part, following a path, I am walking where others have walked, in the footsteps of previous generations, the ancestors. The paths I take may, in this sense, be weak or strong, well-trodden and known or new and fragile. Walking a landscape is thus to gather together through my body its weathers, its topographies, its people, histories, traditions and identities. The walk gathers itself through my own body to create my own identity. In this sense the sum of my embodied being in motion is the sum of the walks I have taken and what and whom I have encountered along the way.

The Past in the Present

Until very recently everybody walked. Walking was life. To live was to walk, to be a socialized being was to walk and work, usually involving particular practices of walking whether hunting or gathering or fishing and farming, in the landscape. Being in the landscape, being part of the landscape, inevitably resulted in the kind of intimate knowledge of it that is for the most part lost today. Walking the past in the present is an attempt to regain at least some of that intimacy and lost experience. It is simply to attempt to walk the landscape as other people might have done and to familiarise myself with it through the process of walking. The contemporary skin of the land has itself more often than not been irrevocably altered but its bones, the hills and the valleys, springs, river courses and the coasts, high and low-lying areas, rocky and steep or flat places are often the same.
The walk unites the walker and the landscape in a lived dialectic of being and becoming, acting and being acted upon. In the process of walking we communicate with the landscape that surrounds us, not with words, but through our bodies. To experience the walk is to experience our own carnal bodies. My walk involves embodied immersion in a landscape. By contrast I am not embodied in the same sense in any image or artefact I might produce. It is always externalized, out there, apart from my body. Walking is in and of the body; it cannot take place outside of the body. It is a wholly lived and participatory corporeal practice. The body cannot be reduced to the status of an object because it is always a minded and mindful body, and the relation is internal. The mind is not external to the body controlling it as it were from the outside, but part of it. Thus thought is of, through and in the body. The body is lived through its actions and movement is both the medium and outcome of embodied knowledges. Walking the past in the present thus involves a material experience, and a mode of gathering together of this experience in a temporal mode of narrative understanding.
A new walk may jog one’s memory of a previous walk, encounter or understanding. It is a process of linking different kinds of experiences. While the walk is obviously in one sense a personal experience, it is directed to a broader, more generalized understanding in relation to characteristics and qualities of the walk that stand out not only for myself but for others: approached from this direction, it is only from this particular point one sees that distant hill for the first time; the rocks look far more jagged from this direction than from that; this place in the landscape echoes, that does not and so on. Thus the art of walking the landscape is one in which experience of the particular leads to considerations of the general and the gradual building up of a holistic interpretative account through comparing and contrasting and reflecting on these experiences.

Styles of Walking in Modernity and Styles of Writing

The actual practice of walking has as yet scarcely been studied in any of the social sciences. While we have various generalized histories of walking (e.g., Marples 1959; Jarvis 1997; Solnit 2002), studies of people actually walking are conspicuously absent and this lacuna is only just beginning to be addressed (see Lee and Ingold 2006; Ingold and Vergunst 2008). The manner in which we walk influences the manner in which we write and, more broadly, re-present that experience. The material practice of walking and the physical conditions encountered through movement in the landscape are very different from other modes of travel. Walking has its own rhythms and modalities influencing different styles of writing. Today three distinct styles can be distinguished: walking as a romantic encounter, walking as a practice of bodily discipline and walking as an act of consumption.
In our industrialized modernity walking in ‘nature’ has increasingly developed into an outdoor leisure pursuit. One walks in order to gain pleasure and that pleasure is overwhelmingly expressed in the form of the tourist gaze (Urry 1991). The landscape is encountered in the romantic sense as something that can uplift the human spirit. The encounter is aesthetic, a search for beautiful places and vistas and quite often for a sense of its past in the form of enigmatic ruins, traces of a distant and (morally) better past. This is the English tradition beginning with Wordsworth and Coleridge, their walks through the Quantock hills and the Lake District in search of aesthetic satisfaction and the picturesque. Landscapes once considered barren, frightening and useless became rewritten as sublime. Modernity becomes seen as a blot to be erased from the text. The narrative structure is broken and progressive in the sense that the poetic descriptions move from one place to another presented as highlights of this experience with much left out in between. These landscapes are for the most part unpeopled. Walking them is an escape from the teeming humanity of the city. Such landscapes are crowded with rocks rather than people. Jarvis has cogently argued that the fluid and improvised quality of blank verse, its perceived ‘naturalness’ as opposed to other forms of poetry and its syntagmatic ordering, sequences of this after that, made it the preferred metrical vehicle to describe pedestrian travel for the Romantic poets (1997: 139).
Another form of contemporary walking overlapping with the Romantic gaze is walking as a form of bodily discipline, a task undertaken to cover so much distance in so many days, to climb the highest peaks and quite literally cover the ground and exert a form of physical mastery over it. Much writing in this mode extols bodily skills and virtues, the ‘mastery’ of a landscape as a form of conquest. Ultimately it is the body that moves that becomes the focus of attention in the literature and the technical skills of map reading, orientation and the types of equipment (walking boots, rain jackets, rucksacks etc.) required: a disciplined body whose involvement in the landscape is facilitated by a disciplined technical knowledge (Michael 2000; Ingold 2004). Linked to this in a less-punishing mode are discourses promoting walking as a means of healthy living and bodily maintenance (Edensor 2000).
A third mode of walking is, by contrast, situated not in the rural landscape, but in the city. Rather than an escape from urban modernity, this style of walking embraces it and the new opportunities this opens up. Here we encounter the textual image of the flâneur as developed by Baudelaire and Benjamin ‘botanizing on the asphalt’ (Tester 1994). Flânerie is an activity of strolling and looking and writing. It originated in Paris, metropolitan capital of the nineteenth century, as conceived by Walter Benjamin in his discussions of the prose and poetry of Charles Baudelaire (Benjamin 1973). The male (and they are always male, lone female street walkers are inevitably prostitutes) flâneur is one who loses himself in the crowd and dwells and participates within it as an observer of modern life. But while of and in the crowd the flâneur observes it dispassionately from within, experiencing a new form of solitude and anonymity whilst amongst teeming humanity. The poet observes in order to write, peopling his solitude in order to make sense of the metropolis and the spectacle of the crowds. He throws himself open to being a witness of the unexpected. Wandering and losing himself in the city, he is most productive in his apparent indolence, the secret spectator of the places of the city, constantly restless, wandering, in search of the new experiences modernity constantly throws up, observing the fleeting and the transitory. Walking here is a consumptive act, sucking in disparate and transitory experiences, which in De Certeau’s (1984) terms is part of the practice of everyday life through which the rhythms of the city (Lefebvre 2004) may be experienced.

Walking the Past

Walking understood in these three contemporary modes is a pursuit undertaken for itself, or in pursuit of knowledge, part of a set of peculiarly exotic practices that have developed in modernity. Walking today has become an option or lifestyle choice like everything else and the necessity of walking has been for the most part evacuated from our lives except as part of the process of commuting to work or going shopping. But walking for most of the human past has been a necessity. As Ingold (1993) has put it ‘landscape’ and ‘taskscape’ have been intimately linked and this is mainly through the medium of the walk. The landscape is intimately linked to those who dwell within it, their practices and activities and movements. To dwell fuses together past, present and future through the corporeality of the body.
It would be possible to develop an entire typology of different styles of walking either in the past or the present, relating to different styles of intentional activity. Here I want to define three ideal types or modes of ‘taskscape walking’: walking as pursuit, walking as husbandry and walking as a resource for social knowledge. These, of necessity, remain ideal types, analytical distinctions, simply because there are so few detailed accounts of walking, to my knowledge, in the social sciences (Ingold and Vergunst 2008). The walk, its form and duration, the kinds of embodied motility required, and the kinds of experiences gained along the way have been left almost entirely undescribed and undiscussed. From the anthropological literature we know about routes of movement across the landscape in general, but virtually nothing about the specificity of actual walking practices at any particular time or on any particular day with reference to any particular locality, with the exception of the analysis of certain ceremonies and ritual practices.

Walking as Pursuit

Most of the human past has involved walking as the pursuit of resources: game, fish and fowl, plants and raw materials. The hunter-fisher-gatherer requires an acute knowledge and awareness of landscape in order to survive. In the polar regions walking is ev...

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