Introduction Landscape: Between Place and Space

Abstract

Abstract This Introduction and the essays that follow explore the concept of landscape from an anthropological perspective. Unlike ‘exchange’, ‘ritual’, ‘history’ and other concepts which have figured centrally in anthropological debates in recent years, landscape has received little overt anthropological treatment.1 In this respect landscape shares a similar status to the body in anthropology, that despite its ubiquity it has remained largely unproblematized: ‘the majority of researchers have in effect simply “bracketed” it as a black box and set it aside’ (Lock 1993: 133). Yet landscape has a submerged presence and significance in anthropological accounts in two related ways. ‘Landscape’ has been deployed, first, as a framing convention which informs the way the anthropologist brings his or her study into ‘view’ (i.e. from an ‘objective’ standpoint—the landscape of a particular people). Secondly, it has been used to refer to the meaning imputed by local people to their cultural and physical surroundings (i.e. how a particular landscape ‘looks’ to its inhabitants). The black box of landscape requires ‘opening’ and its contents themselves brought into view.

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