Cultural Landscapes

Oxford Handbooks Online

Cultural Landscapes  
Lesley Head
The Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies
Edited by Dan Hicks and Mary C. Beaudry

Print Publication Date: Sep 2010

Subject: Archaeology, History and Theory of Archaeology, Landscape Archaeology
Online Publication Date: Sep 2012 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199218714.013.0018

Abstract and Keywords

This article explores the idea of cultural landscapes. The term ‘cultural landscape’ is
widely recognized as a description of a region of the earth that has been transformed by
human action. This article explores the history of the idea of cultural landscapes, focusing
on two dichotomies. The first is the dichotomy between materiality and symbolism; from
highly material beginnings in the early twentieth century, the second is the dichotomy
between nature and culture, concepts treated as oppositional for much of this history. It
then examines some of the geographic differences, with particular attention to Australian
and Scandinavian examples. The next section explores what happens when the cultural
landscape idea itself becomes materialized, in the form of land and heritage management
frameworks. The final section presents a recent critique of the cultural landscape concept
and asks whether it is possible to go beyond the dichotomies, and whether the concept
retains any usefulness.

Keywords: landscapes, cultural landscapes, materiality, symbolism, nature, culture

The Idea of Cultural Landscapes

In considering landscapes, a Handbook of material culture is extending its discussion
from objects and buildings to a broader arena that humans have materially transformed,
the earth itself. The term ‘cultural landscape’ is widely recognized as a description of a
region of the earth that has been transformed by human action. However, the concept of
a cultural landscape has changed over time and evokes a range of contrasting
understandings in different regions of the world, different academic disciplines, and

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Cultural Landscapes

different governance contexts. Here, I argue that it is important to understand these

differences in order to think clearly about cultural landscapes as a form of material
culture.

In this chapter, I examine some moments in the history of the idea of cultural landscapes,
focusing on two dichotomies that play in and out of the dominant Anglo‐American
narratives. The first is the dichotomy between materiality and symbolism; from highly
material beginnings in the early twentieth century, writings on cultural landscapes went
through periods and contexts where symbolism and ideas were more important. The
second is the (p. 428) dichotomy between nature and culture, concepts treated as
oppositional for much of this history. I then examine some of the geographic differences,
with particular attention to Australian and Scandinavian examples. The next section
explores what happens when the cultural landscape idea itself becomes materialized, in
the form of land and heritage management frameworks. I will demonstrate that much of
the work of the cultural landscape has been oppositional. It puts people and culture into
landscapes that had been considered empty and natural. It facilitates a broader context
for sites and buildings that have been considered in isolation. Yet it does so in ways that
are inherently dichotomous, as entrenched in the term ‘cultural landscape’ itself. In the
final section I discuss a recent critique of the cultural landscape concept, and ask
whether it is possible to go beyond the dichotomies, and whether the concept retains any
usefulness.

In the anglophone world the idea of the cultural landscape derives especially from the
work of American geographer Carl Sauer, who wrote in 1925 that humans had become
‘the most important morphologic factor’ (Sauer 1965: 341) in the material transformation
of natural landscapes. Geographical thought throughout much of the twentieth century,
due to the strong influence of the Sauerian tradition, generally distinguished between the
natural landscape as a pristine baseline for human life, with the cultural landscape
imprinted on top by the transformative activities of human culture. For Sauer (1965:
343), ‘the cultural landscape is fashioned from a natural landscape by a culture group.
Culture is the agent, the natural area is the medium, the cultural landscape the result.’ As
has been widely argued, this view of landscape rests on the separation of the natural and
the cultural as unproblematic categories. In view of later critique, it is worth
remembering what an important role Sauer's work played in having humans and their
activities acknowledged as influential landscape actors. The intellectual milieu in which
his work was revolutionary was one of environmental determinism.

Nevertheless, geography's ‘cultural turn’ and associated critique led to a range of studies
since the 1980s that, although different in their respective emphases, sought to put
forward a much more dynamic view of culture. There were particular challenges to the
so‐called ‘superorganic’ view of culture, understood as a total package, with a life of its
own operating at a higher level than the individual. Culture was argued to be a more
dynamic, multiple, contingent, and contested process, worked out in everyday practice
(Jackson 1989; Anderson and Gale 1992). Where landscape was part of these debates,
diverse writers argued that the concept of landscape can contain the range of human

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Cultural Landscapes

dimensions encompassed by the terms cultural (and political, and economic) (Cosgrove
1984; Cosgrove and Daniels 1988; Mitchell 1996; Olwig 2002). In other words, that the
concept of ‘landscape’ already contains all the ‘culture’ it needs. As the titles of their
books indicate, Cosgrove and Daniels were particularly influential in drawing attention to
the symbolic rather than material dimensions of landscape, as (p. 429) represented for
example in iconography and art. The wider cultural turn within the humanities and social
sciences also brought more attention to the symbolic and representational dimensions of
landscape within archaeology (e.g. Bender 1993; Gosden and Head 1994; Ashmore and
Knapp 1999), and the interpretation of these from the material record continues to be a
fertile area of debate. By the end of the 1990s, however, there was widespread concern
within social and cultural geography that the subdisciplines needed
‘rematerialising’ (Jackson 2000).

Whatmore argues that both ‘old’ and ‘new’ cultural geographies externalized landscapes
and cast their making ‘(whether worked or represented) as an exclusively human
achievement’. The big difference in recent work is that it ‘shifts the register of materiality
from the indifferent stuff of a world “out there”, articulated through notions of “land”,
“nature”, or “environment”, to the intimate fabric of corporeality’ (Whatmore 2006: 602).
Whatmore's concept of ‘livingness’ and her hybrid geographies (Whatmore 2002) have
much in common with Ingold's (2000a) discussions of dwelling. Both have been influential
in attempts to go beyond the material/symbolic and culture/nature binaries.

Within cultural geography over the last decade or two there has been increasing
recognition of the agency of plants, animals, and other parts of the non‐human world.
These are often referred to as more‐than‐human geographies (see Braun 2005 for review).
Where binarist thinking ultimately forces a choice in terms of ‘whodunnit’, for writers
such as Whatmore, influenced by actor‐network theory (ANT), ‘the social and the natural
are co‐constitutive’ within myriad networks (Castree 2002: 120).

While cultural geographers and others in the humanities were rediscovering the agency
of the non‐human world, physical geographers and natural scientists were increasingly
recognizing culture. On the face of things, the Sauerian concept of a cultural landscape
as having been materially transformed by human action was a highly appropriate way of
thinking about the fact that humans are inextricably embedded in all earth surface
processes, often dominate them and in some cases have done so for many thousands of
years. There is an emerging trend in some ecological studies, particularly historical ones,
to use the cultural landscape concept to recognize the human presence in the landscape
and/or to discuss issues of biodiversity conservation in humanized landscapes, for
example traditional agricultural ones (Phillips 1998; Steck et al. 2007).

These parallel conversations within the humanities/social sciences and the natural
sciences have for the most part gone in opposite directions. The cultural landscape
concept in use in the sciences is generally one that retains a conceptually unproblematic
distinction between nature and culture (Head 2008). However, there are also grounds for

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Cultural Landscapes

future connections, since in both fields there is increasing recognition of messy networks
of agency that are ‘multiple, contingent and nonessentialist’ (Castree 2002: 121).

Geographic Differences in use of the

(p. 430)

Cultural Landscape Idea

In this section I illustrate how the cultural landscape idea itself varied geographically. In
particular I distinguish between Old World and New World societies. ‘Putting culture in’
to the landscape was particularly necessary in settler societies, such as Australia, where
failure to see and acknowledge the indigenous presence allowed a strong and
unproblematic concept of natural landscape to take hold. Importantly for this discussion,
what was put in was not just a concept of culture, but one that depended not on material
evidence but on oral tradition, stories, and symbolism. On the other hand, use of the
cultural landscape concept in relation to indigenous landscape engagements is itself
potentially problematic, as it can reinforce a false separation between culture and nature.
In Old World contexts such as northern Europe, material cultural influences on the
landscape are more self‐evident. It is not so much a question of whether culture is
absorbed into landscape, but rather whether human activities have been so long‐standing
as to be absorbed into nature.

Early European settler struggles with an often recalcitrant Australian environment led to
themes of emptiness and alienation in cultural engagements with the land. Thus, there is
emphasis in art and literature on the ‘dead heart’ of the desert (Haynes 1998), or the
incompatibility of tropical areas with white settlement, particularly by women (Taylor
1940). The harshest parts of the continent, particularly the deserts, have been seen as
inimical to culture (just as they are quite literally inimical to agriculture). The agricultural
metaphor was central to the colonizing culture's vision of itself and its civilizing presence,
and the apparent absence among Aboriginal people of ‘tillage’ and hence ‘culture’ was
used to justify both physical and conceptual dispossession over the past two hundred
years (Head 2000a). To summarize, colonial Australian understandings of nature have
either subsumed or rendered invisible the presence of people, particularly indigenous
people.

Thus the strongest use of the cultural landscape concept in Australia in the last few
decades has been in ways that recognize indigenous presence in and connections to land,
that put people back in. The presentation of a place as a cultural landscape implicitly
positions it in contrast to a wilderness. This is seen, for example, in the way Australian
debates both influenced and utilized the development of the World Heritage category of
Associative Cultural Landscapes in the case of Uluru‐Kata Tjuta National Park, a
discussion I return to in the next section of the chapter. I have discussed elsewhere in
more detail how the process was influenced by academic debates over culture and

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Cultural Landscapes

nature, by the increasing political voices of indigenous and non‐Western (p. 431) peoples,
and by the practical difficulties of managing inhabited protected areas (Head 2000b).

Nordic geographers, such as Kenneth Olwig (1996, 2002), have been less keen than
Anglo‐American ones to use the term cultural landscape, arguing that landscape is
sufficient. Olwig examines Landschaft and related words in the Germanic languages of
northern Europe, showing that it has had a broad range of meanings relating to territory
and community for the last four or five hundred years: ‘When approached in historical
and geographical context, it becomes clear that Landschaft was much more than “a
restricted piece of land”. It contained meanings of great importance to the construction
of personal, political, and place identity at the time landscape entered the English
language’ (Olwig 1996: 631). Although Olwig's focus was historical, these themes
continue in contemporary Nordic understandings and usages of landscape, especially in
relation to landscape management (M. Jones 2006). For example, the Swedish
Environmental Protection Agency (Naturvårdsverket) recognizes that one definition of
landscape goes back to the territorial units reflected in the names of Swedish provinces
(e.g. Halland, Småland). Naturvårdsverket use a concept of landscape that includes ‘both
natural and cultural phenomena’, and is ‘defined as the result of the interplay between
man, society and nature’ (Sporrong 1995: 14).

Jones and Daugstad (1997) show considerable variability in its usage and application. For
example, they identify discourses of cultural landscape (e.g. agricultural, nature
conservation, cultural heritage, planning) used in land management debates. Thus ‘the
cultural landscape provides an arena in which different interest groups struggle to
influence the formation of our physical surroundings, exemplified in the conflicts that
often arise between the production of economic goods and the production of
environmental goods’ (Jones and Daugstad 1997: 280). The point here is not to argue that
‘cultural landscape’ is not used in Nordic contexts (see, for example,
Naturskyddsföreningen i Skåne 2002), but rather that it is often interchangeable with just
‘landscape’. As shown above, the usual usage of this latter concept is inclusive of cultural
dimensions. German environmental historians Lekan and Zeller (2005: 3) also emphasize
this contrast with New World settler contexts: ‘Unlike American environmental culture,
which is still dominated by debates about wilderness preservation and the retention of
untouched spaces, German landscape perception has long recognized human impacts as
part of the “natural” order.’ Particular emphasis is placed on the evolution of cultivated
and pastoral landscapes over millennia, as the basis for German environmental culture
and national identity.

This integration of the cultural dimensions of landscape is also accepted within the
European Landscape Convention, whose ‘definition of landscape is focused on
people’ (Rössler 2006: 349).

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Cultural Landscapes

Cultural Landscapes in Land and Heritage

(p. 432)

Management
The work of Jones and Daugstad, referred to above, is just one example showing how
different concepts of, and discourses around, culture and landscapes have material
outcomes. They result in maps, fences, legislative and administrative instruments, gates,
and boundaries. They keep some people in and some people out. This section provides
further examples of these outcomes, and their challenges and dilemmas. I start with
discussion of the cultural landscape category within the World Heritage convention, then
go on to some contemporary land management examples. The section concludes with
consideration of how cultural landscapes have been used in recent archaeological and
heritage work.

The World Heritage convention is an arena in which three different categories of cultural
landscape are acknowledged (Rössler 2006; UNESCO 2008). Of the 851 properties (660
cultural, 166 natural, and 25 mixed) on the World Heritage list at the end of 2007, 60
were included as cultural landscapes. Other World Heritage cultural property types, such
as monuments and sites, would also be considered cultural landscapes in the usual
geographic discussion of that term. So indeed would many natural properties that are
valued and managed for their beauty, scientific value, or importance for biodiversity
conservation. In this section of the discussion, however, I focus on the properties
specifically designated as cultural landscapes.

Two particular issues are the degree of material transformation, and the relationship
between culture and nature. These categories can also be thought of as being on a
continuum of material evidence of human activity; from highly visible to potentially
absent.

1. ‘The most easily identifiable is the clearly defined landscape designed and created
intentionally by man (sic)’ (UNESCO 2008). These are often garden and parkland
landscapes, in which the materiality of the human effort is most obvious.
2. ‘The organically evolved landscape’ (UNESCO 2008). This can be either a relict
(fossil) landscape or a continuing one. In either case material form is necessary. In
the relict landscape, the distinguishing features are still visible; if continuing, it still
exhibits significant material evidence of its evolution over time.
3. ‘The associative cultural landscape’ (UNESCO 2008). In these cases their listing is
justified ‘by virtue of the powerful religious, artistic or cultural associations of the
natural element rather than material cultural evidence, which may be insignificant or
even absent’ (UNESCO 2008).

Themes of integration and connection between nature and culture are strong in the World
Heritage conceptualization of cultural landscapes:

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Cultural Landscapes

(p. 433)

Cultural landscapes are at the interface between nature and culture, tangible and
intangible heritage, biological and cultural diversity—they represent a closely
woven net of relationships, the essence of culture and people's identity. Cultural
landscapes are a focus of protected areas in a larger ecosystem context, and they
are a symbol of the growing recognition of the fundamental links between local
communities and their heritage, humankind and its natural environment.

Rössler (2006: 334)

While it could be argued that ideas of integration just mix culture and nature together
without recognizing that as concepts they may be inherently problematic, it remains the
case that the realities of management in most landscapes today involve recognizing and
dealing with human actions. The cultural landscape concept appears to be a tool that
managers find useful. For example, it is being utilized in coastal New South Wales ‘to
provide a practical tool whereby Aboriginal community and cultural values can be
equitably considered in the future coastal planning, land management, and decision
making processes of both state and local government’ (Andrews 2006: 1). The approach
was developed in recognition that conventional Western systems for assessing landscape
significance (e.g. historical, archaeological, anthropological) did not adequately respond
to Aboriginal cultural values (Byrne et al. 2001; Andrews 2006: 5). Andrews argues that
the cultural landscape framework may ‘encompass the traditional values [of] Aboriginal
peoples regarding their spiritual views of the natural world and associative values in the
land, while still being understandable to land and conservation managers whose world
views are typically based in Western historical and scientific scholarship’ (Andrews 2006:
5). Drawing also on UNESCO definitions of associative cultural landscapes, an Aboriginal
cultural landscape is defined as:

A place or area valued by an Aboriginal group (or groups) because of their long
and complex relationship with that land. It expresses their unity with the natural
and spiritual environment. It embodies their traditional knowledge of spirits,
places, land uses, and ecology. Material remains of the association may be
prominent, but will often be minimal or absent.

Andrews (2006: 10)

This need to ‘put people in’ may be particularly strong where the human connections
have not transformed the physical landscape, in the Sauerian sense, or at least not to any
great extent, and are expressed in intangible values. These are the attachments, which
are most difficult to have recognized by other parties and thus protected under
management regimes. Rössler (2006: 336) emphasizes that the World Heritage category
of ‘associative cultural landscape’ ‘has been crucial in the recognition of intangible values
and for the heritage of local communities and indigenous people. The primary difference
was the acceptance of communities and their relationship with the environment.’ The
example in New South Wales is still a work in progress, and it remains to be seen
whether it (1) can be operationalized, and (p. 434) (2) results in different land
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Cultural Landscapes

management strategies than would otherwise be in place. My concern in this discussion

is not whether its aims are met or it is an effective tool. Rather it is to highlight the way
the cultural landscape concept has been mobilized to, at least in principle, include
Aboriginal voices and values in the land management process.

There is increasing recognition by ecologists that the management of ‘nature’ cannot

happen only in protected areas, but must also include landscapes where humans are
dominant. For example, Berkes and Davidson‐Hunt (2006: 35) argue that ‘most of the
world's biodiversity is in areas used by people. Hence, to conserve biodiversity, we need
to understand how human cultures interact with landscapes and shape them into cultural
landscapes.’ Berkes and Davidson‐Hunt (2006: 43–44) show how the management
implications of these types of cultural landscape are a more dynamic engagement than
the single use approach. They argue that protected areas managed to maximize
conservation, and forestlands managed to maximize timber production, both lead to
attempts to fix or freeze the landscape. Management strategies by Anishinaabe people
provide at least three mechanisms by which biodiversity can be conserved and enhanced.
First, through fire and other kinds of disturbance management, all successional stages
are maintained. Secondly, a mosaic landscape with many patches and gaps is maintained.
Thirdly, new edges and ecotones are created.

These types of approaches are not confined to hunter‐gatherer societies. A related

example is found in the traditional agricultural landscapes of northern Europe, where
there is widespread recognition among ecologists that traditional management or some
replica thereof, is important to biodiversity conservation in the so‐called semi‐natural
grasslands. ‘The main reason for restoring these man‐made grasslands is their
exceptionally high species richness at small spatial scales…A prerequisite for keeping
high species richness is to continue grazing, as the number of species drastically decline
on grasslands when abandoned’ (Lindborg 2006: 957). A rather more contested example
is when obviously human constructions within the agricultural landscape, such as stone
walls, have themselves become sites of biodiversity maintenance. Management strategies
might vary considerably depending on whether these are managed for species protection
or for cultural heritage. The importance of human activity in maintaining biodiversity in
agricultural landscapes is also discussed by Calvo‐Iglesias et al. (2006) for Spain, and
Maurer et al. (2005) for the Swiss Alpine grasslands.

It is important to recognize that there are a number of tensions and contradictions in

using the cultural landscape concept to recognize indigenous attachments to land in
contemporary management regimes. The first is the occasional lack of obvious
materiality, discussed above. Secondly, we might consider how well the notion of cultural
landscape captures indigenous ideas of the landscape or non‐human world itself being
sentient, as in the challenging title of Povinelli's (1995) paper ‘Do rocks listen?’ Along
related lines, Rose (2005) has discussed the sentience (p. 435) of other species and of
country: ‘in this Indigenous system, subjectivity in the form of sentience and agency is
not solely a human prerogative but is located throughout other species and perhaps
throughout country itself’ (Rose 2005: 302). When Aboriginal women such as Biddy

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Cultural Landscapes

Simon and Polly Wandanga call out to country as they approach a hillside to dig for yams
(Head et al. 2002), they are acknowledging this sentience. To an outsider this can appear
to be a symbolic act, but for Biddy and Polly the distinction between symbolism and
materiality would itself be a false one.

A third tension is that a highly material landscape, particularly when preserved as World
Heritage, can pin in place and time a static understanding of the cultural processes that
produced it in the past, and where their descendants might want to be in the present.
Archaeologist Denis Byrne tells an evocative story of his visit to the rice terraces of
northern Luzon in the Philippines, where the tourist expectation that the ‘natural
primitiveness of the terraces’ be maintained is at odds with the fact that ‘the terraces
were ephemeral agricultural phenomena that had always been in a state of change…
Outsiders might speak of the terraces as monuments, but they were monuments that
never ceased being built’ (D. Byrne 2007: 43). Local Ifugao people were also expected to
conform to a static external idea of authenticity, for example, when replacing thatch roof
on their huts with corrugated roofing iron.

The tension between materiality and meaning, as discussed by Byrne, goes to the nature
of archaeology itself. As a discipline constituted by both its attention to material evidence
and its pursuit of cultural pasts, archaeology's struggles with landscape are particularly
interesting. Within archaeology and some areas of heritage management, the most
important work is done by the landscape part of the cultural landscape concept. In this
thinking the landscape is distinguished from the much more specific ‘site’, such as an
excavation pit. This point is made explicitly by archaeologist Robin Torrence (2002: 766):
‘important new insights about long‐term changes in human behaviour are gained when
cultural landscapes rather than focal points of “sites” are studied’. Less attention is given
to the way culture is added into the landscape concept, and there is considerable focus on
a range of methodologies that allow a fuller reconstruction of the landscape to be
elucidated, ‘beyond the site’. This can also include consideration of more mobile ways to
think through human connections to landscape, such as Snead's (2006) documentation of
ancestral Pueblo trails.

Similarly, Taylor and Altenburg (2006) emphasize that an important aspect of the World
Heritage Cultural Landscape category is that it puts buildings and monuments into a
broader landscape context. Using Asian examples such as Angkor and Borobudur, they
argue that a broader physical context would stimulate visitors to look beyond the fabric of
the building or complex itself to its landscape setting. Further, there would be emphasis
on the living connections that people maintain with these places. Although different in
temporal context, a similar sort of work for the landscape end of the concept is implied in
Watt et al.'s (2004) (p. 436) comparison of laws for endangered species protection and
historic preservation. There is a concern to ‘expand’ to the landscape scale, from the
single species, or the single heritage property, in order to manage more effectively.

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Cultural Landscapes

Two other extensions of the site and indeed the landscape are the concepts of production
and the journey, both themes that have been widely written about by archaeologists (e.g.
Bradley and Edmonds 1993; Edmonds 1999). Bloxam and Heldal (2007) remind us that
the outstanding monuments of pharaonic Egypt, including the pyramids, were dependent
on sophisticated production processes of stone quarrying and transport. They describe
these ancient quarries and associated constructions (e.g. roads) as Egypt's ‘forgotten’
archaeological heritage, and argue for their inclusion on the World Heritage list along
with the monuments they facilitated. Bloxam and Heldal's focus on the material
conditions of production evidenced by the quarry sites does more than link them across
the landscape to the pyramids and temples many kilometres away. By providing evidence
about the inputs of human labour and associated social organization necessary to
produce them, their approach also helps humanize this landscape. For example, what
human effort did it take to build and use the quarry road, 2.1 m wide and 11 km long,
between Widan el‐Faras and Lake Moeris, or the 3,000 stone vessel blanks recorded at
the gypsum quarries at Umm es‐Sawan (Bloxam and Heldal 2007: 314)? Mobility and the
seasonal round are most often commented on for nomadic hunter‐gatherer groups
(Oetelaar and Meyer 2006), but most patterns of human movement contain seasonal and
other rhythms. Some of the patterns identified by Oetelaar and Meyer (or others) will be
archaeologically visible, others not. For example, concentrations of sites along waterways
attest to their importance as transportation corridors.

In archaeology and heritage studies, as in geography, recent work is grappling with ways
to bring together perception and materiality, humans and assorted non‐humans, and past
and present (e.g. Turner and FairClough 2007).

Is the Cultural Landscape Concept

Irretrievably Anthropocentric?
The diversity of uses to which the concept of landscape is put, and the range of meanings
attached, leads to regular discussions of whether landscape is a useful concept at all (for
a range of recent views see Merriman et al. 2008). Rather than rehearse those views
here, this section discusses a very specific critique of the cultural landscape concept, by
feminist philosopher Val Plumwood (2006). I draw on this example because it seems to me
quite different to the more‐than‐human and (p. 437) dwelling approaches influenced by
the work of Whatmore and Ingold. Plumwood argues that the idea in cultural landscape
studies of putting humans in has gone too far, merely inverting the arrows of connection
and causation found in nature‐reductionist science (see also Rose 2006). For her, the
concept of cultural landscape

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Cultural Landscapes

is an example of a concept that invites us to downplay or hide nonhuman agency

and to present humans as having a monopoly of creativity and agency in the
generation of what are called ‘landscapes’…The concept of a cultural landscape
has become a key part of an agenda in the humanities of human‐centred and
eurocentred reductions to culture that is the equal and opposite to the natural
sciences reduction of explanation to nature…an unfortunate and unnecessary side‐
effect of the long overdue recognition of the creativity of indigenous humans has
been a denial of creativity to nonhuman species and ecosystems—nature
scepticism. This latter denial is unhelpful as well as unnecessary because there is
no necessary incompatibility between recognizing indigenous (cultural) agency
and recognizing nonhuman (natural) agency.

Plumwood (2006: 119–120)

The type of cultural landscape to which Plumwood (2006) directs her critique is explicitly
the Sauerian one (2006: 121) and the landscape concept that she focuses on is a passive
one, framed visually (2006: 123). In that respect she is critiquing both early twentieth‐
century geography and the later cultural turn, and is perhaps less aware of more recent
approaches that present dynamic, embodied and less dualistic engagements between
humans and non‐humans, and attempt to capture these in landscape conceptualizations.

Plumwood (2006: 125) wants to recognize multiple and mixed agencies as shaping
material outcomes, ‘This means that the outcome of any given landscape is at a minimum
biocultural, a collaborative product that its multiple species and creative elements must
be credited for.’ However, in contrast to more hybrid approaches, which would
understand the society–nature dualism as maintaining a misconception ‘that entities are
“essentially” either social or natural prior to their interaction with one another’ (Castree
2002: 118), Plumwood retains and defends the concepts of nature and natural systems.
She rejects concepts such as ‘naturecultures’ that aim to implode the distinction between
the two, arguing that rejecting hyperseparation is not to reject difference or
distinguishability, ‘What is lost when we refuse to acknowledge difference between
nature and culture, or when we accept an idealist or social constructionist reduction of
nature to culture? There may be a range of situations in which they are hard to separate,
but there are an important range of others in which recognizing their difference is
crucial…’ (Plumwood 2006: 144). Plumwood defends nature as a relevant contrast class
precisely because of the current ecological crisis:

There is nothing conceptually absolute, for this kind of collaborative model, about
cutting the cast of agents into humans and nature. Doing so will be appropriate in
some natural and cultural contexts and inappropriate in others. I think that over
the longer term we (p. 438) should aim to decenter the human as a contrast class
and draw our distinctions in ways that do not constantly refer back to the human
as central. Nevertheless in our present context, the human/nonhuman contrast
remains the site of a crucial drama and discourse—that of the decline of natural

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Cultural Landscapes

systems with which this paper began and the need for human attention and action
to reverse this situation.

Plumwood (2006: 127)

There are paradoxes in Plumwood's argument here that relate to a form of human
chauvinism. Given the human role in recent changes in earth surface processes,
particularly climate change, and the need for human action to reverse the situation, there
is surely a case for recognition of some strong human agency? (In this I am also taking
issue with some relational approaches that give insufficient attention to the power
differences between human and non‐human others.) On the other hand, the idea that
concerted global (human) action is now necessary in order to ‘fix’ things may be just
another example of the anthropogenic conceit.

It follows that there may well be cases where the cultural landscape concept does good
work, through for example providing a management context where traditional ecological
knowledge is recognized. Further, surely the concept of nature itself must also be
removed from the realm of the conceptual absolute? I think Plumwood's defence of
nature as an ontological category insufficiently acknowledges sophisticated arguments to
the contrary. Her thorough explication of hyperseparation and difference, in the 2006
paper and in earlier work (Plumwood 1993, 2002), are too detailed to discuss here, but
provide important and relevant resources for those of us trying to think about relations
between nature and culture.

Conclusions
I have sought in this chapter to illustrate some of the ways that materiality plays in and
out of the history of the cultural landscape concept, along with ideas about nature and
culture. For most of its history, cultural landscape has been a very material concept. It
focused first on buildings, fences, and other material human constructions, and later,
drawing on techniques from the natural and palaeoecological sciences, on more subtle
but very material changes, such as changes in the composition and abundance of forests.
If there was a dematerialization throughout the 1980s and 1990s in the attention paid to
symbolic, conceptual, and ideational dimensions of landscape, it was relatively brief and
appropriately corrective. In the case of indigenous peoples, it provided a means for
academic scholarship to acknowledge vital but intangible connections and attachments to
land. And, to draw on more recent embodied and hybrid approaches, we might argue that
intangible connections have their own materiality, inscribed in bodies, sweat, and
(p. 439)

the elusive DNA of yam species dug for thousands of years by Aboriginal women.

What are we to do with these geographic, disciplinary, and contextual differences in the
kind of work done by the cultural landscape concept? The first thing we should do is
recognize the value of the work—all of it has needed to be done at different times and in

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Cultural Landscapes

different places. The political power, albeit limited, that is being given to Aboriginal land
managers is a case in point. Amidst the diversity, the main axis of difference is between
management contexts that can use the cultural landscape concept as a means of
integrated management, also giving expression to values and attachments that do not
necessarily have material expression in the landscape, and more academic ones that
consider the conceptualization to reinforce rather than remove the binaries. Secondly, we
can acknowledge that there is nothing conceptually absolute about a cultural landscape.
We should think of it as a historically contingent concept that has played different roles in
different times and places. We should also think of the concept as provisional; according
to the range of views presented in this chapter it may or may not have outlived its
usefulness. Cultural landscape is profoundly ambiguous and oppositional even in its
linguistic construction.

For me, the demonstrated strength of human power to materially transform earth
processes, including the composition of the atmosphere itself, is reason enough to keep
the cultural landscape concept alive a while longer. It provides one way to talk about our
responsibility for environmental damage and environmental restoration, in language that
has strong vernacular resonance. Of course, we do not undertake such transformations
alone, but in partnership or conflict with a variety of living and non‐living materials—
grasses, rocks, rivers, and atmospheric carbon, to name a few.

Notes:

This chapter is dedicated to the memory of Val Plumwood, who died during the later
stages of its writing. Val was kind enough to let me read her critique of cultural
landscapes while it was still in draft form, but she did not get a chance to read my
critique of her. She no doubt would have responded, and I'm sure my argument would
have been stronger for such engagement.

Lesley Head

Lesley Head, Professor and Head of the School of Earth & Environmental Sciences,
University of Wollongong.

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Cultural Landscapes

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