The Meanings Of Landscape: Essays on Place, Space, Environment and Justice 2018049239, 9781138483927, 9781138483934, 9781351053532

Table of contents :
Cover
Endorsement
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
List of Figures
Foreword
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Landscape, philology, and the environmental
Just ask Alice
Landscape’s double meaning and the spatial appropriation of place and nature
Place and space
The “nature” of landscape
The perspective of natural science
The perspective of art and theater and the prospect of modernity’s nature
The organization of the book
Recovering the philological foundations of the environmental (geo)humanities
The chapters in brief
Note
Chapter 1: Recovering the substantive nature of landscape
Personal preface
Introduction
The duplicitous meaning of landscape
The “territorial” meaning of landscape
Landschaft as territory and community
Landschaft, social estate, and community justice
The Landschaft as a body politic
The land and law in Landschaft
Landschaft art
Landscape and country in England
Landschaft and country
Nature, custom, and landscape
Natural law and landscape
Palladian landscape
The landscaping of Landschaft
Fascist landscape
The morphology of geography’s Landschaft
Rethinking the substantive meaning of landscape
Notes
Chapter 2: Landscape, place, and the state of progress
Prologue
Introduction
Progressive custom
The political landscape
Court vs. country, lord vs. landscape
Landscape as the scene of state
The progress of landscape
The materialization of the landscape of progress
The transformation of progress
The stages of progress
Revolutionary progress
The non-place of modernity
Custom vs. modern progress
Conclusion: From utopianism to topianism
Notes
Chapter 3: Choros, place, and the spatialization of landscape
Introduction
The Platonic chora
The substantive choros of the Greek polis
Ptolemaic chorography and landscape as scenic space
Plato, Ptolemy, chorography, and chora
Platonic cosmology and landscape
Space, place, region, and choros/chora
Conclusion
Notes
Chapter 4: Are islanders insular? A personal view
Preface
Prologue: A personal tale of two islands
Is no man not unto an island? Islandic civilizational primacy
The noninsularity of the insular
Ptolemaic navigation
Islecentricism?
In the mind’s isle
Notes
Chapter 5: The case of the “missing” mask: Performance, theater, ætherial space, and the practice of landscape/architecture
Prologue a tale of two cities
Landscape/architecture and theatrical practice
The case of the missing mask
Substantial masks versus ætherial performance space
Ætherial versus spatial scenery
Personifying Britain as landscape
Turning the substantive place of the theater “outside in” and then “inside out”
An expostulation with Inigo Jones
Landscape and Pygmalion
Conclusion
Notes
Chapter 6: Performing on the landscape versus doing landscape: Perambulatory practice, sight, and the sense of belonging
Performing upon landscape versus doing landscape
Sensing landscape and the sense of belonging
Herd animals and the doing of the pedestrian landscape
Doing and practicing landscape
Doing custom versus performing tradition
“All we like sheep …”
Conclusion
Chapter 7: Heidegger, Latour, and the reification of things: The inversion and spatial enclosure of the substantive landscape – The Lake District case
Preface
Introduction
Part 1: The concept of thing – Heidegger and Latour
The reified thing
Thing studies
Defining things in the substantive landscape
The enclosure and inversion of the landscape of things
The European Landscape Convention
Part 2: Betwixt and between landscapes – The Lake District vs. the Yorkshire Dales
Community vs. nature’s space
Concluding discussion
Acknowledgments
Notes
Chapter 8: Transcendent space, reactionary modernism, and the “diabolic” sublime: Walter Christaller, Edgar Kant, and the landscape origins of modern spatial science and planning
Prelude
Perspectival space and the origins of the sublime
The space of Christaller’s reactionary modern models
Christaller and the bordering of a borderless Germany
Edgar Kant’s “landscapic” regions
Postlude
Acknowledgments
Notes
Chapter 9: Geese, elves, and the duplicitous, “diabolical” landscaped space and wild nature of reactionary modernism: Holgersson, Hägerstrand, and Lorenz
Duplicitous landscape
Nils Holgersson’s Swedish journey
Holgersson and geographical science
Holgersson and the two landscapes
The modern time-space geography of Holgersson
Nils Holgersson, Konrad Lorenz, and biological reactionary modernism
Fictional lies and real geese and Nazis
Holgersson’s “natural” landscape and ethnic cleansing
Goosey miscegenation, racial hygiene, and euthanasia
Past and contemporary non-Nazi reactionary modern parallels: Edward O. Wilson and George Monbiot
Rewilding landscape
Conclusion: Diabolic thought and reactionary modernism
Acknowledgments
Notes
References
Index

Citation preview

“Landscape is an essential concept for our time, and Kenneth Olwig is a pioneer in the recovery of the word’s meanings. His classic essays, brought together in The Meanings of Landscape, are required reading for all those who care about landscape in its many dimensions.” Anne Whiston Spirn, author of The Language of Landscape

THE MEANINGS OF LANDSCAPE

Compiling nine authoritative essays spanning an extensive academic career, author Kenneth R. Olwig presents explorations in landscape geography and architecture from an environmental humanities perspective. With inf luences from art, literature, theatre staging, architecture, and garden design, landscape has come to be viewed as a form of spatial scenery, but this reading captures only a narrow representation of landscape meaning today. This book positions landscape as a concept shaped through the centuries, evolving from place to place to provide nuanced interpretations of landscape meaning. The essays are woven together to gather an international approach to understanding the past and present importance of landscape as place and polity, as designed space, as nature, and as an inf luential factor in the shaping of ideas in a just social and physical environment. Aimed at students, scholars, and researchers in landscape and beyond, this illustrated volume traces the idea of landscape from the ancient polis and theatre through to the present day. Kenneth R. Olwig is Professor Emeritus of Landscape Architecture, Planning and Management at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Alnarp, Sweden.

THE MEANINGS OF LANDSCAPE Essays on Place, Space, Environment and Justice

Kenneth R. Olwig with a Foreword by Tim Ingold

First published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 Kenneth R. Olwig The right of Kenneth R. Olwig to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Olwig, Kenneth, author. Title: The meanings of landscape: essays on place, space, environment and justice/Kenneth R. Olwig. Description: Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018049239 | ISBN 9781138483927 (hbk) | ISBN 9781138483934 (pbk) | ISBN 9781351053532 (ebk) Subjects: LCSH: Landscapes–Philosophy. | Place (Philosophy) Classification: LCC BH301.L3 O58 2019 | DDC 712–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018049239 ISBN: 978-1-138-48392-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-138-48393-4 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-351-05353-2 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

For Karen Fog Olwig, Yi-Fu Tuan, and the memory of David Lowenthal, the scholars who have provided a continuing guiding light for my concern with the meanings of landscape

CONTENTS

List of figures xi Foreword by Tim Ingold xiv Acknowledgments xvii Introduction: Landscape, philology, and the environmental geohumanities 1 1 Recovering the substantive nature of landscape

18

2 Landscape, place, and the state of progress

50

3 Choros, place, and the spatialization of landscape

76

4 Are islanders insular? A personal view

88

5 The case of the “missing” mask: Performance, theater, ætherial space, and the practice of landscape/architecture

104

6 Performing on the landscape versus doing landscape: Perambulatory practice, sight, and the sense of belonging

129

7 Heidegger, Latour, and the reification of things: The inversion and spatial enclosure of the substantive landscape – The Lake District case

140

x Contents

8 Transcendent space, reactionary modernism, and the “diabolic” sublime: Walter Christaller, Edgar Kant, and the landscape origins of modern spatial science and planning

172

9 Geese, elves, and the duplicitous, “diabolical” landscaped space and wild nature of reactionary modernism: Holgersson, Hägerstrand, and Lorenz

198

References 223 Index 248

FIGURES

1.1 Sketch inspired by Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s painting of The Hay Harvest (1565), now in the Czech National Museum (Prague) 28 1.2 The lines of perspective focus both on the eye and on infinity 34 2.1  Engraved title page for the 1651 edition of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, as drawn by Abraham Bosse 60 3.1 The core polis of an area in modern Greece is often named Chora, using the feminine of choros, as here on the island of Mykonos 79 3.2 Ptolemy’s division of geography into geography proper, chorography, and topography, from Peter Apianus, Cosmographia82 3.3 The agora of Athens 85 4.1 The island of St. John, U.S. Virgin Islands, in the center, with St. Thomas, U.S Virgin Islands, to the left and Tortola, British Virgin Islands, above and to the right 90 4.2 St. John, U.S. Virgin Islands, from a vantage point on Bordeaux Mountain; a view of Coral Bay, bordered by the East End peninsula and Tortola, British Virgin Islands, on the horizon 90 4.3 Using palm logs, Nevisian fishermen from Brown Hill roll their heavy, Nevis-made boat up onto the beach below the village 95 4.4 The author and his wife on the back deck of the Staten Island Ferry, en route to Staten Island, with the Statue of Liberty to their right101 5.1 Scene from trial, research, production of The Masque of Blackness as directed by professor Martha Vestin, The Drama Institute, Stockholm, with whom the author collaborated 111

xii Figures

5.2 (Top left) Salamis Theater, Cyprus (Top right) Reconstruction of theater at one end of the Agora of Old Paphos, Cyprus (Below left) A scene from the round interior, open to the sky, of the contemporary reconstruction of Shakespeare’s Globe theater, originally from 1599, and a street view of the round exterior theater building, which is incongruous in today’s post-Jones London 120 5.3 (Top left) St. Paul’s Church (the “actor’s” church) designed by Inigo Jones at Covent Garden (Bottom) The façade and the interior of Jones’ pioneering neo-classical Banqueting House, begun 1619, where masques were held and banquets eaten 121 5.4 (Top) Andrea Palladio’s Teatro Olympico in Vicenza near Venice (Top left) The central portion of Teatro Olympico’s stage, which illudes a Roman street (Bottom) The interior and exterior face of the Caesars Palace Casino and shopping center in Las Vegas 125 5.5 Piazza San Marco, “Venice,” as constructed inside the Venetian Casino in Las Vegas 126 7.1 This flock of iconic Lake District Herdwick sheep, thought by some to descend from early Norse flocks, is seen here maintaining its hefted prescriptive use right, or “ewes right,” to graze a “fells” commons150 7.2 Cover of the boundary recommendations assessment for the Lakes and Dales 158 7.3 Natural England’s map showing the proposed new boundaries for the Lake District National Park and the Yorkshire Dales National Park160 7.4 This map from the boundary recommendations assessment for the Lakes and Dales shows the landscape characterization evaluation areas that have been zoned for study 161 7.5 This portion of the boundary recommendations assessment for the Lakes and Dales shows a section of the criteria used to assess the character of the Orton Fells’ landscape 162 8.1 Warsaw sunset seen from the Joseph Stalin Palace of Culture and Science174 8.2 Joseph Stalin Palace of Culture and Science 175 8.3 Warsaw erased and re-created 176 8.4 Christaller’s model 184 8.5 Von Thünen’s rings 186 8.6 These two maps by Sten De Geer correlate the physical geography of what he termed “Fennoskandia,” the “Core area of the Nordic Race”193 9.1 This drawing by Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) illustrates how the technique of constructing perspectival representation involves the use of a grid resembling a map’s graticule 199

Figures 

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9.2 Map showing the historical landskap of Sweden as divided between Mid-Sweden, Northern Sweden, and Southern Sweden 205 9.3 This Swedish twenty crown note, recently discontinued, shows the flight of Nils Holgersson on the back of Mårten gander over Scania207 9.4 Illustration of landscape as chessboard by John Tenniel from Lewis Carroll’s 1871 Through the Looking Glass 210

FOREWORD Tim Ingold

I switched on the radio early this morning to hear a weekly programme devoted to farming. There was a feature on growing and harvesting seed potatoes, and a farmer who had made this his business was explaining the importance of maintaining purity in the seed stock, of which all the potatoes that reach our tables are essentially clones. ‘We have to keep an eye out’, he said, ‘for UDVs’. ‘UDVs?’ queried the presenter. ‘Yes’, came the reply, ‘that’s undesirable variants’. Having just read the text of Kenneth Olwig’s remarkable book, which you now have before you, it struck me that the farmer’s response was truly diabolical. What makes it so is something you will discover as you read, and I am not going to steal the author’s thunder. But by way of this foreword, I do want to show why a book ostensibly concerned with the long and thorny history of the idea of landscape speaks directly to much wider issues of the fate of humanity – and by extension of the humanities, of language, letters and learning – in a world apparently caught in a diabolic spiral of contempt for the word, and consequent dehumanisation, in which the utopian dream of total techno-scientific control is turning more and more lives inside out. In this brave new world, at once universal but reserved for those of appropriate breeding, people previously used to living together in difference are cast out, like the farmer’s potatoes, as UDVs. Branded as migrants, refugees or stateless persons, they are displaced from home only to find themselves unwelcome abroad. Words are human things. They are the ways we have of making our presence felt, while also bringing into presence the persons, places and matters – that is, the topics – whereof we speak. With words we call these topics to mind, dwell on them, and join our lives with theirs, be it in friendship or hostility, commonality or difference, agreement or dispute. UDV, however, is not a word but an acronym. And if words are ways of joining with the world, acronyms serve the opposite end, of cutting us off. With the acronym we can identify the matters of our

Foreword 

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concern while at the same time turning our backs on them, abstaining from the involvement that would come from speaking their names. By identifying nonstandard potatoes as UDVs, the farmer can stand back, neither giving voice to his desire nor owning up to the skilled attentiveness that alerts him to variation. He can feign detachment, indifference and objectivity. The acronym repudiates presence, puts matters out of mind and banishes affect. But at the same time it betokens an authority based not on skill and attention but on allegedly objective principles of rational management. Thus the acronym is an instrument of oversight in both its senses: it overlooks and yet looks over, declines to attend to its referents while subjecting them to audit and control. It is no wonder that the colonisation of language by acronyms has grown in proportion to the advance of science and technology, both backing and backed by the power of corporations and the state. Nowhere is this more evident than in the field of military operations. The UK Ministry of Defence has published a list of some 20,000 acronyms, among them the well-known IED (‘improvised explosive device’), WMD (‘weapon of mass destruction’) and SAM (‘surface-to-air missile’), but also including the more sinister HK and SK (‘hard kill’ and ‘soft kill’). Some, such as NKZ (‘nuclear killing zone’), present the literally unspeakable as simple matters of fact.1 The violence the acronym does to language, here, parallels the violence that militarisation does to the land. It was, after all, the military that brought mapping and survey to the British Isles under the guise of ordnance, the artillery of war. Where the acronym reduces words to markers of identification, the cartographic map reduces places to locations in space. And if the acronym enables the military commander to speak the unspeakable, the map enables him to plan destruction on an unimaginable scale, while remaining indifferent to its human consequences. Both are diabolical for the same reason. As Kenneth Olwig will explain, the prefix dia- has its etymological source in the Greek for ‘crossover’, while bolos connotes a ‘throw’. The diabolical, then, is a throwing across, in which map and territory, language and world, having once been divided from one another, are conflated such that the territory becomes its own map, and the map its own territory. It is this diabolism that enables the military to treat the substantive landscape as a gaming board, and its inhabitants as pawns whose misfortune it may be to occupy a location targeted by a SAM, or a space marked on the map as an NKZ. The fortunes of landscape and language, as this book shows, are indissolubly bound. In the current day and age, they are equally under attack. For technoscience, words are a distraction. They get in the way, and cloud our perception. Words routinely stand accused of hiding the objective truth of things, of falsifying reality, of covering up the facts. And place attachments, for their part, are seen to stand in the way of resource extraction, global markets and international development. The contemporary world, we might say, is not just philophobic but topophobic. This is a book, to the contrary, that sets out to celebrate both word and place. Indeed its author is an unashamed philophile. As I know from personal acquaintance, Olwig always has his dictionary to hand, and will leap at any

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Tim Ingold

excuse to consult it. For him, it is a leap not out of reality but directly into it, revealing the evolution of a lifeworld in all its richness, diversity and temporal depth. And this philophilia leads, in turn, to what Olwig’s erstwhile mentor – the great humanistic geographer Yi-Fu Tuan – called topophilia, the affective bond between people and place. This is not because words stand for places or substitute for them. It is because words make places, in their very vocal and written performance. They make them in law, in custom, in the telling of stories, in the everyday conversation of neighbours, and in their coming together to deliberate on affairs in common. And the making of places, and of things as places of assembly, is also the making of the landscape – literally land that is continually shaped in the processes of human fellowship. It is in this coming together, Olwig argues, that language and landscape are rendered symbolic. Once more, he takes us on an etymological excursion, to the origins of the term in the combination of the prefix sym-, from the Greek for ‘going along together’, with the ‘throw’ of bolos. In this original sense, of ‘throwing together’, of fellowship in a shared conversation or lifeworld, the symbolic stands as the very opposite of the diabolic. Where the diabolic, having divided the strategic space of cartographic representation from its territorial foundation, cuts across and conflates the two, the symbolic takes up the stories of concurrent lives and weaves them together in their ongoing and mutually responsive cogeneration. Herein lies the lesson of this book. It is that to avoid the diabolical scenario of total technocratic control, in a world purged of UDVs, we should turn not to objective facts but to real things. These are the assemblies of discourse and wisdom, of desire and variation, which have long comprised the soil of human flourishing. It behoves us to attend to them. And to achieve this, the first step must be to overcome the philophobia that afflicts the modern mind, and that has so infected our language as to collapse its idioms into mechanical keystrokes and acronymic character-strings. We must fall back in love with words. Philology, relegated by techno-science to the margins of scholarship, as the dusty hobby of antiquarians, must once again take centre stage. In it lies nothing less that the future of scholarship, and of our common humanity. Tim Ingold University of Aberdeen

Note 1 The list, from 2014, is available at https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/ ministry-of-defence-acronyms-and-abbreviations, accessed 6 October 2018.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Chapter 1: Originally published as Kenneth R. Olwig, 1996, Recovering the substantive nature of landscape, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 86(4):630–653, doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8306.1996.tb01770.x. © The American Association of Geographers, www.aag.org, reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis Ltd, http://www.tandfonline.com on behalf of The American Association of Geographers. Chapter 2: Originally published as Kenneth R. Olwig, 2002, Landscape, place and the state of progress, in Progress: Geographical Essays, Robert David Sack, ed., pp. 22–60, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. ©2002 The Johns Hopkins University Press. Reprinted with permission of the publisher. This chapter was originally written on the occasion of Yi-Fu Tuan’s retirement for a book dedicated to Yi-Fu. Chapter 3: Originally published as K.R. Olwig, 2011, Choros, chora and the question of landscape, in Envisioning Landscapes, Making Worlds: Geography and the Humanities, Steven Daniels, Douglas Richardson, Dydia DeLyser and James Ketchum, eds., pp. 44–54, London: Routledge. ©2011 Taylor & Francis Ltd., http://www.tandfonline.com. Reprinted with permission of the publisher. This chapter was written for a book marking the inception of a new AAG focus on the humanities, which was at the same time marked by the launching of the journal GeoHumanities. Chapter 4: Originally published as K.R. Olwig, 2007, Are islanders insular? A personal view, Geographical Review 97(2):175–190. © 21, 2010, 2007 John Wiley and Sons American Geographical Society. Reprinted with permission of the publisher. This article is the outcome of a seminar on islands organized by David Lowenthal and John R. Gillis, and it was published in a special issue, edited by them, based on the seminar.

xviii Acknowledgments

Chapter 5: Originally published as Kenneth R. Olwig, 2011, Performance, ætherial space and the practice of landscape/architecture: The case of the missing mask, Social & Cultural Geography 12(3):305–318. © 2011 Taylor & Francis Ltd., http://www.tandfonline.com. Reprinted by permission of the publisher. This article was part of a special session on practiced architectures organized by Jane M. Jacobs and Peter Merriman for the 2008 Association of American Geographers annual meeting in Boston. Chapter 6: Originally published as K.R. Olwig, 2008, Performing on the landscape versus doing landscape: Perambulatory practice, sight and the sense of belonging, in Ways of Walking: Ethnography and Practice on Foot, T. Ingold and J. L. Vergunst, eds., pp. 81–91, Aldershot: Ashgate. © 2008 Taylor & Francis Ltd., http://www.tandfonline.com. Reprinted by permission of the publisher. This chapter is the outcome of a seminar held September 2005 in Aberdeen that was organized by Tim Ingold and Jo Lee Vergunst on the subject of ways of walking, which they subsequently edited and published as a book. Chapter 7: Originally published as Kenneth R. Olwig, 2013, Heidegger, Latour and the reification of things: The inversion and spatial enclosure of the substantive landscape of things – The Lake District case, Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography 95(3):251–273. © Svenska Sällskapet för Antropologi och Geografi. Reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis Ltd., http://www.tandfonline.com on behalf of Svenska Sällskapet för Antropologi och Geografi. This article was originally written for a symposium held April 24, 2012, in Stockholm in honor of Don Mitchell in connection with his receiving of the Swedish Vega medal. Chapter 8: Originally published as Kenneth R. Olwig, 2017/2018, Transcendent space, reactionary-modernism and the “diabolic” sublime: Walter Christaller, Edgar Kant, and geography’s origins as a modern spatial science, GeoHumanities, doi: 10.1080/2373566X.2017.1291310. © The American Association of Geographers, www.aag.org. Reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis Ltd., http://www.tandfonline.com on behalf of The American Association of Geographers. Chapter 9: Originally published as Kenneth R. Olwig, 2016/2017, Geese, elves, and the duplicitous, “diabolical” landscaped space of reactionary modernism: The case of Holgersson, Hägerstrand, and Lorenz, GeoHumanities 3(1):41– 64,doi: 10.1080/2373566X.2016.1245108. © The American Association of Geographers, www.aag.org. Reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis Ltd., http://www.tandfonline.com on behalf of the American Association of Geographers.

INTRODUCTION Landscape, philology, and the environmental geohumanities

It’s a great huge game of chess that’s being played —all over the world— if this is the world at all, you know. Alice in Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll (1871) The essays collected and woven together here take an historical and contemporary approach to understanding the past and present importance of landscape in relation to ideas of place, space, nature, law, and justice. The essays belong to the emerging study of the environmental and geographical humanities and the ancient study of philology, with particular focus on art and literary history, especially theater history. Landscape means different things, and does different things, depending on the historical, social, and geographical context. The essays are thus concerned with the meanings and practices of landscape as shaped by ideas of law and justice, and as entangled with nature and the environment. In these contexts the book discusses two central meanings of landscape: landscape as place, polity, and community; and the modern meaning of landscape as a scenic space. The changing conceptions of landscape, and their relation to the way societies and their environs have developed, are international in origin, having been formed as idea and practice through the centuries in places as varied as Scandinavia, The Netherlands, Britain, Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome, Italy, and America. The English meanings of landscape are thus as varied and nuanced as the international origins of the English language itself.

Just ask Alice The heart of this book lies in the humanities, or more specifically in a philological approach in which, as will be explained later, the character of landscape will

2 

Introduction

be seen to have its foundation not in the land’s physical soil or climate, but in the intellectual soil of landscape’s history and cultural geography and the associated cultural climate of its language, literature, architecture, and arts. By taking its point of departure in literature and the arts, particularly the arts combined in the theater, the book gives meaning and, literally, drama to the ways that differing conceptions of landscape have influenced how society and individuals both shape and do place, space, nature, and law. A literary inspiration for the book is a longstanding fascination with Alice’s experiences in the landscapes of Wonderland, even if Alice only gets a cameo speaking part in the final chapter. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832–1898), who wrote the Alice stories under the penname of Lewis Carroll, was concerned about the absurdities that arise when the abstract ideal logic of geometric space is conflated with the mundane world that is the place of people’s lives (see Chapter 9). This issue is fundamental to geometry going back to its Euclidean foundations because Euclid’s written theorems are usually illustrated by drawn figures showing points, lines, triangles, squares, etc. The problem is that a point in the written theorem is an ideal abstraction that, by definition, does not have magnitude or dimension, and there is a similar issue with the width of a line (NOAD 2005: point). For this reason one cannot faithfully represent a point on a textbook page with a dot, because that dot would have spatial extent, magnitude, and dimension, and a line would likewise have width. This means that making a drawn point or line in a geometry textbook is fundamentally at odds with the written text, and is thus deceptive because it is easy to conflate the abstraction described in the text with the concrete representation on the page. This problem becomes manifest with the map, because the map uses the abstract lines and points of geometry to mark, for example, the boundaries of actual places as well as their spatial locations as plotted onto the graticule of the map’s lines of latitude and longitude. In this way the abstract geometric space of the map is conflated with the concrete world of experience. This is illustrated in Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass by the drawing of a landscape scene shown in Chapter 9, Figure 9.4. Here the landscape looks both like a map with its abstract rectangular graticule and like a real substantive place. This is because these invisible geometric lines are marked in the drawing by the straightened water courses and hedges that divide the fields of an agricultural landscape into rectangular chessboard-like properties. It is this “curious” chessboard scenery that provides the scene upon which the action of the story is performed within the reversed world behind the mirror. The graphic scene depicted in the illustration (Figure 9.4) looks like a map with its rectangular graticule, but it also looks like a landscape prospect because the angle of projection of the “map” has been changed from the perpendicular to a more horizontal angle, thereby creating the illusion of three-dimensional perspectival depth. In this way the lines marked by the waterways and hedges draw the eye out to a point on the horizon where they converge upon what appears to be an infinitesimally small point in infinite space. This is an illusion too because,

Introduction 

3

of course, one cannot see into infinity and the point on the horizon cannot be infinitely small. It is the apparent realism of the perspectival illusion, leading the eye to the global horizon, that causes Alice to exclaim that the whole world looks like a great chessboard upon which people play – “if this is the world at all, you know.” But do we know, and do we get the point? These are key questions that this book examines. The illustration provides a central clue because the lines of the map’s graticule, which are normally only visible on the map, but not upon the places mapped, are made visible and tangible by the straightened waterways shown in the illustration. What we no doubt are seeing, in fact, is the landscaped outcome of using maps to survey the land into rectangular properties, and straighten streams that normally meander so that they conform to this rectangular space. In this sense the ideal, utopian realm of geometry has been conflated with the “topian” world within which people actually dwell. But to what degree are we conscious of this? Has this squared landscape become so familiar that we take it for granted? Furthermore, if we take this scene for granted, do we even consider the longterm consequences of turning the world into a global propertied chessboard upon which people compete for dominion, and to which the environment must conform? Meandering streams, for example, result in the deposition of nutrients that produce fertile meadows that simultaneously slow the movement of flood waters, whereas these same nutrients deposited at the mouth of a straightened and faster-moving stream become pollutants causing eutrophication (Olwig 2016).1 The issue, however, is not just environmental, it is also social because the squared landscape is the outcome of a process of enclosure by which land shared in common has been enclosed and privatized, thereby weakening a common foundation for community life and identity. It is basically this questioning of whether this geometrized earth can really be “the world at all” that ultimately drives this book. The philological approach taken here does not only have the traditional philological focus primarily on language and text, but also focuses on the semiotics of pictorial representation in relation to text. The figures in this book therefore represent a visual medium that is key to the message of the text, much like there is a close relationship between text and visual representation in both Carroll’s Alice literature and Dodgson’s work as a geometer, as exemplified by Figure 9.4. A similar thematic relationship between text and graphic figure is brought out in Figure 9.3, which shows the elfin hero of a geography text cum children’s book flying on the back of a goose over a perspectival scene that resembles that shown in Figure 9.4 from Alice’s wonderland. Only this time the scene has been printed upon a Swedish twenty-crown bill, implicitly adding the dimension of money as another invisible parameter shaping the properties of a propertied landscape prospect. Curiously, neither of the famous scientists discussed in the chapter seem to have wondered about or questioned, as Alice does, the absurdity of such intriguing scenes that conflate the organic and the geometric, the earth and the globe.

4 

Introduction

This discussion of Alice might lead some readers to fear that the book has also been inspired by Carroll’s/Dodgson’s nonsense poem Jabberwocky, especially regarding the quotations used from certain French philosophers. One of the philosophers, cited in Chapter 5 actually does (to quote from Jabberwocky) seem to “gyre and gimble in the wabe” – “wabe” meaning, according to Alice, the grassy plot around a sundial. But even here there is method to Carroll’s/Dodgson’s madness, because sundials are of long-standing interest to geometers, and they are also important, as will be seen, to understanding the complexities of landscape. The complications and entanglements of the meanings of landscape are frustrating to some students, who want simple definitions that they can easily quote. But these complications and entanglements also mean that landscape is good, and fun, to think with, and even to do in practice, as I hope reading the following chapters will show.

Ideas of landscape “Landscapes are culture before they are nature; constructs of the imagination projected onto wood and water and rock,” the historian Simon Schama argues in his book, Landscape and Memory (Schama 1995:61). I don’t disagree, but landscape is more than a question of culture, imagination, and natural materials. It is also the substantive legal, political, and material practices through which polities shape urban and rural places within regions and countries. And the meanings of landscape are also a question of language, as expressed in word and image, as it evolves through history and from place to place. Landscape therefore involves philological questions of how people understand and discourse about their world, shaping it on that basis. The chapters in this book thus explore landscape as an expression of the ways polities through their practices, customs, law, and justice, along with their arts, literature, and imagination, perceive and transform both places and the nature of their own being. Schama writes, in continuation of his statement quoted earlier: “But it should also be acknowledged that once a certain idea of landscape, a myth, a vision, establishes itself in an actual place, it has a peculiar way of muddling categories, of making metaphors more real than their referents; of becoming, in fact, part of the scenery” (Schama 1995:61). This is true, but this book goes a step further in arguing that this muddling process not only becomes part of the scenery, it actually creates and constitutes scenery as the medium by which modernity is staged, envisioned, and mythologized, and nature is conceptualized. Modernity exists not so much in the present as in imagined prospects for future progress, whereby the dream of modernity realizes its destiny. Key to the envisioning of modernity, it is argued in Chapter 2 “Landscape, place, and the state of progress,” is the landscape prospect with its focused perspective upon the distant and infinite future prospects of society as it develops stage by stage through time and space. This landscape thus sets the scene for a vision of modernity that is often problematic, muddled, and chimerical.

Introduction 

5

Landscape’s double meaning and the spatial appropriation of place and nature Due to the influence of landscape art, architecture, and theater staging, not to forget the British landscape garden, landscape has come to be seen as a form of spatial scenery identified with nature. Scenery, however, is only a narrowly visual and spatial way of representing, or even misrepresenting, the meaning of both landscape and nature. In these essays it is shown that landscape has long had a deeper meaning, tied to place and justice, that predates that of space and scenery. The distinction between the two senses of landscape is brought out by Samuel Johnson, a savant of both words and landscape (Mayhew 2004), in his epochal 1755 A Dictionary of the English Language. Here he defined the concept of landscape as having a disjunctive double meaning ( Johnson 1755: landscape): 1. A region; the prospect of a country. 2. A picture, representing an extent of space with the various objects in it. In sense one, “A region; the prospect of a country,” landscape means a particular kind of place, that of “a region” and “a country.” In this sense it can also mean the view or “prospect” of such a place. Region and country have a shared meaning in Johnson’s dictionary. Country is thus defined in the dictionary as both “a tract of land; a region” and as “the inhabitants of any region” ( Johnson 1755: country). Country therefore refers both to a group of people, as when it is written that “the country rose up against the king,” and the particular place inhabited by that people. An example of such a country given in Johnson’s dictionary, using a quote from Shakespeare, is “Hereford,” in which he refers both to the city of Hereford and its region, the county of Herefordshire (“shire” being a Medieval name for a county). Herefordshire is a county with countrymen who are represented in the English parliament and who make up the larger country of England, of which Herefordshire is a part. Landscape in this primary sense is thus a place and polity, with a particular history, that has substantive legal and political rights and obligations. It is also a prospect of such a country and place, which means it is something that can be seen and thus has materiality as the environment of that place. It can thus be represented, comprehended, and appreciated visually, as well as with the other senses (Bunkse 2007). It thereby engages the feelings, as discussed in Chapter 3 “Choros, place, and the spatialization of landscape” and Chapter 6 “Performing on the landscape versus doing landscape: Perambulatory practice, sight, and the sense of belonging.” This primary sense of landscape as place is also found, variously spelled, in other members of the Germanic family of languages to which English belongs (e.g., Swedish landskap; Dutch landschap). In Johnson’s sense two, “A picture, representing an extent of space, with the various objects in it,” an odd disjunctive slide occurs in the meaning of landscape. Its meaning shifts here from a substantive place to a space, as represented in a picture, which effectively frames objects within its space. Landscape thus

6 

Introduction

becomes the pictorial representation of a geometrical abstraction, space, that is not specific to any place, polity, or history. Rather, as in geometry, it is seen to express timeless laws that are foundational to much natural science. This spatial sense is key to what this book shows to be the predominant, specifically modern meaning of landscape in which place has become transformed into the space of pictorial scenery. How this occurred, as a consequence of the Renaissance rediscovery of the archetypal cartography of the ancient Greco-Roman astronomer and astrologer Ptolemy, is the subject of Chapter 3 “Choros, place, and the spatialization of landscape.” Choros (χώρος), in ancient Greek, basically meant “place,” “region,” and “country,” and choros has been interpreted to mean roughly the same as landscape in Johnson’s first definition. The meaning of choros as an historically generated, substantive place and polity was spatialized due to the influence of Ptolemy’s redefinition of the term “chorography” to mean a cartographically, and thereby geometrically, determined spatial region. In this way an ancient Greek concept for a place, governed by a polity, was transformed into a space, governed by the laws of natural science and geometry. The choroi of places have centers, but they also, as the anthropologist Tim Ingold has pointed out, “are centres – they have no boundaries” (Ingold 1993: 155–156). In the Ptolemaic geographical and astrological tradition the nature of a location and its culture was significantly determined by its climate as governed by its location on the earth envisioned as a cosmic globe. The original, nonmodern meaning of landscape, referring to a substantive place, has nevertheless persisted alongside the conceptualization of landscape as scenery, as illustrated by the present-day definition of landscape in the Council of Europe’s European Landscape Convention as “an area, as perceived by people, whose character is the result of the action and interaction of natural and/or human factors” (C.O.E. 2000a: chap. 1, art. 1; Olwig 2007a). One reason for the continued existence of the notion of landscape as place, despite the spatial fixation of modernity, is that the older substantive sense is linked to ideas of law and morality rooted in customary and common law, the legal heritage upon which the Anglo-American legal system is built. The modern notion of landscape, on the other hand, is rooted in ideas of top-down “natural” law and statutory law going back to the formation of the modern centralized state, as argued in Chapter 1 “Recovering the substantive nature of landscape.” This chapter was written at a time when it was commonly believed, as prominently argued then by Denis Cosgrove (Cosgrove 1984) and other “new cultural geographers,” that the concept of landscape had originated in the Renaissance with the rise of perspectival representation, and thus effectively was essentially coequal with Johnson’s second definition of landscape as pictorial scenic space. Chapter 1 documents that there was an older originary sense of landscape as polity and place that preexisted the scenic sense and which was still relevant in practice. This realization, however, does not contradict the importance of the work of new cultural geographers, such as Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels, in uncovering the seminal significance of landscape scenery to the

Introduction 

7

construction of the modern world (Cosgrove and Daniels 1988). It rather brings out the oppositions between the older and the newer meaning of landscape that continue to contradict the narrative of modernity, and the role of landscape in that narrative, something with which Cosgrove himself later came to agree (Cosgrove 2004; 2006).

Place and space As is suggested by the preceding discussion of the transformation of the meaning of landscape from place and polity to scenic space, a similar transformation also occurs with the meaning of place. It is more difficult, however, to trace this transformation using dictionaries because they tend to simply elide the meaning of place and spatial location, as in the first definition of place in the New Oxford American Dictionary as: “a particular position or point in space” (NOAD 2005: place). Yi-Fu Tuan, in his pioneering work on space and place, argued that place could not be reduced to a location in space: As location place is one unit among other units to which it is linked by a circulation net; the analysis of location is subsumed under the geographer’s concept and analysis of space. Place, however, has more substance than the word location suggests: it is a unique entity, a ‘special ensemble’ … it has a history and meaning. Place incarnates the experiences and aspirations of a people. Place is not only a fact to be explained in the broader frame of space, but it is also a reality to be clarified and understood from the perspectives of the people who have given it meaning. (Tuan 1974b:213) Tuan was my doctoral thesis adviser at the University of Minnesota’s geography department at the time, and his ideas have contributed importantly to the approach taken here to the meanings of place and space (see also Tuan 1974; 1977). I had come to geography after completing a master’s degree in Scandinavian studies, which was effectively the discipline called Nordic philology in Scandinavia. This is why this book is also informed by a philological interest in the history of language, literature, and the arts in relation to place, space, and landscape. Taking such a philological approach, in which the etymology of words as found in dictionaries is analyzed in historical context, it can be argued that place derives from the Greek as the shortened form of plateia (hodos) πλατεία (ὁδός) meaning broad (way), suggesting an open place or square where streets meet can often provide the site of a plaza, piazza, plaza, Platz, or place. These words, in fact, are etymological descendants of plateia, and this is what plateia (πλατεία) means in Greek to this day. The plateia, in this sense, is a place, like the somewhat mysterious zero in mathematics, that holds a place (Olwig 2005d; 2006). In this case it is a place where things take place, such as when the Greeks assembled at the place of an agora in order to represent

8 

Introduction

and govern their choros, as described in Chapter 3. In Northern Europe, there were similar gatherings, in similar open places, called things (or moots/meetings). This was where polities formed to govern and define the things within the area of their landscape, as discussed in Chapter 7 “Heidegger, Latour, and the reification of things: The inversion and spatial enclosure of the substantive landscape – The Lake District case” The essence of the substantive landscape, as discussed in Chapters 1 and 7, is usefully captured by the anthropologist Anna Tsing as that place in which political moots could be gathered to discuss things, that is, issues of importance. A landscape is a gathering in the making. This definition lends itself to analysis of many of the problems which landscape studies can address. Landscapes are both imaginative and material; they encompass physical geographies, phenomenologies, and cultural and political commitments. (Tsing 2017:7) This book is concerned with the causes of the transition from the first sense of landscape, as polity and place, to the second sense of landscape, as spatial scenery, and its consequences for the understanding of place and space, and the use and abuse of nature and justice. In this context it is important to understand the way the concept of nature came to be conflated with that of landscape.

The “nature” of landscape The idea of landscape as pictorial, spatial scenery emerged during the Renaissance and Enlightenment at about the same time as nature came to be similarly defined as scenery, so that the two concepts effectively often merged. Coming from the Latin word for “birth,” nature had originally been thought of as a behind-the-scenes generative force manifested by the fertile combination of elements that brings about life, and which determines something’s normal inborn character or “nature.” Nature thereby also had a powerful normative meaning differentiating the natural from the unnatural; that which fosters life, and that which fosters death. To the ancients, nature develops as an embryonic principle of growth and fertility in a circular way from birth to childhood to maturity and thence to death and rebirth. In classical Greece and Rome, and throughout most of the subsequent European history, pastoral society was identified with a natural state of being. This is because pastoral society was seen as based on an ideally harmonious and fertility generating interaction both among people as a community sharing common resources and between humans, animals, plants, and the soil of the common lands that they shaped together as a substantive landscape. Pastoral society was identified with the state of birth and the childhood of humanity as a natural community of social beings, as opposed to a preexisting wild state, which was regarded as unnatural

Introduction 

9

and nonhuman because, as the first century Roman philosopher Lucretius put it (Lucretius 1951:199–200; Olwig 1984:7): Through many decades of the sun’s cyclical course they [mankind] lived out their lives in the fashion of wild beasts roaming at large. … They could have no thought of the common good, no notion of the mutual restraint of morals and laws. The individual, taught only to live and fend for himself, carried off on his own account such prey as fortune brought him. When the meaning of nature and landscape merged, nature came to be defined as “natural scenery” (Merriam-Webster 1993: nature) and landscape, in this same pictorial way, began to be defined as: “a picture representing a view of natural inland scenery” (Merriam-Webster 1993: landscape). Nature thereby ceased to be “behind the scenes” and became the scenes themselves (Olwig 1993a; 2004a). Landscape is “inland” in this definition because the prefix land no longer means land in the sense of the place of a people (e.g., Scotland), but land in the sense of soil, so that landscape must be differentiated from “seascape” (O.E.D. 1971: landscape). The specifically pictorial sense of landscape, furthermore, fades into the background as landscape comes to be perceived as natural scenery seen implicitly as if it were in a picture, as in the definition: “a portion of territory that can be viewed at one time from one place” (Merriam-Webster 1993: landscape). Like the “Cheshire Cat” in Alice in Wonderland that sublimates into a smile, landscape also goes from being a material substantive place that can be both viewed and represented in a picture to being the picture itself and finally the sublime space of the view.

The perspective of natural science The prospect, perceived from a single “point of view,” can be traced to the Renaissance development of central point perspective based on the Euclidean geometrical techniques of cartography. In perspectival scenic representation the lines of perspective converge on the singular eye while simultaneously leading it out to another point of convergence in what appears to be the infinite spatial distance. Perspectival pictorial representation, like the map, is thus effectively a representation of “an extent of space, with the various objects in it,” as Johnson insightfully put it. This geometrically constructed optical technique developed within the emerging natural sciences of the Enlightenment and it mimics, for example, the way the sun’s (or moon’s) rays – the source of the earth’s literal “enlightenment” – appear to focus on the eye when reflected in a body of water at sunrise or sunset. The eye is thus drawn out along the ethereal path of light to its celestial source in space. The evolution of the ancient Greek notion of æther as the fifth, “quintessential,” element and the modern fetishized concept of space is explored in Chapter 5: “The case of the ‘missing mask’: Performance, theater, ætherial space, and the practice of landscape/architecture.” The recurrent focus

10 

Introduction

on the rising or setting sun or moon in landscape painting thereby reinforces the idea that painting, as Leonardo da Vinci put it: is the sole imitator of all viable works of nature … a subtle invention which brings philosophy and subtle speculation to bear on the nature of all forms—sea and land, plants and animals, grasses and flowers—which are enveloped in light and shade. Truly painting is a science, the true-born child of nature. (quoted in Olwig 2002b:145) The merging of the meaning of landscape painting with the meaning of nature thus involved a mode of surveying and perceiving the earth that was similar to, and drew upon, the scientific instruments being developed in the Renaissance and Enlightenment to visually perceive and survey the earth, and frame it within the abstract space of the map, diagram, and landscape picture. When the map was reconfigured to represent the world as scenery by changing its angle of projection (as when one tilts a Google Earth map), it became possible to use the resulting landscape scene as a tool to structure the geographical representation and study of the earth. The object of scientific geographical study thus became the physical landscape conceptualized as map and scenery, like the scenery on a theater stage. This is problematic, of course, because the image of nature created on a stage through the perspectival representation of geometric space is an illusion. The space of geometry may be rational, but it is not, as seen earlier, substantial – the lines and points with which scenic space is created has no substance (see Chapter 5). We can thus create environments that illude landscape scenes, as with the landscape parks surrounding many English estates, but in the end they are the creation of human artifice and will not survive without artifice. When we manage nature conceptualized as scenery, as with a landscape park, we are dealing with a kind of circular tautology in which the perspectival representation of the landscape architect provides the template for a material scene, which then comes to be perceived and managed as nature. The same occurs at a larger scale, as in the case of some national parks that are preserved and managed for their scenic qualities, as exemplified in Chapter 7.

The perspective of art and theater and the prospect of modernity’s nature The scenic prospect is identified in the aforementioned definitions of landscape with pictures, and the picturing of nature, and this context suggests that the landscape is a genre in art. Landscape paintings are, of course, ubiquitous in art museums, on walls in people’s homes and in books about landscape, but landscape theater scenery is arguably historically more interesting when it comes to the shaping of the meaning of landscape, it is just less easy to study because it is ephemeral – discarded when the play ceases to be performed. It is especially

Introduction 

11

interesting because landscape theater scenery, as discussed in Chapter Five, seeks to create a total spatial environment in which the drama and its audience are located. Theater scenery also changes in stages, following the outline of the narrative plot. As argued in Chapter Two, theater scenery played a key role in framing the idea of linear progress in stages toward the vision of a future modern, scientifically planned, society. One of the meanings of landscape listed by Johnson is “the prospect of a country.” “Prospect,” as Johnson explains in his dictionary, means both “a view of something distant” and a “view into futurity.” This dual meaning derives from the word’s origin in the Latin prospicere, meaning to “look forward,” from pro“forward” + specere “to look” (NOAD 2005), and this leads in turn to the idea of forming a mental picture of an anticipated event (Chapter 2). This dual sense is particularly well exemplified in central point perspectival representation because the lines of perspective draw the eye out through a geometric space that is theoretically infinite in space and eternal in time, like the space of the map and globe. But the tricky thing to remember when looking forward in a global world is that one’s gaze eventually also curves and returns to its point of origin. One is therefore also looking backward in a forward looking way – not the least because time moves from East to West and, for that reason, history has also been thought to move in the same direction. Columbus, who traveled west to what is now called the West Indies, thus thought he had returned to Eden when he met the scantily dressed, seemingly primitive “Indians” living in the Indies of the east and discovered what came to be know as the “New World.” Though the prospect of the distant sublime landscape, as in the American West, looked forward to a modern future, it also involved a dialectical return to an imagined wild original natural state of society, represented as the buckskinned pioneer in the Western film genre, that mirrored the rugged individualism admired by the industrialists (Olwig 1995a). The imagined distant modern future thereby fused with elements inspired by what was perceived to be the “natural” state of man in a distant past (Olwig 2002b). The rise of a consciously modern and individualized industrial society in the eighteenth century thus, paradoxically, brought with it the naturalization of a wild and raw landscape, in which an individualized “man” confronts and challenges a sublime, elevated nature. This wild nature, with its raw materials sought after by prospecting explorers, was seen to provide the key to a prospective future modern revolution driven by industry, at the same time as it became the ideal wild landscape to be preserved in “natural” National Parks (Olwig and Olwig 1979; Olwig 1995a). Much as industry craved raw materials to be fired and forged in sublimely “dark satanic mills,” as the poet William Blake famously put it, the aesthetics of the industrial age required sublime nature. While some, like Blake, longed to restore England’s pleasant pastures, the cult of the sublime worshipped an ideal of wild nature, be it the nature of the industrialist’s raw materials or that of the aesthete fleeing industrial urbanity. There is thus a significant difference between the ideas of harmony between society and nature as envisioned in pastoral literature and art, and those identified with the sublime confrontation of man and

12  Introduction

nature, raw in tooth and claw, in a wilderness landscape where only the fittest survive (Olwig 1995a). Nature, historically thought of as a generative force, thus comes to be seen in scenic terms that privilege wild, often infertile (but mineral rich) environments. This has important consequences for the way society shapes and defines what is nature, and what is not, and hence the way nature is framed as the object for environmental management. It was not the least in North America that the prospect of progress linked to the conquest by white European settlers of distant wild and sublime western scenic prospects came to epitomize national identity. It was here in America that the scenic wilderness “national” park was invented. The wilderness ideal helped naturalize a colonial imperialism that simultaneously required the removal, and even extermination, of the previous native population, often deemed to be racially inferior, and the obliteration of the memory of this population. This was notably the case with the Native Americans living in places like Yosemite Valley whose cultural landscape was rewilded as wilderness scenery after their extermination or expulsion from the valley (Olwig 1995a). It is less well known that this brutal westward expansion into the setting sun helped inspire the Nazi German desire to expand in the name of nature and a supposed German love of freedom in the opposite direction, toward the rising sun in the East, at the expense of a native Slavic population that they deemed to be inferior beings with a slave mentality. The role of scenic landscape and the sublime in the formation of influential Nazi spatial ideals which continue to have an effect on environmental and spatial planning, is the subject of Chapter 8 “Transcendent space, reactionarymodernism and the ‘diabolic’ sublime: Walter Christaller, Edgar Kant, and the landscape origins of modern spatial science and planning.” The interest in Nazism, space, nature, and landscape in the last two chapters goes back to Chapter 1 and, especially, Chapter 7. When I wrote this essay I was not aware that the German philosopher Martin Heidegger’s flirtation with Nazism was lifelong. The French anthropologist Bruno Latour, however, read my article and apparently did think of the Nazi connection insofar as he subsequently invited me to participate in a small symposium in Paris on the subject of the German Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt. Schmitt had become trendy in some intellectual circles largely because of his use by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. Latour had referenced Schmitt’s book The Nomos of the Earth: In the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum (Schmitt 2006) and he was apparently worried about the possibility of a link to Nazism if he pursued Schmitt’s ideas. This seminar awakened me to the need to address the revival of Nazi thought, even in polite circles, and the need to explain why the attraction of Nazism is much more complex, and enduring, than the madness of the Jewish Holocaust. Schmitt’s concern with nomos, meaning “law,” in relation to the geography of the earth reminded me of the importance of the idea of the search for “nomothetic” spatial laws by the proponents of spatial science and planning, and the inspiration that Schmitt drew from the Icelandic concept of Landnám in justifying territorial conquest reminded me of the role of Scandinavia in inspiring Nazi thought. Both these subjects are addressed

Introduction 

13

in Chapters 8 and 9. The point of Chapters 8 and 9 is to show the complexity of the “diabolic” discourse of “reactionary modernism” that is usually identified with Nazism, but that is also characteristic of the landscape of modernity more generally, and which I argue is embedded in the perspectival representation of landscape as scenic space. This is because perspectival artworks often combine nostalgic idyllic images of a past harmony between man and nature that are framed within the rational modern space of perspectival representation. Chapter 8 is concerned with the connection between landscape, the diabolic, and spatial science and planning. Though many readers may not be aware of this, “space” is a dominant concept in much planning and architecture, and “spatial” concepts exert considerable influence upon the way our built and natural environments are planned and designed. Chapter 9: “Geese, elves, and the duplicitous, ‘diabolical’ landscaped space of reactionary modernism: Holgersson, Hägerstrand, and Lorenz,” on the other hand, is concerned with the links between the spatial framing of the nation and landscape as a diabolic conflation of place, space, and nature, which influenced both spatial and biological theory, and which has links to both Nazi and non-Nazi thinking concerning wildness and landscape.

The organization of the book The journal articles and book chapters republished in this book have been edited, updated, and elided so as to create a more coherent work and avoid too much repetition. They are therefore not exact reproductions of the originals and should not be cited as such. In some cases figures have also been changed, removed, or added. This is because the contemporary mania to monetize and privatize has meant that it is virtually necessary to have a law degree to negotiate the jungle of copyright law, and it can be very difficult (and expensive) to obtain permission to publish a given illustration. As this situation has become more complicated over time, some of the previously published illustrations thus had to be abandoned. Fortunately just about any artwork mentioned in the book can easily be found on the Internet. The chapters are intended to be read in order because each builds somewhat on the last, but they can also be read individually on their own and in differing orders. From the outset I saw these articles as being something like the sketches an artist makes before painting the whole picture, and the idea is that by collecting them together here this picture will gradually emerge, though more as a cubist collage than as a landscape sofa piece. The backbone of the collage created by this collection of essays is a philological approach that is linked to the environmental and geographical humanities.

Recovering the philological foundations of the environmental (geo)humanities [The character of a people] does not have its foundation in the land’s soil or climate, it has its soil, its intellectual soil in History, out of which it

14 

Introduction

springs – has its intellectual climate in Language, in which it lives and moves. Joachim Frederik Schouw (1789–1852) Landscape, and with it our ideas of place, space, and the environment, has largely been appropriated and subsumed by the visual tools and thinking of the natural sciences. The natural sciences have thereby come to eclipse the important role the humanities have played historically and still play in comprehending and constituting landscape as a substantive place. Of particular importance to the recovery of landscape as understood and constituted through the humanities, I argue, is the revitalization of the study of philology, with its concern for history, language, and geography. Etymologically philology derives from the ancient Greek φιλολογία (philología), in which φίλος (phílos) means loved, beloved, dear, friend, and λογία (logía) refers to speech, word, and reason. Together they mean love of argument or reasoning, love of learning and literature. Historically philology was nearly synonymous with humanistic intellectual life, encompassing not only Greek, Roman, and Biblical literature but also, when examined in an historical and geographical context, language, literature, and the arts more generally. As James Turner points out in his book on the history of philology, “Until the natural sciences usurped its throne in the last third of the nineteenth century, philology supplied probably the most influential model of learning.” He adds, “The immense resonance of philology as a paradigm of knowledge is much less well known today than the parallel influence of natural science,” and this is “because science won and philology lost” ( J. Turner 2014:29:x–xi). Though Turner’s point is well taken, it also involves an oversimplification that can be illustrated by the case of Joachim Frederik Schouw (1789–1852). The epigram with which this section begins is taken from an 1844 lecture held by Professor Schouw entitled “Scandinavia’s Nature and People” (Schouw 1845:15; trans 1852:241). Schouw was a scientist, in fact an internationally prominent Danish botanist whose plant geography was in the same league as that of the famous geographer Alexander von Humboldt. Yet, as the epigram shows, Schouw was an ardent defender of an essentially philological approach to understanding the relationship of people to their natural environment. His work was, furthermore, an inspiration to the American geographer and philologist George Perkins Marsh (1801–1882) who helped found the modern conservation movement (Lowenthal 2000; Olwig 1980). He also arguably was an early exponent of what has subsequently become known as the idea of the “Anthropocene,” which is to say the idea that we are living in an era in which human society plays a dominant role in shaping nature (Lowenthal 2000; Marsh 2003 [1864]; Olwig 2003b; Haraway and Noboru Ishikawa 2016). Schouw not only advocated for an essentially philological approach, he was also against the universalistic romantic arguments of the “natural philosophers” of his time, such as the Danish physicist Hans Christian Ørsted and the DanishGerman geologist Henrik Steffens (Chapter 1). They effectively argued that the

Introduction 

15

character of a people has its foundation in the land’s soil or climate, thus sowing the seeds for what later became known as blood and soil nationalism (Olwig 1984:61–64; 1994; 1999; 2002b:166–175). Schouw was a leader in the Danish movement against absolute despotism and for democracy, helping to write the new 1849 democratic constitution, but he was not a nationalist. He was rather a leading pan-Scandinavianist, favoring a Scandinavian federation of regions, similar to the landscape regions treated in this book ( Jones and Olwig 2008; Olwig 1995b) or the federated political landscape of the Netherlands. Scientists, per se, thus cannot be seen to be inherently opposed to philology or more humanistic approaches to landscape and the environment. The articles in this book owe much to the thinking of both Schouw and Marsh, particularly as Marsh’s ideas have been interpreted, expanded upon, and made to apply to the contemporary world by David Lowenthal (1965; 2000; 2015). Following in the tradition of Schouw and Marsh (Olwig 1980) this book therefore does not dismiss the importance of natural scientific knowledge, it just questions the role of the sciences when they are (mis)used to generate ideologies in which nature determines culture (Olwig 1984; 2009). Cosmologies and ideologies promoted by the natural sciences in the tradition of natural philosophy nevertheless have arguably come to predominate over the role of philology, and the humanities generally, in comprehending society–environment relations. The overpowering success of the natural sciences as a template for thought well beyond the boundaries of the study of the physical world does not mean that philology has disappeared, just that it has gone somewhat underground, not the least in Anglo-America. This means that philology no longer plays the unifying role that it once did in the humanities and in the understanding of landscape and the environment. This is a particularly notable problem with regard to the fate of geography, a discipline that along with the study of history and languages is vital to philology’s paradigm. Geography has thus gone from being a field incorporating a strong historical and humanistic element in a broad concern with landscape and environment, to becoming by the end of the twentieth century a field largely dominated by the natural sciences mindset of “spatial science,” as discussed in Chapters 8 and 9. There has, however, been an ongoing humanistic counterreaction to this development. It has been fostered by geographers linked often to the study of geography as a nexus of history, anthropology, and geography associated with the landscape geography of Carl Sauer at the University of California Berkeley and the writings of John B. Jackson. These included Yi-Fu Tuan, David Lowenthal, Clarence Glacken, and Edmunds Bunkse, and their work has been furthered by a following generation of geographers, not all of whom are humanistic, including Denis Cosgrove, Steve Daniels, Tim Cresswell, Mike Jones, Tomas Germundsson, Tom Mels, and Don Mitchell. It is from academic and personal contact with these geographers that much of the inspiration for this book has been derived. It is not only geographers, however, who have contributed to the historical, philological, and generally humanistic understanding of landscape that has inspired this book. This book also owes a personal and

16 

Introduction

intellectual debt to, among the others, the anthropologists Tim Ingold, Werner Krauß, and Karen Fog Olwig, the landscape architects Anne Whiston Spirn and Shelley Egoz, the natural historian Graham Bathe, and the historians Bill Cronon and Andrew Humphries.

The chapters in brief The first chapter is concerned with the relationship between the predominant modern meaning of landscape as spatial scenery and the historically original meaning of landscape as a polity and its places that ideally form a nexus of community, justice, nature, and environmental equity. It is this latter, originary meaning of landscape that I have termed the “substantive” landscape, in which substantive is used to mean “real rather than apparent,” “belonging to the substance of a thing,” also as used in the legal sense of “creating and defining rights and duties.” The scenic landscape, on the other hand, is something that is performed upon, like a stage, within a scaled, hierarchical, spatial structure of authority, as in a state’s territorial systems of governance or its property regimes in which state or private ownership are key to social position and power. Chapter 2 examines how history and progress, via the scenic landscape, came to be perceived as a linear, step-by-step march of time that left the historical past behind and often literally in ruins. Chapter 3 shows how the chorographic philological understanding of place and polity, as creatures of historical and geographical narrative understanding, became reduced to cartographic and perspectival pictorial representation in a timeless, abstract, and empty Euclidean space. The next four chapters introduce an anthropo-philological approach. This is an approach in which the philologist’s love of knowledge and learning is brought to bear not just in libraries and art museums, but also through participating in and observing the life, language, and culture of places. This approach is inspired by Ingold’s call to use “the knowledge born of immediate experience, by privileging the understandings that people derive from their lived, everyday involvement in the world” (Ingold 1993:152). Chapter 4, “Are islanders insular? A personal view” explores, based on my experiences as a Staten Islander, the differing ways that islands are perceived and used in practice according to whether they are regarded as being parts of an archipelagic world of places, or as being enframed in cartographic space. Chapter 5 elucidates how the classical elements, or essences, of air, water, fire, and earth were reduced to a “quintessential” essence, “æther,” which informed the conception of space as materialized in the landscape scenes constructed within the theater. The ætherial performance space constituted within the scenery of the theater inspired, in turn, the architecture that shaped the landscapes of the world outside the theater. It thereby turned the world itself effectively into a performance space, as is illustrated here by the example of my experience of Las Vegas. This same “æther,” furthermore, can be seen to have evolved into the modern notion of space, as used in physics, physical planning, geography, and architecture. In Chapter 6 the performance of walking within a

Introduction 

17

scenic landscape is contrasted to the practice of walking a substantive landscape, the contrast being linked to place identity and legal custom. Chapter 7 builds on the argument of Chapter 6, discussing how the meaning of thing and things changes radically depending on the meaning, practice, or performance of landscape. While the substantive landscape was constituted both by and with “things that matter,” the scenic landscape is constituted as an assemblage of things as matter. Finally, the last two chapters are concerned with the “diabolic” landscape that derives from the fact that the perspectival space of landscape as scenery is constructed using “modern” science and mathematics. The scenes envisioned within this space, however, are often of an idealized premodern nature, so that the landscape scene represents both the modern and the reaction to the modern. This combination of the modern and the reactionary is seen to be “diabolic” rather than “symbolic.” Diabol-, the root of diabolic, means to throw across, and thereby to confuse and mystify meaning. Symbol, on the other hand, deriving from the Greek symballein, means to throw together. Symbols are fundamental to creative thought because they throw together different things in a way that can lead to new and fruitful ideas, whereas diabols confuse matters. Symbols, however, can become diabolic if taken literally, so that confusion is created when it is forgotten that the symbol is a creature of the creative mind and not of nature. Reactionary-modern landscape scenery can thereby transform cultural symbols into diabols because it confuses symbolic representation with that which is represented. The potentially diabolic character of landscape scenery is illustrated in Chapter 8 by the example of the diabolism of Nazi spatial planning, and in Chapter 9 by the way the landscape symbolism of a children’s book can be seen to morph into forms of spatial and environmental perception and planning that can be deemed “diabolic” – especially in the case of the Nazi idealization of wild nature, and its relation to the modern rewilding movement.

Note 1 Please note that all references in the text that cite simply “Olwig” refer to publications by Kenneth R. Olwig. Publications by Karen Fog Olwig will be cited as (K.F. Olwig …), and texts by Mette Fog Olwig will be cited as (M.F. Olwig …).

1 RECOVERING THE SUBSTANTIVE NATURE OF LANDSCAPE

Personal preface I became interested in what I have termed the “substantive landscape” while teaching in Stockholm at a postgraduate institute for social and physical planners under the Nordic Council. Though I am American born and educated I was nevertheless hired to represent Denmark, where I resided, in a Nordic institute where there was no lingua franca, as everybody was expected to communicate in their home language – in my case Danish. This was a situation in which I needed to be especially attentive to the nuances of language because even though the Scandinavian languages are relatively closely related, there are also significant differences and Norway even has two official languages, plus a myriad of dialects. It was in this context that I discovered that the Swedes often used the term “landscape” (landskap in Swedish) to refer to an historical place, often their home region (see Chapter 9). I thus found that ordinary Swedes often used landscape in a sense that was very different from the scenic sense that predominated in my native language, English, but which also could be found in Swedish. This made me curious about the origin, meaning and history of the meaning of landscape as place and region, and I discovered that the Swedish meaning of landscape as place was also found in English and other Germanic languages prior to the advent of the scenic meaning of landscape but that it had become virtually lost to memory in the academic literature on the subject. My Swedish experience raised the question of why it was that the meaning of landscape changed from that of a place to that of a scenic space. Differences in meaning in the use of landscape between differing European languages had hitherto been explained by English-speaking academics as having to do with the idea that each language was a separate entity, more or less sealed off from the others. My teaching in Stockholm, however, made me acutely aware that

Recovering the substantive nature of landscape  19

in practice different languages blend into each other and only become sharply distinguished and demarcated as different languages when nation-states demand an official, standardized language – something that was difficult in the relatively newborn independent state of Norway. My realization that people do not speak in radically different languages meant that variations in meaning attached to the same word usually could be explained by varying geographical and historical factors, not by hard boundaries between national languages. There is thus a gradual transition between Swedish and Norwegian along the long and relatively porous border between the two countries, and the same applies, I realized, among most of the countries of continental Europe. The English Channel and the Atlantic Ocean, on the other hand, have contributed to the ability of the nation-states of Britain and the Americas, that have a shared Anglo-American language history, to construct a somewhat uniform language, distinct from those of the continent from where the English language originated. This can explain the apparent tendency for modern English speakers to know only one language and to be alienated from others. This chapter will show, however, that this was not always the case. In the Renaissance the leading cultural figures who shaped the language, such as William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, were quite cosmopolitan, belonging to circles that moved throughout the cultures of Europe. It was in this context that the modern meaning of landscape was shaped and gained its modern predominant meaning as scenery. My chance discovery that one of the earliest uses of landscape to mean scenic space is found in the Renaissance English Masque of Blackness (1605) provided an important key to understanding the political and social relationship between the two different meanings of landscape. As a kind of theatrical Rosetta Stone, the masque appears again and again in this book, playing an important role in explicating the relationship between landscape, place, space, nature, and justice. The personal context in which the essays in the book took shape is important because it shows that there can be an anthropological dimension to philology. Thus, one becomes familiar with the language, literature, history, and geography of a place not just by studying in libraries, but by living in or visiting the place whereby it becomes possible to both observe and participate in the expressive, reflective, and practical “doing” of landscape in the place. I am therefore happy to have been able to live and teach in geography and landscape architecture departments in Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, while continuously maintaining a home in Copenhagen, shared with a Danish anthropologist who has been both a scholarly and matrimonial partner (see Chapter 4). The discussion of Greek is likewise informed by visiting and living in Greece (Ermoupolis, Syros), and even the approach taken to theater is to some degree a product of participating in the production of the Masque of Blackness and the experience, in place, of different theaters, ancient and modern. Living and working in Europe has furthermore meant that I have frequently had the opportunity to lecture and travel all over the continent. This has offered many possibilities to discuss the meanings of landscape with other scholars, and to get involved with organizations and

20  Recovering the substantive nature of landscape

people actively working with landscape as a concept or a practice, such as the Council of Europe in its promulgation of the European Landscape Convention; the United Kingdom–based Landscape Research Group; the shepherds, public officials and other engaged citizenry of the English Lake District; and the reindeer-herding Sami of northern Scandinavia. Furthermore, as a geographer married to an anthropologist, and with a daughter who is a hybrid of both, I have also been enabled to do much the same in the Americas, the West Indies, India, and Africa. Though the chapters in this book concentrate on Europe, these travels have brought an awareness of the relevance of its themes to places as varied as West Indian islands (Chapter 4), Las Vegas (Chapter 5), and even Mexico (Fernández-Christlieb 2015; Olwig 2015a). This chapter explicates the key distinction between the “substantive” and the “scenic” landscape, which is central to the following chapters in the book. It also brings into play the book’s key themes: place, space, nature, theater, and justice. The use of geometry to construct the scenic landscape is relatively easy to explain in abstract theoretical terms, whereas the substantive landscape is difficult to understand in this way because it is a product of a long history, and it reflects a notion of historically evolved customary law, which is best understood in the context of its development over time. This means, however, that this chapter includes much literary and art history, as well as social and geographical history, which might seem tiresome or “academic” to some but stimulating to others. Readers in the first category might therefore wish to skip this chapter, and then return to it when it becomes apparent that the question of the historical origins of the substantive landscape is actually quite interesting!

Introduction The full complexity of the ideas of landscape and nature has been largely lost due to a modern tendency to appropriate the meaning of landscape to a concept of nature as scenery. The resulting conflation of meaning has not only led to questionable forms of blood and soil nationalism, it has obscured the substantive meaning of landscape, and related concepts, in European and North American society. This study of the evolving meaning of a key geographical term advocates a substantive conception of landscape in which substantive is used to mean “real rather than apparent,” “belonging to the substance of a thing.” It is also used in the legal sense of “creating and defining rights and duties.” A substantive concept of landscape is as concerned with human law and justice as it is concerned with natural law or aesthetics. This essay will recover this substantive meaning of landscape through an historical and geographical analysis of the transformations of meaning undergone by the concepts of landscape and nature. From … a post-modern perspective landscape seems less like a palimpsest whose “real” or “authentic” meanings can somehow be recovered with the correct techniques, theories or ideologies, than a flickering text displayed

Recovering the substantive nature of landscape  21

on the word processor screen whose meaning can be created, extended, altered, elaborated and finally obliterated by the merest touch of a button. (Cosgrove and Daniels 1988:8) With these words two leading cultural geographers envision the virtual reality of postmodern landscape. This melting of landscape into cybertextual space is the most recent step in landscape’s disciplinary dematerialization. Richard Hartshorne helped set this in motion when he dismissed landscape as the central organizing concept of geography and supported, instead, a geographical science of space in which regions are mental constructions (Hartshorne 1939:263, 275; 1958; 1959:48–64; James 1972:232, 272, 283, 468). This essay will seek to recover the substantive depth of meaning of landscape and its implications for our understanding of society/nature relations.

The duplicitous meaning of landscape In The Nature of Geography (1939), which became a kind of disciplinary bible for geographers of the time, Richard Hartshorne criticized the use of the word landscape in American cultural geography (Hartshorne 1939:149–174, 250–284). Landscape was at this time, according to Hartshorne, “perhaps the single most important word in the geographic language,” due in no small measure to “Sauer’s epoch-making [1925] essay on ‘The Morphology of Landscape’” (Hartshorne 1939:149, 155). The central problem for Hartshorne was that the American geographical concept derived from the German geographical term Landschaft, which, unlike the English word, had an essentially double meaning. It had a specifically German meaning as “a restricted piece of land” (Hartshorne 1939:150, 250–284). It was, however, also used, as in English, to refer to the “appearance of a land as we perceive it,” e.g., “the section of the earth surface and sky that lies in our field of vision as seen in perspective from a particular point.” This “aesthetic” usage of the term enabled users to shift “from the landscape as sensation to the objects that produce that sensation” (Hartshorne 1939:150, 152). Confusion resulted, Hartshorne argued, “from the use of the same word to mean, on the one hand, a definitely restricted area and, on the other, a more or less definitely defined aspect of an unlimited extent of the earth surface” (Hartshorne 1939:154). Hartshorne’s solution to the problem of landscape was essentially to abandon it in favor of geography as a “chorographic” science of region and space (see Chapter 3). Others, however, saw that the scenic concept of landscape provided a useful approach to the study of human environmental perception (Lowenthal 1961; Lowenthal and Prince 1964, 1965; Tuan 1972 [1961]). When this approach is carried to one extreme, however, there is a tendency to shift from the subjective qualities of perception to the scenic object as the ultimate determinant of perception (Appleton 1975; Bourassa 1991). At the opposite extreme, the focus shifts from the scenic object to the perceived sensation of landscape created by

22  Recovering the substantive nature of landscape

the pictorial field of spatial vision. Taken to its ultimate conclusion, this approach reduces landscape to a “flickering” iconographic text displayed on a screen. I would argue, however, that much of the confusion generated by these diverging approaches can be clarified by re-examining, in historical, geographical, and philological contexts, the substantive meaning of landscape as a place of human habitation and environmental interaction.1 Landscape, I will argue, need not be understood as being either territory or scenery; it can also be conceived as a nexus of community, justice, nature, and environmental equity, a contested territory that is as pertinent today as it was when the term received its modern scenic meaning at the end of the sixteenth century.

The “territorial” meaning of landscape It is commonplace today for writers on landscape to note, following the dictionary, that the derivation of the word is “often attributed” to a Dutch form of a common Northern European term designating an area of territory – a province, district, or region (Merriam-Webster 1993: landscape; Mikesell 1968; Oxford English Dictionary [O.E.D.] 1971: landscape; Schama 1995:10). This was the term applied to a popular newly emergent genre of Northern European art when the term landscape became identified with scenery at the turn of the sixteenth century (Williams 1976: country).2 The significance of the landscape concept at that time, and hence its importance to the emergence of this art form, remains unclear in the literature. German language discussions of Landschaft are often obscured by the tendency to confuse and conflate older and newer meanings of the term (Hard 1970). There have been a number of imaginative English language attempts to elucidate an original territorial meaning of landscape (Stilgoe 1982:3–4; Jackson 1984:3–8), but there has been a tendency to overlook the fact that landscape was not simply nomenclature for a given territorial scale. This confused situation has led some writers to ignore the historical content of the word and accept as axiomatic that: “It is well known that in Europe the concept of landscape and the words for it in both Romance and Germanic languages emerged around the turn of the sixteenth century to denote a painting whose primary subject matter was natural scenery” (Punter 1982; Cosgrove 1993:9). This aesthetic approach to landscape, which is well established in art history, has provided new insights for cultural geography, but it can also be somewhat onesided and, thereby, obscure the relation between the aesthetic form of landscape and its substantive content. In the following it should become apparent that the Northern European concept of landscape emerged much earlier than the turn of the sixteenth century and that it carried, and continues to carry, a range of meaning that goes far beyond natural scenery. The word Landschaft is common, in various spellings, to the Germanic languages of Northern Europe, including English (Grimm and Grimm 1855: Landschaft).3 There is no reason to focus on the Dutch meaning of the term, however, since “Dutch” generally meant German or Germanic at the time the

Recovering the substantive nature of landscape  23

word lent its name to a genre of art (O.E.D. 1971: Dutch). The Netherlanders, themselves, spoke three or four languages including Frisian and Low German (Clark 1946:200). When approached in historical and geographical context, it becomes clear that Landschaft was much more than “a restricted piece of land.” It contained, in fact, meanings of great importance to the construction of personal, political, and place identity.

Landschaft as territory and community An historical examination of the territorial meaning of Landschaft suggests that we are dealing with a rather special geographical phenomenon. One place where functioning Landschaft territories of ancient origin survived until the late nineteenth century is North Friesland on the marshy, windblown, western coast, and islands of Jutland, just south of the present Danish border (Sante 1964:433). Until 1864, when the Danes lost the area to Prussia, it was part of the Duchy of Schleswig under the Danish king. An 1864 volume of the standard Danish topographical reference work explains that landskaber (Danish for Landschaften) differed from similar territories called amter by virtue of having “had a more independent development, in relation to both the other districts and internally, and therefore there are territorial constitutions which give the population a greater right to self-determination and to participate in the judicial process and in government” (Trap 1864: section 1:67). Amt is translated as “county” or “shire,” though its size and administrative practice are not directly comparable to the British equivalents (Vinterberg and Bodelsen 1966: amt). The amt was administered as a bureau or “office” (the literal meaning of amt) manned by the amtmand, the officer or bureaucrat of the state, which from 1660 was an absolute despotism. If the territory had, instead, been placed under the jurisdiction of a greve (Graf in German), or count, it would have been termed a grevskab (Grafschaft), or, literally, a “county.” Landskaber were neither counties nor amter because they steadfastly refused to submit to the law of other communities. Of one such landskab, Eiderstedt, it is written: “No other district in the Duchy of Slesvig is equipped with a district constitution which expresses such a high degree of freedom and independence.” This is because: “It has gradually developed into its present state and it rests as much upon rules, which have developed through autonomy and custom, as through law and privilege” (Trap 1864: section 1:81). The orally transmitted customary law for Eiderstedt, locally named “the crowning glory of true justice,” was first written down in 1426, apparently in response to Danish pressure to have the area incorporated under the Jutland law (Trap 1864: section 1:267; Sante 964:433).4 One of the factors that makes these Landschaften special is the strength of the link between community (Gemeinschaft in German) and place. This is exemplified, in modern times, by the case of the sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies (1855–1936). He was from the Landschaft of Eiderstedt and his experience of the “changing of a political community into a mere administrative district” under

24  Recovering the substantive nature of landscape

the Prussians after 1864 is believed to have inspired his famous thesis on the relationship between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft (community and association) (Loomis 1955:xxv). Tönnies’ work is the source of much modern thinking on community (Tönnies 1974 [1887]; 1979 [1887]). There was nothing new, however, about the inspiration which he drew from his home community. The idea and the reality of Landschaft, and similar territorial phenomena, had inspired thinking for centuries about what we now call community.

Landschaft, social estate, and community justice The meaning of Landschaft must be understood in geographical as well as historical terms. The bewildering complexity of German territorial organization prior to nineteenth-century unification makes generalization difficult, but it also means that Landschaften such as Eiderstedt were able to persist as living alternatives to feudalism or the centralized absolutist state. “In the area of Western civilization,” according to historian Marc Bloch, “the map of feudalism reveals some large blank spaces – the Scandinavian peninsula, Frisia, Ireland” (Bloch 1961:445). Alongside these blank spaces were places like Saxony which “by the number of its free peasants – free both as to their lands and as to their persons – seemed to represent a transitional stage from that of Frisia, which had no manorial system and consequently no serfs” (Bloch 1961:267). In the areas without manors there was, hence, no vassalage. This, according to Bloch, was because: Where men of all ranks were able to rely for support on other forms of strength and solidarity than personal protection – kindred groups especially among the Frisians, the people of Dithmarschen and the Celts, kindred groups again among the Scandinavians, but also institutions of public law of the type common to the Germanic peoples – neither the relationships of dependence peculiar to territorial lordship, nor vassalage and the fief invade the whole of social life. (Bloch 1961:247–248) A gradual formalization of the territorial identity of the Landschaften of North Friesland and similar territories (such as adjacent Saxon Dithmarschen) occurred in the course of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (Bader 1957:247–264; 1978:177–182; Kobler 1988:114–115, 158, 373; Sante 1964:303–309, 431–432, 637–639, 719–723, 732–736, 751–752). Landschaft, however, meant much more than a territory. In some contexts, Landschaft referred not to a territory but rather to the estates represented in a land’s parliament (Landtag) or to the representative body itself. The Landschaft could also be defined to exclude the Ritterschaft (or nobility) and the clergy, making it comparable to the English estate of the commoners who were represented in the House of Commons.5 The Landstandschaft of the estates (Stände) of a land were the equivalent of the law-abiding and taxpaying citizens who, by virtue of their good standing, have the right to vote.

Recovering the substantive nature of landscape  25

This expression of community and place identity was important at a time when the medieval ascetic ideal was being replaced by the ideal of the active, engaged citizen (Pirenne 1958:221–269).

The Landschaft as a body politic The various usages of the term Landschaft may seem confusing, but they are not all that different from the use of related terms in English. The suffix schaft and the English ship are cognate, meaning essentially “creation, creature, constitution, condition” (O.E.D. 1971: -ship). Schaft is related to the verb schaffen, to create or shape, so ship and shape are also etymologically linked (O.E.D. 1971: shape). The citizens in good standing of a New England town shaped the body politic of the township as constituted under a body of law. A township is both a body of citizens, the representatives who make decisions on behalf of those citizens (as in “the township voted to raise taxes”), and the domain shaped by those citizens. Finally, the condition of being a good townsman or citizen, like the condition of fellowship, is expressive of more abstract notions of community values. In times past, the English language included other words like countryship and folcship (meaning nation) in which the suffix -ship functioned much the same as schaft (O.E.D. 1971: -ship).

The land and law in Landschaft Etymologically, the primary Germanic meaning of the term Land was an area, e.g., the various lands (cultivated land, meadow land, common land) constituting a farm or manor (Grimm and Grimm 1855: Land; Jackson 1984:6). In the feudal era, these lands were not generally owned by individuals as separate properties. They rather formed a complex of use rights that were determined by custom and by personal feudal obligations. These lands, taken together, may constitute larger lands under a given body of law and may have an ancient origin that predates feudalism (Gurevich 1985:153–209; Hastrup 1985:220, 236; Hedeager 1993).6 Such a land is defined by its customs and culture, not by its physical characteristics, though it may conform to an area of dry land, e.g., an island.7 The link between customary law, the institutions embodying that law, and the people enfranchised to participate in the making and administration of law is of fundamental importance to the root meaning of Land in Landschaft. Jutland is thus defined as a land because it “has its own particular legal system and its own (lands)ting” or representative council (O.D.S. 1931: Land). It is this law that constituted the Jutes as a polity. The institution of the ting (Ding in German) is also found in English, where it is known as a thing (or moot/meeting). The importance of law is suggested by the ancient proverb that prefaces the first written version of the Jutland “landscape” law in 1241: Mæth logh scal land byggæs, which literally translates as “With law shall land be built” ( Jansen and Mitchell 1971:3–7).8 The meaning of the word “built” at that time was related to such

26  Recovering the substantive nature of landscape

English words as bower, meaning dwelling, as well as abode, the place one abides, the place of being home (Merriam-Webster 1993: be, bower, abide, abode). A more correct translation might thus be “the abode of the land is shaped by abiding by the law.” The law, according to the preface, shall be ærlic oc ræt, thollich, æftær landæns wanæ (“honorable, just, and tolerable, in accordance with the customs of the land”) ( Jansen and Mitchell 1971:4–5). The concept of land is thus linked to the Scandinavian meaning of landskab during this era: (1) conditions in a land, its character (beskaffenhed), its traditions or customs; (2) the organizing of things in a land; (3) Landskab district (Fritzner 1886–1896: landskapr; Kalkar 1976 [1881–1918]: landskab).9 Even when a land, e.g., Jutland, is incorporated into a larger land, e.g., Denmark, it still retains the character of its Landschaft provided it retains its law and customs. The Jutland law thus eventually became known as a Landskabslov – a landscape law.10 A landskab was not just a region, it was a nexus of law and cultural identity, and this is why a Frisian Landschaft could not accept the Jutland law, or even the law of other Frisian Landschaften. The various Landschaften of Frisia thus maintained a separate identity, even though they shared a similar language and ethnicity. This could lead to friction between the Landschaften, but it also could provide the basis for federation, as notably with the Netherlands.

Landschaft art When one examines the social and historical context of the sixteenth-century origins of Northern European landscape art, it becomes clearer why the term Landschaft should have become attached to a genre of painting that became popular with the people of Northern Europe. This was a time of intense interest in “the ancient constitutions” of the Northern Europeans (Pocock 1957). “Constitution” did not mean a written document but rather the legal principles embodied in customary Northern European law (the United Kingdom still has no written constitution). As with Eiderstedt, this customary law was originally memorized and only later written down. This was an era that sought alternatives not only to the universalism of the Roman Catholic Church, but to the universalism of written, codified, Roman law, which that church had introduced to Northern European society. Brilliant jurists, such as the Huguenot François Hotman (1524–1590), argued that customary law, though rooted in the ancient precedent of “time out of mind,” was in fact always up-to-date because custom was constantly being reinterpreted in the light of present circumstance. Roman law, on the other hand, though it pretended to be universal in scope, was in fact an expression of the time and society that had created it (Pocock 1957:14–29; Giesey and Salmon 1972; Hotman 1972 [1573]). The study of customary law not only helped generate an interest in historical change, it legitimated those representative local and national institutions, such as a parliament, that were believed to have generated that law (Hotman 1972 [1573]). Whereas feudal ties to the lands under the lord’s domain were

Recovering the substantive nature of landscape  27

through interpersonal relations of fealty (Gurevich 1985:91), customary law was the expression of particular local and national communities and their use rights to those lands. The search for the ancient constitution during Hotman’s day naturally led back to the record of the ancient past as preserved in the newly rediscovered Germania by the Roman historian Tacitus (ca. 56–ca. 120).11 It also led to the peripheral regions of feudal Europe, such as Switzerland, where social critics like Hotman enjoyed the freedom to teach and publish. The interest in customary law in this era should not simply be understood in terms of abstract political and religious ideologies. Questions of taxation and of which social groups were entitled to political enfranchisement were contested both in the courts and in carnivalesque festivities on the streets (Bakhtin 1984; Ladurie 1980:303–370; Pirenne 1958).12 It is in this Northern European context that the concept of Landschaft takes on importance, not just in its social and legal senses but also as a territory of law and feeling encompassing both town and country (Bloch 1961:367, 372; Carsten 1959:5). The works of a pioneering landscape painter such as Pieter Brueghel (ca. 1525–1569) or Joachim Patiner (ca. 1485–1524) (whom Albrecht Dürer in 1521 called der gut landschafft mahler [sic] and whose works were said by contemporaries to be “pregnant with whole provinces”) are fascinating sources on the custom of the time, rural and urban.13 These paintings remind us that customary law was not just the preserve of the courts, it was also inscribed and memorized in the material fabric of the Landschaft. Customary obligations were responsible for the maintenance of bridges and roads, the maintenance and use of the fields, and the demarcation of territory (Milsom 1981:12). Brueghel’s painting, as the art historian Michael Rosenthal writes, “emphasizes not only the logic of the terrain” but also “the logic of the activity” shown in the paintings. It contains “an element of explanation, sometimes to the near-diagrammatic” (Rosenthal 1982:12) (Figure 1.1). The annual springtime festivities shown in paintings and the perambulatory beating the bounds of the village lands were mnemonic means by which customary law was memorized in the substance of the land. When children were bumped on their heads at the location of boundary markers, or wood was taken from a forest to erect a maypole or make a bonfire, people were engaging in ritual play by which they passed the memory of common access and use rights from generation to generation. This memory, rooted in the child’s concrete mode of thought, might well have legal value years later in courts where the precedence of custom weighed heavily.14 The memory of customary law, however, was not just that of the child; it extended back to the precedence of “time out of mind,” and thus, in principle, all the way back to the customs of the ancient Northern European peoples living in forests like those described by Tacitus and painted by Albrecht Altdorfer (ca. 148–1537) (Silver 1983; Olwig 1984:11–22). The new spirit of place identity and pride was manifested in the publication of a series of monumental cosmographical works, complete with maps and sketches of Landschaft territories. Though the cosmographers may have had imperial

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FIGURE 1.1  Sketch inspired by Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s painting of The Hay Harvest (1565), now in the Czech National Museum (Prague). Note that the painting is not simply of a rural scene, but that it shows a region looking down from a rural area to a major city at the mouth of a river. It provides a near-diagrammatic substantive explanation of a characteristic landscape of the time that is still suitable to a geography course on the spatial organization, transportation networks, field systems, and social stratification of the landscape as the place of a polity. (Rights to the sketch are in the sole possession of the author.)

motives, they were dependent on contributions from people with an intense local attachment to the lands they described. The Swiss, who battled to maintain their independent confederation, were naturally in the forefront (Strauss 1959:60–64, 86–92; Pearson 1976; Schmithusen 1976:91–93, Gibson 1989: 53–54). The subject of Northern European landscape art is clearly Landschaft in the full sense of the word. It was much more than “beautiful natural scenery.” It was imbued with meanings, etched by custom in the land, that were at the heart of the major political, legal, and cultural issues of the time. It was at the center of the process by which members of the non-noble estates of emerging national bodies sought to establish cultural identities as active, politically engaged, and patriotic citizenries. The importance of community and law was particularly critical for the people of the European lowlands who, in the seventeenth century, had to battle both the sea and jealous feudal neighbors (Clark 1946:195–197). This helps explain the popularity of paintings of familiar home environments among the burghers and farmers who are depicted in so many paintings as skating together on a common pond (Alpers 1983; Schama 1987a:71–72; 1987b).

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Landscape and country in England The work of the early nineteenth-century painter John Constable “exemplifies English devotion to rustic life and landscape” (Lowenthal and Prince 1965:83). The district of eastern England where Constable grew up, and to which he returned again and again for his subject matter, was known by contemporaries as “Constable Country” (Rosenthal 1983:5). Even if Constable did not attempt to render it with photographic precision, he was concerned to reproduce the imprint of this particular traditional culture on the countryside (Rosenthal 1983:5–21; Daniels 1993a:200–242; 1993b). Constable would appear to be rendering a conception of landscape that is close in spirit to that painted by his Northern European predecessors. But whereas the paintings of these predecessors hardly distinguished between rural nature and the city, Constable’s were first and foremost concerned with “nature” or “natural landscape” perceived as rural picturesque scenery (Rosenthal 1983:91–132, 226). Constable’s work thus exemplifies both English continuity with the Northern European tradition and a redefinition of the idea of Landschaft. A full understanding of the modern English concept of landscape requires attention to both the preservation of continuities and the process of redefinition. The idea of country in the phrase “Constable Country” has a long history. The words county and country have been used virtually interchangeably in English, and they have been freighted with many of the same legal, political, and social connotations as the concepts of Land and Landschaft. According to the historian Perez Zagorin, the earliest use of the word country dates from the fourteenth century. Essentially country: “signified ‘county,’ and it continued to retain this sense for centuries. Somewhat later, it acquired the further meaning of rural and distant from cities and courts, instances of which occur from the sixteenth century on” (Zagorin 1969:33). The term county was a territorial designation of Norman-French origin, which, after 1066, was applied to the ancient English territories known as shires. County literally means the territory of a count, but the English counties were not governed by counts and they were not the invention of a centralized Norman state; they were ancient pre-Norman legal territories (Milsom 1981:13–15). The earliest English use of county referred to the representative “shire-moot,” thing, or court that governed the county (O.E.D. 1971: county). The customary law generated by the courts of the county was therefore, in the view of a legal historian, the expression of “communities whose geographic boundaries had in some cases divided peoples and cultures, and not just areas of governmental authority” (Milsom 1981:12). According to Marc Bloch: [it was] within the framework of the county, mainly, but also in the more restricted sphere of the hundred, that the most vital elements in the nation preserved the habit of meeting to determine the customary law of the territorial group. … And so it continued till the time when, summoned to

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meet as one body, the representatives of the shire courts formed the earliest nucleus of what was later to be the House of Commons. (Bloch 1961:371) As early as the time of Queen Elizabeth I, the growing influence of Parliament fused the concept of county/country with the general idea of representation of the public interest. Members of the House of Commons thus talked of their duty to their “Countries” or “Country” (Zagorin 1969:33). The members of the Commons represented particular districts, but via the institution of Parliament the interests of the local community were extrapolated into the interests of the country of England as a whole. During the political revolution of the seventeenth century, the generalized and abstract idea of country provided the basis for an opposition between what later in the century became known as the party of the court and the party of the country (Zagorin 1969:19–39). The term country is still used in this sense when the calling of a British national election is termed “going to the country” (Williams 1976: country). The opposition between court and country is also latent in the etymology of country, which, according to the literary critic Raymond Williams, originated in the Latin contrata and entered the English country via the Old French cuntrée. In the phrase contrata terra it could mean the land or the region opposite the court (territory derives from terra meaning land). Williams thus parallels this meaning of country with the Old English sense of landskip as a region (1976: country). The word region, likewise, has this oppositional quality, as pointed out by the linguist Emile Benveniste, who notes that the Latin phrase e regione ‘opposite’ referred to the region at the lineal opposite end (1973). The sense of opposition between the party of the court contra that of the country is thus built into both the concepts of country and region, and this can help explain the political link between country and the region of a county and its contradiction to the court. It also indicates how the meaning of country became linked to representational government before later becoming linked to landscape in the sense of scenery, and thereby to its contemporary associations with quaint cottages on rural lanes, picturesque rural estates, and a contrary populace. Furthermore, with the court’s shift to a more permanent location in the capital city (see Chapter 2), the opposition between court and country was reified, as will be seen, into a somewhat deceptive spatial opposition between city and a contrasting country as detailed in Williams’ classic study The Country and the City (1973). The modern countryside is very much a product of the city. Like Land and Landschaft, country could be used to refer both to an area of territory as well as to the people of the territory (e.g., “the land, or country, rose in rebellion”). It could also be used, as has been seen, to conceptualize the oppositions between the differing forms of government and social organization as represented by the opposition of court and country. Finally, like Land and Landschaft, the term country could be applied to once autonomous territories that have become part of a larger state itself called a country

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(O.E.D. 1971: country, definition 3). The identification of counties or countries with the general public interest was related to the arguments of continental and English jurists, like Hotman, who sought to justify the existence of national parliamentary institutions as expressions of prefeudal or preconquest legal institutions based on customary law (Pocock 1957:1–29; Giesey and Salmon 1972). In the sixteenth century, British political thinkers applied these arguments in the context of a struggle between the supporters of a strong central monarchical state, as with the party of the court, and the supporters of the rights of Parliament, as with the party of the country. The most notable of the early sixteenth-century jurists on the parliamentary side was Chief Justice Sir Edward Coke (1552–1634). “Custom,” according to Coke, “lies upon the land” and it has “two pillars”: “common usage” and “time out of mind.” It is on the basis of these pillars that customs “are defined as a law or right not written; which, being established by long use and the consent of our ancestors, hath been and is daily practised” (as quoted in Thompson 1993:97–98, 128, 129). English common law was seen to arise, in turn, out of customary law through the activity of the national courts (Milsom 1981:1–8). The consecration of customary law by ancient ancestors made it virtually sacrosanct for Coke and his followers (Holdsworth 1928:14–15; Hill 1965:225–265). Customary law was important to the constituencies represented in the House of Commons because it provided the precedents by which they had historically defended their rights against the claims of personal feudal fealty (Baker 1979:198–200; Milsom 1981:119, 166–199; Gurevich 1985:89–91). Inheritable rights in the land, as guaranteed by customary and common law, were thus of obvious importance to the rising power of the rural gentry who saw themselves as representing the rights of “the country” in Parliament.15 Expressions such as “commonwealthman” and “countryman” carried connotations referring to a more abstract notion of collective community virtue (Robbins 1961). The customs of the country provided a common rallying point for the otherwise diverse social elements, both landed and unlanded, who revolted against Charles I and made up the backbone of Cromwell’s Commonwealth (Holdsworth 1928:14–16; Hill 1975; Thompson 1993:97–184). The concept of the country, like that of the Landschaft, was at the heart of the hotly contested question of which laws and which segments of society had the right to represent the national community.

Landschaft and country The early seventeenth-century English invested country with much the same meaning that was attached to the Northern European concepts of Land and Landschaft. Hence the art imported from continental Europe into England was comprehensible insofar as it represented country in much the same way on both sides of the Channel. The power to define the image and idea of country in art was therefore of some importance. Was the polity an absolute monarchical state

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under statutory law, personified by the king, or was it a country of countries, or landscape of regions, governed under customary law, represented by a parliament? The court was highly conscious of this issue and landscape representations played an important role in the way the court attempted to define itself in relation to the country (Orgel 1975). It is therefore significant that the court invested heavily in landscape images that were constructed on the basis of principles deriving from the Italy of Rome rather than from the idea of country expressed by the concept of Landschaft. There was a superficial resemblance between Northern European Landschaft art and scenic art in the Italianate tradition. Both fit Henry Peacham’s (ca. 1576–ca. 1643) 1606 definition: “Lantskip is a Dutch word, & it is as much as wee shoulde say in English landship, or expressing of the land by hills, woodes, Castles, seas, valleys, ruines, hanging rocks, Citties, Townes, &c. as farre as may bee shewed within our Horizon” (quoted in Ogden and Ogden 1955:5). The difference is that whereas the Northern tradition represented the particular customary qualities, however idealized, of actual Landschaft, the Italianate tradition emphasized the timeless geometrical laws of spatial aesthetics as expressed in natural scenes that were inspired by the ideal past of classical imperial Rome (Ogden and Ogden 1955:30–62; Alpers 1983; Barrell 1986:138–150; Olwig 1993a).16 The distinction is important because these scenes express a concept of nature and law that is different from that expressed by Landschaft.

Nature, custom, and landscape Customary law, as Coke was wont to say, was an ancient “birthright” (quoted in Hill 1965:257). This right was rooted in a particular idea of nature (Hill 1958:78–79) that had a well-established legal history. As Hotman wrote: “Just as our bodies, when dislocated by some external blow, cannot be repaired unless each member be restored to its natural seat and place, so we may trust that our commonwealth will return to health when it is restored by some act of divine beneficence into its ancient and, so to speak, its natural state” (Hotman 1972 [1573]:143). This view of nature is close to the term’s derivation from the concept of birth (Olwig 1993a). The word nature thus has the same root as nativity, native, and nation. As the philosopher, John Passmore explains it: “The word ‘nature’ derives, it should be remembered, from the Latin nascere, with such meanings as ‘to be born,’ to ‘come into being.’ Its etymology suggests, that is, the embryonic, the potential rather than the actual” (Passmore 1974:32). Customary law is natural in this sense because, though it has its origins generations back in time, it is nevertheless in a constant state of renewal and growth. The attorney-general for Ireland, Sir John Davies, illustrated this mode of thought when, in 1612, he praised English customary law as being: so framed and fitted to the nature and disposition of this people, as we may properly say it is co-natural to the Nation, so as it cannot possibly be ruled

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by any other Law. This Law therefore doth demonstrate the strength of wit and reason and self-sufficiency which hath been always in the People of this Land, which have made their own Laws out of their wisedome and experience. (quoted in Pocock 1957:33–34) The supporters of the court, on the other hand, favored a very different concept of law and nature and, hence, a different concept of country and landscape. James was already King James VI of Scotland when he became King James I of England in 1603. He felt that he had an historic mission, given by God and physical nature, to unite the countries of his island realm into a British monarchy. He therefore wanted to have himself crowned king of Britain despite the opposition to the title by Parliament. The court went to considerable expense to promote its own conception of law and nature through the use of landscape scenery in elaborate theater masques and plays (Ogden and Ogden 1955:21–23). One of the earliest English uses of the term landscape to mean scenery stems from the Masque of Blackness from 1605 where the author, Ben Jonson (1572–1637), writes: “First, for the Scene was drawn a Landtschap” ( Jonson 1969:48; O.E.D. 1971: landscape, definition 1). At this time, when all the world was often believed to be a stage (Yates 1969), the idea of the country was framed as theater landscape. Jonson’s friend, the Scottish author William Drummond of Hawthornden (1585–1649), thus transformed Northern European social and political ideas of Landschaft into theater when, in 1638, he queried the Parliamentarians in revolt against Charles I: “What can yee purchase by some few Monethes libertie of dauncing to your own shadowes, in new Magistracies, offices of State, imaginarie and fantastical! counsilles, lanskippes of Common Wealthes, and an icye Grandeur, erected by your selves to impaire and derogate to souveraignitie, to disolve governement, but a part of a Tragicomedie?”17 The elaborate and expensive scenery for the masque was as central to the performance as the text in a situation in which the stage was not just the setting but the action itself (Orgel 1975:36). Masque landscape used central point perspective to create an illusory three-dimensional spatial realm that encompassed and blurred the boundary between representation and reality, between players and spectators. The central point focused both upon the eye of the surveilling monarch and on the stage scenery (Orgel 1975) (see Chapter 9, Figure 9.1). The masque, thereby, helped create an illusion (pleasing to the court) that the country of Britain, under the guidance of the monarch, had reentered a natural paradisiacal state reminiscent of the golden age of classical myth (Ogden and Ogden 1955:21–23; Hunt 1991) (Figure 1.2). The master wizard of landscape as theater was Jonson’s partner, the scenographer, designer, architect, painter, and royal surveyor Inigo Jones (1573–1652). Jones developed his predilection for Italianate scenic art during several study tours to Italy at the beginning of the seventeenth century (Ogden and Ogden 1955:34). He also spent time in the service of the Danish court where theater was

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FIGURE 1.2  The lines of perspective focus both on the eye and on infinity. This possible stage scene is from a series of paintings of views of the ideal city from the school of Piero Della Francesca, ca. 1480. It is at the Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen Zu Berlin. (Photo by author. Color version available in eBook edition.)

popular and both Northern European concepts of landscape and Italianate scenic ideals would have been familiar. His mentor at the English court was the Danish king’s sister and King James’ queen consort, Anne of Denmark.18 Jones’ (and Jonson’s) first production was the “Queen’s Mask,” the Masque of Blackness in which the queen herself helped determine the theme and participated actively, in blackface, in the performance ( Jonson 1969:3; Orgel and Strong 1973:6, 89–93). Both the content and form of Jones’ landscape scenery expressed a concept of nature. The scenic content, inspired by Roman art, represented a bucolic realm that was coequal with the realm of the “British” monarch. The form was a geometrical framework that created the spatial illusion that made these scenes seem natural, even supernatural. Jonson describes Jones’ landscape in “the queen’s” Masque of Blackness as being “drawn, by the lines of perspective” so that the whole work seemed to be “shooting downward from the eye” ( Jonson 1969:50). This was an expression of a neo-Platonic conception of a higher, harmonious, and universal natural principle of proportion behind the surface of external temporal reality (Edgerton 1975; Orgel 1975:83–87; Wiles 1993:43–66), or, as Jonson writes of Jones’ landscape: “the orderly disorder which is common in nature” ( Jonson 1969:48). The ultimate point of the masque is, in fact, a celebration of the physical nature of royal Britannia, “this blessed isle … A world divided from the world” under the “sciential” light of a king who is endowed with the power of natural science ( Jonson 1969:55–56). The science of surveying and the profession of the scenographer overlapped. Indeed Jones developed his aesthetic ideals in Renaissance Italy where the development of the newly rediscovered Ptolemaic techniques of surveying and cartography went hand in hand (Cosgrove 1993:222–254). Surveying created a geometrical, divisible, and hence salable space by making parcels of property out of lands that had previously been defined according to rights of custom and demarcated by landmarks and topographical features (Kain and Baigent

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1992:5).19 The rational geometric space that underlay the conception of the world as scenery expressed, therefore, a revival not only of Platonic ideas of nature but also of the Roman grid and the Roman legal idea of possessio (Tacitus 1942:721, § 26; Bloch 1961:116; Edgerton 1975; Gurevich 1977:6; Milsom 1981:119–151; Cafritz et al. 1988). These ideas, which were foreign to Northern Europe, lent legitimacy to the ideological transformation of land into the bounded territory of the state, or the private property of its citizens. Landscape, as presented in the masques, should be seen not as representing actual countryside but rather as a vision of an ideal scene, e.g., the natural golden age brought about by royal presence.20 As the stage directions for a masque read: The scene is varied into a landscipt in which was a prospect of the King’s palace of Whitehall and part of the city of London seen afar off, and presently the whole heaven opened, and in a bright cloud were seen sitting persons representing innocency, Justice, Religion, Affection to the Country, and Concord, being all companions of Peace. (text in Orgel and Strong 1973:457) The science of perspective blurs the distinction between the world out there and the world of the theater, where the spectators are treated to a scenic vision of the city (in which they are themselves located, sitting in the theater). This blurring causes the landscape to be perceived as a “natural” sign that transcended the “conventions” of human communication.21 One cannot, therefore, distinguish the iconographic meaning of this scenery from its aesthetic form; the medium was, quite literally, a message expressing the ideals of a Royal British Absolutism determined to “purify, reorder, reform, re-conceive a whole culture” (Orgel 1975:36, 87).

Natural law and landscape The court masques were products of a time when the distinction between the laws of nature and those of mankind were not as clearly drawn as today. The same Francis Bacon (1561–1627) who envisioned an island utopia ruled by a benevolent despot with the aid of scientist students of nature’s laws was also a leading jurist for the court (Bacon 1915 [1627]:11, 14, 21, 35). As Lord Chancellor, he vainly sought to institute a rational and uniform system of codified statutory “natural” law against the opposition of his chief rival, Edward Coke (Hill 1965:85–130, 225–265).22 The monarchy and the court saw their law as natural but their sense of natural law was very different from the law conceived by the champions of customary law. They regarded the natural law of the monarchy as universal and opposed to the particularity of convention – views that were reflected in the image of landscape promoted by the court. The next step in the creation of modern English ideas of landscape occurred when the scenic landscape of theater and art was used as a model for the aesthetic shaping of

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the external English environment. Henceforth it was difficult to distinguish, in purely visual terms, scenic landscape from Landschaft. “Palladian landscape” (Cosgrove 1993) was the vehicle by which this transfer from the theater to the “real” world was accomplished.

Palladian landscape Inigo Jones toured the Veneto in the early seventeenth century collecting drawings and published works by the Venetian architect Andrea Palladio (1508–1580) (Cosgrove 1993:20–21). Palladio represented an architectural school that had endeavored to replace the traditional Gothic style of Venice with a classical style inspired by ancient imperial Rome. It incorporated the principles of single-point perspective not only in theater design (see Chapter 5, Figure 5.4) but also in the construction of whole environments. Palladio was famed for the estate houses, or villas, of the terraferma, which he designed both for the wealthy merchants from the islands of imperial Venice, who were then colonizing the coastal on-shore region, and for the indigenous nobility. The enclosure (at the expense of the customary rights of the native peasantry) and drainage of terraferma had become a new avenue for the investment of merchant capital. For Palladio it became a vast theater stage upon which he made his designs (Cosgrove 1984:102–141; 1993:1–29). This designed environment thus became, in the words of the British geographer Denis Cosgrove, “one of the loveliest of the world’s rural landscapes. This is the great gift of the Palladian landscape, the reason for its hold on our imagination. It is a visionary landscape” (Cosgrove 1993:251). When Jones returned to work in England, he brought this vision with him and applied it not only to theater but to architecture and town planning (Orgel 1975:6–14) (see Chapter 5, Figure 5.3). Christopher Wren (1632–1723), an astronomer, geometrician, and king’s surveyor, as well as the premier architect and urban planner of the Restoration, continued the classical orientation of Jones. The ideal of natural beauty that lay behind his transformation of London after the fire of 1666 was a forerunner of the later Palladian transformation of the countryside. The latter occurred after the gentry sealed its own power, and that of a Parliament under its domination, with the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688. According to Wren: “There are two causes of Beauty natural and customary. Natural is from Geometry, consisting in Uniformity (that is Equality) and Proportion. … Geometrical Figures are naturally more beautiful than any other irregular; in this all consent, as to a Law of Nature” (quoted in Bennett 1982:118–124). This natural ideal would have been an anathema to the older “party of the country” which had used custom to defend the rights of Parliament. Much to the chagrin of the “Old Whigs,” the powerful oligarchy of the land-owning Whig country gentry largely abandoned the commonwealth ideology of Cromwell’s time (Robbins 1961). The Glorious Revolution of 1688 was a tame affair, neither particularly glorious nor revolutionary, which, despite its name, did not seek to upset the status quo, and many

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Whigs looked back with horror upon the anarchy of the civil wars. The old doctrines celebrating custom were no longer appealing in a world empire where local customary use rights stood in the way of gentry enclosures and agricultural improvements (Butlin 1982; Neeson 1993; Thompson 1993:97–351). Instead of looking to Northern Europe, the propertied Whigs found their social ideal in republican Florence and especially in imperial, oligarchical Venice (Barrell 1986:1–162; Hunt 1991). Inigo Jones was rediscovered, and his architecture and landscape design were moved from the arena of the court theater to that of the country estate. For the moneyed landowners of the time, whatever their political orientation, the rational spatial geometries used to construct the Palladian scenic ideal provided an ideal means to create “natural” surroundings while simultaneously erasing the memory of custom’s common landscape that stood in the way of gentry “improvement” (Turner 1976:163–164; Everett 1994:41). Where Wren replaced London’s fire-damaged Gothic churches with classical temples, the new rural landscape often replaced the Gothic dwellings of the old nobility with Palladian villas surrounded by expansive landscape gardens. The Italianate ideal moved thereby from the realms of theater, art, court, and city out into the countryside (Manwaring 1965 [1925]). The earlier opposition between court and country was thereby transformed into an illusory antithesis between a pastoral “country,” where the men of power had their “natural” seat, and the city, the hub of empire where they made their money (Williams 1973). Rural landscaping created the scenic image of the country community ideal, while helping to undermine the customary law upon which it was based. The synthesis of the Palladian mansion set in a vast landscape park became the quintessential country “estate” (Cosgrove 1993:21). Estate had once meant social standing, but now it meant, first and foremost, a country property (O.E.D. 1971: estate, definition 13). In the words of one literary historian, “‘land’ and ‘place’ became equivalent to ‘propriety’ – meaning in seventeenth-century English both property and knowing one’s place” (Turner 1976:5). It was a question of knowing one’s place in the order of nature as this order was shaped in the land. The land in landscape had become the terra firma of the country, the physical nature upon which men play out their appointed roles.23 It was in this era that the word nature was first used to mean scenery, as in John Dryden’s 1697 translation of Virgil’s The Georgics: But time is lost, which never will renew, While we too far the pleasing path pursue, Surveying nature with too nice a view. (Dryden 1806 (1697): 175; Georgics Ill: 448–450; O.E.D. 1971: nature, definition 13)24 The hidden underlying geometric laws of nature expressed in the harmonious structure of the Palladian landscape ideal appealed, ironically, as much to the new Whig oligarchy as to the old party of the court. The country estate became a microcosm of the empire, where men of property improved their estates

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according to the rationality of “science.” These laws, to use Basil Willey’s words (1940:10), “are the laws of reason; they are always and everywhere the same, and like the axioms of mathematics they have only to be presented in order to be acknowledged as just and right by all men.” The vision of an ideal state of nature governed by these laws provided the “means whereby the new ruling classes could vindicate, against the surviving restraints of the old feudal and ecclesiastical order, their cherished rights of individual freedom and of property” (Willey 1940:24). The scenic concept of landscape provided both the template for the transformation of land into natural parks and the world view or picture that became the mark of education for the ruling elite (Barrell 1972;1992:41–62). According to the garden historian John Dixon Hunt, the iconography of the gardens was used to invent an Italianate “tradition” by inculcating “certain values and norms of behavior having an implied continuity with the past.” Thus, instead of native custom, we now have “the fiction of a tradition of constitutional progress from classical Rome to Seventeenth and even Eighteenth Century England, which paralleled the progress of the arts” (Hunt 1991:19–24). The gardens at Stowe that necessitated the almost complete destruction of three villages, nevertheless included pavilions dedicated to the “liberty of Great Britain” (Everett 1994:41). The grid that framed the space of both map and landscape had the marvelous quality that it was also capable of infinite expansion from the estate to the common wealth, to a world empire under construction (Edgerton 1987). The function of the park, according to a contemporary, was thus “to extend the idea of a seat and appropriate a whole country to a mansion” (quoted in Daniels 1988:45). The person who could properly perceive and manage the landscape scene of an estate could manage likewise the common wealth of the world. Not everyone accepted the countrified ideology of the Whig oligarchy. The so-called commonwealthmen or Old Whigs, mentioned earlier, perpetuated the ideals of the early Parliamentarians and countrymen (Robbins 1961). Robert Molesworth (1656–1725), a leading Old Whig who translated Hotman’s Francogallia into English (Molesworth 1738; Giesey and Salmon 1972:123–125), advocated religious and political tolerance while agitating for a federal structure for Britain. Molesworth, as might be expected, had no use for Roman political ideals: ’Tis said of the Romans, that those Provinces which they Conquer’d were amply recompensed, for the loss of their Liberty, by being reduced from their Barbarity to Civility; by the Introduction of Arts, Learning, Commerce and Politeness. I know not whether this manner of Arguing hath not more Pomp than Truth in it; but with much greater reason may it be said that all Europe was beholden to these [Northern European] People for introducing and restoring a Constitution of Government far excelling all others that we know of in the World. ‘Tis to the ancient Inhabitants of these Countries, with other neighbouring Provinces, that we owe the Original of Parliaments. (Molesworth 1694:38–39)

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The ideology that the Old Whigs and their predecessors had used to oppose absolute monarchy and oligarchy was eminently well suited to the construction of a new democratic federation in America. It was here, rather than in Britain, that the ideas of the Old Whigs would come to fruition (Robbins 1961:3–21).

The landscaping of Landschaft Just as the ideology of custom and country created a problem for the Whig oligarchs who wished to consolidate and improve their land holdings, contemporary German nationalists, who wished to unite the lands of their country into one unified state, had a similar problem with the native ideals of Land and Landschaft. There was a well-established German tradition that celebrated the ancient, autonomous freedoms of the German lands. As exemplified by Friederich Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell,25 this tradition focuses on Switzerland, but it is pan-Germanic insofar as it draws its inspiration from the history of independentminded Länder and Landschaften ranging from Friesland to Sweden, the legendary homeland of the Swiss.26 The idealization of the tenuous unity of the freedomloving peoples of the European periphery presented a problem for those who wanted to transform Germany into an efficient modern unified state capable of fending off rationalist, centralized France (Boime 1990:315–355). The problem was how to preserve the Germanic folk symbolism identified with decentral places like Switzerland while creating a strong, centrally ruled state. The answer, in effect, was to merge the British concept of landscape as the spatial scenery of the nation with the Germanic territorial concept of Landschaft and thereby foster the idea of landscape as the outcome of layered scenic stages of spatial and temporal progress from nature to a culture that is expressive of both the German nation and the nature of its soil (see Chapters 2 and 8). Britain, at this time, provided a model for Germans who longed to see their lands progress. This engendered an interest in all things English, including the pathbreaking English landscape garden (Neumeyer 1947). The idea of landscape as scenery thereby became common German intellectual property (Hard 1965). The idea that society developed on the basis of its landscape scenery made it possible to continue to idealize the freedom-loving character of people from physically difficult peripheral environments, be they Swiss or Frisian, but to attribute that character to the general laws of nature rather than to the laws of particular custom. It was simply a question of bringing the older Germanic cultural and territorial idea of Landschaft and newer scenic concepts of land and landscape together in a new synthesis. To understand how this synthesis was accomplished it is useful to look at the work of the “Jena circle” of thinkers. The Jena circle was characterized by a “universal romanticism” that sought a holistic conception of art, science, and natural law. Among the leading figures in this school were Friedrich Schelling (1775–1854) and the brothers August Wilhelm Schlegel (1767–1845) and Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829). An important participant in the Jena circle, and a familiar figure among the progressive

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artists of Dresden, was the Danish/German botanist, geologist, and natural philosopher Henrik Steffens (1773–1845). As a respected geologist who had studied at A. G. Werner’s world-renowned school of mining in Freiburg, Steffens had the scientific authority that the philosophers usually lacked (Steffens 1874 [1840– 1844]; Snelders 1970; Mitchell 1984; Ziolkowski 1990:18–63).27 A measure of Steffens’ importance is the homage paid to him by the Swiss-American geographer Arnold Guyot in the preface to his The Earth and Man (1849): There are, however, three names so closely connected with the history of the science to which this volume is devoted, and with the past studies of the author, that he feels bound to mention them here. Humboldt, Ritter and Steffens are the three great minds who have breathed a new life into the science of the physical and moral world. (Guyot 1849:vii) Werner, Steffens’ mentor in geology, was a “neptunist,” one who saw the world as having been created through the deposition of sediment under the sea. To a botanist and geologist like Steffens, this idea of layered change led naturally to the idea that plant and animal life was adapted to the geological foundation, and that human culture developed in stages built on the groundwork of this landscape scene (see Chapter 2). Inspired by his interaction with the nationally minded Dresden school of landscape painting, best known for the work of Casper David Friedrich, Steffens developed a pictorially structured concept of the historical relation between man and nature (Boime 1990:428–432): Through this interaction of the whole upon the individual, and the individual upon the whole, is generated an identical picture-history, which presupposes the entirety of nature as the foundation for all final existence, and all of humanity as the expression of this interaction itself. The expression of the co-existence of all these individuals’ interaction in history and nature is space-eternity’s continually recumbent picture. But the whole is only an eternal chain of changing events. … The constant type of these changes is time – eternity’s constant moving, flowing and changing picture. (Steffens 1905 [1805]: 91) In the modern German language the ideas of “picturing,” creation and development were conflated. The German word for picture, Bild, and the verb bilden (meaning to build or create and by extension to educate and develop) had been identified with each other at least since the Reformation (Markus 1993:14–15). This identity continued into Steffens’ era when Germans sought a form of moral rearmament through the development of the nation-state, of education, and of the arts grounded in the native soil and geology. 28 Just as an educated

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Englishman should be able to interpret the world as landscape scenery, Bildung (education) required an ability to conceptualize the world as Bild (see also Chapter 9). Casper David Friedrich’s famous 1818 painting, Wanderer over a Sea of Mist (depicting an heroic individual who has climbed to a rocky mountain pinnacle to stare into the infinite), is a Bild but it also represents bilden. In Steffens’ hands, however, the infinite space of the painting’s vanishing point is replaced by an infinite progress, stage by stage, through time (see Chapter 2), which is, literally, grounded in nature. Development and growth start with the bedrock of geology (Mitchell 1984; 1993:77–78). As Steffens put it: It is weak language to say that through the influence of physical conditions human actions assume their character. Man is wholly a product from the hands of nature. Only in his being this wholly – not partly, but wholly – do we confess that in him nature centres all her mysteries. And so it became plain to me that natural science is bringing a new element into history, which is to become the basis of all knowledge of our race. History and nature must be in perfect concord, for they are really one. (Steffens 1874 [1840–1844]:100) Steffens’ mode of thought leads easily to the organic grounding of society’s legal constitution, its Grundgesetz, in the Grund (ground, soil) itself. Natural philosophy, therefore, has been identified as a source of nationalist, and racial, ideologies (Poliakov 197 4:71–105, 174–175). Steffens’ work brings together three topics that engaged the Universalist German thinkers of his time: the laws of natural science (especially historical geology), aesthetics, and the history of law (Ziolkowski 1990). The brothers Grimm exemplify this confluence of interests. They began their careers as students of ancient Northern European law before developing their pioneering philological interest in the laws and history of language (Grimm 1854). These various interests converged in their studies of Scandinavian and German folklore (Peppard 1971) – studies that were influenced, in turn, by the ideas of their friend Steffens concerning the relationship between physical landscape and folk culture (Steffens 1840–45, vol. 6:109–110; Peppard 1971:34). The importance of the Grimms’ scholarship cannot be denied, nor can their upright support for Germanic notions of political freedom be taken lightly (Peppard 1971:xii). In the final analysis, however, this pan-Germanic mode of thought led to an idea of a greater Germany that absorbed neighboring territories, and that homogenized German society into an abstract Volk-Geminschaft, bound to the soil, and believed (ultimately) to think with a single mind (Nitschke 1968; Poliakov 1974:71–105) (see Chapter 8). In the end we find Jacob Grimm writing polemics, on the basis of specious folk-cultural and geographic arguments, for the incorporation of large sections of Denmark into Germany (Peppard 1971:223, 231–232). The ultimate irony, however, is perhaps the way in which

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the expansion of the German state resulted in the swallowing up of such ancient Germanic Landschaften as Ditmarschen and North Friesland and in the loss of their former independence and sense of community.

Fascist landscape One must be careful to distinguish between an interest in North European principles of law and justice embodied in the ideas of country and Landschaft and the conflation of this law with laws of nature that are thought to be expressed through race, blood, and soil. The English identification with the Anglo-Saxons and Scandinavians did not necessarily or normally lead to racism, even though this sometimes occurred (Poliakov 1974:37–53, 45, 89). English Old Whigs such as Molesworth were highly inspired by the Anglo-Saxon legal heritage of England, yet notably tolerant of ethnic and religious difference, and their tolerance in these matters helped ground a specifically American “liberal” tradition, where their ideas took hold (Robbins 1961:88–133). In Germany, the older ideas of community and customary law identified with Landschaft were wedded to a scenic concept of landscape that caused these values to be perceived as a product of a region’s environment. The Land ceased to be an area defined by human law; it rather became the soil, Boden, which determined the blood of the people dwelling on the land. There can be no doubt that the modern German conception of Landschaft was implicated in the promotion of blood-and-soil fascist ideology (Bramwell 1989; Groning and Wolschke-Bulmahn 1987; Rollins 1995) (see Chapters 8 and 9). This does not mean, however, that German Landschaft geographers necessarily understood the possible connection between their work and fascist ideology. German Landschaft geography, as we know it from Carl Sauer’s The Morphology of Landscape (1969 [1925]), developed on the intellectual foundations laid by natural philosophers like Steffens, but in the more skeptical climate created by natural scientists like Germany’s Alexander von Humboldt, or Denmark’s Joachim Frederik Schouw, who disavowed the natural philosophers’ romantic speculations and environmental determinisms (Olwig 1980; 1996b:80–83) (see Introduction). The natural-science approach to the Landschaft, and its practical applications, gave it the objective status in the German mind of Wissenschaft (science). While Richard Hartshorne was in Germany preparing The Nature of Geography (1939) just prior to the war, he may have been unduly polite to his German hosts, but it is also clear that he was worried by some of what he saw. This concern helps explain his critique of American landscape geography and his attempt to cleanse geography of its environmentalist taint by making it a science of space (Olwig 1996b: 84–86), which, ironically, turned out to also have Nazi connections (see Chapter 8). In the process of cleansing geography of landscape, however, he overlooked the fact that Landschaft was not just a confusing mixture of territory and scene; it could also be an expression of law, justice, and culture. Carl Sauer, on the other hand, took a more open approach to the idea of landscape, which,

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despite its early confusions, eventually provided the germ of a discipline capable of a wide-ranging and culturally informed, nondeterministic exploration of society/environment issues.

The morphology of geography’s Landschaft In 1939, when Richard Hartshorne published The Nature of Geography, he noted, as stated earlier, that landscape was “perhaps the single most important word in the geographic language” of a relatively young American university discipline. This was due in no small measure to Carl Sauer’s epoch-making 1925 essay on “The Morphology of Landscape” (Hartshorne 1939:149, 155). It was largely through this essay that American geographers were introduced to the many currents of the European variants of landscape geography. “The Morphology’s” inspired encapsulation of the landscape concept’s multifaceted potentiality can be seen as a partial outgrowth of the fertile ideas of German romanticism and natural philosophy. Sauer’s essay motivated a generation of American geographers and laid the groundwork for Sauer and his colleagues to reevaluate the concept of landscape and to formulate new approaches to it. When Sauer describes the Germanic concept of landscape as “a land shape, in which the process of shaping is by no means thought of as simply physical” (Sauer 1969 [1925]:321), he is using the term in a way consistent with the natural philosophy of Henrik Steffens. This creative land-shaping process, as understood by the German geographers, is performed upon a physical surface and a naturally bounded territory that is built up in layers. It begins with geognostic factors, most notably vegetation, that provide the living “scene” upon which human culture develops. Landscape’s prefix in German geography then and now refers to land- as both an area of country and the bedrock and soil of that area. The framed, spatial quality of the Landschaft is noted in one of Sauer’s footnotes to “The Morphology.” Here Sauer refers to Norbert Krebs’ book Natur- und Kulturlandschaft, which defines geography’s contents as being ‘“in the area (Raum) itself with its surfaces, lines, and points, its form, circumference, and content. The relations to geometry, the pure areal science, become more intimate when not only the area as such, but its position with references to other areas, is considered” (Sauer 1969 [1925]:325, note 19). Sauer emphasized the continued importance of the aesthetic quality of the landscape picture, Landschaftsbild, in a special section called “beyond science” (Sauer 1969 [1925]:344–345). The idea of landscape as a unity of territory and people is, however, also present in “The Morphology.” This concept of landscape is virtually unthinkable without people: It is a forcible abstraction, by every good geographic tradition a tour de force, to consider a landscape as though it were devoid of life. Because we are interested primarily in “cultures that grow with original vigor out of the lap of a maternal natural landscape, to which each is bound in the

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whole course of its existence,”29 geography is based on the reality of the union of physical and cultural elements of the landscape. (Sauer 1969 [1925]:325) These German ideas on the organic unity of community and the physical landscape were criticized by Hartshorne (Hartshorne 1939:150, 259, 276–281). Hartshorne’s ideas have, in turn, been echoed in the critique of American cultural geography by proponents of a British-oriented school of geography sometimes known as the “new cultural geography” (Duncan 1980; Cosgrove 1993:5–6). 30 Geographers of this persuasion dismiss American cultural geography as “dominantly rural and antiquarian, narrowly focused on physical artifacts (log cabins, fences, and field boundaries)” (Cosgrove and Jackson 1987:96). They prefer a spatial and aesthetic approach to landscape as scenery (Duncan 1990; Cosgrove 1993).

Rethinking the substantive meaning of landscape Present-day criticism of American cultural geography has focused on Sauer’s “The Morphology of Landscape” (Gregory 1978:28–29, 55; Duncan 1980; 1990:3–7; Duncan et al. 1993:1–21; Jackson 1989:9–24). This is curious because it has long been recognized that Sauer’s later work “expressly repudiates most of the doctrines he propounded in the ‘Morphology’” (Leighly 1969:7). One of the areas where this repudiation bore fruit was his support for a revival of the ideas of George Perkins Marsh (1801–1882) on society’s role in changing the face of the earth (Sauer 1956; 1969 [1941]:356). Marsh, a consummate Nordic philologist, knew not only the languages of Northern (and Southern) Europe, but also the historical and political context of their geographical theorization (Olwig 1980:36–39) (see Introduction). This helped him marshal arguments against the determinism espoused by geographers like Arnold Guyot (Lowenthal 1958:269). Marsh reversed, in effect, the deterministic premises of the nineteenth-century German concept of Landschaft, thereby emphasizing the role of human social institutions in man/environment relations. He can thus be considered an early proponent of what has now come to be known as the idea of the “Anthropocene” (Haraway et al. 2016). The early concept of Landschaft was, of course, precisely an expression of human law and legal institutions. Marsh never lost sight of the role of humans as political and cultural beings in making and destroying inhabitable environments. Environmental regeneration, for Marsh, required “great political and moral revolutions in the governments and peoples by whom those region are now possessed” (Lowenthal 1965:xv; Marsh 1965 [1864):11–12, 45–46). This approach also led to a concern with environmental perception and interpretation because, as Marsh expressed it: Sight is a faculty; seeing, an art. The eye is a physical, but not a self-acting apparatus, and in general it sees only what it seeks. Like a mirror, it reflects

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objects presented to it; but it may be as insensible as a mirror, and it does not necessarily perceive what it reflects. (Marsh 1965 [1864]:15) The landscape studied by American cultural geographers in the tradition of Marsh and Sauer is by no means predominantly rural and antiquarian. It is a substantive landscape in which issues of environment, economics, law, and culture are all important.31 It is also a symbolic medium to be perceived, read, and interpreted on the ground, in written texts, and through artistic images. This is clear from the work of geographers and others connected with the University of California, Berkeley during the Sauer era, e.g., Clarence Glacken, David Lowenthal, Yi-Fu Tuan, Edmunds Bunkse, and John B. Jackson (Lowenthal 1961; Glacken 1967; Tuan 1974; Lowenthal 1985; Duncan 1990:195). The United States, as a former British colony, has inherited the British scenic idea of landscape, and the impact of this idea is clearly an important subject of study (Cosgrove 1984:161–188; Daniels 1993a). But for better or worse, the United States is also very much the inheritor of German romantic ideas concerning the relation of culture to nature as expressed in the physical landscape (Novak 1980; Olwig 1995a, 1995b). This is only one side of the coin, however. The United States is also a society made up of many differently constituted communities (Kamphoefner 1987:170–200; Conzen 1990). Just as the townships of New England preserve a political landscape characterized by a representative democracy that has long since died out in Old England, they have likewise inherited the ideals of the seventeenth-century Parliamentarians and “commonwealthmen,” many of whom fled to America (Robbins 1961:3–21). The United States also, however, has inherited, particularly in the midwestern area of the Jefferson purchase, geometric Enlightenment ideals of nature which favor the scenic landscape and the spatial structure of enclosure (Olwig 2005b). The United States has nevertheless not been characterized by the rigid, hierarchical class structure of Britain, nor has it experienced Britain’s massive landscaping by a powerful class of landowners – though some wealthy Americans have tried (Heiman 1988:187–262). Despite manicured country club lawns, Americans by and large have not been socialized to know their place in a stratified landscape where everything from the stately home to the cottage to the back-to-back terraced row house has been carefully situated according to the gradient of a spatial scale. The predominant American reality is a vernacular landscape that tends to violate the visual aesthetics of perspective and harmony (Lewis, Lowenthal, and Tuan 1973; Meinig 1979; Jackson 1984). In the United States environmental justice is a community issue (Di Chiro 1995), and differences of culture and custom are at least as vital as those of class and society to an understanding of the landscape of environmental conflict. I do not mean to imply, however, that these environmental and social issues are irrelevant in modern Britain. The “United” Kingdom has yet to erase the national memories of the peoples absorbed by England, and with the influx of immigrants, it is now full of ethnic neighborhoods that maintain a

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cultural sense of place identity that refuses to be absorbed into a stratified social landscape (Williams 1989; Daniels 1989; Ingold 1993:154; Millichap 1995). It is not enough to study landscape as a scenic text. A more substantive understanding of landscape is required. Such a substantive understanding of landscape derives, I would argue, from the historical study of our changing conceptions and uses of land/landscape, country/countryside, and nature (Olwig 1984; Jones 1991; Demeritt 1994; M. Williams 1994). It is an understanding, furthermore, that cannot focus on the country or on the city, but must incorporate the mutual definition and relations of both (R. Williams 1973; Spirn 1984; Cronon 1991). Such an understanding recognizes the historical and contemporary importance of community, culture, law, and custom in shaping human geographical existence – in both idea and practice.

Notes 1 By substantive, I mean “real rather than apparent” and “belonging to the substance of a thing,” but also the legal sense of “creating and defining rights and duties” (Merriam-Webster 1993: substantive). In this context, I am also concerned with landscape as a “real” phenomenon in the sense that the “real” relates “to things in law,” especially “fixed, permanent, or immovable things (lands tenements)” (MerriamWebster 1993: real). 2 The words landsceap and landscipe were used in Anglo-Saxon to mean a district, region, tract of land, or country, or simply land (Bosworth and Toller 1966–1972 [1898–1921]: landsceap, landscipe). The O.E.D. argues that “the alleged OE. [Old English] landsceap is an error due to a misreading.” It does not question, however, the veracity of landscipe (O.E.D. 1971: -ship). 3 I use the German spelling of Landschaft for the continental Germanic meaning of the term since this is the predominant language in an area where national linguistic boundaries during most of the period of study were not as clearly defined as today (Clark 1946:199–201). I use the current English spelling, landscape, except in quotations where other spellings are used, and the spelling current in the other Germanic languages when this is appropriate to a particular geographic and linguistic context. If the latter differs from present-day national standards, it will be italicized. All translations are by the author unless otherwise noted. 4 My thanks to Annelise Ballegaard Petersen for help with the translation of old (and new) German texts. 5 See the references for Mecklenburg and Austria/Voralberg (Sante 1964:541, 751); see also Bloch (1961:371). The standard German dictionary dates the first reference to the usage of the term Landschaft to refer to (1) inhabitants of a district as such to 1121; (2) the (presumably noble) representatives in the Landtag or parliament dates to 1179; and (3) the division into estates to 1420/1555. The use of the term for estates persists into the late nineteenth century (Grimm and Grimm 1855: Landschaft, definitions 5, 6; Ordbog over Det Danske Sprog (O.D.S.) 1931: Landskab, definition 4). The O.E.D. defines estate as “an order or class regarded as part of the body politic, and as such participating in the government either directly or through its representatives.” The term is also applied to the assembly of these estates. England had three estates: the Lords Spiritual, Lords Temporal, and the Commons. Under a purely feudal system the peasantry would be represented through the nobility, but in some areas, such as Sweden, the free farmers formed a fourth estate (O.E.D.1971: estate). In Dithmarschen and North Friesland, the farmers were the predominant estate (Kobler 1988:114–115, 127–128, 373–374). The name of the Dithmarschen Landtag was Landschaft and the

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name of the inn where it met in the town of Heide was Landschops-huus (Mensing 1931: Land-dag). 6 Lands such as Jutland or Zealand (Sjælland) themselves incorporated older lands, just as they are now incorporated in the land of Denmark. East Gothland is likewise incorporated as a Landskap in Sweden. This is because smaller legal areas of possible tribal or clan origin “melt together” with larger ones (Benediktsson et al. 1981:228, 236; see also Fenger 1992:143). Eiderstedt was the product of a 1456 union with two other “lands” – Everschop and Utholm (which had united in 1370). Each of these “lands” (as they called themselves) retained its legal and political autonomy (Trap 1864:267; see also Kobler 1988:127–128). During the Middle Ages, these lands apparently formed the loose federation of North Friesland that was ruled by a common council (Trap 1864:124–125). Switzerland and the Netherlands have retained a variant of this political structure. 7 The land of men was dry land (also spelled Land in German), but the “land” of the fish was the sea (Gurevich 1985:79). 8 This law became a foundation of subsequent Danish justice, though it was superseded (except in the duchies) by the codified body of law promulgated by the absolute monarchy in the seventeenth century (Kroman 1945; Benediktsson et al. 1981:228–233). 9 I am indebted to Chris Sanders at The Arnemagneanske Commission’s Dictionary, Copenhagen, for his help in tracking the older Nordic meaning of this term. The word beskaffenhed (Beschaffenheit in German) has the root skab (or schaft in German) meaning shape. Shape can mean to create by shaping, but it can also be used to refer to the shape or form of that which has been shaped. The Beschaffenheit of something is thus literally the shape, in the sense of condition, that something is in. The term Landschaft, in this sense, literally refers to the shape the land is in with respect to its customs, the material forms generated by those customs, and the shape of the bodies that generate and formalize those customs as law. 10 The oldest Danish application of landskab to Jutland in the lexicographic records for the forthcoming Old Danish Dictionary is found in two manuscript versions of the Jutland law from 1490 and 1497 in which land is replaced by landskab (personal correspondence with Merete K. Jørgensen at the dictionary project). Similar ancient districts such as Gothland in Sweden have been commonly termed landskap since at least the eighteenth century. Landskapet Åland is a culturally Swedish territory under the Finnish state and, unlike the Frisian Landschaften, still retains considerable legal and political autonomy. 11 Germania was rediscovered in 1425 and published in 1470 (Tacitus 1948; Strauss 1959:10, 31; Schama 1995:75–100). 12 Ladurie’s (1980) point of departure is a Roman Catholic area of France with a long legal background in Roman law. He therefore downplays the importance of Germanic legal precedence and even the importance of custom (which other historians have emphasized). His negative attitude to custom derives from the mistaken assumption that the appeal to customary law is necessarily reactionary (Clark 1946:197). 13 The oldest recorded use of the term to designate the background for a painting dates to 1490 (quoted in Gibson 1989:53–54). 14 On the legal importance of ritual in the customary law of late medieval Europe, see Bloch (1961:113–116) and Ladurie (1980:305–324). For a more general discussion of the relation between ritual and customary use rights, see Malcolmson (1973), Bushaway (1982:25, 36, 82–86, 92, 149) and Thompson (1993:97–184). 15 Like the words Land, Landschaft, and country, the root common is also applied in a variety of territorial and social contexts. The commoners are thus the estate that is represented in the House of Commons and that participates in the governing of the Commonwealth. 16 Italianate painting could incorporate contemporary elements within this ideal framework. A classic expression of the opposition between the two approaches is

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found in a comment on the Northern European tradition attributed to Michelangelo (1475–1564): “It will appeal to [those] who have no sense of true harmony. In Flanders they paint with a view to external exactness. … They paint stuffs and masonry, the green grass of the fields, the shadow of trees, and rivers and bridges, which they call landscapes, with many figures on this side and many figures on that. And all this, though it pleases some persons, is done without reason or art, without symmetry or proportion” (quoted in Alpers 1983:xxiii). 17 Drummond had studied law in Bourges and was familiar with the work of Hotman and hence, no doubt, the legal thinking behind the Parliamentarian concept of commonwealth and representative councils (MacDonald 1971:84–90). 18 The queen would have known the full Germanic meaning of Landschaft. Her grandfather, Duke Ulrik of Mecklenburg (where she spent her early childhood), ruled a country where the parliament was known as a Landschaft. The Landschaft could claim to represent the entire country because it had refused, in 1523, to allow the land to be divided by a dynastic split (Carsten 1959:427; Sante 1964:540–543). One of Anne’s father’s first acts as King Frederik II of Denmark was to conquer the free farmer republic of Dithmarschen and incorporate the Landschaft territory into his realm in 1559. 19 Northern European Landschaft painting was also enabled by the techniques of the surveyor, but these paintings were not (as noted earlier) focused upon a universal ideal of a framed and balanced pictorial space. The English and Dutch cadastral maps differed even though the English maps reveal evidence of techniques developed in the Netherlands. In England, “the ownership of a landed estate with its fields, woods, mansion, farms, and cottages was the entrée to landed society, an estate was ‘a little common wealth’ in its own right” (Kain and Baigent 1992: 7). The situation was otherwise in the Netherlands, where surveying developed as part and parcel of land reclamation in a society in which the newly created properties were put in the possession of the farmers themselves, rather than the owners of vast estates. These maps served the interests of the self-governing, representative, local polder and drainage boards called waterschappen or the larger-scale hoogheem raadschappen (Kain and Baigent 1992:7, 11–39). 20 This use of landscape is hardly “a picture representing natural inland scenery” (O.E.D. 1971: landscape, definition 1). Jonson and Jones’ landscape presents the inland world as idealized natural scenery, much as plays are presented in the theater. This is illustrated by Jonson’s The Vision of Delight of 1617: Behold a king Whose presence maketh this perpetual spring, The glories of which spring grow in that bower, And are the marks and beauties of his power. (quoted in Orgel 1975:52–53) 21 According to Ernst H. Gombrich: “Where every natural object can be conceived as a sign or symbol, every symbol, in its turn, will be thought of as existing ‘by nature’ rather than by convention. … The very confusion of Neo-Platonic thought helped to weld form and content, symbolic significance and aesthetic effect, together” (Gombrich 1948:180–185). 22 The distinction between natural justice and conventional justice goes back to a passage in Aristotle’s Ethics which reads: “There are two kinds of political [as distinguished from domestic] justice: the natural and the conventional. Natural justice has the same force everywhere and it does not depend upon its being agreed upon or not. Conventional justice is justice whose provisions are originally indifferent, but once these have been established they are important” (Aristotle 1934:295–298; also quoted in Locke 1990:103–105). 23 This reification of the meaning of land eventually made it necessary to create such alternative neologisms as seascape (late eighteenth century) and townscape (late nineteenth century) (O.E.D. 1971: seascape, townscape).

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24 Etymological dictionaries that define the primary meaning of landscape as “a picture representing natural inland scenery” (O.E.D. 1971: landscape) are somewhat misleading. The idea that nature is scenery developed after the concept of landscape entered the English language. It would be more correct to state that landscape presents nature as scenery. 25 Representatives of this tradition would be the eighteenth-century historian Justus Moser and the philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder (Dopsch 1937:5–25; Moser 1965 [1780]; Schiller 1894 [1804]:xvi, xxi). 26 Wilhelm Tell contains many references to the ancestral customs of the Swiss “lands,” such as the famous council at Rütli Mead where one land’s representative proclaims: “Tis well. Let our old customs here prevail; Though night be dark, the light of justice shines” (Schiller 1972:49 [II, 2]). Schiller also admired the Frisians because they preserved the ancestral customs that guarantee their “Landesfreiheit,” “the liberty of the country” (Schiller 1889 [1788]:22; 1922 [1788]: 21). According to Schiller: “All the provinces enjoyed these privileges in common; others were peculiar to the various districts [Landschaften in original]” (Schiller 1889 [1788]:21; 1922 [1788]:20). On the alp Landschaften see Blickle (1973). 27 Steffens was also a contributor to historical geology (1810, 1973 [1801]). A testament to the importance of Steffens’ geology is the fact that the latter work (Steffens 1973 [1801]) was republished in a series of “geological classics.” 28 Mitchell suggests that the German Kulturlandschaft paintings from this time should be termed Bildungslandschaft because of their emphasis upon the historical process of development (Mitchell 1993:143). 29 Sauer here quotes from Oswald Spengler, Der Untergang des Abendlandes: Umrisse einer Morphologie der Weltgeschichte, Vol. I (Munich, 1920, p. 28): “Kulturen, die mit urweltlicher Kraft aus dem Schosse einer mütterlichen Landschaft, an die jede von ihnen im ganzen Verlauf ihres Daseins streng gebunden ist, aufbluhen” (Sauer 1969 [1925]:325). 30 According to Duncan, the “deft hand of U.K. geography” is behind the generation of a “new U.K. practice of cultural geography” in which British social geography and cultural geography are “conflated,” thereby forming a “new cultural geography … which is very different from its American counterpart” (Duncan 1993:372–376). See also Jackson (1989:1), Duncan (1990:3–7), Philo (1991), Blaut (1993), Cosgrove et al. (1993), and Price and Lewis (1993). 31 As Daniels has argued, “issues of ecology simply cannot be addressed by the spatial science paradigm. Instead of dismissing Carl Sauer and his disciples, as some ‘new’ cultural geographers have in their ignorance done, we might look again at their work and that of the culture-environmental tradition in Europe, notably that of H. J. Fleure” (Daniels 1991).

2 LANDSCAPE, PLACE, AND THE STATE OF PROGRESS

Prologue The “deliberative steps,” which bring the peripatetic mind a sense of place and community, are, I would argue, inherently circuitous. The steps of the pilgrim’s progress thus takes the pilgrim away from the home place, but it also brings the pilgrim back to the place of origination – allowing the pilgrim to know it afresh.1 It is through such peregrination that the liminalities that bound the structures of our daily life are transcended, and a sense of place and community is generated (V. Turner 1969, 1974). A sense of place can help us, in Yi-Fu Tuan’s words, to “forget our separateness and the world’s indifference”: Briefly, I shall argue that we cannot, by taking thoughtful and deliberative steps, maintain a state of rootedness, whereas a sense of place can indeed be thus achieved and maintained. Rootedness implies being at home in an unself-conscious way. Sense of place, on the other hand, implies a certain distance between self and place that allows the self to appreciate a place. (Tuan 1980:3) Place supports the human need to belong to a meaningful and reasonably stable world, and it does so at different levels of consciousness, from an almost organic sense of identity that is an effect of habituation to a particular routine and locale, to a more conscious awareness of the values of … places such as neighborhood, city, and landscape, to an intellectual appreciation of the planet earth itself as home. (Tuan 1992:44) There is a contradiction, however, between the progress which is made, metaphorically speaking, by the taking of deliberate peripatetic steps, and the

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progress made when we march, in step, into a future that obliterates the places of its past.2 The “substantive” landscape discussed in Chapter 1 is one in which the memory of customary law is affirmed through cyclical repetition, as with the festive perambulation of village lands in Rogation week that is literally in harmony with the cyclical movement of the seasons governing the use rights linked to the use of the land. However, even though this cycle repeats itself, year after year, reinforcing customs perceived to originate in a “time out of mind,” they also change and develop in spiral fashion according to changing needs. Custom is therefore never fixed and “traditional.” By contrast, the landscape scenography of the English Renaissance masque by Inigo Jones, the Royal Surveyor presented in the previous chapter, was created drawing on the fixed eternal abstract Euclidean space employed in surveying. It was through surveying that the cadastral property maps transformed the common substantive landscape of customary rights into a landscape of spatially and legally defined properties, be they on the scale of the nobleman’s estate, or that of the state itself. This is a space in which the lines of perspective direct the scenic landscape perspective’s lineal focus toward an unattainable point in the infinite distance associated with an infinite temporal future marked by stages of development through infinite space. This development is also due to the fact that the space of perspectival representation, as noted particularly in Chapters 1, 3, and 5, is structured on the basis of the cartography of Ptolemy’s globe. The minutes marked by the lines of longitude on a globe are a geometrical measure that effectively also mark the time in a particular location as calculated according to the rotation of the globe vis-à-vis the sun. East–West movement in this global space thus becomes implicitly movement backward or forward in time. It is this geometric space of the landscape scene through which one marches, in step, into a rising future that obliterates the substantive past as shaped by custom, and with it even past meanings of landscape (see Chapter 8). It is this space that armies march in step to the unsyncopated beat of an ensnaring drum. According to Tuan, writing in the journal Progress in Geography: The pedestrian advances by leaving step after step behind him. … This commonplace observation gains interest if we think how radically spaceand-time changes when a person is not walking but marching with a band. The marching man still moves, objectively, from A to B; however, … [i]nstead of advancing by leaving steps behind the marching man enters space ahead. (Tuan 1974b:225) The march of progress, following this line of thinking, takes us away from place. The person marching in time to the beat of a drum does not derive a sense of place,3 nor do people marching in lockstep form a community.4 The creation of a sense of place, I will argue, depends on a form of peripatetic progress, which

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is in conflict with the march of progress. The march of progress takes us into an “open” placeless space, a utopia (or nonplace), and tends to obliterate the places that it leaves behind. In the following I will critically examine the march of progress and contrast it to a topian concept of progress, which does not parade us linearly to the steady beat of its drum, but allows us, like the spiral of a harmonic progression in music, to return to, and regenerate, the places that give us sustenance.

Introduction This chapter concerns the transformation of the idea of progress from a concept that, in the Renaissance, still identified the circuitous process by which the place of a human commonwealth was generated, to a notion that progress involved the linear development in time and space of a territorial landscape scene, point by point, through a succession of stages. This lineal idea of progress simultaneously designated its opposite. Forms of place identity that were rooted in the past experience of society were thereby designated as being “traditional,” and thus in opposition to the march of progress and deemed to be old and in its way. The idea of progress thereby implied the necessity of eliminating that which impedes progress. This darker, Faustian side of progress might be termed the “dialectic of modernity.” It is a dialectic that opposes cosmic dreams of a utopian future to the topian exigencies of present and past (see Chapter 8). Like the ever-receding vanishing point of the lines of perspective on the landscape horizon, this utopian idea of progress never seems to fully materialize. This is because the constituting of the social landscape as a progressively changing nebulous scene has the effect of dissolving the substantive qualities of place to which the progressive functioning of communities is linked. Progress must bring us back to the places and communities from which our social existence derives its substance if it is to have any meaning. This essay, by the same token, is not based upon a linear analysis of progressive stages, but seeks, rather, to circulate between the poles of a discourse which, although it is seen to take form in the Renaissance, is nevertheless consciously present in the narratives of twentieth century modernism.

Progressive custom When Elizabeth I (1533–1603) made her “progress” through England, the Tudor queen made a bodily customary circuit from place to place in which the local constituencies of the country were made manifest to the monarch and the monarch to the country. She sat upon a throne, called the state, and was carried in a stately procession through political landscapes shaped by differing legal communities according to mutually acknowledged rights of custom. This was a ritual, seasonal process by which was generated a larger and more encompassing notion of England, as the place of a commonwealth. The countermotion to the queen’s progress out into the countryside was the movement of the bodily members of the

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Parliamentary body from the “country” to their meeting in the capital. These opposing movements progressively reinforced the idea of a larger English commonwealth, or body politic, under a higher form of common law.5 The abstract notions of justice expressed in common law were likewise generated through the circuitous progress of circuit court judges through legal realms rooted in local custom. England was a country of nested countries in-so-far as each county or shire was also thought of as a country (see Chapter 1). Each shire, in turn, was made up of nested communities and places. At the end of Elizabeth’s reign, this progressive process of commonwealth identity formation was seriously contested, however, by a new notion of progress that sought to appropriate established ideas of community and place within the framework of a centralized, absolutist state centered in London. During the reign of Elizabeth’s Stuart successor, King James I of England (1566–1625), the meaning of progress began to undergo the transformation that led to the modern idea of progress as a linear movement, occurring in space and changing through time, through stages of development (O.E.D. 1971: progress).6 The Stuart court facilitated this change by effectively creating a new means of envisioning progress by staging the country as the theater of state in elaborate, and expensive, court masques (Chapter 1). In this theater, located at the London court of Whitehall, the head of state no longer progressed circuitously from place to place, but was now positioned upon a fixed elevated throne, while the spectacle of the country and its body politic, seen in the spatial perspective of staged landscape scenery, was paraded before him, progressing from scene to scene before his commanding gaze. In this way a political landscape made up of a multiplicity of places, functioning as the arenas of legally constituted communities, was appropriated within the space constituted by the landscape scene. In teasing apart this transformation of meaning it becomes apparent that the concept of landscape as scenery may mask as much as it reveals about the nature of progress. The unmasking of landscape raises the question of whether the linear conception of progress in space and time is real or illusory? This essay will first sketch the origins of the linear conception of a state of progress and then trace the subsequent implications of this link between landscape and the idea of progress.

The political landscape At the time of Elizabeth I the states of Northern Europe, such as Denmark or Sweden, were lands of lands, much as England was a country of “countries” or “counties,” each subland or “landscape” having its own quasi-independent representative legal bodies and corresponding bodies of law that the monarch was required to acknowledge through some form of royal progress. The monarch’s progress was a necessary means of marking the mutual recognition of the legal status of the monarchy, as embodied by the regent, and the quasi-autonomous existence, embedded in their customary law, of the lands through which the monarch passed. The Germanic word land is, in this context, synonymous with

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“country.” Scotland is the country/land of the Scots.7 The suffixes -shape and -scape are cognate. The landscape, in the countries of Northern Europe, was the outcome of the shaping of the land as a political entity by the legal bodies that represented the local political communities and gave their customs the form of law. It was thus, according to ancient Nordic proverb, by abiding by “law” that a “land” became the abode of a community. The Nordic word for custom was sædvane, a word which combines “habit” (vane) with “seat” (sæde) – literally, the habits of custom by which one makes a place the seat of one’s dwelling (a sense we still find in words like country seat). As smaller lands were gradually incorporated into a larger union of lands under a monarchical state, these smaller lands often became known as “landscapes,” thereby suggesting that though they had become part of a larger land, they maintained the shape or quality of a land, their “land-shape/landscape.” Jutland thus retained the name of a land, and its particular body of “landscape law,” after it became a part of the Danish state under Denmark’s monarch. Even though landscapes were no longer independent lands, landscapes lent their special place identity, and their ideas of justice, to the spatially larger land of lands encompassed by the realm of the monarch. As late as the sixteenth century Scandinavian monarchs were still elected to their position, and to officially become monarchs they had to be acclaimed by the representative legal bodies known as ting – “things” or “moots” (meetings) in English – of the different lands or landscapes encompassed by their realm (Chapter 7). The progress of the monarch from landscape to landscape, country/county to country/county, was thus not entirely unlike that of a modern American presidential candidate whose circuitous path to power involves campaigning from state to state (historically from the back of the procession of cars making up a train), and who is ultimately elected to be the leader of the American state of states by an electoral college representing each individual (sub)state. Americans thereby help maintain the complex place identity characteristic of England at the time the early settlers fled the political transformations brought about by the Stuart court in the early seventeenth century. In differing contexts they can be fiercely local or fiercely American.

Court vs. country, lord vs. landscape The death of Elizabeth in 1603 created a radically new political situation in England because it brought the Stuart Scottish king, James VI, to power as James I of England. The resulting personal union of the two kingdoms led James to feel that he had been born to achieve the manifest destiny of uniting Scotland and England. He began his reign with a magnificent ceremonial progress from Edinburgh to London, and marked the inception of his new London-based court with a series of theater masques with a landscape vision of a Britain united under his gaze. It was necessary to promote the court’s vision of a united Britain in this way because Parliament, to James’ great chagrin, opposed his plans for unifying

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the countries of Britain into one state. Such a unification would have weakened the legitimacy of Parliament because its authority, as Chief Justice Edward Coke (1552–1634) was fond of pointing out, was based upon the moral authority of English custom (see Chapter 1). Custom was the basis for the common law that united England as a legal community and which empowered Parliament as the representative of the differing estates of that community. According to Coke, “Custom lies upon the land.” There were, as noted in Chapter 1, “two pillars” for custom: “common usage” and “time out of mind.” It is on the basis of these pillars that customs “are defined as a law or right not written; which, being established by long use and the consent of our ancestors, hath been and is daily practised” (quoted in Thompson 1993:97, 128, 129). Custom literally lay upon the land because custom was (and still is) progressively established by people through their daily practices in the circuitous course of shaping the place of their dwelling through the seasons (Thompson 1975:102; Bourdieu 1977:72–95). The constitution of the local community was etched into the land through this practice, so that the physical environment of the land became a material reflection of the commonwealth of interests that governed it. The force of custom was progressively renewed through ritual circuits of movement, in place and community contexts ranging from the royal progress through the country as a whole to the progress of urban parades and, as noted earlier, the progress of villagers as they beat the bounds of their farmlands during Rogation week. Though ostensibly based upon “time out of mind” precedence, customary law was, in fact, progressively brought up to date through the reinterpretation of precedence in the light of present circumstance. Eric Hobsbawm has explained the logic of this mode of thought by comparing it to a motor and fly-wheel: “Custom” in traditional societies has the double function of motor and flywheel. It does not preclude innovation and change up to a point, though evidently the requirement that it must appear compatible or even identical with precedent imposes substantial limitations on it. What it does is to give any desired change (or resistance to innovation) the sanction of precedent, social continuity and natural law as expressed in history. (Hobsbawm 1983:2–4) According to Hobsbawm “tradition” must be distinguished clearly from “custom” because whereas tradition denies progress, custom reaffirms it. As he writes: The object and characteristic of “traditions,” including invented ones, is invariance. … “Custom” cannot afford to be invariant, because even in “traditional” societies life is not so. Customary or common law still shows this combination of flexibility in substance and formal adherence to precedent. The difference between “tradition” and “custom” in our sense is indeed well illustrated here. “Custom” is what judges do; “tradition” (in

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this instance invented tradition) is the wig, robe and other formal paraphernalia and ritualized practices surrounding their substantial action. … Inventing traditions, it is assumed here, is essentially a process of formalization and ritualization, characterized by reference to the past, if only by imposing repetition. (Hobsbawm 1983:2–4) Custom, in other words, becomes tradition when it is reified, in accordance with the dialectic of modernity, as the costume belonging to an antiquated past (O.E.D. 1971: costume). The stalemate between the Stuart court and the country of England, as represented in Parliament, produced a situation in which James was encouraged to promote a new conception of land, country, and progress that would legitimize his efforts to unite Britain under his rule. Though the situation of Britain was unique in many respects, James’ situation resembled that of other European princes. The basic outlines of this conflict that became known as “court vs. country” in Britain was known on the North European continent as “Lord vs. landscape” – or Landschaft as it is spelled in German (see Chapter 1). The historian Otto Brunner describes these contradictions, on the basis of Austrian material, in the following terms: The Land comprised its lord and people, working together in the military and judicial spheres. But in other matters we see the two as opposing parties and negotiating with each other. Here the Estates appear as the “Land” in a new sense, counterposed to the prince, and through this opposition they eventually formed the corporate community of the territorial Estates, the Landschaft. At this point the old unity of the Land threatened to break down into a duality, posing the key question that became crucial beginning in the sixteenth century: who represented the Land, the prince or the Estates? If the prince, then the Landschaft would become a privileged corporation; if the Landschaft, then it would become lord of the Land. (Brunner 1992 [1965]:341) 8 James would have been well informed about the situation on the continent because he was related to the lords of a number of north European territories through his wife, the royal consort Queen Anne of Denmark (1574–1619). He had met many of these relatives in Copenhagen on the occasion of his 1589 wedding, well before he had ever set foot in London. The court of his brotherin-law, the now legendary King Christian IV of Denmark, was then making progress both toward the unification of the twin kingdoms of Denmark and Norway, and toward the ideal of an absolute monarchy, ruling on the basis of a body of rational statutory law founded not upon custom, but upon the timeless natural law elucidated by mathematics and science. The progress of Denmark was visible in the great astronomical research institution established

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by the astronomer, astrologer, and cartographer Tycho Brahe on the island of Hven, which James made a point of visiting. Brahe used his science in the service of astrology to predict the return of the golden age as a utopian era under the absolute rational governance of godlike leaders. Science, not the least the science of surveying, also provided the techniques by which the Danish state created the cartographic and scenic visions of the realms it sought to unite under its power. When James became King of England he gave his wife Anne carte blanche to spend astronomical sums to produce court spectacles of the Stuart state’s vision of a reborn golden British age under the sun-godlike gaze of James. She, in turn, hired a budding English scenographer/surveyor/architect, Inigo Jones (1573–1652), then in the employ of the Danish king, to become the behind the scenes wizard who created these scenes.

Landscape as the scene of state The dramatic entrance of a new English concept of landscape upon the political scene of the Stuart court occurred in Ben Jonson’s preface to The Masque of Blackness, the first major theatrical production promoted by Queen Anne: First, for the Scene was drawn a Landtschap … the scene behind seemed a vast sea … that flowed forth, from the termination or horizon … which (being on the level of the state) was drawn, by the lines of perspective, the whole work shooting downwards from the eye. … So much for the bodily part, which was of Master Inigo Jones, his design and act. ( Jonson 1969:48) The Masque of Blackness was performed on Twelfth Night, Epiphany, 1605. It signaled not just the birth of a new year, but the recent birth of a new century; a new Stuart dynasty; and the birth of an imagined, forthcoming, new British golden age. The masque, a forerunner of opera, was written by the coming English poet laureate, Ben Jonson (1573–1637), according to a concept conjured up by the queen. The staging and costumes were done by Jones, the future court “surveyor” or architect. Jones introduced here, perhaps for the first time in English history, the use of changing perspectival stage scenery. Through the vehicle of the masque’s scenery the country is transformed into something new, an ideal landscape scene, framed according to the techniques of Italianate perspectival painting as inspired by visions of a reborn classical utopia.9 These techniques were, in turn, derived from the principles of surveying and cartography.10 The first masque performed for the Stuart court was the 1604 Twelfth Night performance of Samuel Daniel’s The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses, which was performed by Queen Anne and her ladies in the Great Hall at Hampton Court. In this masque a central perspective stage was not used. Rather, the scenery was scattered about the hall, and the actors and audience circulated between them, according to Tudor custom. The plot concerns the visit of twelve Greek

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goddesses to the “Western Mount of mighty Brittany, the land of civil music and of rest.” Anne played the central figure of Pallas “the glorious patroness of this mighty Monarchy” (quotations from Rygg 1996:79–80). The Masque of Blackness marked the move of the masque to a Whitehall setting, complete with changing central perspective stage scenery and a unified story line. The reclusive (and paranoid) King James, who did not like to make a bodily progress through the landscape, in The Masque of Blackness was able to experience the scenic movement through differing landscapes from one spot, elevated above the crowd, sitting on his palisaded throne of state, which was in turn located in the court theater of his capital city. The illusion of the sea, which is described as appearing to flow forth from the horizon, is created in part by the lines of perspective that, “being on the level of the state,” converge upon the eye of the monarch. The head of state, from his privileged, elevated position, possessed a commanding view of the “bodily part” of the masque, the landscape scenery of his realm, and the players upon it (including the blackfaced figure of his pregnant wife). There were few seats in the theater, and one’s social standing was literally marked by how close one stood to the privileged position of the monarch. The masque was a form of total theater, involving dance, song, gastronomy, and drama within the context of a spectacle, created by Jones, which was so spectacular that it overshadowed the textual narrative. At a signal the players and audience would suddenly merge in a geometric dance, thus breaking down the barrier between stage and public, theater and daily life. The players included both professionals, leading lords and ladies, the queen, and the most beautiful youths of the realm. Jones dressed the players in revealing costumes that celebrated the bodies of the players, who in turn represented the body politic. The invisible lines of perspective focused, on the other hand, upon the surveillant head of the head of state, who was figuratively identified with the sun, whose beams illuminate the landscape. The court masque thus represented, in the very structure of its theater, the structure of a nation overseen by the comprehensive gaze of an imperial state that controls the body politic via invisible, and hence secret, lines of power, symbolized by the ability of the science of perspective to create the illusion of infinite depth in a three-dimensional, bodily space. In the masques the meaning of the land in landscape shifts subtly from meaning the customarily constituted country of a people to that of the soil that, like the floor of a stage, provides the foundation for the scene upon which we play out our lives. It is a floor, however, that is blocked out like the grid of a map, or the property of an estate. The laws that shape the illusion of bodily, organic, space on the stage – the “bodily part” – are not those of historic custom but those of a lineal perspectival geometry that marches the eye progressively, in stages, out into and through an infinite space that is also infinite in time. In this way the three-dimensional landscape of scenic space gains a fourth dimension of time. The Stuart court’s envisioning of the naturally defined geographic body of Britain as the scene upon which the individuals making up the body politic play out their roles, creates a space in which one’s estate (or status), and hence one’s

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prospects, are determined by one’s place or position as both observer and participant in the blocked out spatial framework of the physical British landscape scene. Place ceases to be a landscape or country community defined by an everevolving body of customary law shaped by practice. Instead it is appropriated by the space of the landscape scene in which individualized bodies occupy a fixed, spatialized place within the coordinates of a larger territorialized framework. The landscape of the theater thereby provides a miniaturized version of the state of Britain in which the same lords who flocked to London to position themselves at James’ court also were expected to manifest their elevated estate, at a lower spatial scale, at country estates from which they exercised their power as subregents of the state. This vision of the state was immortalized, not long thereafter, in the frontispiece to Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, in which a similarly individualized body politic, with its landscape under the surveillant gaze of the head of state, is given graphic form (Hobbes 1991 [1651]) (Figure 2.1). In Hobbes’ vision the individual bodies who play out their roles on its stage have effectively become “decentered” in relation to the larger framework of the theater of state as masque, which is centered, via central point perspective, upon the gaze of the head of state.11 They are no longer the author of their own identity. “Persona,” as Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) pointed out: in latine signifies the disguise, or outward appearance of a man, counterfeited on the Stage; and sometimes more particularly that part of it, which disguiseth the face, as a Mask or Visard: And from the Stage, hath been translated to any Representer of speech and action, as well in Tribunalls, as Theaters. (Hobbes 1991 [1651]:112; italics in original) The idea of the masque is deeply implicated in the way the authority to speak on behalf of the state was constituted in the Renaissance. The world of the court, represented as theatrical masque, was a microcosm of the larger theater of the state itself and those who spoke upon its stage received their persona, and their “authority,” from the state as represented in the symbolic form of the theater and its scenery. A person who acts upon the stage of this theater of state may, in Hobbes’ words, “represent” either “himself ” or “an other.” When representing “an other,” “he that owneth his words and actions, is the Author: in which case the Actor acteth by Authority” (Hobbes 1991 [1651]:112; italics in original). As the philosopher Régis Debray has put it, since nobody has ever either seen or heard a state, a state must, at any price, make itself visible and let itself be heard because: “It is the theater of the state which creates the state, just as the monument creates memory” (Debray 1994:66; translated by the author). The theater landscape, as in the masque, thus became a means of making visible, and audible, the abstract authority of the state, which in this way became the true author of the words and actions of actors upon its stage. Inigo Jones was thus the “wise surveyor! Wiser architect,” who would “survey a state,” as Ben Jonson

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FIGURE 2.1  Engraved title page for the 1651 edition of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, as drawn by Abraham Bosse. (From Wiki Commons. This work is in the public domain in its country of origin and other countries and areas where the copyright term is the author’s life plus 100 years or less.)

put it in his 1631 poetic remonstrance, “An Expostulation with Inigo Jones,” after his breaking off his artistic partnership with Jones ( Jonson 1985:462–465) (see also Chapter 5).

The progress of landscape The court theater at Whitehall, designed by Jones, envisioned a new conception of the territorial state that the Stuart court was seeking to promote. This state

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would no longer require the progressive movement of the corporal body of the monarch to hold it together. It would, instead, fix the head of state at the capital of London, from whence the secretive invisible power of the corporal state would permeate and control the landscape and thereby bring harmony and order to an individualized body politic. The court’s Lord Chancellor and chief legal council was Francis Bacon, and his support for statutory law based on “sciential” natural principle made him the natural enemy of Coke and customary law. He proposed an alternative form of government in The New Atlantis, which envisions a utopian autocratic society, resembling Plato’s Republic, ruled by an absolute monarch under the guidance of a college of scientists (Bacon 1915 [1627]). The word sciential, as used at the time, is useful because though it literally means “relating to or producing knowledge or science,” it also means “having efficient knowledge,” which is to say knowledge that can effectuate action and cause something to happen – as in magic (Merriam-Webster 1993: sciential, efficient). Words like science and knowledge thus carried connotations of occult wisdom at this time and famous scientists such as Tycho Brahe, on his island, also had a reputation as a magus, not unlike Prince Prospero in Shakespeare’s contemporaneous Tempest (which incorporated elements of the masque and was performed at court for James and Anne). Jones’ scenography represented the culmination of a European tradition in which the masque functioned as a forum for the display of the “sciential” power of the state. This was a notion of science with deep roots in mystical traditions linked to ancient philosophers, astronomers, and astrologers such as Pythagoras, Ptolemy, and Plato, and a notion of the state with roots in both Plato and Machiavelli.12 At this time the state was deliberately enveloped in a secretive aura – the mysteries of state – in part as an attempt to link the state, as the guardian of religion, to the church as the embodiment of the “mystical body” of Christ (Kantorowicz 1957:7–23, 193–232; Barkan 1975:61–115). Secretive institutions such as the “Privy Council” and the “Star Chamber” helped enforce this aura. “Flying machines” and other stage devices, developed with the aid of the most advanced science of the time, helped create a picture of how this “sciental” state would transform the landscape of Britain into that of an ideal golden age beyond time or history, under the elevated surveillance of the state. The court masque incorporated elements of the seasonal ritual progress by which the evolving justice of custom was renewed. Seasonal rituals, such as those connected with Rogation week, midsummer, and Yule, were part of a larger yearly framework that celebrates the death and rebirth of nature. Elizabeth’s progress had been carefully constructed so as to make her person the symbolic vehicle of these natural cyclical powers of renewal. The dramatists of her era likewise incorporated these patterns into their theater. Shakespeare thus built this pattern of change into the structure of plays like A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream, or Twelfth Night. The critic Northrop Frye gives the following description of this pattern of movement: Shakespeare’s type of romantic comedy follows a tradition established by Peele and developed by Greene and Lyly, which has affinities with the

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medieval tradition of the seasonal ritual-play. … Thus the action of the comedy begins in a world represented as a normal world [often that of the court], moves into the [natural] green world, goes into a metamorphosis there in which the comic resolution is achieved, and returns to the normal world. … Thus Shakespearean comedy illustrates, as clearly as any mythos we have, the archetypal function of literature in visualizing the world of desire, not as an escape from “reality,” but as the genuine form of the world that human life tries to imitate. (Frye 1971:182–184) The progressive changes made in the landscape scenery of the masques followed the general pattern described by Frye, but rather than making the process of vernal renewal a cyclical seasonal event, it is reified as the coming of a revolutionary millennial golden age under a Stuart subvicar of God. The ideal world portrayed in the masque thereby becomes the symbol of the genuine form of the world against which the inauthenticity of our daily life must be measured. Thus, we are told in the conclusion to the Jonson and Jones masque The Fortunate Isles, and their Union that the unification of Britain signals the coming of a “point of revolution” in which: There is no sickness nor no old age known To man, nor any grief that he dare own. There is no hunger there, nor envy of state, Nor least ambition in the magistrate. ( Jonson 1969:447, line 296) The Masque of Beauty (the sequel to The Masque of Blackness) concludes with the lines: May youth and pleasure ever flow; But your state, the while, Be fixèd as the isle. So all that see your beauty’s sphere May know th’ Elysian fields are here. Th’ Elysian fields are here. Elysian fields are here. ( Jonson 1969:74, lines 335–346) 13 The progress toward this millennial rebirth of a mythical ancient elysian Britain was made manifest by the spectacular changes of three-dimensional scenery architected by Jones that gave landscape a fourth temporal dimension. The medium of scenic illusion became the powerful bearer of the Stuart court’s message. By causing the eye to follow the lines of perspective out through the landscape and into the infinite potentiality of its distant horizons, this message carried,

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furthermore, a suggestive subliminal progressive subtext. A classic example of this is found in the masque Albion’s Triumph, where the presence of the monarch prompts the following change of landscape scene: Here comes the trophy of thy praise, The monarch of these isles, The mirror of thy cheerful rays, And glory of thy smiles: The virtues and the graces all Must meet in one when such stars fall. The King and the masquers dance the main masque, afterward taking his seat by the Queen. The scene is varied into a landscipt in which was a prospect of the King’s palace of Whitehall [where the spectators are sitting] and part of the city of London seen afar off, and presently the whole heaven opened, and in a bright cloud were seen sitting persons representing Innocency, Justice, Religion, Affection to the Country, and Concord, being all companions of Peace. (Inigo Jones and Aurelian Townshend, Albion’s Triumph, 12th Night, 1631:330–345) According to Stephen Orgel, a leading authority on the English Renaissance masque, this conception of the sciential state listed “among the promised benefits of the new learning the most fabulous wonders of masques: dominion over the seasons, the raising of storms at will, the acceleration of germination and harvest. Every masque is a celebration of this concept of science, a ritual in which the society affirms its wisdom and asserts its control over its world and its destiny” (Orgel 1975:55). The masque was the product of an idealism that was determined to “purify, reorder, reform, reconceive a whole culture” (Orgel 1975:36, 87).

The materialization of the landscape of progress The Stuart court never achieved its goal of creating a united British state under a strong monarch. The head of the second Stuart head of state was literally and symbolically severed from his body just outside the theater in Jones’ court Banqueting House in 1649. The Glorious Revolution of 1688 created, however, the basis for a Britain united under a Parliament controlled by a powerful landed oligarchy that no longer needed to fear that unification would throw the balance of power in favor of the monarch. A century after Jonson and Jones staged their landscape vision of a united Britain, Parliament gave its approval to the uniting of the Scottish and English kingdoms. Along with the idea of Britain, the powerful landed gentry also looked with favor upon the landscape and architectural ideals

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of the Stuart court. The architects who pioneered the landscape garden parks of Britain and its matching British, Jones-inspired Palladian architecture, Richard Boyle, 3rd Earl of Burlington (1694–1753) and William Kent (ca. 1685–1784), were avid students of Jones’ designs, and Jones was duly honored with a bust in the gallery of British worthies displayed at the gardens designed (in part) by Kent at Stowe (alongside Newton and Locke) (Clarke 1973:569). To the oligarchy of powerful, commercially and imperially inclined landowners who now controlled parliament a synonym for progress was “improvement.” Improvement was predicated, for them, upon the appropriation of the customary use rights of the commoners with the enclosure of their land into bounded and surveyed country estates under their absolute ownership and control. At the same time as these improvers were actively intensifying the agricultural use of the land, they were also busy surrounding their homes with enormous landscape gardens of the sort pioneered by Kent (Barrell 1972:64–97; Williams 1973: 60–107). They now looked out from classical Jonesian/Palladian country seats upon theatrically landscaped scenery in much the same way that King James looked out from his elevated seat upon the British landscape scenery created for the court masque. Like the monarch they saw this landscape as a symbol of cultural and social progress.14 The progress signified by these gardens also had a darker side, however, in that it often required the destruction of whole villages and, even, the ruination of the “gothic” manorial homes of earlier occupants, which in their ruined state could be turned into eye-catching follies decorating the garden as a point de vue (Everett 1994; Hussey 1927). The landscape of progress required the creative destruction of that which was deemed to be its opposite, but it might then become a pleasing reminder of ancient tradition, now so sadly and (so luckily!) irrevocably lost. The landscape park became a symbol, throughout Europe, for the particular form of progress that Britain was seen to represent. The ascendancy of Britain as the epitome of progress in agriculture and industry was not lost on the remainder of Europe. Charles Montesquieu (1689–1755) was thus an Anglophile who not only promoted British ideals; he was so enamored of William Kent’s gardens, as a symbol of these ideals, that he lay out part of his grounds at his La Brède estate in the English style (Courtney 1963:4). Perhaps the most encompassing example of the identification between progressive improvement and the landscape garden was to be found in eighteenth century Anhalt-Dessau, in Germany, where an entire principality was governed on the progressive principles thought to be exemplified by the English-style park constructed on the estate of Prince Franz at Wörlitz (Brandt 1987).

The transformation of progress It is, to recapitulate, at the time of Shakespeare, Jonson, and Jones that the idea of progress begins to undergo a transmutation and instead of simply referring to a progressive, circuitous movement from place to place begins to suggest a

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linear spatial movement through stages of development and temporal “social progress.” As we read in the Oxford English Dictionary under the definition of the verb progress: Progress v. Common in England c. 1590–1670. 4. fig. To make progress; to proceed to a further or higher stage, or to further or higher stages continuously; to advance, get on; to develop, increase; usually, to advance to better conditions, to go on or get on well, to improve continuously. 1610 B. Jonson Alch. II. iii, Nor can this remote matter, sodainly Progresse so from extreme, vunto extreme, As to grow gold, and leape ore all the meanes. 1791 Washington, Our country … is fast progressing in its political importance and social happiness. This change of meaning can also be seen in the sphere of religion where the pilgrim in John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress from 1678–1684 is no longer the sort of pilgrim that we know from Geoffrey Chaucer’s (ca. 1342–1400) Canterbury Tales, whose circuitous progress is to an earthly holy place from which the pilgrim plans to return. Bunyan’s inventively named hero and heroine, “Christian” and “Christiana,” make a one-way progress from the earthly “City of Destruction” to the “Celestial Country” (Bunyan 1953 [1678–1684]:183). The same gradual transformation of meaning also begins, at about this same time, in the definition of stage: Stage: etym – standing, station, standing place. I. 5. The platform in a theatre upon which spectacles, plays, etc. are exhibited; esp. a raised platform with its scenery and other apparatus upon which a theatrical performance takes place (1551). IV. (represents an English development of meaning which seems to have begun about 1600). 10. A period of a journey through a subject, life, course of action, etc. 1608, Shakespeare (Per. iv, iv, 9): “To teach you the stages of our storie.” “All the world,” to use Shakespeare’s words, had become “a stage” (Shakespeare 1948: As You Like It, II, vii:139, p. 509). In the hands of Inigo Jones this stage became a landscape scene (see Chapter 5), and the progress of the state was measured according to the stage-by-stage temporal transformations of that landscape.

The stages of progress The salient feature of the Renaissance stage was the development of perspective scenery. Behind the surface appearance of the scene was the science of mechanics and perspective that allowed the creation of elaborate stageworks designed to promote the illusion of “bodily” scenic depth based upon the geometries of

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perspective. The stage came, thereby, to provide a metaphor for a universe characterized by surface appearance and behind-the-scenes scientific principles that generated that appearance and drove the progress of society’s state. The power of this metaphor can be seen in the works of Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle (1657–1757), who was a central figure in promoting what we now regard to be the modern conception of science. Fontenelle writes in Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds from 1686: I have always thought that nature is very much like an opera house. From where you are at the opera you don’t see the stages exactly as they are; they’re arranged to give the most pleasing effect from a distance, and the wheels and counter-weights that make everything move are hidden out of sight. You don’t worry, either, about how they work.15 Only some engineer in the pit, perhaps, may be struck by some extraordinary effect and be determined to figure out for himself how it was done. That engineer is like the philosophers. But what makes it harder for the philosophers is that, in the machinery that Nature shows us, the wires are better hidden – so well, in fact, that they’ve been guessing for a long time at what causes the movements of the universe. … Whoever sees nature as it truly is simply sees the backstage area of the theater. (Fontenelle 1990 [1686]:12) The picture of progress from stage scene to stage scene witnessed in the theater was perceived to be a function of science. This was true of the early seventeenth century masques, it was true for Fontenelle, and, a century later, in 1795, we see that such ideas continue to inform the influential Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind by Fontenelle’s successor at the French Academy of Sciences, Antoine-Nicolas De Condorcet (1743–1794) (Condorcet 1955 [1795]).16 Progress, for Condorcet, was driven by science but it was manifested in stages as if in a theater. Progress is thus envisioned by Condorcet, as the title indicates, as a series of historical pictures through which the linear “march” (his word) of progress takes place in a series of stages beginning with the first stage, when “men are united in tribes,” to the contemporary stage, “from Descartes to the foundation of the French Republic,” to the final tenth stage in which “the future progress of the human mind” is envisioned (Condorcet 1955 [1795]:v–vi, 9). Progress, just as in Elizabeth’s day, still involves movement, but this movement is no longer circuitous, it is now linear and in “march” tempo. Elizabeth’s stately progress was constrained by the need to ever look backward toward custom. Condorcet’s march of progress into the future has its eyes fixed firmly on the horizon ahead: How consoling for the philosopher who laments the errors, the crimes, the injustices which still pollute the earth and of which he is often the victim is this view of the human race, emancipated from its shackles, released from

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the empire of fate and from that of the enemies of its progress, advancing with a firm and sure step along the path of truth, virtue and happiness! It is the contemplation of this prospect that rewards him for all his efforts to assist the progress of reason and the defense of liberty. He dares to regard these strivings as part of the eternal chain of human destiny. (Condorcet 1955 [1795]:201; italics mine) Condorcet’s own path to the future was shortly thereafter obliterated by his murder following his imprisonment by the marching soldiers of the revolution he helped set in motion and who ordered his death. He nevertheless was soon canonized as a state hero who pointed the way to the glorious future of the French nation state.

Revolutionary progress Condorcet paid with his life for a notion of progress that, to achieve its goals, required the destruction of that which was deemed to belong to the past, such as the noble social class from which Condorcet himself sprang. A quintessential expression of this destructive dialectic of modernity is Karl Marx’s reference in the Communist Manifesto to the revolutionary role of the bourgeoisie: Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all newly-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind. (Marx 1969 [1848]:18–20) Marx does not mourn this melt-down of culture and place; he sees it rather as the necessary precondition for the establishment of a new stage of development. The phrase “all that is solid melts into air” has been paraphrased by Marx from Shakespeare’s Tempest, with its elements of the masque, and its imagined “brave new world” (Shakespeare 1954: act 4, scene 1) (see also Chapter 5). The stage of human development achieved by communism is also like the dream of a revolutionary return to the golden age in the Stuart masques in that it involves the effective end of history and the beginning of a new (communist) millennium. In order to make way for the new, one must deny the authenticity of the old and the historic, and hence “the Communist revolution” necessarily “involves the most radical rupture with traditional ideas” (Marx 1969 [1848]:54). All that appeared to be solid and traditional must therefore be revealed to be an inauthentic and unnatural ideological construction concealing the true relations

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of exploitation under the appearance of a palpable permanency. The exposure of this concealed inauthenticity thus paves the way for a timeless utopia that denies that it is a utopia because it is based upon the rationality of a scientific socialism that in the sphere of social relations is comparable to the rationality of Darwin’s scientific theory of evolution (Marx 1969 [1848]:58–78, 8). What is deceptive about the dialectic of modernity, as presented by Marx in the Manifesto, is that it requires the tacit presupposition of a natural and genuine utopia against which the inauthenticity of that which is historically constituted can be measured. For Marx this ideal measure is principally provided by the futurism of a communist utopia that is consciously constructed according to the natural rational precepts of scientific socialism. Marx and (particularly) Engels, however, also saw communism as involving an end of history as hitherto known, and a return, in effect, to the supposed classless conditions that existed prior to this history: The whole history of mankind (since the dissolution of primitive tribal society, holding land in common ownership) has been a history of class struggles … the history of these class struggles forms a series of evolution in which, now-a-days, a stage has been reached where the exploited and oppressed class – the proletariat – cannot attain its emancipation from the sway of the exploiting and ruling class – the bourgeoisie – without, at the same time, and once and for all, emancipating society at large from all exploitation, oppression, class-distinctions and class struggles. (Engels 1969 [1888]:7–8) The dialectic of modernity, as articulated by Marx and Engels, has its own particular communist content, but the structure and power of this dialectic owes, I would argue, to the fact that it implicitly draws upon powerful Western utopian visions ranging from that of Plato’s Republic to that of the Judeo-Christian new Jerusalem or Francis Bacon’s scientific New Atlantis. In these utopias it is the ideal of a future state, organized according to timeless rational principles, which provides the standard against which the historically constituted present is measured and found wanting. This ideal measure, however, can also be provided by an imagined natural Edenic utopia of a past golden age – Engels’ theorizing about primitive communism belongs to this category. Such pre- and post-historical utopian ideals belong, as the word utopia indicates, to no place and to no time. They provide the setting, beyond time and place, wherein mankind can emancipate itself from history and reconstruct its full authentic potential within a society in which, for Marxists: “in place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all” (Marx 1969 [1848]:57). If the measure of the authentic is utopian, then historically constituted places are inauthentic, and they must be displaced if utopia is to be achieved.

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The non-place of modernity For Marx the necessary prerequisite for the building of the socialist edifice is the revelation that the apparent substantiality of our historically constituted society is, in fact, a vaporous ideological construct. Only when this society has passed through the cleansing crucible of modernity, and is thereby “melted into air,” can a space be cleared for the construction of the brave new world of the communist state. This dialectic of modernity, in which progress toward a better future requires the destruction of the place of the past, is by no means peculiar to Marx. It is, as Marshall Berman (1982) has shown, foundational to modernism (see Chapter 8). This dialectic is well illustrated, for example, in the work of the archetypal architect of modernism, Le Corbusier. His modernist visions thus necessitated the simultaneous destruction of large areas of the cities, e.g., Stockholm and Paris, where they were to be realized. Though Le Corbusier’s Parisian proposal was paid for by a capitalist automobile manufacturer,17 his rhetoric bears a remarkable resemblance to that of Marx and Engels: Movement is the law of our existence: nothing ever stands still, for if it does it begins to go backwards and is destroyed, and this is the very definition of life. Therefore we must act, we must advance, we must produce. After a century and a half of miraculous preparation, reason has come into her own in company with science, and science has flung us violently into the machine age. Everything is revolutionized. It seemed as though progress could lead to nothing but universal destruction, but all that crumbled was the old world. Through the debris the new world began to appear boldly. Reason alone, which appeared definitely to dominate everything, might have led us into the deepest despair, but the violent forces of life seem to have thrust us once more into a new adventure. Reason and passion join hands to produce something constructive. ... Our world, like a charnel-house, is strewn with the detritus of dead epochs. The great task incumbent on us is that of making a proper environment for our existence, and clearing away from our cities the dead bones that putrefy in them. We must construct cities for to-day. (Corbusier 1971 [1924]:243–244) Le Corbusier’s vision involved the replacement of the places of the past (notably the Jewish ghetto), which he describes as “junk,” with the space of sky-scrapers: I wish it were possible for the reader, by an effort of imagination, to conceive what such a vertical city would be like; imagine all this junk, which till now has lain spread out over the soil like a dry crust, cleaned off and carted away and replaced by immense clear crystals of glass, rising to a height of over 600 feet. … Our city, which has crawled on the ground until now, suddenly rises to its feet in the most natural way, even for the

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moment going beyond the powers of our imaginations, which have been constrained by age-long habits of thought. (Corbusier 1971 [1924]:281)18 The panoramic landscape prospects seen from these towering edifices would, in Corbusier’s view, stimulate the imagination, creating visions of a modern future. “In our walks through this maze of streets, Corbusier noted, “we are enraptured by their picturesqueness, so redolent of the past.” The advent of aerial photography, however, “creates a blow between the eyes” which makes one aware of the disorganized structure of the city, and the human misery which it causes (Corbusier 1971 [1924]:284). To make this elevated vision of the modern “evident to the eye” Le Corbusier painted a panorama illustrating his vision of the new Paris. This panorama was displayed in the pavilion of a journal called Esprit Nouveau at the 1925 Paris International Exhibition of Decorative Art. Here, in this panorama, one could see “the majestic rhythm of vertical surfaces receding into the distance in a noble perspective and outlining pure forms. From one sky-scraper to another a relationship of voids and solids is established. At their feet the great open spaces are seen. The city is once more based on axes, as is every true architectural creation.” Along these axes automobiles are seen racing through this open linear space.19 This city is the latest step in a long process of opening up the city which follows “the normal laws of progress” (Corbusier 1971 [1924]:282–283). The Palladian/Jonesian park landscape of Enlightenment Britain underwent a new transformation when it became the preferred setting for modern architecture in the vein of Le Corbusier – a backdrop that provides fine views from the picture windows of apartment towers. According to Le Corbusier, “the City of Tomorrow could be set entirely in the midst of green open spaces. One of the mistakes made in New York, in his mind, was that the sky-scrapers were not built in the parks” (Corbusier 1971 [1924]:82). In Le Corbusier’s imagination, “The whole city is a Park. The terraces stretch out over lawns and into groves. … Here is the CITY with its crowds living in peace and pure air, where noise is smothered under the foliage of green trees” (Corbusier 1971 [1924]:177).20 Much as the “natural” landscape parks created to surround the country seats of the British gentry involved the destruction of villages and their environs, the creation of the lawns, sometimes called “green desserts” by environmentalists, surrounding modernist buildings has also involved the destruction of historically constituted places.

Custom vs. modern progress Le Corbusier shared the distaste for custom and for democracy expressed by the supporters of Renaissance-enlightened despotism. “Town planning,” for Le Corbusier, was “the mirror of authority and, it may be, the decisive act of governing.” This, to him, suggested the necessity for “a revolution which must be

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incorporated into the act of governing.” “A country as a whole, that is to say the mass of the people as well as their representatives,” according to Corbusier, “is not really conversant with the subject [town planning] … or with the tremendous possibilities of its emancipating power. They are, on the contrary, entangled in the network of common custom.” Modern town planning, as envisioned by Le Corbusier, will usher in a utopian era not unlike Bacon’s New Atlantis: “It is undoubtedly true to say that to think in terms of modern town planning is to open every door to harmony and happiness both in the homes and amongst the mass of mankind” (Corbusier 1971 [1924]:viii). To achieve these goals Corbusier concluded, we must “make a strong assault on compromise and democratic stagnation” (Corbusier 1971 [1924]:139). For Corbusier the great prototype of the modern planner is Louis XIV, “the last great town planner in history” (Corbusier 1971 [1924]:152).21 Louis’ great work had unfortunately become undone “as a result of carelessness, weakness and anarchy, and by the system of ‘democratic’ responsibilities” (Corbusier 1971 [1924]:14). For Le Corbusier, however, Louis XIV’s work still stands as a beacon for city planners. The last page of his manifesto on urban planning, The City of Tomorrow, is thus dedicated to a full page drawing of Louis XIV “commanding the building of the Invalides.” The caption reads: “Homage to a great town planner. This despot conceived immense projects and realized them. Over all the country his noble works still fill us with admiration. He was capable of saying, ‘We wish it,’ or ‘Such is our pleasure’” (Corbusier 1971 [1924]:302).

Conclusion: From utopianism to topianism The idea that custom, misconceived as tradition, is inherently opposed to progress has become so ingrained in Western culture since the Renaissance that this axiom is often taken for granted. Actually, it would be more correct to ascertain that custom stands in the way of the progress of particular social and political interests, and this helps explain its reduction to static tradition. “Progress” is a matter of definition. When a community, for example, draws upon legal precedent and custom to argue for the preservation of historical environments in order to protect itself against destruction by a proposed highway or “urban renewal” project, that community can be seen as hindering the progress of established economic interests. That community, however, might also be seen as unpaving the way for a new appreciation of historical/environmental values which can radically improve the fabric of urban life (Porteous 1989). In America the environmental justice movement is largely community based (Di Chiro 1995; Harvey 1996:366–402), and the dramatic reduction of crime in a number of U.S. cities is attributed in part to the reassertion of various forms of community control in the face of the inability of the police to enforce the law (Rosen 1997). Custom and precedence are still important principles of justice and communities still reinforce their sense of place identity through all manner of parades, carnivals, pageants, and the like (cf. V. Turner 1969, 1974; Ekman 1991).

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The modernist dialectic has been embodied from its inception in the Renaissance in the illusory landscape of a utopian dream of progress as conceived by the architects of modernity. To create this utopian landscape it has been necessary to wipe the landscape of topian custom from the drawing board. The landscape of custom hindered the progress of particular social interests, such as those behind the (absolutist) central state. It favored, on the other hand, the growth of democracy, and conceptions of justice, abstracted from the customary law of local communities. Where the modernists once promised to eradicate an inauthentic unnatural past and replace it with an authentic, utopian future, we are now often confronted with certain postmodernist visions of the world in which all seems to be constructed and inauthentic, and progress proceeds from a recognition of this fact (Harvey 1990:113–118, 336–337). This denial effectively redeploys the modernist dialectic within an intellectual context in which faith has been lost in modernism’s grand narratives (Lyotard 1979). Perhaps it is time we moved beyond modernism’s utopianism, and postmodernism’s dystopianism, to a topianism that recognizes that human beings, as the creatures of history, consciously and unconsciously create places. For topianism the issue is not whether places are inauthentic constructions, as measured against a utopian ideal, but whether a working community has succeeded in generating a place for “the good life” (on this life; see Tuan 1986). One of the words that preserves the sense of a progress that is circuitous is the word progression, as used in a “chord progression.” Such progressions underlie even complex forms of music, which stretch our auditory bounds, but a fully realized chord progression brings us back to the music’s harmonic point of origin, leaving us where we started, enriched. An harmonic progression, as Pythagoras (Chapter 5) would be the first to tell us, echoes the sublime, but inaudible, music of the cosmos, at the same time as the melodies and lyrics that they carry along speak to us of our earthly, placebound, experience of hearth and home (Olwig 1993b; Tuan 1996).22 Topianism, if it is progressive in this sense, is accomplished, on the one hand, through the practices and customs of dwelling and, on the other, through circuitous progressions out into the world that allow us, in Tuan’s words, to “peer beyond the carapaces of place and culture … by thus putting a slight distance between us and what we create,” thereby helping us to “recognize not only their necessity and power to delude but also their goodness and beauty” (Tuan 1992:46).

Notes 1 In the circuitous steps of the dance we even begin to merge with place because, as Tuan tells us, this brings us into an “homogeneous, nondirected ‘presentic’ space” (Tuan 1974b:226). 2 The word peripatetic comes from Greek, via Latin, meaning “given to walking about” or “around,” with particular reference to the custom of Aristotle of teaching while walking and discoursing in a place for walking in the Lyceum at Athens (O.E.D. 1971: peripatetic). Aristotle used this technique to help create the sense of place of an academic community. 3 I distinguish between place and community because though community often is identified with a particular area in space it need not be coequal with such an area, and this

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area may not constitute the place with which the community identifies. Place identity must be socially constituted; it is not given by the coordinates on a map, or by physical conditions. A religious or academic community, for example, may be spread out over the Earth. Such a community, however, may also identify with a particular place (e.g., Rome or Jerusalem or a given university campus like Berkeley), or succession of places (e.g., the succession of places where academic communities meet). Communities often constitute places, as when an academic community founds a college campus, or a religious community founds a city or state (e.g., Salt Lake City, Utah, or Israel). For a useful discussion of the constitution of place, see Tuan (1974b, 1977, 1980). 4 By this, I mean the sort of diverse community described in the work of Victor Turner, and not regimented unities. The difference can be illustrated by differences in movement and rhythm. Turner focused on the importance of pilgrimage for the development of a sense of “communitas” and, by extension, place identity (V. Turner 1969, 1974). Pilgrims, according to Turner, tend to emphasize the communality of the endeavor by wearing ordinary clothing and using pedestrian means of transportation, particularly their feet. The pilgrims’ path is circular and pilgrims are not noted for marching to their destination in lock step. As Henry David Thoreau was fond of pointing out, pilgrims did not generally stride purposely to their destination, they took their time and “sauntered” (Thoreau 1991 [1862]). Armies tend to dress in uniforms that emphasize their sense of uniformity, and they too tend to cultivate pedestrian means of locomotion, but they move as linearly and uniformly, in march step, as they dress. Armies, might thus, use the march to foster a sense of solidarity amongst the ranks, but it is a unity in which diversity is suppressed. If soldiers form a sense of “communitas,” this would occur through experiences, like that of field camp, which are more similar to those of the pilgrim. Parades and processions are also means by which community feeling can be generated, and these often contain marching soldiers (veterans) and bands bearing flags. There is an evident link between such marching and nationalism, and, hence, with that sort of community which Benedict Anderson calls “imagined” (Anderson 1991). Though all communities are, in some sense, imagined, the scale of the nation-state demands a form of solidarity that transcends personal and local place experience, and which hence requires considerable imagination. Thus, as with the distinction between pilgrims and marching armies, there is also a salient difference between, say, a dancing carnival troupe and the marching troops and the uniformed bands, though they may participate in the same parade. 5 When it was discovered in 1604 that Guy Fawkes had placed a large store of gunpowder under the House of Parliament, just before the king was to address it, King James I exclaimed to the assembled members of Parliament that: “these wretches thought to haue blowen vp in a manner the whole world of this Island, euery man being now commen vp here” ( James 1918 [1616]:286). The Parliamentarians did not thus just represent their particular “countries,” they also represented the sum of these countries which made up the more abstract “community of the English realm” (communitas regni Angliae). It was thereby the Parliamentarians who (together with the King) constituted this commonwealth, and with it, the country of England (Brunner 1992 [1965]:349). The word country could thus be used at a variety of levels. At one level it could be identified with the county, and at another with the entire English “commonwealth” – a country founded on law and united by compact or tacit agreement of the people for the common good (commonweal) (Merriam-Webster 1993: commonwealth). The ability of Englishmen to simultaneously identify with the notion of country at a variety of nested spatial realms is illustrated by the words of a member of Parliament M.P. who, in 1628, proclaimed: I speak … not for myself, that’s too narrow … It is not for the country for which I serve. It is not for us all and the country which we represent, but for the ancient glory of the ancient laws of England. (quoted in Holmes 1979–80:70)

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6 The classic history of ideas study of progress is J.B. Bury, The Idea of Progress: An Inquiry into Its Origin and Growth (1955). 7 The Romance languages had similar words carrying similar connotations of legal community and territory. Queen Anne of Denmark’s tutor in Italian, John Florio (1553–1625), thus gave the following definition of Paése in his famed 1611 ItalianEnglish dictionary, Queen Anna’s New World of Words: “the countrie. Also a countrie, a Land, a region, a province” (Florio 1611: Paése). 8 For an English language historical study that discusses the empowerment of the Landschaft in the Duchy of Württemberg during the sixteenth century, see Sabean (1984:13). 9 Whereas North European landscape art, as the name suggests, appears to have been largely concerned with representation of the qualities (however idealized) of landscape territories (or countries) as constituted by customary law, Italianate perspectivistic representation of rural scenes was apparently largely concerned with the representation of utopian bucolic ideals found in classical literature (see my discussion of this issue in Olwig 1996b). The oldest recorded use of the term Landschaft to designate the background for a painting goes back to 1490 (Gibson 1989: introduction), and the French equivalent, paysage, dates first from 1549, well after the origins of Italianate perspective painting, but at the time of the emerging contradictions between Landschaft and lord, Protestant and Roman Catholic. Paysage appends the suffix -age to pays in much the way as schaft is appended to Land in the Germanic languages, or -ship to town in English. Pays carried essentially the same connotations of areal community and people as country and land. The equivalent Italian terms, paése and paesàggio, emerged about the same time and carried the same meaning (Gamillscheg 1969: pays, paysage; Robert 1980:pays, paysage). 10 See my review of the literature on this subject in Chapter 1. 11 On landscape scenery and the “decentering” of the individual, see Olwig (2001). 12 Frances Yates traces Jones’ use of mathematics and mechanics, in constructing his stage effects, back to the work of such Elizabethan scientists, cum mystics and magicians, as the mathematician John Dee (1527–1608) and the physician Robert Fludd (1574–1637). According to Yates, “In the courts of Europe such shows were prestige symbols, affirmations of the greatness and wealth of the monarchs who could afford them. There was also undoubtedly still lingering some idea that a kind of magic was worked by such spectacles in aid of the monarchs whom they extolled” (Yates 1969:85–86). The linking of the sciential and the magical and occult was, I would venture, more than “lingering.” 13 Kirsten Rygg argues that the echo “is clearly coming from Elysium; the voice is a voice from the heavenly spheres and speaks of a divine presence, called forth in the end by the dancing of the worlds’ soul” (Rygg 1996:310). This would make sense given the theme of reflection found in the reference in the Masque of Blackness to the Pythagorean message of the moon (which Rygg does not discuss) seen in the water of the Nile. 14 The term theater was applied to areas in gardens in the Palladian style of Kent and it was commonly applied to landscape gardens by subsequent writers, as when Horace Walpole writes of the techniques of Kent: “Thus, selecting favourite objects, and veiling deformities by screens of plantation; sometimes allowing the rudest waste to add its foil to the riches theatre, he realized the compositions of the greatest masters in painting.” Elsewhere he wrote: “Prospect, animated prospect, is the theatre that will always be the most frequented” (Walpole 1943 [1782]:26, 34). On the role of theater and the ideas of Jones in British garden design of this period, see also Hunt (1992:47–102). 15 Note that Fontenelle uses the plural in referring to the different “stages” presented to the spectator at the opera. The successive scenes presented to the viewer are thought of as changing stages, rather than, as today, as changing scenes upon a single stage.

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16 I would like to thank Tom Are Trippestad for bringing the relevance work of Fontenelle and Condorcet to my attention. 17 Le Corbusier’s project to raze a large section of central Paris, including the Jewish ghetto, was named the “Voisin Plan” after the name of the automobile manufacturer who paid for his exhibition at the Esprit Nouveau (an international journal of contemporary activities) Pavilion at the 1925 Paris International Exhibition of Decorative Arts. Le Corbusier felt that since “the motor has killed the great city, the motor must save the great city” (Corbusier 1971 [1924]: 275). In the preface of the 1947 edition of The City of Tomorrow, after the orgy of urban destruction resulting from WWII made the demolishing of historic urban spaces unfashionable, Le Corbusier recanted on his earlier radical views on this subject. He clearly regretted that the Voisin Plan was to be included in the new edition of this historic book (the preface is dated 1945; Corbusier 1971 [1924]:vii–xi). 18 Le Corbusier was emphatic about the need to make a clean slate out of the existing historical city. As he put it, “How to create a zone free for development is the second problem of town planning. Therefore my settled opinion, which is quite a dispassionate one, is that the centres of our great cities must be pulled down and rebuilt” (Corbusier 1971 [1924]:98). “Statistics,” he adds later, “show us that business is conducted in the centre. This means that wide avenues must be driven through the centres of our towns. Therefore the existing centres must come down. To save itself, every great city must rebuild its centre” (Corbusier 1971 (1924):116; italics in original). “We must build,” Corbusier writes in another place, “in the open: both within the city and around it” (Corbusier 1971 [1924]:176; italics in original). If this is not absolutely clear, he makes sure the reader gets the message, writing in capitals for emphasis: “WE MUST BUILD ON A CLEAR SITE. The city of to-day is dying because it is not constructed geometrically. To build on a clear site is to replace the “accidental” lay-out of the ground, the only one that exists to-day, by the formal lay-out. Otherwise nothing can save us. And the consequence of geometrical plans is Repetition and Mass-production” (Corbusier 1971 [1924]:220; italics in original). 19 According to Le Corbusier, “A motor-car which is achieved by mass production is a masterpiece of comfort, precision, balance and good taste” (Corbusier 1971 [1924]:176). 20 These parks in Le Corbusier’s opinion, could be “of the formal French kind or in the undulating English manner, and could be combined with purely geometrical architecture,” but in practice the English has dominated in modernist architecture (Corbusier 1971 [1924]:236). 21 Corbusier writes: “We behold with enthusiasm the noble plan of Babylon and we pay homage to the clear mind of Louis XIV; we take his age as a landmark and consider the Grand Roy the first Western town planner since the Romans” (Corbusier 1971 [1924]:45). Louis XIV Place Vendôme “is one of the purist jewels in the world’s treasury” (Corbusier 1971 [1924]:152). He was a monarch who not only had absolute power, he also had “a conception well thought out and clearly presented.” “It is useless” therefore, according to Corbusier, “to say that everything is possible to an absolute monarch; the same thing might be said of Ministers and their Departments, for they are, potentially at least, absolute monarchs (even if their general slackness prevents their being so in fact)” (Corbusier 1971 [1924]:151–152). The ideal combination appears to be an architect of state, like Louis XIV, with both absolute power and a clear conception of their goal. 22 In the north of Europe the word that means to be in tune, stemme (in Danish), is also the word for voice, and for the vote that is voiced at a democratic assembly. When agreement is reached and people are in overensstemmelse, this suggests that an harmonious stemning has been achieved within the political landscape which, in turn, will be echoed in the harmony of the physical landscape. For a thoroughly Teutonic analysis of the meaning of this word in German (Stimmung), see Spitzer (1963).

3 CHOROS, PLACE, AND THE SPATIALIZATION OF LANDSCAPE

Introduction Landscape has long been of interest in the environmental and geographical humanities. This is because it is an important concern in the literary and visual arts (Clark 1949; Olwig 1984; Pocock 1981) as well as in design and architecture and, of course, a core concept within environmental studies, ecology, geography, and related fields such as physical and spatial planning. There is, however, a curious divide between the aesthetic character of the landscape of literature and art and the practical and scientifically defined landscape associated with geographical analysis and planning. In some fields, such as landscape architecture, university departments will include both artistically inclined faculty doing landscape design, and social and natural scientifically oriented faculty concerned with the planning, ecology, and engineering of landscape. This helps explain why landscape architecture departments can be found in university faculties ranging from natural science to agriculture, engineering, art, and architecture. This duality between the artistic and the scientific, however, is nothing new. It can be seen to permeate the idea of landscape as scenery from its very origins in the renaissance of classical learning that took place in the Renaissance. Denis Cosgrove has pointed out that the humanities, as opposed to the natural sciences, are often thought of as being concerned with the affective and the subjective. Landscape scenery is thus seen to express a humanistic perception of the environment as represented in painting, literature, and gardening. Cosgrove argues, however, that in the Renaissance, when the humanities emerged as a field of study, it included, for example, the science of geometry. Furthermore, leading humanists, such as Leonardo da Vinci, regarded perspectival representation as an objective, scientific view of nature. Landscape represented perspectively as scenery also played an important role in the development of spatial

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planning, landscape architecture and agricultural improvement (Cosgrove 1982, 1984, 1985). This double character of landscape understood as scenery (see also Chapters 8 and 9) is related to the fact that the invisible lines structuring the space of perspectival representation are scientific and practical, based on Euclidean geometry, optics, surveying and cartography, whereas the visible content of the representation often is intended to engage and stimulate the emotions – e.g., a romantic scene of pastoral shepherds and shepherdesses, perhaps as inspired by the naked figures in a scene from Greco-Roman classical literature (see Chapter 9, Figure 9.1). This dual character of landscape scenery, I argue, can be traced back to the different spellings and senses of chora/choros, a key term in Western intellectual history. The first spelling is chora, a theoretical concept that derives from Plato’s ancient Greek cosmology, whereas the other is choros, which relates to the substantive Greek political landscape. It should be noted that this difference in spelling is not always consistent because many use the Platonic spelling of the word in the feminine, chora, to refer to both senses of the word.

The Platonic chora In Plato’s cosmology the universe is divided into three natures. The first nature that Plato describes in the Timeaus is “unchanging Form,” like that of geometry, contemplated through “thinking,” this is the realm of the masculine “idea” deriving from the ancient Greek idea meaning “form, pattern” (as with the abstract geometrical patterns seen in the sky) (NOAD 2005: idea). The second nature is brought into existence and is “sensible,” like the topographical forms of the earth, and hence involves “perception” (Cornford 1937:192). Chora, the third nature, imagined as a kind of feminine being, giving birth to the second nature, is a “bastard” concept apprehended neither by intelligence nor by sense, but as if in a dream, when the eyes are shut and visual perception is blocked. Though chora is in some contexts translated as “space,” scholars generally prefer to term it “place” in order to avoid confusion with the notion of empty space (which is khaos in ancient Greek), since Plato’s chora is more like the enclosed receptacle of a room, a jug or a womb (Cornford 1937:192, 200; Olwig 2008c). The modern meaning of landscape as scenery, it will be argued here, goes back to the Renaissance Neo-Platonist understanding of chora, inspired by the rediscovery of the cartography and cosmology of Claudius Ptolemy, the second century a.d. Alexandrian, Greco-Roman, astronomer, astrologer, geographer, and Platonist.

The substantive choros of the Greek polis Choros literally means “a definite space, piece of ground, place” and makes particular reference to “the lower world” of the earth, as opposed to that of the cosmic heavens, defining it among other things as “land or country” (Liddell and Scott 1940: χῶρος). The geographer Carl Sauer, saw choros, which he spelled “chore,” as being cognate with landscape, arguing that “the facts of landscape

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are place facts” (Sauer 1925:26, 46). Chore or choros was thus similar in meaning to the Germanic word landscape (to use the English spelling) and the French word paysage in the Romance languages, in that it could be identified with the places or lands of a polity (Olwig 2002a).1 Choros is also the root of chorography (O.E.D. 1989: chorography), a branch of geography with an ancient history. Historically chorography was a broadly humanistic form of regional geography, affiliated with history and philology, but it was eclipsed by the mid-twentieth century rise of geography as spatial science (Olwig 1996b:63–96). It has, however, enjoyed renewed interest in recent years (Olwig 2001:95–117; 2008c:1843– 1861; Birkeland 2005; Curry 2005; Pearson 2006). The rise of spatial science and planning was predicated, I will argue, on a redefinition of chorography as rooted in Ptolemy’s Platonist concept of chora/choros. In this redefinition chora is basically viewed as a spatial container, as an enclosed zone encircled in the empty Euclidean space of a map, and its study involves methods of perspectival representation derived from cartography used to pictorially define the meaning and significance of landscape (Figures 3.1 and 3.2).

Ptolemaic chorography and landscape as scenic space Denis Cosgrove, as noted in Chapter 1, has influentially argued that the modern English concept of landscape emerged around the turn of the sixteenth century: “to denote a painting whose primary subject matter was natural scenery” (Cosgrove 1993:9). It was, in his optic, the Renaissance rediscovery of the cartography of Ptolemy that was foundational both to the development of modern cartography and to perspectival representation (Cosgrove 1985:45–62) (see Figure 9.1). Although this is not incorrect, I would add that it was primarily Ptolemy’s concept of chorography that was key to the genesis of the modern understanding of landscape as spatial scenery, and the displacement of the original concept of landscape as place and region. This is because the understanding of choros/chora as a place constituted and described through speech and narrative, and developed through history, was replaced by Ptolemy with a visual definition of choros/chora as a space encircled within the timeless geometry of a map.

Plato, Ptolemy, chorography, and chora Ptolemy, as noted, provided a set of cartographic techniques that were seized upon in the Renaissance to help create the perspectival illusion of spatial depth. His cartographic instructions were contained in his Geographike Uphegesis, meaning “guide to geography” (Ptolemy 1948 [ca. AD 150]:162–181). “Geography,” for Ptolemy, was “the representation, by a map, of the portion of the earth known to us, together with its general features” (Ptolemy 1948 [ca. AD 150]:162–163). The -graphy in geography thus referred to diagraphos, meaning a map marked out by lines. Topography was a subdivision of geography concerned with locations within the cartographic space of the map, whereas geography was a science based

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FIGURE 3.1 

The core polis of an area in modern Greece is often named Chora, using the feminine of choros, as here on the island of Mykonos. Naming the polis Chora is to give it a generic name, the “Place,” signifying its importance to the larger polity. A variant of the English stead, meaning “place” (e.g., Dutch stad “town,” German Statt “place,” Stadt “town,” Danish sted, “place”) is also often affixed to the names of towns in Germanicspeaking countries. (Photo by author. Color version available in eBook edition.)

on the use of astronomy and geometry to locate phenomena on the globe, and chorography was concerned with regions: “geography differs from chorography in that chorography concerns itself exclusively with particular regions and describes each separately, representing practically everything of the lands in question” (Ptolemy 1948 [ca. AD 150]:162–163). Whereas Ptolemy saw the construction of the map, and the plotting of locations upon it, to be matters for mathematics and science, he could not, however, as also was the case with Plato, fit chorography into an exact geometric scheme. It remained something of a “bastard” concept with no scientific parentage. He contrasted chorography to geography, stating that “no one can be a chorographer unless he is also skilled in drawing” whereas “by using mere lines and annotations it [geography] shows positions and general outlines.” This leads to the conclusion that “while chorography does not require the mathematical method, in geography this method plays the chief part” (Ptolemy 1948 [ca. AD 150]:164).

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As an astronomer, Ptolemy was able to use celestial coordinates to pinpoint locations mathematically along the irregular boundary of an area on the graticule of a map’s Euclidean space, but it required the artistic skill of someone who can draw to connect these locational positions with a smooth encompassing line. In the Greek original, Ptolemy described the -graphy in chorography as mimesis- dia-graphes, meaning “imitation/representation through a graphic form.” In the process of translation into Latin this came to be rendered by some as imitatio picturae or, as it was put in English at the time, a “‘certaine imitation of paintinge’” (Nuti 1999:91). This suggested to contemporaries that “Ptolemy himself wanted to establish some kind of relationship between the two disciplines” of chorography and painting (Nuti 1999:91). The -graphy in geography, however, had historically been primarily interpreted to mean writing (Merriam-Webster 1993: geography), whereby one produces a text rather than a picture. There was thus a long tradition in Greek and Roman scholarship, predating Ptolemy and traceable back to Homer, Herodotus, and Strabo, of linking the writing of history and geography within the field of chorography (Lukermann 1961:194–210; van Paasen 1957). When geography, however, is defined as being the graphic practice of mapping, the disciplines of geography, topography, and chorography become identified primarily with the use of graphic and pictorial techniques of representation, rather than with writing. This emphasis upon the pictorial can be related to the influence of Platonism upon Renaissance interpreters of Ptolemy.

Platonic cosmology and landscape Ptolemy’s geography fit perfectly the Platonic cosmology that fascinated the Neo-Platonists of the Renaissance. Ptolemy, who was himself a Platonist (Taub 1993), based his geography upon the science of mapping. Ptolemy’s cosmography was earth centered and, like that of Plato, it separated the sublunar sphere of the earth from the surrounding sphere, or spheres, of the cosmos that revolved around the fixed point of the earth. For the Greeks the cosmos was not simply the universe, it was a principle of order, and the ideal geometric paradigm for that order was to be found in the heavens. According to the historian Liba Chaia Taub, Ptolemy’s astronomical writings represented “the culmination of a rather neglected form of Platonic ethical theory, with its special emphasis on astronomy” (Taub 1993:152). Cartography, for Ptolemy, was based upon the use of celestial coordinates as plotted onto the grid, or graticule (latitude and longitude) of the globe, an approach now familiar in the modern map. This kind of map is thus composed of a geometric structure, analogous to the paradigmatic archetypal cosmic geometric forms or ideas that, in Plato’s cosmology, constituted a higher ideal reality that was believed to be visible in cosmic space. Prior to the invention of the telescope and other precise astronomical measuring techniques, the shapes and movements of the heavenly bodies looked to be more geometrically regular and perfect than they were in fact. The concept of the idea, that is the root of ideal,

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came from the Greek word idein, meaning “to see” (Miller 1995:286). Ideas, in other words, were something one saw, as when one saw geometrical forms in the motions and shapes of the heavenly bodies, and when one saw the rationality of a geographical theorem via its pictorial representation as lines and points within a spatial framework. Sciences such as geometry made it possible for people to perceive, as mental images, archetypal ideal ideas expressed through their graphic representation, as in geometric theorem or, as in Ptolemy’s case, a map or globe. The Ptolemaic map, thus, can be seen as a representation of the idea of an ideal cosmic geometric nature (that of the earth as celestial globe) that undergirds and orders the chaotic phenomena of the sublunary realm of earthly nature. The perspectival representation of chorography as landscape likewise represents an ideal idea of landscape. The role of representation in Platonic philosophy suggests that the -graphy in geography provided a way of visually representing archetypal ideas in Plato’s cosmology. It therefore implied more than a simple graphic likeness. Ptolemy’s Geography, in Latin translation, was often given the title “Cosmography.” This mistranslation was not unreasonable, however, because the Geography can be perceived as being concerned with cosmography defined as “the constitution of the whole order of nature or the figure, disposition, and relation of all of its various parts” (Merriam-Webster 2000: cosmography). Ptolemy’s geography, understood as cosmo-graphy, thus can be seen to form the graphic pictorial image that represents the underlying archetypal ideas behind Platonic cosmology. Cosmology is here understood as “a branch of systematic philosophy that deals with the character of the universe as a cosmos by combining speculative metaphysics and scientific knowledge; especially: a branch of philosophy that deals with the processes of nature and the relation of its parts” (Merriam-Webster 2000: cosmography). It is thus in this cosmographic sense that the perspectival representation of scenery was a representation of nature. The Ptolemaic cosmography created a world picture that was first a representation of an ideal Platonic spatial framework within which was inscribed a world that, especially through linear perspective, created an illusion of the lived space of daily life. Ptolemy himself was aware of the ability of mapped space to create an illusory bounded whole, like that of a head with its face: The purpose of chorography is the description of the individual parts, as if one were to draw merely an ear or an eye; but the purpose of geography is to gain a view of the whole, as, for example, when one draws the whole head. (Ptolemy 1948 [ca. AD 150]:163) This image of the globe as a head with a face was to reappear in pictorial form in a famous woodcut, illustrating Ptolemy’s “cosmography,” found in Peter Apian’s influential Cosmographicus Liber from 1533 (Strauss 1959:55–56) (Figure 3.2).

82  Choros, place, and the spatialization of landscape

FIGURE 3.2 Ptolemy’s

division of geography into geography proper, chorography, and topography, from Peter Apianus, Cosmographia (Antwerp, 1540). Note the face. (The figure is in the public domain.)

By representing the land as a head and face, the Renaissance cosmographers gave the landscape a mask-like personality – persona being the Latin for mask and, by extension, face – that was capable of being captured by painters, much as in a portrait. This face, however, is an ideal construction within a Platonic space. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari call this sort of inversion by which an objective environment takes on a subjective scenic face “deterritorialization”: We could say that it is an absolute deterritorialization: it is no longer relative because it removes the head from the stratum of the organism, human or animal, and connects it to other strata, such as significance and subjectification. Now the face has a correlate of great importance: the [scenic] landscape, which is not just a milieu but a deterritorialized world. There are a number of face-landscape correlations, on this “higher” level. Christian education exerts spiritual control over both faciality and landscapity (paysagéité): Compose them both, color them in, complete them, arrange them according to a complementarity linking landscapes to faces. (Deleuze and Guattari 1988:172; interpolation mine) A landscape that is fundamentally a representation of an ideal space within which the world is given a scenic face and personality is describable as “deterritorialized”

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(see also Chapter 5), but this, of course, is not the only meaning of landscape. Prior to the Renaissance, deterritorialization of landscape via Ptolemaic/Platonic spatial and perspectival forms of representation, the primary meaning of landscape, as well as the choros/chora in chorography, was a form of place or region.

Space, place, region, and choros/chora The term chorography has come to be defined in dictionaries in purely Ptolemaic terms as: “The art or practice of describing, or of delineating on a map or chart, particular regions, or districts; as distinguished from geography, taken as dealing with the earth in general, and (less distinctly) from topography, which deals with particular places, as towns, etc.” (O.E.D.: chorography). The problem with this interpretation is that it does not capture the complexity of meaning of the ancient Greek usage. Chora is thus one of the most daunting concepts in Plato’s cosmology as set forth in his Timeaus. Plato, as noted earlier, describes chora here as being apprehended without the senses by a sort of bastard reasoning and hardly an object of belief. This, indeed, is that which we look upon as in a dream and say that anything that is must needs be in some place and occupy some room. (Plato 1937:192) Plato is here describing chora as apprehended in relation to the cosmology put forth in the Timaeus, and it is in this cosmological context that its reasoning is “bastard,” without legitimate parents. Chora does not fit into Plato’s cosmology and the ideas that are its legitimate progeny. As the philosopher Jacques Derrida puts it, chora “is something which cannot be assimilated by Plato himself, by what we call Platonic ontology, nor by the inheritance of Plato” (Derrida 1997:10). Derrida deals with the philosophical conundrum posed by chora by stepping outside the box of Platonic cosmology and examining the meaning of chora as an ordinary term in ancient Greek (which he continues to spell in the feminine, like Plato, but which otherwise could be spelled choros). Here chora/choros meant, as noted earlier, “place,” “region,” and “country” in the sense of the land of a people (Derrida 1997:16). He takes note that these are politically defined places and comments that the ordered polysemy of the word [chora] always includes the sense of political place or more generally of invested place, by opposition to abstract space. Chora “means”: place occupied by someone, country, inhabited place, marked place, rank, post, assigned position, territory or region. (Derrida 1997:7) This observation is in agreement with the ancient Greek and Roman conception of chorography as written, for example, by Strabo according to the geographer

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Christiaan van Paassen. Strabo was concerned with the region and its contents qualitatively described. His chorography thus did not involve “a determination of length and breadth, no copying of the outline, but a narration of ‘such are the conditions here’” (van Paassen 1957:7). Among the things that Strabo treated was therefore the “laws and political institutions of the various peoples” (van Paassen 1957:8). During the nineteenth century interest in the chorography of Strabo, and early predecessors such as Herodotus, was revived by humanities-oriented geographers after a period when this form of chorography had been looked down upon because it did not have the quantitative, scientific, rational ambitions of Ptolemy (van Paassen 1957:3). It was this anti-Ptolemaic notion of chorography that attracted Sauer, who approved of Alexander von Humboldt’s observation: “In classical antiquity the earliest historians made little attempt to separate the description of lands from the narration of events the scene of which was in the areas described. For a long time physical geography and history appear attractively intermingled.” (von Humboldt quoted in Sauer 1925:23) Chora was not just a philosophical concept, it also had a substantive meaning and this meaning, as Derrida tells us, had implications for “the discourse on places, notably political places” (Derrida 1995:104). The role of discourse in the constitution of chora is brought out in Derrida’s description of the constitutive role of the agora as “the political place (lieu) where affairs are spoken of and dealt with” (Derrida 1995:23) (see also Chapter 7). The term agora is used to name the place where assemblies are held as well as to denote the people who make up the deliberative assembly, and even the speech at the assembly (Hénaff and Strong 2001).2 For an ancient Greek the essence of choros as a polity would have been expressed through the discourse of the citizens gathered at the agora. The country would not have been defined, as in a modern state, by lines on a map, but by the discourse of the citizenry at the agora through which a polity was established. An agora is a place where Greeks aggregated for the purpose of a market and for the purpose of political exchange through discourse and it is derived from the Greek ageirein, meaning “to act to assemble” (Chantraine 1994; Merriam-Webster 2000: agora) (Figure 3.3).3 The agora, which forms the core of the historical Greek choros, literally takes place in the etymologically original sense of the term “place”: “Middle English, from Middle French, open space in a city, space, locality, from Latin platea broad street, from Greek plateia (hodos)” (Merriam-Webster 2000: place). It was in such a place that the Greek polity flocked together, gatherings occurred and a polity was created, thereby developing a place that came to symbolize their political heritage.4 Some theoreticians of place, such as Fred Lukermann (1961) and Edward Casey (1997), have looked to chora, as defined by Plato, for a concept equivalent to place, but the problem is that when place is defined in terms of chora, as understood by either Plato or Ptolemy, it inevitably becomes influenced by the Platonic

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FIGURE 3.3 The

agora of Athens. (Photo by author. Color version available in eBook edition.)

attempt to reduce chora to a spatial phenomenon. Echoing Plato, Lukermann thus writes that “choros technically means the boundary of the extension of some thing or things, it is the container or receptacle of a body.” Choros therefore “may safely be translated in context as area, region (regio), country (pays) or space/ place – if in the sense of the boundary of an area” (Lukermann 1961:55). This, of course, resembles the Ptolemaic cartographic understanding of chorography, which has to do with the creation of a regional whole within the space of the map by connecting together locations along the boundary of the region. What one sees here, thus, is a kind of leakage from Plato’s discussion of chora, where he struggled to assimilate this “bastard concept” into the spatial ontology of the Timaeus as a kind of feminine receptacle that is dialectically opposed to the penetrating masculine idea. But, as Derrida put it, chora “is something which cannot be assimilated by … Platonic ontology” (Derrida 1997:10). Chora thus becomes, in Derrida’s words, “a space that cannot be represented” (Derrida 1997:11). The agora centers on a holy core but has no defining spatial boundary. It is the gathering of people at the agora, not a bounded topographic space that defines the choros of its polity. When one tries to assimilate chora to a Ptolemaic/Platonic spatial framework it leads to a concept of place that is inextricably bound up with location in space, and hence a notion of “space/place” that is, in Derrida’s words, “a kind of hybrid being” (Derrida 1997:7).5 Such a hybrid is inevitably characterized, to borrow the geographer Nicholas Entrikin’s term, by a “betweeness” (Entrikin 1991) characteristic of the modernity originating in the Renaissance (Olwig 2008c). An elision of meaning from choros/chora, as a region or land that is the place of a polity to place as a location in space, inevitably occurs when choros/chora is used in the Ptolemaic idea of chorography. This betwixt and between confusion can be avoided, however, by clearly distinguishing between the meaning of choros as place and the Platonic reduction of chora to an enclosed space. A phrase such as place-region or landscape-region thus might be used to distinguish the landscape

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of choros as the place of a polity from the landscape that is constituted as a spatial and scenic phenomenon in the maps and drawings of spatial scientists ( Jones and Olwig 2008).

Conclusion The interjection of the concept of choros/chora, and with it chorography, into the discourse on landscape helps clarify a number of confusions that have long plagued discourse concerning the meanings of place, space, and landscape, more generally, and which are of particular relevance to the historical connection between geography and the humanities. One such confusion is that between landscape as a visual representation, as studied by the “new cultural geography” of Denis Cosgrove and Steven Daniels (1988), and landscape defined as an area or region identified with the “old” cultural geography of Carl Sauer. There is no necessary opposition between landscape defined as a region or country, and its pictorial representation. Pictorial and written forms of representation can be complementary, and can together help provide an understanding of the landscape as place. It is another matter, however, to assume that the pictorial representation of landscape necessarily involves the specific use of perspective, as derived from cartography, to represent landscape as natural scenic space. Not all landscape painters used linear spatial perspective, and not all paintings using linear spatial perspective were of landscape. What is important, as Cosgrove has shown, is that some graphic artists used linear perspective to envision and define landscape, and this modern vision of landscape subsequently had a major effect on the perception and construction of the landscape scene (Cosgrove 1993, 2008). Whether this form of perspectival representation, and its consequences for the spatial planning and design of the built physical environment (see Chapters 2 and 5) are for better or worse is a vital subject of debate (Foucault 1979; Lefebvre 1991) that should not be confused with the simple question of whether landscape can or should be represented visually. Choros in the sense of place, as Derrida and others have suggested, was generated and understood through the language and discourse of the polity over time at the agora. Similarly, chorography has a long history of narrative representation. The distinction between representation through language and by visual means is useful because it brings out the importance of language and narrative, and hence philology, to an understanding of landscape that has become increasingly enclosed by the visual and the spatial.

Notes 1 The root pays in paysage also means a place, area or region, and this common European understanding of landscape is reflected in the European Landscape Convention’s definition of landscape as “an area, as perceived by people, whose character is the result of the action and interaction of natural and/or human factors” (COE 2000a).

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2 The northern European equivalent to the agora in the constituting of landscape as a political place is the thing or ting meeting (see Chapter 7). 3 I owe a debt of thanks to Minna Skafte Jensen for her patient help with the complexities of Greek etymology. Whether I have got it right, of course, is my own responsibility. 4 Platea is akin to “Latin planta sole of the foot” which is also the source of the word plant, deriving from the “Late Latin plantare to plant, fix in place” (Merriam-Webster 2000: plant). Choros is akin to the Greek chēros, the etymological source of heritage, the choros being something that you have inherited through bereavement (MerriamWebster 2000: choros). 5 This tendency is illustrated by the Oxford English Dictionary’s statement on how chorography has become “a term, with its family of words, greatly in vogue in 17th c., but now little used, its ancient sphere being covered by geography and topography jointly” (O.E.D 1971: chorography).

4 ARE ISLANDERS INSULAR? A personal view

Queequeg was a native of Kokovoko, an island far away to the West and South. It is not down on any map; true places never are. Herman Melville, Moby Dick, chapter XII: Biographical ([1851]:54)

Preface Choros, an ancient Greek word for the place of a polity, was linked to that of landscape in Chapter 3. Choros was a place defined from within by an assembly of the people at the agora, much as the landscape was defined by the meeting of the moot, or the “thing” (Chapter 7), such as the shoreline of an island, and it could thus be interlinked with larger federations, much as landscape polities were interlinked in the Netherlands. Choros in this sense, thus, was not defined top-down by a boundary encircled on a map. The Greece celebrated in the eighth century b.c. Homeric epics was largely an archipelagic realm of islandic polities that spread out and were interwoven across the Mediterranean. The different islands were embedded in a sea that served as a vital, shared context of life where fishing, travel, trade, and communication took place. The Greece celebrated through the autocratic figure of Alexander the Great (356–323 b.c.), on the other hand, was the vast land-based empire covering Persia, Syria, Mesopotamia, the Punjab, and Egypt where the capital was situated in the eponymous Alexandria. Claudius Ptolemy (ca. a.d. 100– ca. 170), the Greco-Roman mathematician, astronomer, astrologer, geographer and founder of modern cartography, lived in Alexandria and was a citizen of Rome, also a vast land-oriented empire. It was Ptolemy, as discussed in Chapter 3, who redefined choros as a territory defined by a boundary encircled and enclosed within an abstract Euclidean cartographic space. The Ptolemaic

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concept of choros, as argued in Chapter 3, went on to play an important role in redefining landscape as a scenic space enclosed within the space of the map. The present chapter is concerned with the implications of the difference between experiencing and navigating through the world understood as interwoven archipelagic places, or choroi, on the one hand, and, on the other, the logistics of movement across the geometric space of a globe mapped in the tradition of Ptolemy. The Euclidean space enclosed on a map is by definition uniform, and the line defining its boundary is infinitesimally sharp. When places are defined this way, the borders between them tend to be perceived as constituting clear boundaries, providing a barrier separating one territory from another. When islands are mapped this way one thus gets the impression that they are insular, divided from the rest of the world by their coast. But the islands of Greece provided a cradle of civilization, interweaving the cultures of many different places. Mindful of this, the present chapter asks, Are islanders insular? The answer here, however, is not sought primarily in theoretical and textual analysis, as elsewhere in the book, but rather in this article I use my personal experience and background as an islander, doing fieldwork among islanders in the West Indies. I then expand on that personal experience by drawing on literary sources, particularly Homer’s The Odyssey and Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, both of which I argue express an island worldview. The island worldview, as imagined via literature, is contrasted and compared with the continental global view on the basis of differing modes of navigation and cartography.

Prologue: A personal tale of two islands There was basically only one paved road crossing the U.S. Virgin Island of St. John in the early 1970s, when my anthropologist wife, Karen, our Samoyed dog, Fudde, and I all lived there. This was the Center Line Road, or the Old King’s Road as it also was called, which wound its way up the hill from the port of Cruz Bay. Cruz Bay was, and is, the island’s main connection to urbanized St. Thomas and from there to the continental world. Cruz Bay was the only place on the island that resembled a town, with a couple of shops, a few bars, a signless restaurant, a gas station, an apothecary, a bank, and the local seat of government in a small old Danish fort. It was here that the bulk of the island’s two thousand or so inhabitants lived. After a few miles of continuous twisting climb, the road straightened out and made a beeline east across the center of a volcanic plateau before winding down to a newly constructed asphalt route that clung to the crumbling cliffside of a mountain, before entering Coral Bay Village, at the island’s northeast corner (Figures 4.1 and 4.2). Coral Bay consisted of a magnificent centuries-old Moravian church, a newish barrack-like school, a fire station of sorts, an abandoned gas station, a few houses, and the Sputnik bar and grocery, with its resident Pyrenean Mountain dog, Churchill. The main road made a swing right, to the south, at Coral Bay Village following the winding contours of the island’s eastern shore and, after a short while,

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FIGURE 4.1 

The island of St. John, U.S. Virgin Islands, in the center, with St. Thomas, U.S Virgin Islands, to the left and Tortola, British Virgin Islands, above and to the right. The dark area is the Virgin Islands National Park.

FIGURE 4.2 

St. John, U.S.Virgin Islands, from a vantage point on Bordeaux Mountain; a view of Coral Bay, bordered by the East End peninsula and Tortola, British Virgin Islands, on the horizon. The pyramid-shaped peninsula in the middle of the bay is the site of the former Danish fort. (Photograph by the author, winter 1978. Color version available in eBook edition.)

the asphalt gave way to broken and potholed slabs of poured concrete. The road passed through the nineteenth-century family-land settlements of freed slaves with names such as Calabash Boom and Hard Labor, and ended at John’s Folly – the names of the last two settlements bespeaking the marginal agricultural character of the rocky and steep hillside soils. The road thus marked about the longest

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possible overland distance between two points on St. John, and even though the island is small (20 square miles), the ups and downs, coupled with the tropical heat, meant that one only made the journey with any frequency if one had a car with good brakes. It was when we lived in Hard Labor that I met a young native of John’s Folly, a nine-year-old boy named Leo. Leo had little experience of the world beyond John’s Folly, but this did not mean that he was not curious about it. His first question to me, after we exchanged names, was, “What island do you come from?” Without a moment’s hesitation I responded, “Staten Island.” He looked puzzled, until I explained that it was an island north of Puerto Rico – which formed the northern reach of his young world. The world at the other end of the road was relatively unfamiliar to him. Fishermen, however, visited John’s Folly, and the family had a boat that provided an easy means of transportation to Tortola in the British Virgin Islands that loomed on the horizon, a relatively short sail from home across Coral Bay, Privateer Bay, and the Sir Francis Drake Passage. Here, in dusty Road Town, the family would have found supplies in an abundance and at a price that could not be matched in Cruz Bay. They would not, however, have met many people who were not West Indians in Road Town at that time. Most of the people Leo met would have been from an island. Leo’s question resonated with me because my home island bore about the same relation to Manhattan, as his to St. Thomas. To go into “the City” (Manhattan) we had to climb a hill before hopping a number 6 bus at the six corners of Meier’s Corners (a few blocks down Victory Boulevard from Four Corners), and then, after traversing both hill and dale, take a ferry ride across New York’s great harbor. Much of my youth was thus spent sailing this harbor in all kinds of weather, sometimes from the pilothouse, even holding the wheel, since my next-door neighbor was a ferry pilot. At night, when it was foggy, and it often was foggy, the booming foghorns reminded us of our nearness to the sea. The harbor was part of our lives. A Sunday outing might be to Fort Wadsworth, to look at the freighters waiting to enter the docks on Monday, or to Sailor’s Snug Harbor, a retirement home for sailors with a lovely park and view of the harbor. A neighbor on my Staten Island home street was the Norwegian captain of a Norwegian freighter, and farther along the street lived a school friend, Maria-Elena Burchardt, the daughter of an American Coast Guard captain who had met his Costa Rican wife while on duty in Central America. If I phoned her, he might answer the phone saying, in a hail and hearty voice, that she was “below decks.” Commuting to St. Thomas from Hard Labor was remarkably similar in time to the commute to Manhattan from Staten Island, and the feeling of relief upon return to one’s home shores was entirely the same. For Staten Islanders, as for St. Johnians, the most important distinguishing feature of a person was whether he or she was “an islander.” To be an islander was to be somebody. This is why Leo’s question flattered me (albeit unintentionally). In Cruz Bay, the “native born” St. Johnian population, as they called themselves, would have branded, upon sight,

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a foreigner like me as a “continental.” The epithet would be applied to black and white alike, for in Cruz Bay they knew the difference between islanders and continentals, and it was not a good thing, as I well appreciated, to be labeled a continental. It was thus nice to be in John’s Folly where the continent, as a conceptual category, did not even exist – at least not for young Leo. Non-islanders, reading the preceding lines about St. John, are no doubt thinking that I am describing a situation of “insularity.” Insular in the sense of being “a: of or relating to the people of an island; b: resulting from isolation or characteristic of isolated people” (Merriam-Webster 2000: insular). This definition of the term from the Merriam-Webster Dictionary reflects non-islanders’ preconceived prejudices against islanders. Insularity, however, is a concept, to judge from its etymology (Latin), that was thought up by non-islanders, and it certainly has no purchase among islanders. Islanders are, in fact, by and large, anything but insular. You can go to the most distant and isolated corner of a distant and isolated island, like the outskirts of Gingerland on Nevis, in the Leeward Islands, and pick a random farmer hoeing his yams or ginger, in a torn shirt and untied, beaten-up shoes, and ask him where he spent the last twenty years, and you will more than likely discover (as I have done) that he spent many of those years driving a bus in central London. I do not think you would get the same result in an Iowa cornfield. Islanders travel widely, and they can do it with such impunity, without losing their intractable sense of identity, precisely because they have an island to anchor their journeys. As my mother (who was not an islander, and who could never become one, but who could give birth to the son of an islander), used to say, “You can take the boy out of the island, but you cannot take the island out of the boy.” This is a truth that islanders hold to be self-evident.

Is no man not unto an island? Islandic civilizational primacy Leo’s question, put another way, might be phrased “Is no man not unto an island?” (in which unto indicates belonging or relationship) (Merriam-Webster 2000: unto). In Western civilization there is, I would suggest, a certain primacy to the state of being unto an island. If one traces Western civilization back to the ancient Greeks, prior to Ptolemy, one also traces that civilization back to the islandic. Civitas is the root of civilization, and the Greek city-states were often islandic affairs. Space itself, in fact, was conceptualized in islandlike terms, rather than as an absolute, open, geometrical space within which things are located, as is common today (Panofsky 1991). The Homeric epics, which were foundational to Greek cosmography, were islandic epics (Lukermann 1961) that are thought to be a sort of verbal “sailing manual for considerable parts of the Mediterranean” (Casey 2002:181). And, of course, these epics were hardly characterized by insularity. Odysseus and his men covered a lot of ground or, to be more precise, a lot of water – and the distinction is important. Like Leo, the first question Odysseus would probably have asked an ancient Greek stranger would have been “What island polis (in the wine dark sea)

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are you from?” In fact, when Odysseus returned home incognito to the island of Ithaca and was asked by his son (who did not recognize him) where he came from, followed by the question, in the form of a local saying, “What ship brought you here, I don’t think you walked all the way,” the answer was that he was from Crete, as if an island would be the only believable reply (Homer 1937 [8th century BC]:182). He later explained to his son that he came with the ships of “those famous seamen the Phaiacians” (Homer 1937 [8th century BC]:183). The Phaiacians, we are told, were a people who had migrated from an inhospitable home on the plains to a place, “dear to the immortals,” that “lies far away in the sea, out of sight of land” (Homer 1937 [8th century BC]:77). The Phaiacians had become so wed to the sea that Homer, in jest, gave them names taken from ships and seamanship: “Topship and Quicksea and Paddler, Seaman and Poopman, Beacher and Oresman, Deepsea and Lookout, Goahead and Upaboard …” (Homer 1937 [8th century BC]:90). Aristotle, like Homer, saw the Greeks of the Mediterranean as being somehow dearer to the immortals; freedom loving yet governable, as compared to the enslaved peoples of Asia to the east and south, or the ungovernable barbarians to the north and west (Aristotle 1962:295–297). Troy, though Greek, was on the continental mainland of what is now Turkey, and one wonders if this did not militate against the city. The world, today, is full of places like St. John, Staten Island, and Ithaca, which have since become relatively isolated backwaters, though this in itself can be an attraction – at least in the perception of continentals. But it is important to remember that this isolation is related to the relative importance of land borne versus waterborne infrastructure. History might be (boldly) characterized in terms of tidal changes between societies where waterborne transportation infrastructure predominates and societies where landborne infrastructure predominates the way people organize and think about place and space. The Greeks were unto islands, the Romans continental, the Atlantic Vikings islandic, the Swedish Vikings largely continental, Carolingians continental, the British islandic, the Americans continental, the Japanese islandic, and so on. This can be illustrated with examples taken from the West Indies. The Danes, whose native country was spread out across an archipelago, settled St. John in the era of eighteenth-century mercantilism and sea travel that made Denmark into a world power, with possibly the second greatest navy in Europe. The remnants of that power can be seen at Fortsberg, Coral Bay, which once constituted a feared bastion, but now the fort and cannon are largely smothered by lush tropical plant growth. The West Indies are full of navy bases and impressive fortifications, such as Brimstone Hill on St. Kitts, which were once the sites of huge sea and land battles. Today it is difficult to imagine how such impoverished Lilliputian societies could ever have been compared in value to continental Canada (Brown 1946). Since we left St. John, however, another pendular swing, of sorts, has occurred, and neighboring Tortola, where pirates once buried their treasure, has become a rich haven for “offshore” global enterprise and bare-boat charters; Nelson’s Dockyard, on Antigua, has once again become a thriving harbor full of sailing vessels with rich

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and powerful offshore capitalist buccaneers at the helm. It is hard to understand the geography of the world without considering such sea changes. I described the United States as continental in orientation, but this, of course, was not always the case. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it was a nation of seafarers, with what became one of the world’s great merchant marines and navies. At that time, Staten Island, even if geographically ensconced by New Jersey, was an integral part of New York City, with Fort Wadsworth guarding the mouth of the lower harbor. This was a time when the city was, first and foremost, one vast port linked together by water, rather than a Manhattan financial and commercial center constrained by water on all sides. The eastern coast of the United States is still dotted with impressive offshore settlements on islands like Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard, which were once the thriving seats of the whaling industry and commerce, but which now provide a quiet setting for the summer holidays of wealthy continentals. The prelude to Herman Melville’s Moby Dick begins in continental New Bedford, Massachusetts, but the voyage itself, as the narrator takes pains to emphasize, begins on Nantucket Island. Moby Dick is, in many ways, America’s Odyssey. It is a celebration of a worldview in which all the world is unto islands. From the sea, the world is made up of islands and peninsulas, and that which is unreachable by water is isolated terra incognita and the true home of insularity. The word for insularity should really be in-continentality. The world is full of peninsulas, almost islands that from the sea appear to be islands. Scania, at the southern peninsula-like tip of the contiguous landmass of Sweden, was once depicted on maps as an island, spelled Scandia in Latin – the “island” that gave its name to Scandinavia. Until 1658 Scania was an integral part of a Denmark, which had Copenhagen at its center, but the Danes now look across the sound to their lost provinces. Denmark’s loss of Scania was the outcome of the same tidal shift that transformed the West Indies into a continental backwater, and which here resulted in the loss of the dominance of Denmark’s sea power with a parallel rise in the power of Sweden’s land-based armies and continental orientation. Sweden saw the Scandinavian Peninsula as a natural land unit encompassing Norway and tied to neighboring Finland and the European continent. Still, it was not until the early nineteenth century that Sweden was able to wrest Norway from Denmark. On the map, Norway has the odd appearance of a long, sometimes absurdly thin strip of land stretching all the way to Finland, obstreperously blocking northern Sweden from access to the enticingly close Atlantic. Norway makes no sense as a landmass because it was not conceived as a landmass, but as a northern seaway, winding between thousands of islands, capes, bays, and fjords. The power of the Danish navy maintained the territorial integrity of Norway, all the way to the Russian border with Norway until 1814, when the ancient union of the Danish and Norwegian crowns was dissolved and islandic Norway came under the suzerainty of the more continental Swedes. In 1905 Norway became independent, and though the inland allodial farmer, and his blond family in folk costume, monopolized national symbolism, water still binds coastal Norway together, its great symbol being the coastal ferry from the old Hanseatic town of Bergen to Nordkapp.

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The noninsularity of the insular To be isolated (from the Latin insula) is to be “stranded,” “set apart from others,” “detached from others and alone” like ”a tiny village that had been isolated from civilization” (Merriam-Webster 2000: isolated). The islander may be detached from land transport, suggesting that the islander is “stranded” (on a beach) and immobilized, but the opportunities for movement by water are enormous. It is through this movement, rather than through immobilization, I would argue, that the islander develops the special sense of being unto an island, distinct from settled, land-bound continentals. The fishermen of Nevis exemplify this kind of movement. In the early 1980s I arranged to go out with the Nevisian fishermen from Brown Hill, the village where we lived. Prior to going fishing – which involved getting up well before dawn and undertaking a half-hour’s journey in the dark across a thorny semidesert by overladen donkey to the beach – I spread out my maps before the fishermen, so as to get an overview of where we would be going. The maps meant nothing to them, and they were not able to explain how they navigated. But it soon became clear that they had a highly detailed knowledge of the sea bottom, and they knew exactly where it was best to sink their traps. They used heavy, locally made, wooden boats, utilizing homemade traps called “pots” that rested on the sea floor, which, in the West Indies, varies rapidly in depth from the shallow island shelf to the literally unfathomable. In order to prevent people from other villages or islands from poaching the pots, the buoys that kept afloat the ropes used to hoist up the pots, were tied so that they remained invisible, a few feet below the surface (Figure 4.3).

FIGURE 4.3  Using palm logs, Nevisian fishermen from Brown Hill roll their heavy, Nevis-made boat up onto the beach below the village. (Photograph by the author, spring 1984. Color version available in eBook edition.)

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Thus, when we sailed out to empty the pots, there was nothing to be seen but open sea. At a certain point, however, the fishermen stopped the boat, plunged a hook into the water, and pulled up the submerged buoy. They performed this seeming feat of magic, they explained to me, by a means employed by sailors the world over, as I later learned from a Greek sea captain. When they first threw in the pot, they took a sighting of the shore to the right. They would look for two easily recognizable objects that were in alignment with their line of vision, for example, an abandoned windmill foundation and the highest peak of Saddle Hill. Then they would look about 45 degrees to the left and find two similarly aligned points. When they returned, all they needed to do was to find the spot where both sets of points were in alignment with the boat, and then plunge a hook into the water. The Nevis fishermen’s method for finding their pots can also, of course, provide a means of navigation over greater distances when you are in sight of land. In this case, one’s heading moves between a series of points that are aligned in much the same way as the location of the fish traps. This method can help you follow, for example, a route heading between the shores of two islands that will enable you to avoid dangerous shoals, tricky currents, or shorelines that shift with time and tide; or to navigate between ports following first one coast and then the next. Herman Melville used a variant of this form of navigation to humorous effect in Moby Dick, where he described Ishmael’s attempt to navigate the dark streets of Nantucket, together with a harpoonist named Queequeg, by following such a “sea route” to an inn called the Try Pots. The directions were given to them by Peter Coffin, the old-salt landlord of the Spouter-Inn in New Bedford, who originally hailed from Nantucket: In short he [Peter Coffin] plainly hinted that we could not do any better than try pot-luck at the Try Pots. But the directions he had given us about keeping a yellow warehouse on our starboard hand till we opened a white church to the larboard, and then keeping that on the larboard hand till we made a corner three points to the starboard, and that done, then ask the first man we met where the place was: these crooked directions of his very much puzzled us at first, especially as, at the outset, Queequeg insisted that the yellow warehouse – our first point of departure – must be left on the larboard hand, whereas I had understood Peter Coffin to say it was on the starboard. (Melville 1950 [1851]:64)1 It is worth noting, in this context, that the word starboard, in its origins, has nothing to do with stars, but derives from an Old English word that basically means “steer board,” or the steering side (board) of the ship. This meaning derives from the practice of steering ships by means of a rudder extending from the right side of a ship (Merriam-Webster 2000: starboard). The person steering the boat would then sit to the larboard of the rudder in such a way that the person’s

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weight could help sway the heavy vessel through the heaving sea.2 Direction, thus, was not measured according to some abstract system of celestial coordinates, but according to the body of a ship having its bearings vis-à-vis identifiable fixed shoreline phenomena complemented by the ability to calculate one’s drift off course through dead reckoning and a directional point of orientation such as the North Pole. A boat of this sort is not steered as an automobile; it is leaned into, much as you lean into a bicycle, a pair of skis or a glider. Direction is thus very much a question of the relationship between a person’s body, the body of the ship wallowing in the water, the bodies of land that are passed along side and between, and the direction of movement. The form of navigation used by the Nevisian fishermen became highly developed between the late thirteenth and early sixteenth centuries with the aid of the portolan chart that helped European sailors navigate from port to port (hence the name, portolan). The portolan chart creates, as Denis Cosgrove has observed, an image of the earth as a sea of island worlds, as opposed to the geometric spatial unity generated by the Ptolemaic globe (Cosgrove 2001: 90–95). The philosopher Edward S. Casey writes of the portolan chart: “Such a map is indeed a map of a place (as topos literally signifies), and not just of a site (the proper object of nontopographical [the Ptolemaic] maps that concern themselves with position in cartographic space)” (Casey 2002:180). Some of the most successful sea-going societies thus developed using such “portolan” forms of navigation in areas such as the Wadden Sea off Friesland, the Danish and Greek archipelagos, and the Norwegian Atlantic, where navigation requires great skill to survive low shoals, shifting tides, sand banks, and tricky currents. These complex regions of sea and land, which are difficult for enemies to penetrate, have fostered federations of fiercely independent, place-oriented, political communities (Krauß 2010; Mels 2005; Olwig 2002a:3–42). The Netherlanders were expert makers of portolan charts, which were particularly useful for negotiating the shifting areas of interspersed land and sea, and continued to make these charts well after the Renaissance emergence of the Ptolemaic map. It is arguable that the Dutch survived as a society both because they were so successful at negotiating these treacherous northern waters, and because their continental enemies were not (Schama 1987a, 1987b).

Ptolemaic navigation The Nevisian fishermen’s method of navigation, especially as coupled to the portolan type of chart, is one that places the fishermen’s bodies continuously at the center of a number of axes that give them their bearings vis-á-vis features on the visible coasts that delineate bodies of land and the desired direction of their movement. This is a very different form of navigation from that developed in conjunction with transoceanic travel across open spaces, out of sight of land. The Mercator chart, with its squared lines of longitude and latitude, was geared to this transoceanic form of seamanship, in which the compass and the astrolabe,

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and eventually the chronometer and the quadrant or the sextant (and today the GPS) worked together to help locate a ship’s position on the abstract space of the map. If one reads an account of this kind of navigation, such as that in Two Years Before the Mast by the jurist Richard Henry Dana, which recorded a voyage begun in August 1834 by a cargo ship from Boston to California, one will be immersed in a continuous series of log readings of the sort which are meaningless without a map: Sunday, June 12th. Lat. 26°04¢S., lon. 116°31¢W. We had now lost the regular trades, and had the winds variable, principally from the westward, and kept on in a southerly course, sailing very nearly upon a meridian, and at the end of the week – Sunday, June 19th, were in lat. 34°15¢S., and lon. 116°38¢W. (Dana [1840] 1964:274) The distinction between this form of navigation and that in which bodily motion and dead reckoning are key is brought out in the climactic chapters of Moby Dick where Captain Ahab dashes his quadrant to the deck and finally is able to track down the white whale: Then gazing at his quadrant, and handling, one after the other, its numerous cabalistical contrivances, he pondered again, and muttered: “Foolish toy! babies’ plaything of haughty Admirals, and Commodores, and Captains; the world brags of thee, of thy cunning and might; but what after all canst thou do, but tell the poor, pitiful point, where thou thyself happenest to be on this wide planet, and the hand that holds thee: no! not one jot more! Thou canst not tell where one drop of water or one grain of sand will be to-morrow noon; and yet with thy impotence thou insultest the sun! Science! Curse thee, thou vain toy; and cursed be all the things that cast man’s eyes aloft to that heaven, whose live vividness but scorches him, as these old eyes are even now scorched with thy light, O sun! Level by nature to this earth’s horizon are the glances of man’s eyes; not shot from the crown of his head, as if God had meant him to gaze on his firmament. Curse thee, thou quadrant!” dashing it to the deck, “no longer will I guide my earthly way by thee; the level ship’s compass, and the level deadreckoning, by log and by line; these shall conduct me, and show me my place on the sea.” (Melville [1851] 1950:493–494) Even somewhere in the middle of the Pacific Ocean you can navigate if you can deduce your location from the record of the courses sailed, the distance made, the known or estimated drift, and a host of clues related to the wind, the smell of the air, the wave patterns, the character and color of the water, and the passing shapes of sea life, astral bodies, and islands. Moby Dick, too, must have had a similar skill.

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Islecentricism? The Nevisian mode of navigation was focused upon the persona of the moving fisherman vis-à-vis bodies of land. The Nevisian fisherman, pulling his fish pots, develops a certain sense of himself vis-à-vis the body of land to which he coordinates his position. And if he sails away on a merchant boat, the sight of the island’s coast disappearing from view might help create a reflective sense of identity, as being unto an island community, within a sea of other such communities, to which he can return. The same is true, of course, of the many island women who fan out from the Caribbean islands to seek their fortune and to better the condition of their family at home (K.F. Olwig 1993a, 1993b). The islander is thus constantly in a situation in which identity is centered on the fact of being unto an island among other islands. The islander, I would argue, is characterized by a sensibility that might, for want of a better word, be termed islecentrality. In the artistic form of the Homeric epics and Melville’s Moby Dick, this sensibility can even become the stuff of art, embracing a civilization’s worldview. This may be because the islander relates to the world in terms of topologically defined bodies of land, which, like people, retain their identity regardless of size. St. John was thus to St. Tomas, in my worldview, as Staten Island was to Manhattan, and in this respect St. John was a microcosm of Staten Island. The commonplace figure of the island hereby becomes a topos that can stimulate figurative forms of thought in which the island becomes a metaphor for larger worlds, as in Homer’s Odyssey.3 The island as a “true place,” to quote the Melville epigram at the start of this paper, is not on a modern (Ptolemaic) map, because this form of map reduces places to a Euclidean point in a geometric frame, and as any student of Euclid knows, this point is so infinitesimally small that it has no substance. The island, thereby, is reduced from being a microcosm of larger worlds in a larger islandic landscape to a site or location, a point subsumed by an encompassing, static, hierarchical spatial framework. Could the root of the islander’s supposed insularity be some form of islecentrality? Does the islander’s mode of existence reinforce a sense of self and place which, on the one hand, allows whale hunters or Vikings to hazard distant unknown seas and, on the other, to maintain a strong bond of identity with a small island community like that of Ithaca, Nantucket, St. John, Nevis or Staten Island? This question was suggested to me some years ago, when I lived in Stockholm and I had the opportunity to explore the nearby region surrounding the Mälaren Sea where the Vikings had once thrived in what was then a submerged landscape with much the character of an archipelago. There are many rune stones in the area, many of them memorializing a man or boy who had died at sea. If the body could not be brought home for burial, at least one could erect a stone on the site of the home farm. The sculptural form of the stone, grounded in the native landscape, and the tale of a distant doom, carved in runes, seemed to express two sides to the same island-centered story. The stony ground, emerging as islands from an ice-age sea, was clearly the locus of a powerful sense of place

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identity and home that was countered by surrounding waters that provided the means to strike out in search of new and dangerous horizons.

In the mind’s isle There now is your insular city of the Manhattoes, belted round by wharves as Indian isles by coral reefs – commerce surrounds it with her surf. Right and left, the streets take you waterward. Its extreme downtown is the battery, where that noble mole is washed by waves, and cooled by breezes, which a few hours previous were out of sight of land. Look at the crowds of water-gazers there. Herman Melville, Moby Dick, chapter I: Loomings (1950 [1851]:1) Islecentrality springs from island existence, but in the end it is a way of comprehending the world that is not intrinsic to islands. It is the difference between the Earth comprehended as a world constituted through our bodily experience and the Earth understood as a globe – a timeless abstract geometric figure.4 My hypothesis is that islecentrality is encouraged by the experience of living on an island where there is a gradual, but tangible, bodily transition between land and water that is experienced both through one’s own bodily movement and through that border’s shifting with the weather and the time (as with the tide – a word also meaning time in the Nordic languages). Islecentrality springs from island existence, but there is no essential essence to the quality of being an island. At the beginning of Moby Dick, Melville tells about the existential attraction of the sea that drew mid-nineteenth century “Manhattoes” to the wharves girthing the island. Manhattan was indeed experienced as an island then, when the United States was still an islandic country dominated by its eastern coastal waterborne communication. But I would question whether Manhattan is an island in this existential sense now. The docks and piers are virtually gone today, and most people now enter and leave the city by means of tunnels and bridges that do not give the experience of crossing an elemental border between land and sea. Although Manhattan is physically a narrow island, it somehow manages to turn its back on the surrounding waters, focusing inward on the terrestrial pastoral idyll of Central Park. Manhattan, with its gridded streets, is furthermore oriented toward the cosmic north and south, east and west. Manhattan is a node in an abstract spatial network of other commercial nodes, such as Chicago. A metaphorical “sea” of corn once crossed by prairie “schooners,” the poet might tell us, surrounds Chicago. But this sea is the gridded sea of the Mercator map, to be navigated by compass and quadrant, or transversed on a rigidly geometric framework of roads. There is no elemental boundary between the “islands” of human settlement and the sea of corn, no tidal flow and no current. The metaphorical sea of corn is a dead metaphor. Like Manhattan, Chicago

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is still a port city, linked to the world by water, but you would never know this looking at the wharfless shore seen from Centennial Park. As a commercial node in space, wharfless Manhattan might as well be Chicago. The residents of Battery Park City, just north of Manhattan’s southern tip, have a view of the water from their promenade, but it is no longer the wharfpenetrated harbor about which Melville wrote, but rather a scenic backdrop for joggers and dog walkers who rarely, if ever, use the sea to get anywhere in particular. If a stranger should ask one of them if they were from “the island” they would probably assume the person was asking if they were from Long Island, not Manhattan. A Staten Islander, by contrast, would promptly reply, “sure I am from the Island,” of course meaning Staten Island! It is really only at the southern tip of Manhattan, where the Staten Islanders embark and disembark, that one truly feels that one is on an island. It is here, at the site of the original Dutch settlement, that one gets the inescapable feeling of being on the coastal prow of an island in a moving sea (Figure 4.4). The piers of “South Ferry” (as is written on the Manhattanites’ signage) still beckon one to put to sea, as in Melville’s day. But only the Staten Islanders still enter and leave the city predominantly by water. They know a wharf from experience, their bodies regularly absorbing the rumble and shake of the “Staten Island Ferry,” with engines reversed and deck plates rattling, smashing into the creosoted wooden pilings of the Manhattan ferry slip in the morning.5 And they are the ones who see and smell the way the boat churns up the pungent sea as it breaks away from Manhattan in the evening, slowly creating a widening visceral

FIGURE 4.4 

The author and his wife on the back deck of the Staten Island Ferry, en route to Staten Island, with the Statue of Liberty to their right. (Photograph by the author, February 2002. Photo by Mette Fog Olwig. Color version available in eBook edition.)

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gap of foaming and seething water between the moving boat and the fixed sharp concrete and iron edge of “the city.” Soon the jagged silhouette of Manhattan starts to shrink and darken behind the boat, while the soft green hills of Staten Island, the highest points on the Eastern Seaboard, grow on the horizon. To the larboard, the Verrazano Narrows Bridge lit by a sinking sun frames the opening to the sea that beckoned Melville. The Staten Islanders’ entrance and egress from Manhattan is the liminal rite of passage that separates them, as islanders, from the continentals of the world.6

Notes 1 Richard Dana, a jurist and author of Two Years Before the Mast, describing a voyage in 1834, offers a contrasting description of a seaman of a scientific bent, navigating on land: “I had made him [second mate Tom Harris] promise to come and see me when we parted in San Diego; he had got a directory of Boston, found the street and number of my father’s house, and, by a study of the plan of the city, had laid out his course, and was committing it to memory. He said he could go straight to the house without asking a question. And so he could, for I took the book from him, and he gave his course, naming each street and turn to right or left, directly to the door” (Dana 1964 [1840]: 362). 2 The word larboard derives from Middle English ladebord, which is probably related to the word laden (to load), referring to the side of the ship upon which it would be loaded (Merriam-Webster 2000: larboard). This makes sense, of course, because if you have a rudder sticking out the right side of a ship, you necessarily would load on the left side. According to Richard Dana, describing a voyage in 1834: “Of late years, the British and American marine, naval and mercantile, have adopted the word ‘port’ instead of ‘larboard,’ in all cases on board ship, to avoid mistake from similarity of sound. At this time ‘port’ was used only at the helm” (Dana 1964 [1840]: 11, footnote). There would appear to be a certain continuity of meaning here, since the word port was applied to the opening through which goods were laden into and out of the ship. Modern Danish still contains the word ladeport, referring to the opening through which goods are laden into and out of a barn. 3 Topology shares the same root, topos, with topography and can be used to refer to the topographic study of a particular place, specifically, the history of a region as indicated by its topography (Merriam-Webster 2000: topology). 4 The word world derives from an Old English word weoruld, meaning something like “human existence, this world, age,” in which the sense of age is something like the sense in “the age of reason,” or “the ancient Grecian age (world) of islands” (Merriam-Webster 2000, world; see also Gurevitch 1985: 97). As Hastrup puts it: “Time, space, quality, society, and individuals seem to coalesce in the notion of veröld (‘world’). This word is composed from verr (‘man’) and öld (‘age’). … The ‘world’ was the age and the condition of man, or mankind” (Hastrup 1985: 68). This differs from the globalized idea of the earth in which the world of mankind is decentered and reduced to the Euclidean abstraction of the globe (Olwig 2011a). 5 The dramatic docking of the Staten Island ferry at Manhattan is due to the fact that shifting crosscurrents of water and wind affect the waters off the southern tip of the island at the confluence of the Hudson and East Rivers. As a ship looses speed it looses its ability to steer in a crosscurrent, so the captain needs to keep up some speed while heading into the slip, and it is the crashing into the flexible wooden pilings on the slides of the slip that helps brake the movement of the vessel (together with a violent reversal of the propeller that churns up the water and shakes the boat). The thresholds between water and land are viscerally felt on the Staten Island ferry.

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6 It has also become a right of free passage (now paid for by the city). I would like to thank the editors David Lowenthal and John R. Gillis of the special issue of Geographical Review on islands in which this essay was first published, and the participants in the seminar upon which it was based, for their islandic inspiration in writing this article, and Denis Cosgrove and the anonymous peer reviewer for their insightful comments, which particularly helped me to draw this article to its concluding departure.

5 THE CASE OF THE “MISSING” MASK Performance, theater, ætherial space, and the practice of landscape/architecture

In the preceding chapters this book has examined how the substantive landscape, a practiced place of a polity with its customary laws and justice, may be transformed into a form of scenic space when constructed and enclosed within an externally defined spatial framework. Chapter 3 dealt with the way the Greek concept of choros, meaning the substantive place of a landscape-like polity, was reduced through the cartography of the Greco-Roman Ptolemy to a locus within an abstract geometric space. But, one might ask, what was so special about this “space” that it was able to motivate and drive the morphing of substantive place into an intangible scenic space? A “quintessential” answer to this question lies in the important cosmological and scientific role played by “æther,” an antecedent of the contemporary concept of space.1 This chapter is concerned with the development of the ancient Greek concept of æther, as the fifth quintessential element, into the present day concept of space, and its influence on the transformation of the meaning and practice of landscape. This transformation is expressed first through the medium of theater and then through the design and construction of built landscapes, inspired by theater, in which people wind up performing their lives like actors on a stage (Olwig 2011b).

Prologue a tale of two cities The inspiration for this chapter lies in a contrast between the experience of two cities as they appeared to encapsulate the relation between the landscape as the substantive place of a polity and the insubstantial space of scenery, as presented in Chapter 1. The first is Boston, where I participated in a session about “practiced architectures, spaces, performances, events” at the 2008 Association of American Geographers (AAG) Annual Conference.2 The session posed the question: How is architecture, as an evolving practice encompassing both the landscape and

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the buildings within it, comprehensible in the light of contemporary questions concerning performance, spectacle, embodiment, the everyday, and materiality? Boston is the capital of Massachusetts, a New England state that is still characterized by townships that with their town hall meetings and direct democracy are not unlike their antecedents in the historical European landscape polities described in Chapter 1. The city is also notable for its extensive central commons adjacent to the Massachusetts Statehouse, much as many of the state’s town greens are adjacent to the place of the town meetings. Massachusetts thus has many qualities of a “substantive landscape,” a place historically created through the customary legal practices of its polity. Boston, in other words, did not seem to be the ideal place to explore the characteristics of a scenic spectacle within which people perform as actors in a space designed by an architect – the session’s topic. The second city was Las Vegas, where the AAG meetings were held a year later, and for which I had prepared a paper on the historical scientific and cosmological role of æther (Olwig 2011b). Las Vegas is one of America’s youngest, most dynamic, and fastest growing urban areas, and its famous “Strip” turned out to be just the sort of place that could inspire a discussion of contemporary questions concerning performance, spectacle, embodiment, the everyday, and materiality. It is, however, misleading to call the Strip “Las Vegas,” because Las Vegas is a real city with a representative government and the Strip is not part of this city. Most people no doubt identify the name Las Vegas with the Strip consisting of a long run of casinos, many containing hotels, fancy restaurants, and shopping malls, but the Strip is actually a kind of “off-shore” (in a sea of sand) gambling space. It is located in a virtual city that is outside the city limits of Las Vegas in an unincorporated area controlled by private interests and identified in origin with organized crime – the antithesis of rule by law and a democratic government. I will therefore use the term “Vegas” to refer primarily to the area on the Strip. In Vegas I found little in the way of landscape as public place, let alone a large common. But I did discover that Venice’s Piazza San Marco, one of the world’s most historically important public outdoor places, and an important historic site of representative government, has been transposed and “transfigured” into a modern shopping mall within the space of a casino owned by a politically highly influential mogul. This virtual Venice comes complete with a “Grand Canal,” ­operatically performing gondoliers, street musicians, and luxury shops (Figure 5.4). (“Paris” is located in a nearby casino and ancient “Rome” is in a casino across the Strip). Vegas seemed to be the inverse of Boston, structured in such a way that public outside places had been turned inside out, with the result that they were now located within a private space, designed as a landscape of spectacle, in which people perform particular roles, as if on a theater or Hollywood stage, or in a “reality” television production. In the following I will examine the role of the Renaissance theater as an “ætherial” perspectival performance space in effecting the transformation of the substantive landscape into the landscape of spatial scenery. This transformation, I will argue, took place by turning things first outside in, then inside out, and

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finally, as in Vegas, outside in again. In the analysis I will contrast, on the one hand, the pre-Renaissance understanding of the place of the theater within the polity that predominated from ancient Greece to Shakespeare’s Globe, and, on the other hand, the post-Renaissance theatrical tradition that has come to play a key role in landscape architecture from the scenography and architecture of Inigo Jones (Chapters 1 and 2) to that of Vegas. The chapter pivots on the process of inversion by which the emplaced and embodied materiality of older forms of theatrical experience came to be enclosed within an abstract and ætherial perspectival space. Theater was thereby transformed into an interior performance space that creates the illusion that it takes place in the exterior world outside the theater. It is this performance space, with its landscape scenes and building façades created within the theater, that Renaissance architects then transposed to the outside world. This now externalized performance space, however, is by nature easily interiorized back to its theatrical architectural origins, as in Vegas. What happens in Vegas, however, is also recognizable at a smaller scale in other cities (including Boston), for example, in the interiorized shopping malls in which inherently public places have been enclosed within a private space where consumption is performed and clothing as costume purchased and donned.

Landscape/architecture and theatrical practice The 1605 English court performance of The Masque of Blackness (henceforth Blackness), with text by Ben Jonson (1572–1637) and scenography by Inigo Jones (1573–1652), was written to celebrate the 1603 ascension to the English throne of James VI of Scotland as James I of England. James hereby united the two countries under his rule, even though they remained separate political entities with their own parliaments, much to his displeasure. Blackness, as discussed in Chapter 1, represented one of the earliest uses of perspectival “landscape” scenery within the space of a theater. The theater, where masques like Blackness were performed, and the environment outside the building, were also among the first places to which the concept of landscape, understood as scenery, was applied. “Scenery” derives from “scene,” coming from the Greek skēnē, meaning “stage” in the sense of a background for the staging of a dramatic theater performance or scene, e.g., a “love scene” (Merriam-Webster 1993: scene) – the play being played on the circular stage area in front of the skēnē called the “orchestra.” The ancient Greek theater was located out of doors, and the outdoor performance of theater continued to be customary up to and including the time of Shakespeare, when plays were still often performed in open town squares or in theaters, like the Globe, which were open to the sky (Davis 1987; Gurr 1992). The connection to ancient Greco-Roman theater could be direct, as through the written and visual record of classical culture that was also known to playwrights and theater directors, as well as in the ruins of classical theaters found all over Europe and the Mediterranean. But it could also be an expression of the same customs deeming

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that thing meetings, or moots, be held out of doors (Chapters 1 and 7). Inigo Jones, Shakespeare’s contemporary, helped create modern theatrical performance space by controversially designing indoor theaters within which he created a more exclusive and excluding perspectival space with scenery that appeared to be out of doors. Jones’ early work as a scenic designer, architecting interior theater scenes, set the scene furthermore for his later career as an architect known as “Britain’s Vitruvius,” the founder of British Renaissance architecture in the Palladian tradition. He designed not only exterior buildings, however, but also the landscape of their surrounding spaces. Thus, according to the architectural historian Sir John Summerson: “With Covent Garden Jones introduced formal town planning to London—It is the first London ‘square’” (Summerson 1966, 2010). Less known is the evidence of Jones’ influence upon the architect William Kent (1685–1748) and arguably, thereby, upon the origin and development of English landscape gardening, which Kent helped pioneer (Olwig 2002b:80– 124). Jones thereby designed landscape scenes that began within the interior of theater buildings, in the built environment of the city, before being transposed to the exterior environment of the city and countryside. Jones, as noted in Chapter 1, began his career at the English court when he was engaged, by James I’s consort, Queen Anne (or Anna) of Denmark (1574–1619), to design the scenery and costumes for Blackness and for subsequent “Queen’s masques.” He had been headhunted by Anne from the court of her brother, King Christian IV of Denmark, for whom he worked, among other things, as an art buyer in Venice. Ten years later Jones, now working for King James, advanced to the title of “Surveyor of the King’s Works.” The practice of land surveying was foundational to the conceptualization and design of the perspectival space of landscape scenery (Cosgrove 1988; Edgerton 1975), and it was this scenery, as a theatrical performance space, that was made “real” within the townscape of Covent Garden as well as within the landscape gardens of the countryside. It was in Venice that Jones became acquainted with the Renaissance arts of the time, not the least the iconic architecture of Andrea Palladio (1508–1580) (Summerson 1966). Palladio famously designed the Teatro Olimpico, with scenery by Vincenzo Scamozzi, which was built in Vicenza, near Venice, between 1580 and 1585 (see Figure 5.4). This theater, though indoors, was made to look like an outdoor theater, complete with an illusory sky and a surrounding urban scene. The theater made use of perspectival space, but the scenery was a solid building façade that did not change, unlike in Jones’ masques where there was changing scenery, as in the form of painted perspectival scenic backdrops (Boucher 2007:250–253). Theater was a passion among the members of the humanist intellectual circle to which Palladio belonged from the time of his youth, starting with Greco-Roman–inspired outdoor theaters and ending with his indoor Vicenza theater. This theater, his final work, was purpose built to house the Accademia Olimpica, a learned humanistic Renaissance society that Palladio helped found, where the members were particularly engaged in exploring the history and architecture of theater.

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For Jones, as for Palladio, the theater provides a key to understanding his subsequent work as an architect. Ben Jonson, Jones’ literary partner in creating the masques, who gained an education at the prestigious Westminster school in London under the mentorship of the learned chorographer/geographer William Camden (1551–1623), also clearly had a deep interest in the theater and its evolution from classical times. By parsing the masques one can therefore gain an insight into the way that Jonson’s humanist learning together with Jones’ ability to design theatrical scenic spectacle formed a totality that can illuminate how the modern performance space of theater, architecture, and landscape design have evolved together. Masquing, Jonson emphasized, was experienced through its performance and this made it inherently ephemeral. Jonson therefore undertook the then unusual step of publishing the scripts for the masques because: “The honor and splendor of these Spectacles was such in the performance, as, could those hours have lasted, this [endeavor] of mine, now [i.e. without his publishing the script], had been a most unprofitable work” ( Jonson 1969:47). Theater’s ephemeral quality has caused the importance of its use of theater landscape scenery to be less examined than that of painting in studies concerned with the role of the arts in shaping the idea of landscape as scenery. Landscape architecture, which produces environments experienced through practice and performance, is nevertheless closer in spirit to theater than to painting.

The case of the missing mask A curious thing about the Masque of Blackness was that the performers did not wear masks, as Sir Dudley Carlton, who attended the performance of Blackness, pointed out humorously in his diary: At night we had the Queen’s Maske in the Banquetting House, or rather her Pagent [meaning a scene erected on a stage] … Their apparel was rich but too light and Curtizan-like for such great ones. Instead of Vizzards [masks], their Faces, and Arms, up to the Elbows, were painted black, which was Disguise sufficient, for they were hard to be known; but it became them nothing so well as their red and white [complexion], and you cannot imagine a more ugly sight than a Troup of lean-cheek’d Moors. (quoted in McManus 2002; emphasis in original, interpolation mine) The mask, in Carlton’s view, appeared to be missing from the masque, but an examination of clues in the text might have revealed to Carlton that the mask had not gone missing. Rather, it had moved from its place in front of the face of the masquer to an encompassing scenic space, within which the masquer now acted. The façade of the landscape scenery, painted on the back and the side wings of the stage, thus formed a kind of theatrical mask that helped transform

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the identity of the person performing into the figure they were performing, much as had the mask. It was this “performance space” that transformed actual social figures, like Queen Anne, into performers, acting according to Jones’ designs and Jonson’s text. But, one might ask, how could mere “space” accomplish this task? The answer is that this was not just a geometric space, it was the air of an ætherial sphere. In the Greco-Roman cosmology, that the Renaissance sought to revive in new forms, there were basically four elements, or essences: earth, air, water, fire, plus æther, a “quintessential” (from the Latin quinque meaning “five + essence”) fifth element that was a kind of holistic combination of them all. Æther derives from the ancient Greek, meaning “upper air,” from the base of aithein, “burn, shine” (NOAD, 2005: ether). Æther was believed to constitute an elevated ætherial sphere; an air breathed by the gods that was located upward from the sphere of the moon and from which light and heat shined down upon and permeated the elements of the sublunary earth. Æther was a component in the influential Greek cosmology and philosophy of Plato and Aristotle and, beginning in the Renaissance and Enlightenment, it came to play a role in the development of modern metaphysics, physics, and art. Æther was seen to be an invisible substance, like air, that provided amongst other things the vehicle for the transmission of sound and light and, in the nineteenth century, electromagnetic energy (Schaffner, 1972; Whittaker, 1951). The concept of æther still played a role in physics at the turn of the twentieth century, but since then it has been replaced by “space,” because it seemed clearer to use this term rather than engage in theorization involving an imperceptible substance the existence of which could not be proved. Æther still occurs, however, in advanced theoretical physics and in popular culture, e.g., in the form of the “Ethernet” (Eddington, 1935:39; OED, 1989: ether, definition 5.a.; Olwig 2011b). Though none of the four classical elements or essences were termed space, æther, as a quintessence encompassing the others, had something in common with Euclidean space, also termed absolute or geometric space, because this space encompasses the phenomena within it. Æther, however, was particularly identified as the bearer of light, which also encompasses phenomena and makes them visible, thereby bringing enlightenment and knowledge. The source of light was the element fire, which burns air and gives off heat, and the most powerful source of light was the sun that transmitted light and heat to the element earth through the element air, which also, as mist and humidity, carried the element water. The relationship between light and knowledge is illustrated by the fact that the concept of knowledge for the ancient Greeks was signified by the word “gnomon,” which derives from gignōskein, meaning “to come to know” (Merriam-Webster 1993: gnomon, know). Gnomon meant “one that knows or examines, an interpreter, discerner,” but it also literally meant the pointer on a sundial that casts a shadow by which a person can gain knowledge of time and place (Liddell and Scott1940: γνώμων). The knowledge of time thus derives from the light of the sun cast as a shadow by the gnomon. Æther, however, did not simply enlighten

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by means of light, it also carried sound, which was similar to light in that it was believed to reverberate and echo, much as light was reflected in a mirror. Sound, of course, can also provide knowledge both through the perception of the environment and by means of the words carried by the sound of the voice. The ancient Greek theater played an important cultural and political role as both the place where plays that transmitted knowledge were played and the place where representative assemblies were held and things discussed (Chapters 1 and 7), and it could be located centrally near the agora. It had a circular shape so that audience members were in visual contact with each other within a conical amphitheater that reinforced the voice of the players and the resonant sound effects that accompanied the action. It was placed out of doors so that the scene was illuminated by the sun, the sound could be carried by the prevailing wind, and the public was in visual contact with the “choros” (Chapter 3) in which the theater was placed. In the center of the circular area of the platform upon which the play was performed there was often a short column that would have effectively functioned as a gnomon and cast a shadow made by the sun ( just as the players would likewise cast a shadow), so the circular area upon which the play took place, and perhaps the whole theater, might be imagined to be an oversized sundial providing knowledge of time in relation to place (Figure 5.2).3 This might intuitively seem odd, but consider then that many huge clocks decorate public spaces; that in the Enlightenment “Age of Reason” the cosmos was envisioned as a vast clockwork; and that a country like Italy has both sun and many very old public buildings with towers decorated by sundials, sometimes supplemented by a more modern clock. Then the idea of a public theater that effectively has a gnomon at its core may not be so farfetched, especially when one recalls that a sundial is, in principle, infinitely more accurate than a clock, moving smoothly in analogue with the sun, whereas the clockwork is a mechanism that ticks in integers. In the area behind the circular stage of the Greek theater there was a background cloth or tent, the skēnē, which eventually became a fixed building-like façade. It was from behind here that the players could enter or exit. The word skēnē is thought to perhaps be akin to the Greek word skia, meaning “shadow,” but it is also akin to the word shine (Merriam-Webster 1993: scene, shine). The scene might thus be understood as involving the play of light and shadow in front of and behind the scene. A shadow can signify a negative absence of light, but it can also be thought of as a positive sign cast by the source of the light, e.g., when sunshine generates the shadow on a sundial. The shadow, like dark-shaded writing engraved on a light surface, thus provided a graphic means of communicating knowledge dependent upon the contrast between light and shade (for more on shadows, see Casati, 2004). The text and scenery of The Masque of Blackness shows how carefully Jonson and Jones worked both to revive and redevelop the ancient role of the mask and æther in order to put it to use to foreshadow the role of the new monarch of “Britain” as a contemporary sun king.

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Substantial masks versus ætherial performance space In ancient Greek theater, especially in its earliest iterations, little more was needed to put on a play than for the actor to put on a mask. Scenery was not essential to this form of theater. In Blackness, however scenery somehow took on the ancient role of the mask in theater. Æther, as represented by the figure of Æthiopia, the moon goddess, provides a key to understanding how Jonson and Jones accomplished this transformation. She is the one, declaiming from above within the celestial realm of æther, who directs the earthly players to act and perform (Figure 5.1). She communicates by means of her reflection in the scintillating waters of a lake from which the Niger River was then thought to spring: Æthiopia was that bright face Reflected by the lake. ( Jonson 1969:55) Æthiopia, according to Jonson, was worshipped by the “Æthiopians” as the goddess of the moon. Æther was the root of the name of the goddess Æthiopia.

FIGURE 5.1  Scene from a trial, research, production of The Masque of Blackness as directed by professor Martha Vestin, The Drama Institute, Stockholm, with whom the author collaborated. It shows the moon, Æthiopia, telling the princesses how they can become fair by sailing to Britain. It was this scene in the performance that gave the clue to understanding the key quintessential role of æther in the masque, and in Renaissance cosmology more generally (see also Olwig 2011b). The play was performed by members of the Sommarteater på Krapperup theater troupe. Original sketches by Jones of masque scenery and costumes can be seen in Olwig (2002b). (Photo by author. Color version available in eBook edition.)

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The suffix of Æthiopia derives from the Greek ōps, ōp- meaning “eye, face” (NOAD 2005: -opia), and the name of this moon goddess therefore means the eye and/or face of æther. In Blackness the moon goddess communicates by means of the light of her face as seen against the blackness of the night sky and as reflected in the lake’s dark shimmering water, thereby linking the element of fire producing the vibrant light reflected by the moon with the elements of air through which the light travels, and the earthly water upon which she is mirrored. She could also, however, communicate to people via a kind of ætherial resonant sound, as is suggested when she declaims: Æthiopia: I was that bright face Reflected by the lake, in which thy race Read mystic lines; which skill Pythagoras First taught to men, by a reverberate glass [mirror]. ( Jonson 1969:55) Jonson’s text is no doubt difficult to parse for modern readers, but this is not just because of its odd construction and strange names, words, and phrases, but also because in modern discourse we have lost the meaning of æther, which was key to Renaissance cosmology, and which continued to have scientific meaning until about a century ago. The idea, for example, that a mirror is a “reverberate glass” sounds odd, but it is actually suggesting a connection of scientific importance between the fact that both light and sound resonate and reverberate as waves through a medium like that of the waters of the lake, and that medium was thought to be æther, not empty space. Pythagoras (ca. 570– ca. 495 b.c.) was an influential Greek philosopher, mystic, and mathematician who contributed to the study of geometry (e.g., the Pythagorean theorem) and music by, among other things, working out the relationship between the length of a plucked string and the tone that it makes. He is believed to have calculated, on this basis, what he imagined to be the reverberant sound made by the movement of the luminous celestial spheres and thereby the ætherial harmony of the elements as expressed here by the spherical face of the moon. This sound, though inaudible to humans, became apparent in the night sky and was thus interpretable to those who could read their mystic lines, much as lines of a score can be read as music. This might sound mad, but Pythagoras is nevertheless key to understanding one of Shakespeare’s most beautiful passages as found in The Merchant of Venice (Shakespeare 1948 [1595]: V, i:54–65; see also Olwig 1993b): How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank! Here will we sit and let the sounds of music creep in our ears. Soft stillness and the night, become the tourches of sweet harmony. Sit, Jessica. Look how the floor of heaven is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold. There’s not the smallest orb which thou behold’st, but in his motion like an angel sings, still quairing [choiring] to the young-eyed cherubins. Such harmony is in immortal

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souls. But whilst this muddy vesture of decay doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it. These Pythagorean ideas, furthermore, were not only of importance to Renaissance art, but also Renaissance science as, for example, in the case of the astronomer Johannes Kepler’s revolutionary Harmonice Mundi from 1618 (Koestler 1964; Olwig 1993b). Æthiopia represents the quintessence of the masque as a beautiful and harmonious celebration of light, music, and dance, and she expresses this quintessence by uniting the four elements in her light as it reflects in the reverberate glass of the lake. She thereby makes the ætherial realm comprehensible to the princesses, and by extension to the spectators. Her ætherial face, as it illuminates and resonates with the scenery, becomes the mask that frames and enlightens the performance of the masque. This notion of resonance might seem odd, taken in the context of its arcane Renaissance erudition, but consider the anthropologist Tim Ingold’s more contemporary exposition of the musical resonance that is quintessential to human interaction (Ingold 1993:160): For the orchestral musician, playing an instrument, watching the conductor and listening to one’s fellow players are all inseparable aspects of the same process of action: for this reason, the gestures of the performers may be said to resonate with each other. In orchestral music, the achievement of resonance is an absolute precondition for successful performance. But the same is true, more generally, of social life. Indeed it could be argued that in the resonance of movement and feeling stemming from people’s mutually attentive engagement, in shared contexts of practical activity, lies the very foundation of sociality. The difference between Jonson’s and Ingold’s resonant sound is that Ingold’s musicians could just as well play within the orchestra of an ancient Greek outdoor theater, where they would cast their own shadows, as in an indoor auditorium. They breath air rather than æther and if they played in a chamber music orchestra, or a jazz combo, they would not need a conductor in order to resonate with each other and the audience. Finally, they do not attempt to play the ætherial music of the heavenly spheres, unless, of course, they are playing Gustav Holst’s orchestral suit, The Planets, or a symphony by the Danish composer Per Nørgård (Olwig 1993b). In the context of the ancient Greek theater the players would wear removable symbolic masks that gave resonance to their voices and which were the source of their identity within the play. The word for mask and face in ancient Greek was the same, prosopon, meaning “face, countenance, mask” and “in Hellenistic Greek also dramatic part, character, person” (O.E.D. 1989: prosopon). Prosopopoeia, in turn, meant the representation, as with a mask, of an inanimate thing or an abstraction as a person with personal characteristics, such as the power to think or speak. In Æthiopia’s case, her mask, the face of the moon,

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represents the abstract idea of the ætherial quintessence (O.E.D. 1989: prosopopoeia, definition 2). Personification is a similar concept, deriving from the Latin for mask, persona (O.E.D. 1989: person). Æthiopia thus literally means æther’s face/ mask/personification, so Æthiopia can also be regarded as the personification of æther. As the theater historian David Wiles points out, in the age of Sophocles “donning a face [i.e. a mask] was no negative act of concealment but a positive act of becoming” (2007:1). In the case of the daughters of the Niger, however, the opposite is true because the heat of the excessive light that burns their faces black conceals their beauty. They cannot, furthermore, just take off this mask because it is burned upon their faces. They must therefore sail off to Britain, which has a milder climate due to its position on the globe and the tempering effect of the ocean – something Jonson knew about through his education under Camden, one of the foremost chorographers of his time (Olwig 2002b). In the milder climate of Britain they will then lose their dark tan and their true beauty will shine through and they will be able to bask in Britain’s ætherial light! Their identity in the masque is thereby not an expression of an external, removable, mask, which is separable from the player, but an expression of the geographical environment of black Africa versus that of fair Britain. Just as there is no mask in the masque, there are no people; the figures that are represented as acting and performing in the masque are not humans, but personifications of the elements, notably water in the case of the monarch of the Niger and his daughters. The lack of people thus represents a reversal by which it is effectively the scenic natural background that is brought to life (by human actors) in order to perform the lead roles. In this way the primary message of the masque is conveyed through its material theatrical form, bringing home the point that what ideally should make Britain a natural political unity is the fact that it is a natural geographical body surrounded by temperate waters. It is thus the land of Britain, in the physical sense, that generates a land of fair people in both the physical and political sense. The use of a theatrical masque to personify the state has its roots in the ancient Greeks’ and Romans’ use of the theater both for plays and for the representative political fora through which the state was constituted. The link is brought out in Thomas Hobbes’ classic and defining 1651 work on the state, Leviathan, in which he wrote: Persona in latine signifies the disguise, or outward appearance of a man, counterfeited on the Stage; and sometimes more particularly that part of it, which disguiseth the face, as a Mask or Visard. And from the Stage, hath been translated to any Representer of speech and action, as well in Tribunalls, as Theaters. (Hobbes 1991 [1651]:112; italics in original) Hobbes, following the Roman example, envisioned the citizenry of the state as actors who take on different roles according to the duty that they are performing.

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The personating of each role requires a different mask, parallel to the personage of a modern judge who at a legal tribunal puts on a robe and wig. Hobbes comprehends this relationship in terms of theatrical performance, explaining that it is the head of the state who is the “author” that “owneth” the “words and actions” of the “Actor” who “acteth” under the “Authority” of the head of state and thereby “represents” the state (Hobbes 1991 [1651]:112; italics mine).4 Hobbes thus comprehends the state as a kind of theater writ large and, as can be seen from the book’s famous title page, this state is envisioned as a landscape scene towered over by the monstrous specter of the state, with a crowned head commanding the scene, and its body a composite of the many human bodies making up the body politic (see Chapter 2, Figure 2.1). It is this body politic, which at this time was becoming known as the “nation,” that acts and performs on the landscape scene of the nation-state (Olwig 2002b). The problem for both James and personages like Camden, who supported the unification of the kingdoms of Scotland and England as the state of “Britain,” was that this unification was not acceptable to the parliamentary assemblies representing the people of the two countries – essentially because their substantive legal customs and governance that were the basis for their constitution had evolved according to their differing historical contexts (Olwig 2002b). The argument of Blackness thus represents a reversal of the substantive premises that had historically constituted and shaped these lands. Jonson and Jones, instead of representing these lands as having been shaped by human polities and their substantive laws, reverse the process, so that in Blackness it is the natural laws governing the physical character of the geographical body of Britain that has ordained that Britain should be a political unity ordained by nature. This reversal, as justified by nature and science, is complicated, however, by the situation that it is premised upon the fact that the unification is legally justified by their unification within the body of the monarch who is king of both and thus the embodiment of the state (Olwig 2002b). The ingenious solution to this duality is to portray the monarch as a sun king who is the ultimate source of the mild physical and political climate of the geographic body of Britain, which, in turn, unifies the countries of Britain within an organic united kingdom. Central point perspective plays an important role in this achievement because the lines of perspective focus, on the one hand, on the point of infinity that is the focus of the lines of perspective that unify the space of the landscape and give it depth. These lines, on the other hand, also focus on the eye of the king who thereby has a literally commanding view of the landscape, which he has figuratively enlightened. Jones’ theater thereby establishes an interiorized landscape in which the use of light and the structuring of space created the illusion of three-dimensional space that shot from the black hole of the pupil and penetrated through to a point ending ultimately in cosmic infinity (Olwig 2011b:526; see also Figure 5.1; Chapter 1, Figure 1.2; Chapter 2, Figure 2.1; and Chapter 9, Figure 9.1). Euclidean geometric space is linked to æther because, in the ancient Greek perception, the shapes and movements of the celestial bodies, which are located in

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the heavenly ætherial region, described perfect archetypal geometric forms. The mathematician Ptolemy, as discussed in Chapter 3, was thus literally a geometer, which is to say someone who measures the earth (e.g., in meters), and who thereby created a geometric representation of the earth as a globe. He also, as was seen in Chapter 3, transformed the mundane understanding of choros as polity and place into a Platonic conception of choros as a geometrically defined space. For this reason, when artists like Dürer (Figure 9.1) or designers like Jones used cartographic surveying techniques to create a perspectival representation of landscape, the image represents more than an illusion of three-dimensional space. It also creates a focused ætherial space dialectically linking the sphere of the eye with the spheres of the heavenly bodies, which are the source of ideas, enlightenment, and knowledge. Jones reconfigurated the architecture of the theater so that the theater, instead of being placed outside, visibly and sensually emplaced within the “choros” of the polity (Chapter 3), is transformed into a performance space within the geometrically proportioned space of a building (Figure 5.3). But within this performance space the surrounding world is illuded through the science of perspective. This inversion of the architecture, involving moving the theater from an external place within the choros to an internal performance space within a building, recalls the philosopher Michel Serres’ conceptualization of the origin of “modernity”: The world represents itself, is reflected in the face of the sundial and we take part in this event, not more and no less than a post [i.e., the gnomon of a sundial], for, standing upright, we also cast shadows, or as seated scribes, stylus in hand, we too leave lines. Modernity begins when this real world space is taken as a scene and this scene, controlled by a director, turns inside out – like the finger of a glove or a simple optical diagram [e.g., perspectival line-drawing to the eye] – and plunges into the utopia of a knowing, inner, intimate subject. This black hole [of the eye’s pupil] absorbs the world. But before this absorption, the world as such remains the seat of knowing. (Serres 1995:80; interpolations mine; see also So¨derstro¨m 1996:254) When seen in the light of the role that the masques played in framing the ideal landscape face of the Stuart court it makes sense that Jones was eventually asked to design his structures not just for the stage, but also for the capital city outside the theater, thereby reconfiguring his in-door stage constructions as outdoor buildings. Jones’ Banqueting House (Figure 5.3) is the quintessential expression of the way the geometric design ideals that he originally created within the space of the theater were used in architecture. Thus they form the basis of the court’s building within which his theater was performed (and which included a banquet because the masques were a kind of dinner theater) and eventually, as in Covent Garden, a cityscape within which buildings were constructed with their private façades facing out upon a public space. It is “quintessential” because it involves not just abstract geometrical space, but the entire ætherial realm of fire, air, water, and earth.

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Ætherial versus spatial scenery Authors such as Denis Cosgrove, as discussed in Chapters 1 and 3, emphasize the importance of the reconfiguring of the vertical geometric space of the map as the horizontal space of landscape scenery. I would argue, however, that key to the Renaissance humanists’ construction of the perspectival landscape was not just geometric space, but an ætherial realm that subsumes Platonic and Ptolemaic “choralogical” space. With regard to the creation of perspective, the artists/scientists of the Renaissance, such as Leonardo da Vinci, appear to have been more concerned with light, and thereby optics, than with space. The art historian James Elkins points out, in fact, that the early Renaissance painters made pictures without the benefit of a concept of space, which did not become common before the seventeenth century (Elkins 1994). They did, however, have a concept of the quintessence that combined the element of light generated by fire with the element of air through which it is transmitted. Because of the importance of light, da Vinci was interested in not just linear perspective but also the simulation of aerial perspective, which is an optical effect caused by the atmosphere’s effect on light’s spectrum and intensity (OED, 1989: aerial perspective). According to da Vinci, vision is “the very quintessence, the spirit of the elements, which finding itself imprisoned within the soul is ever longing to return from the human body to its giver, and you must know that this same longing is that quintessence, inseparable from nature, and that man is the image of the world’’ (quoted in Turner, 1966:37). As I argued in the paper on æther presented at the Las Vegas AAG: The combination of light and space in aether … means that the landscape scenery is more than a geometrical spatial structure based on the top down perspective of Ptolemaic map and cosmology. It also includes a horizontal dimension that involves not just the perspectival geometry of space but the spectrum of light. Whereas a spatial scale (a word derived from the Latin scala for ladder) is graduated and linear, moving vertically in increments within a framed unified space from the Earth to the cosmos above, the light spectrum involves a smooth ætherial, encompassing continuum that unites and enlightens the interstices between spatial scales, helping to create the illusion of a smooth sweeping view into the infinite space of the horizon and the heavenly bodies beyond. Thus, whereas Ptolemaic space was Earth-focused, ethereal space is more Copernican in orientation, with its focus on the light of the sun (also as reflected in the moon). It is in relation to the quintessential element of æther the landscape takes on a spiritual dimension. (Olwig 2011b:7) The word spirit derives from the Latin spiritus, meaning “air or breath,” and æther is the quintessential air that the gods breath. Spirit, as a dictionary defines it, is “the animating or vital principle in man (and animals); that which gives life

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to the physical organism, in contrast to its purely material elements; the breath of life’” (OED, 1989: spirit, etymology and I.1.a.). It is thus via æther that landscape scenery becomes personified as a living embodied natural realm capable of acting and performing, as is seen when Æthiopia, the face of æther, directs the spirits representing the waters of the Niger to flow to Britain. In Blackness it is thus the elements that act, not the humans, though they are impersonated by humans. It is in this way that a reversal occurs in Blackness, by which it is nature that provides the legitimization for the unification of Scotland and England-Wales as Britain, not the person of the monarch. Æther was not just the province of the arts, it was also, as has been seen, the concern of scientists such as da Vinci, who in turn put science to use in creating art. Æther was a key concept in Renaissance and Enlightenment science. It was central to, for example, the research of Isaac Newton and it remained important in science until the time of Einstein who argued that instead of theorizing an imperceptible substance that could not be proven to exist, it was better just to use the concept of space (Olwig 2011b). Arthur Stanley Eddington, a British astrophysicist and science writer, argued that æther theory involves “something like a turning inside out of our familiar picture of the world.” He concluded: “If you can make this reversal of the picture, turning space from a negative into a positive, so that it is no longer a mere background against which the extension and the motion of matter is perceived but is as much a performer in the world drama as the matter is – then you have the gist of the aether theory whether you use the word ‘aether’ or not [e.g. use the word space instead of aether]’’ (Eddington 1935: 40; Olwig 2011b:520). The transformation of landscape from being a place whose nature is shaped by a polity to a scenic space structured “scientially” by mathematics and geometry, and governed by nature’s laws, thus has roots both in the arts and the sciences as inspired by the concept of æther (Figure 5.1).

Personifying Britain as landscape Blackness was written to celebrate the 1603 ascension to the English throne of James VI of Scotland as James I of “Britain,” and thereby the apparent realization of James’, and Camden’s, dream of uniting the two kingdoms within the geographical body of Britain under the revived Roman name of Britannia. Æthiopia, the personification of the æther, thus proclaims with reference to Britain: With that great name Britannia, this blest isle Hath won her ancient dignity, and style, A world divided from the world … Britannia, whose new name makes all tongues sing, … Ruled by a sun, that to this height doth grace it, Whose beams shine day and night … His light sciential is, and past [more than], mere nature … ( Jonson 1969:55–56; interpolation mine)

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Prosopopoeia, or personification through the use of a mask, could involve the representation of the dead. It thereby brought forth the specter or spirit of the ancestors, and by extension more abstract ideas identifiable with the past. In this passage Æthiopia is reviving the ancient disused (“dead”) Roman name Britannia as the new name for the kingdoms of England and Scotland, as embodied by both their island geographic body and in the body of their common monarch. Blackness thus functioned as an elaborate prosopopoeia in which the interior performance space of the theater morphs into the exterior world of Britain itself. Britain hereby is masqued, or personified, by the face and body of the island’s landscape in a space ruled symbolically by its monarch in London. The face, which is also identified both with persona and the mask, has become “deterritorialized,” to use an expression taken from Deleuze and Guattari (and also drawn upon in Chapter 3). It is thereby removed from “the stratum of the organism,” in this case the face of James, and connected with the strata of “significance and subjectification” expressed by the face and persona of the landscape scenic façade represented on the stage and illuminated by the light radiating from the faces of the sun king, James, and the moon Æthiopia (but in fact as projected by Jones). “The face,” thus, has become an important “correlate … to the landscape, which is not just a milieu but a deterritorialized world” (Deleuze and Guattari 1988:172). But much as this face has been deterritorialized from the human body as portrayed in the masque, it has been reterritorialized as the landscape face of a personified Britain, “a world divided from the world” as represented on the stage.5 The quintessence of this landscape, made up of the four essential elements that constitute the island’s material landscape, is the æther that is projected from the sun, personified and performed by the sitting monarch, and reflected from the face of the moon, personified and performed by Æthiopia. It is this ideal theatrical landscape scene that then becomes transposed to the outside world of Britain itself in the form of spatial planning of the capital city and the extensive landscape gardens, surrounding the great landed estates that come to shape the pastoral image of Britain, but which can also be viewed as a façade hiding the true character of the land as a highly urbanized and industrialized hierarchical, class-driven nation-state (Barrell 1972; Olwig 2002b; R. Williams 1973). The landscape hereby comes to be known as “the face of the earth,” as in the environmental studies classic Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth (Thomas 1956), just as that face can be perceived as having a personality, as in the archaeological milestone The Personality of Britain (Fox 1932).

Turning the substantive place of the theater “outside in” and then “inside out” From classic times to the Renaissance, as noted, theater was customarily performed out of doors. Thus, before Jones could effectively create his scenic theatrical space he had to turn the space of the theater, as inherited from classical times, outside in. The Renaissance “rebirth” of ancient classical theater

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FIGURE 5.2  (Top left) Salamis Theater, Cyprus. (Top right) Reconstruction of theater at one end of the Agora of Old Paphos, Cyprus. Note the column/gnomon on the stage of the Salamis theater and the sundial-like affect of the actor’s shadow at the Old Paphos theater, by which the audience could gain knowledge of the time. (Below left) A scene from the round interior, open to the sky, of the contemporary reconstruction of Shakespeare’s Globe theater, originally from 1599, and a street view of the round exterior theater building, which is incongruous in today’s post-Jones London. (Photos by author. Color version available in eBook edition.)

involved a process by which theater moved from taking place in the context of inclusive, nearly circular, outdoor public places (Figure 5.2) to becoming an exclusive space of performance within a covered theater building (Kernodle 1944) (Figure 5.3). Spatial illusion itself might be considered to involve a kind of turning inside out of the world insofar as it creates a form of ideal, ethereal, spectral space that resembles that of the substantive material world, but which actually has no substance. In this space material human beings become personified as performers, enacting different roles. But when Jones turns the world of the theater inside out again, so that the perspectival space of the theater interior with its scenic façades is applied to the planning and construction of the façade of the theater building itself, and the external environment surrounding the theater, then a “reterritorialization” occurs in which the realm encompassing the theater becomes materialized as a form of landscape scenery. Landscape hereby ceased to be conceptualized as a region or place, and became a perspectival “modern” spatial scene (Cosgrove 1984; Mitchell 1994) (see Chapter 2).

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FIGURE 5.3  (Top left) St. Paul’s Church (the “actors’” church) designed by Inigo Jones at Covent Garden. It was “here,” as represented inside on a theater stage, that Professor Higgins met Eliza in G.B. Shaw’s play Pygmalion, which provided the basis for the musical My Fair Lady that played nearby in the London theater district. Note that the portico of the building is pure façade because the real “front” entrance is at the “back” of the building. (Bottom) The façade and the interior of Jones’ pioneering Banqueting House, begun 1619, where masques were held and banquets eaten.The movable stage was located at the end of the hall, which had the shape of a double cube. One therefore sees less than half of the hall.The ceiling, by Peter Paul Rubens, shows a scene of the Apotheosis of King James I  in which he appears as the monarch of Britain. James I’s son Charles I, a great lover of the masque, was escorted out of the Banqueting House and beheaded in public out of doors. (Photos by author. Color version available in eBook edition.)

The dramatic transformation that occurred with the advent of Jones’ architecture can still be experienced by simply moving the relatively short distance from the reconstructed Shakespeare’s Globe theater on the South Bank Thames’ waterfront in London to the original Globe theater’s nearly contemporaneous Banqueting House across the river in central London at the court at Whitehall (see Figure 5.3). The Globe stands out as a disjointed bit of old England, with its rounded shape, its half timbering, its thatched roof over the audience seated in a circle around the stage, and its center open to the sky (Figure 5.2). The Banqueting House, designed by Jones for the performance of his masques, seems

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not at all out of place and is hardly noticeable in modern London. With its quadratic performance space (a double cube) and almost neoclassical façade, it slots perfectly into the planned gridded space of a modern city including central squares and plazas, such as Covent Garden (Figure 5.3), where the better classes live, and radiating outward to where the poor live on the urban margins, where the Globe theater was located then, on the wrong side of the river.

An expostulation with Inigo Jones The Greek theatrical milieu differs from the performance space of Jones’ theater where perspectival space focuses upon the eye of a particularized and hierarchized spectator. This emphasis on the visual meant that the spatial structure of the theater privileged the ability to see the scene over the ability to hear the text, much to Jonson’s consternation because Jonson believed in the superiority of the written word over images. Jones characterized himself as a “designer” and demanded to be known as the co-inventor with Jonson of the masques, leading Jonson, the author of the texts, to break his artistic partnership with Jones (Gordon 1949:168–171). Jonson expressed his feelings on the subject in his 1631 satiric poem “An Expostulation with Inigo Jones” ( Jonson 1985:462–465): O showes! Shows! Mighty shows! The eloquence of masques! What need of prose, Or verse, or sense, to express immortal you? You are the spectacles of state! Tis true Court hieroglyphics, and all arts afford In the mere perspective of an inch-board [painted scenery]. You ask no more than certain politic eyes, Eyes that can pierce into the mysteries Of many colours, read them, and reveal Mythology there painted on slit deal [thin boards]. Oh, to make boards to speak! There is a task! Painting and carpentry are the soul of masque. Pack with your peddling poetry to the stage: This is the money-get, mechanic age! To plant the music where no ear can reach, Attire the persons as no thought can teach Sense what they are which, by a specious, fine Term of the architects, is called design! But in the practised truth destruction is Of any art beside that he calls his. For Jonson the practice of the surveyor and engineer had come to literally upstage the authority of the poet, as well as that of the composer and choreographer. The masques were “the spectacles of state!” suggesting that they functioned both as spectacle and as the lens in a pair of spectacles that shaped a mythic vision of the state. Jones did not, however, simply shape the vision of the state; he shaped the

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state itself through the “omnipotent design” by which he, the “wise surveyor! Wiser architect,” would “survey a state” ( Jonson 1985:462 – 465). Jonson’s critique of Jones might be regarded as a precursor of Michel Foucault’s ideas about surveillance and power (Foucault 1979 [1975]), as when Jonson wrote: Do you know what a Surveyor is now? I tell you, a supervisor! A hard word, that; but it may be softened, and brought in to signify something. An overseer! One that overseeth you. (1873 [1634]:664) There is, however, more to Jones’ scenic space than the architecture of surveillance and power (Markus 1993). It is the landscape of the state of Britain itself, with its capital, that Jones surveyed and transmuted into a transformed forerunner of the modern cityscape (Olwig 2002b). In the Jonsian masque the function of the physical mask, as worn in Greek theater, had become transferred to the landscape stage scenery. The player, with an individual mask dividing the face from the public, now was transformed into an actor performing behind the façade of an ætherial scenic space. When the landscape scenery of the masque is thus transposed to the world outside the theater, all the world comes to be perceived in terms of landscape scenery, hierarchized according to scale. This transposition is well exemplified by Hobbes, for whom, as seen, masking was not a positive act of becoming, but an act of concealment: “Persona in latine signifies the disguise, or outward appearance of a man, counterfeited on the Stage.” It is also a phenomenon that “from the Stage, hath been translated to any Representer of speech and action, as well in Tribunalls, as Theaters” (Hobbes 1991 [1651]:112; italics in original), which is to say that whether in the theater or a court of law, we perform our roles as if wearing a mask. Wiles, paraphrasing the sociologist Marcel Mauss, has made a similar observation, stating that: “To be possessed by one’s role ... remains a feature of modern life” (2007:262). We all appear, in this sense, to have become persons who are acting and performing in the performance space of landscape conceived as scenery (Pearson 2006).

Landscape and Pygmalion The literature and theater historian Clare McManus has emphasized the significance of the 1609 Masque of Queens to Jones’ transition from stage designer to architect because in this masque a building called “The House of Fame” itself plays a central role. The building literally plays a role because parts of the building actually come to life and perform; the female caryatids supporting the building, like the statue in Ovid’s Pygmalion, turning into living beings to perform a dance (McManus 2002:111–122). Architecture thus no longer simply provides a performance space for spectacle; it is the performance and the spectacle. In Ovid’s story Pygmalion is dissatisfied with real women, so he carves an ideal

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woman of ivory with whom he then falls in love, after which Venus makes the statue come alive out of pity for him. Jones, in effect, similarly transformed the relational space of the theatrical arena into an absolute, ideal and archetypal perspectival space of beautiful scenery. It was this space that came alive when Jones transfigured the space outside the theater into a living image of the theatrical ideal, complete with classical inspired façades. George Bernard Shaw astutely set the opening scenes for his play Pygmalion (later transformed into the musical My Fair Lady), under the Tuscan Portico façade of Jones’ 1633 actors’ church, St. Paul’s, in the Covent Garden theater district where Eliza, who was selling flowers, was seeking shelter from the rain (Shaw 1957 [1913]) (Figure 5.3).6 The audience inside a Covent Garden theater thus gazed upon a scenic illusion of an outdoor architectural space nearby the theater in which they themselves are sitting indoors and which, as Shaw well knew, itself had its antecedents as scenography within Jones’ theater. Shaw in his play thereby inverted the theater district’s architectonic space “outside in” to its “origin” within the space of a theater that, itself, was in a theater district. But Shaw also turned the story inside out, so that a living Eliza was metamorphosed into a dolled-up figure whose speech was materialized in a performance in which it was not so much what was said, but how it was said, that conveyed one’s status in society (cf. Austin 1962). Today, or rather tonight, Covent Garden comes ever closer to the quintessence of Jones’ ætherial architectural ideal, with spectrally lit building façades and colorful illuminated signs. Furthermore, the once open square is now occupied by a former open market now roofed and boutiqued, with hidden loudspeakers planting ætherial Muzak where no ear can reach and with persons attired “as no thought can teach” in fashion often inspired by that of Italy. Jones derived his architectonic inspiration from Venice and from the architectural inspiration Palladio derived from the theater. Jones effectively turned the space of the classical Greco-Roman theater outside in before he then turned it inside out by architecting external buildings and landscapes that drew inspiration from his earlier work as a scenographer. Vegas goes a step further by turning the actual landscape of Venice outside in by reconstituting Venice within the space of a Vegas casino building. This Venice includes shops (it is a shopping mall masked as Venice) and a canal with singing Italian gondoliers and, of course, Piazza San Marco (Figure 5.4). On the piazza is an Italian restaurant with an Italian waiter whose previous job, he told me, was serving in a restaurant within a casino in Venice, Italy. But now, he exclaimed, he is performing as a Venetian waiter in a restaurant within a Venice that is within a casino! He might have added that the Vegas casino, in which Venice was located, was itself located within the sandy sea of a dry desert, whereas the casino in Venice, within which he had worked, was placed within a very wet lagoon (Figure 5.5). The Italian Venice is famous for the masquers playing in its traditional carnival, a ritual like that of Stuart England’s twelfth night revels for which Blackness was written, within which the world is traditionally turned on end (Bakhtin

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FIGURE 5.4  (Top) Andrea Palladio’s Teatro Olympico in Vicenza near Venice. (Top left) The central portion of Teatro Olympico’s stage, which illudes a Roman street. By making the façades of the buildings progressively smaller the farther they are from the spectator the illusion of depth was created. This made it necessary to use dwarfs or children to play roles upstage. Note how the ceilings are painted to illude the sky, and the façades of the walls and stage are made to look as if one was actually at an outdoor theater in ancient Rome. (Bottom) The interior and exterior face of the Caesar’s Palace Casino and shopping center in Las Vegas. Note how the interior is made to look as if one is outside on the streets of ancient Rome, also complete with a ceiling that illudes a sky – which changes throughout the day. At the end of this street is a “Roman” fountain with statues that at a given time come alive, as in Jones’ Masque of Queens. (Photos by author. Color version available in eBook edition.)

1984). The bodies of the Venetian masquers still cast their own shadows by the light of the sun or the moon, like the gnomon in a sundial. In Vegas’ Venice, however, shadows are cast by an ætherial spectral illusion of sunlight, directed by its designers and transforming Venice into an ephemeral performance space. In Vegas’ Venice the players do not wear masks and there is no carnival, the architecture itself has become the masquerade and life a carnival. In one sense it is a liminal place, on society’s margins, like the Lido where the casinos are located in Italy’s Venice. But in another sense it is the epitome of everyday contemporary life with its increasingly fanciful lifestyle shopping malls of consumption and spectacle, its event spaces for public performance, and its economy that has

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FIGURE 5.5  Piazza San Marco, “Venice,” as constructed inside the Venetian Casino in Las Vegas. The sky changes throughout the day to create the illusion that one actually is out of doors. (Photos by the author. Color version available in eBook edition.)

become a veritable game of chance. It could be argued that Vegas’ Venice is the penultimate inauthenticity, but it could also be argued that it is the authentic quintessential logical outcome of an early modern architecture, constructed in æther, which eventually became a building block of an equally ætherial (post-) modern society and its landscape.

Conclusion In this chapter I have examined how our lived substantive world has been turned inside out through the medium of architecture as shaped by theatrical scenographic practice. The story of how modern space, as a site of performance, originated in Renaissance theatrical performance space helps explain why it seems natural today to ask questions concerning the role of performance, spectacle, embodiment, the everyday, and materiality in the context of building and landscape architecture, especially when architects are exhorted by prominent brethren to “learn from Las Vegas” (Venturi, Brown and Izenour 1972). Vegas, of course, is much more than a built architectural space; it is, like Jonson and Jones’ masques, a site filled with ætherial music, light, gastronomy, song, and dance, and like the masque it provides a private location where the economically and politically powerful can play together in their finery, whilst the commoners gawk from the sidelines. Æther seems to be a rather arcane concept today when compared to the concept of space, which is not only applied to the performance “space” of the theater, but also ubiquitous in architectural and planning discourse, not to forget the texts of geographers (Olwig 2002a; see also Chapter 8). But actually æther had a long influential history before Albert Einstein effectively killed the concept

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by suggesting that it would suffice just to call æther “space,” making space as used in physics, a scientific field that has become central to modern cosmology, a lineal descendent of æther. Thus, when geographers attempt to loan some of the scientific prestige of physics by turning their subject into a “spatial science” (Olwig 2002a; see also Chapter 8), or when architects and planners use space as a kind of mantra, they are arguably – wittingly, unwittingly, or witlessly – participating in an artistic and scientific discourse centering on quintessential æther that goes back to the beginnings of Western Civilization. It is not only in theater and the arts, but in science itself, as told earlier by Eddington, that æther has involved “a turning inside out of our familiar picture of the world.” In this scientific context it is interesting that for Eddington this turning inside out recalled the Renaissance theater. The title of the essay in which the passage cited earlier from Eddington appears was “Dramatis Personae,” and it appropriately has an epigram, taken from Shakespeare’s The Tempest: “These our actors,/As I foretold you, were all spirits, and/Are melted into air, into thin air’’ (Eddington 1935:27; Olwig 2011b:526). The Tempest, which was played not at the Globe but at a court theater, creates an ætherial landscape in which the elements act and have agency within the spatial network of the stage. It is this landscape that, at the conclusion of the play, and possibly the conclusion of Shakespeare’s theatrical career, “melts into air” when Prospero disposes of his magic wand and sets free his spirit servant, Ariel (Olwig 2011b:526). It could similarly be argued that when the substantive landscape is enclosed and transmogrified as scenic space, it is then also “melted into air” (Chapter 8), or as Cosgrove and Daniels are quoted in Chapter 1 as writing: From … a post-modern perspective landscape seems less like a palimpsest whose “real” or “authentic” meanings can somehow be recovered with the correct techniques, theories or ideologies, than a flickering text displayed on the word processor screen whose meaning can be created, extended, altered, elaborated and finally obliterated by the merest touch of a button. (Cosgrove and Daniels 1988:8)

Notes 1 The Renaissance spelling æther is used here to avoid confusion with the anesthetic ether or the aether of the natural science. 2 The session was convened by Jane Jacobs and Peter Merriman. 3 The idea that the pillar in the Greek theatron (theater) was a form of gnomon was suggested to me by the Romanian mathematician Marius Buliga with whom I have had an inspiring correspondence in which he has clarified things geometrical. See https://chorasimilarity.wordpress.com/2012/04/18/the-gnomon-in-the-greektheater-of-vision-i/. 4 It was at this time that the terms performance, actor, acting, and plot were first applied to the theater. Previously plays were played by players (O.E.D 1989: act, performance, play, plot). Performance connotes the execution of a command or plan, as with the

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royal command performance of Blackness according to a scripted plot and choreography – which, unusually for its time, was published by Jonson in a fixed official text (unlike Shakespeare’s scripts that developed in the context of the practice of putting on the play). The term actor itself originally denoted an agent or administrator, and at this time had only recently become a theatrical term. 5 The idea that Britain constituted “a world divided from the world” refers to a longstanding tradition going back to the ancient Greco-Roman classics (see Olwig 2002b:63–66). It could also be argued that Vegas also constitutes a world divided from the world, where “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.” 6 Shaw himself argued that the Globe’s theatrical space was superior to that of the modern theater for Shakespearian performance (Mazer 1981).

6 PERFORMING ON THE LANDSCAPE VERSUS DOING LANDSCAPE Perambulatory practice, sight, and the sense of belonging

Throughout history, whether as hunters and gatherers, farmers or herders of livestock, people have drawn a living from the land, not from space. Farmers plant their crops in the earth, not in space, and harvest them from fields, not from space. Their animals graze pastures, not space. Travelers make their way through the country, not through space, and as they walk or stand they plant their feet on the ground, not in space. Painters set up their easels in the landscape, not in space. Tim Ingold Thus writes the anthropologist Tim Ingold in the first paragraph of an article titled “Against Space: Place, Movement, Knowledge” (Ingold 2009:29; 2011). Two different senses of landscape, I will argue, can be linked to this passage. The first concerns the landscape of earth, fields, pastures, country, and ground, which is to say that which has been termed the “substantive landscape” in the preceding chapters. The second is the landscape of scenic space. These two different senses of landscape are linked to two different ways of seeing. The first involves binocular vision, movement, and knowledge gained from a coordinated use of the senses in carrying out various tasks (Ingold 1993). The second derives primarily from a monocular perspective that is fixed and distant from the body. The first modality engenders a sense of belonging that generates landscape as the place of dwelling, practice, and doing in the body politic of a community, whereas the second constructs a feeling of possession and staged performance in a hierarchical social space. The first relates to the historically original sense of landscape as the place of a polity, as exemplified in Chapter 5 by the townships of New England, and the second to the modern idea of landscape as a scenic space, as exemplified by “Vegas.”

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Chapter 5 elucidated how the experience of the landscape as an “ætherial” performance space was constructed by turning the substantive landscape inside out, and enclosing it within a Euclidean, cartographic, and architectural space. This chapter takes a literally more pedestrian, down-to-earth approach to the experience of the substantive landscape that is engendered not by performing on a landscape scene, but by doing and practicing the landscape, notably by walking. The origins of this chapter was in a seminar organized in Aberdeen, Scotland, by Ingold and his colleague Jo Lee Vergunst in which we actually “walked,” as they put it, in the hills outside Aberdeen. I would have called it more of a hike than a walk. But the experience called to memory the daily circumambient walks we make when staying in the Danish hamlet where my family has a country cottage and small orchard, and the role of these walks in establishing our place of belonging to its community and our customary right of access to its paths across private land. The phrase “practicing the landscape” is quite pertinent here because this perambulatory walk is something that must be done over and over, as when practicing a musical instrument. If you do not practice, you get thrown out of the orchestra! If you do not practice and use the landscape sustainably, you lose it. In the substantive sense of landscape the prefix land has the meaning of the place, region, or country of the people of a body politic. New England, for example, is the new land of the English settlers in America, Scotland the land of the Scots, and Jutland the land of the Jutes. It is also the prospect of such a place. It is the place of a culture, as defined by common customs and language, rather than the space of a state, defined by maps, rules, and statutes – though the two can overlap (Olwig 2002b, 2005b). This is the land “scaped,” “shaped,” or created as place and polity by people through their practices of dwelling – their “doing” of landscape. The suffix -scape embodies this sense of creative shaping and carving (Olwig 1993a). -Scape is also, however, cognate with the suffix -ship, which gives the concrete a more abstract character in the sense of a condition as in friendship and scholarship, or as “something showing, exhibiting, or embodying a quality or state” as with the case of township or fellowship (Merriam-Webster 2000: -ship; see also Olwig 2004b). One might have a number of concrete friends, scholars, and fellows, but the relation between them is cemented by something more abstract and qualitative: friendship, scholarship, and fellowship. The farmers in the passage from Ingold quoted earlier thus have their various croplands, pasturelands, and so on, but the painter, as an artist, is trying to capture the more abstract condition or quality of these lands as they make up the landscape prospect before the easel. Brueghel’s painting, as the art historian Michael Rosenthal points out, “emphasizes not only the logic of the terrain,” but also “the logic of the activity” that is depicted. It contains “an element of explanation, sometimes … near-diagrammatic” (Rosenthal 1982:12; see also Ingold 1993). A Brueghel painting thus represents not just a prospect of landscape, but the shaping up of the landscape’s prospects (see Chapter 1, Figure 1.1).

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It is possible, as the art historian Arthur Wheelock explains, for a painter such as Jan Vermeer to create depth through the depiction of “overlapping forms rather than by orthogonal projections.” Thus, “in the subtle balance and internal logic of his best compositions, [Vermeer] managed to create a sense of space for his figures without forcing the observer to view them from a single vantage point or at a single instant” (Wheelock 1977:274, 282, 327). A painter, however, who seeks to capture the nature or character of the landscape by depicting it within the gridded and orthogonal enclosed spatial framework of central point perspective, forces the observer to view the scene from a single vantage point in abstract space and at a particular instant in abstract time (Olwig 2005c). In relation to the substantive sense of landscape this spatialized sense represents, I would argue, a version of what Ingold has called “the logic of inversion” by which “the pathways along which life is lived” are turned into “boundaries within which it is enclosed.” “Life”, he adds, “is reduced to an internal property of things that occupy the world but do not, strictly speaking, inhabit it” (Ingold 2009:29; 2011); on inversion see also Chapters 5 and 7). This is a rather abstract statement, but this inversion can be concretized by showing how it is tied to two very different senses of belonging, depending on whether one is performing upon or doing and practicing landscape.

Performing upon landscape versus doing landscape The scenic landscape perceived pictorially as an extent of space, with the various objects in it, is literally that of the map. The techniques of perspective drawing were derived, in large measure, from techniques of surveying and cartography (Cosgrove 1988; Edgerton 1975), and hence also from the techniques used to create the cadastral property map. Whereas maps tend to have a perpendicular projection, focusing directly downward, a change in the angle of projection creates the basis for a scenic view (see Chapter 9, Figure 9.1). The term scene should similarly be taken literally, for it derives from the perspectival scenery of the gridded theater stage, with its “blocked out” space upon which the action is performed (see Chapter 1, Figure 1.2). The space of the map, like that of the landscape scene, is a grid in which various objects can be plotted according to their coordinates. On the quadratic space of such a map, life is enclosed within property boundaries. The land demarcated on the map belongs to the landowner, who commands a view of the land from the perspective of the map, the landscape painting or the world viewed as if in a landscape painting or on a stage. It is upon this stage that the landowner creates his landscape garden and his “improved” agricultural fields, and upon this landscape labor and recreation are performed, as in a theater. As Yi-Fu Tuan explains: Scenery and landscape are now nearly synonymous. The slight differences in meaning they retain reflect their dissimilar origin. Scenery has traditionally been associated with the world of illusion which is the theater. The

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expression “behind the scenes” reveals the unreality of scenes. We are not bidden to look “behind the landscape,” although a landscaped garden can be as contrived as a stage scene, and as little enmeshed with the life of the owner as the stage paraphernalia with the life of the actor. The difference is that landscape, in its original sense, referred to the real world, not to the world of art and make-believe. In its native Dutch, “landschap” designated such commonplaces as “a collection of farms or fenced fields, sometimes a small domain or administrative unit.” Only when it was transplanted to England toward the end of the sixteenth century did the word shed its earthbound roots and acquire the precious meaning of art. Landscape came to mean a prospect seen from a specific standpoint. Then it was the artistic representation of that prospect. Landscape was also the background of an official portrait; the “scene” of a “pose”. As such it became fully integrated with the world of make-believe. (Tuan 1974:133) Tuan identifies landscape, in the sense of region or place, with the Dutch who are famous for their landscape paintings. But, as discussed in Chapter 1, this meaning of landscape is also native to English, and it can actually be found throughout the Germanic languages (Olwig 2002b). This “platial” landscape of farms, fenced fields and regional polities (Mels 2005) is not so much a scenic surface as a woven material created through the merging of body and senses that occurs through habitus and dwelling.

Sensing landscape and the sense of belonging One of the most revealing ways to approach the differing senses of belonging identifiable with the two forms of landscape delineated earlier is to examine the role of the eyes in shaping each form. In the substantive sense the landscape is shaped in large measure through doing, and apprehended through the use of two eyes. Nowhere is this mode of apprehension more evident than in the practice of walking. The walker experiences the material depth of the proximate environment through binocular vision and through the effect of motion parallax created by the blurring of near objects in contrast to those farther away. The touched, smelled, and heard proximate material world is thereby woven into the walker’s sensory field, leading him or her to experience the landscape as a topological realm of contiguous places. When the landscape is represented as scenic space, in a painting relying on the geometries of central point perspective, the painter sees the world from a fixed stationary point, and the walker becomes an object occupying a fixed location frozen in abstract Euclidean space (Olwig 2005b). Apprehending the landscape in this sense, the viewer is positioned at a given location and uses only the singular perspective of one eye. Thus the landscape is rendered, in terms of one dictionary definition, as “a portion of land that the eye can comprehend in a

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single view” (Merriam-Webster 2000: landscape). The eye, moreover, is fixed in space and time, as can be seen from another dictionary definition according to which landscape is “a portion of territory that can be viewed at one time from one place” (Merriam-Webster 1993: landscape). These definitions invoke the scenic conception of landscape as “a picture representing a view of natural scenery (as fields, hills, forests, water) [landscape painting]” and “the art of depicting such scenery” (Merriam-Webster 2000: landscape). When painting with one eye closed, squinting over the thumb, the world is flattened out so that one can better block it onto the canvas, while simultaneously distancing oneself from the proximate environment in which depth perception depends upon binocular vision. Once the landscape has been thus flattened and distanced, it can be disaggregated into objects located within the geometries of a cyclopean, one-eyed, perspectival framework, thereby recreating an illusion of the depth that was lost when one of the eyes was closed. These two very different modes of perception create the basis for contrasting senses of belonging in regard to the “land,” and hence of what it means to say that Scotland is the land of the Scots, or Jutland the land of the Jutes. One can belong to the land, or the land can belong to you. In the former sense, a feeling of belonging is fostered by movement with both eyes wide open; whereas in the latter sense belonging is fostered by the possessive one-eyed gaze of the surveyor, the perspective painter, or the tourist with a single-lens camera. It has its roots in the space of the map, overlain upon the surface of the earth and punched into the soil with boundary posts. When one buys a piece of property, this bounded, usually quadratic piece of real estate becomes a personal possession. The aforementioned statement from Ingold that through the process of inversion “the pathways along which life is lived” are turned into “the boundaries within which it is enclosed” applies literally to the historical process by which the commons were enclosed through surveying and mapmaking (Neeson 1993). The surveyor and mapmaker were the agents of this inversion that served the interests of the “improvers” who enclosed the land within the Euclidean space of the map in order to create private estates out of common land. Today, property ownership has become endemic, and mass communications and mass tourism have taught the world to appreciate landscape scenery as a good that one can possess when one purchases a charter tour, a guidebook, and a camera (Urry 1990). Although landscape has become largely synonymous with scenery, the older, preinversion meaning of landscape still lurks in dictionaries in the guise of definitions such as: “c: a particular area of activity” (Merriam-Webster 1993: landscape). In this understanding what counts is not what you see or how you are seen to perform, but what you do and how you practice what you do.

Herd animals and the doing of the pedestrian landscape The feeling of belonging to the land through movement, I suggest, is as old as the activity of hunters and gatherers in tracking game and finding edible materials

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along habitual, interwoven paths traversed by the inhabitants of a familiar habitat or in the exploration of new areas. There is a fine line between tracking a herd of animals on a hunt, and herding the same animal as a pastoralist. People have been following various herd animals, such as reindeer, for a long time, and it is through this activity, I would venture, that many of our earliest senses of belonging in relation to landscape have their origin. My own speculation on this subject comes from delving into the meaning of the word fee. Here is a brief etymology: Middle English, from Old English feoh cattle, property, money; akin to Old High German fihu cattle, Old Norse fe cattle, sheep, money, Gothic faihu money, wealth, Latin pecus cattle, pecunia money, pectere to comb, Greek pekein to comb, pokos fleece, Sanskrit paKu cattle; basic meaning: to fleece, pluck (wool); obsolete: personal property: GOODS, LIVESTOCK, MONEY. (Merriam-Webster 2000: fee) To judge from this, it would appear that in earlier times it was not so much the pastureland as the herd animals grazing the land that belonged to people and was as a medium of exchange. As the philosopher Michel Foucault has noted: “The shepherd’s power is not exercised over a territory but, by definition over a flock, and more exactly, over the flock in its movement from one place to another.” This means that “in contrast with the power exercised on the fixed unity of a territory, pastoral power is exercised on a multiplicity on the move” (Foucault 2007:171). This, of course, fits well with the fact that much grazing land, to this day, is common land used on the basis of customary use rights to given pastures through which flocks move. The process by which people can become attached to the land through their herding of various quadrupeds has been documented ethnographically by anthropologist John Gray, who studied the practices of shepherding in the Scottish borders. The shepherds’ pattern of movement is largely directed by the movement of the sheep from pasture to pasture. Shepherds say the sheep “heft” on or bond themselves to various places in the land (Gray 1999:451). They become attached to particular grazing places through familiarity, so that the shepherds can expect them to follow a cyclical course as they move from meadow to meadow. The term heft is applied, however, not only to the process by which sheep bond to the land but also to the bonding of these sheep into a social unit also called a heft. It is moreover applied to the hill pastures attached to the farm. Thus in use, the term is extended from the animals’ bonding to the land, through their bonding with one another, to the human attachment to the farm as a social institution, and to the land (Gray 1999:451). In this way heft comes to refer to people’s feelings of belonging. Such belonging means both (with regard to animals) “to become accustomed to a new pasture” and (with regard to people) “to become domiciled, settled or established in a place or occupation, to dwell” (S.N.D. 1960: heft). Spelled haft, the word is also found elsewhere in Britain. The etymologically

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primary sense of haft is “to accustom (sheep) to a different pasture,” but it also has a later sense, applicable to people, “to settle or establish especially in a place of residence” as in “we are now nicely hafted here” (Merriam-Webster 2000: haft; see also O.E.D. 1971: haft). What we see, then, is a transferal of meaning from the processes through which sheep become bonded to a place and to each other to the figurative understanding of human bonding to place and the community dwelling there. Etymologists believe that both heft and haft have their origins in Old Norse (S.N.D. 1960: heft; Merriam-Webster 2000: haft). This is interesting both because it indicates the age of the terms in Britain and because it suggests that the notion of hefting/hafting may be tied to ancient principles of customary law. Haft and heft are thus “probably of Scandinavian origin; akin to Old Norse heftha to gain (land) by right of occupation, hefth possession, act of gaining by occupation, Old Norse hafa to have – more at HAVE “ (Merriam-Webster 2000: haft). Heft and haft, it appears, are related to a constellation of Old Norse words that, despite possibly different etymological origins, have become associated in meaning through context and similarity of pronunciation. The Old Norse word hæfð(in which the ð is a combination of d and t) is derived from a common Germanic word meaning “have” and is linked to words meaning “bind,” “grab,” and “hold,” as well as to phrases such as to “holde i hævd” (to use the modern Danish spelling). Hævd means “to keep up,” as with the practicing of an “old custom,” but also in the sense of the “maintenance” by which one keeps up, for example, a meadow (or one’s lawn) through mowing, or a path through walking. The maintenance of such use is, in turn, connected with the meaning of hævd/ hæfð as a prescriptive use right (O.D.S. 1931: hæft; Vinterberg and Bodelsen 1966: hævd; Falk and Torp 1996: Hævd, Hæve, Hefte).

Doing and practicing landscape The transferal of meaning from observations made concerning the place and social bonding of sheep (and other herd animals) to human behavior is “figurative,” as the dictionary says, but it is at the same time a figure that derives from actual bodily engagement with the perambulatory process of herding sheep and, no doubt, of sharing through empathy the sheep’s feeling of attachment to a pasture and to its flock. By the same token, there is a strong element of visceral attachment to customary law. When you continually walk and wear a path, and thereby maintain its appearance and structure as a path, you simultaneously maintain your prescriptive use right to use that path. But you also may develop an attachment to the practice of walking on that familiar path. Legal systems rooted in customary law, like that of the English, accept worn paths and maintained hedges as evidence of use rights upheld through precedent of “time immemorial.” Through this process the various croplands and grazing lands of a given area are woven together and shaped into what I have termed a “substantive” landscape in Chapter 1. This landscape is a creature of the inhabitants’ daily

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tasks and habits (Ingold 1993), but habit becomes custom and morality as people’s interests both meet in agreement and clash in dissension (Thompson 1993). One way of reinforcing the commonwealth of interests of the community is through customary rituals, such as beating the bounds, or fetching wood for a communal bonfire or maypole. In this case the weaving of the material existence of the landscape takes on a textual dimension through the repetition of passages walked, and passages recited, both having their origins in religion and folklore. These rituals also involve doing the landscape with feet, body, and both eyes, to the extent that the sense of place is even reinforced through bodily pain. The perambulation of the village during the annual beating of the bounds thus involved various rituals in which pains were taken, for example, to ensure that boys’ heads were knocked on a boundary marker and that their bodies otherwise experienced the pain of strong physical contact with important places, such as a ditch or wall, so that they would remember them later in life should a dispute arise (Houseman 1998). One should not, however, be too alarmed by what might appear to be child abuse. The games and merriment of centuries past were often quite rough and painful by modern standards (Malcolmson 1973). Beating the bounds was a seasonal event characterized by much carnivalesque holidaymaking, involving bodily sport and humor, thereby reinforcing the sense that the village literally formed a community body (Bakhtin 1984). These festive occasions were nevertheless also of legal importance as proof of the community’s use right to walk upon, or utilize, a common resource (Thompson 1993). This is illustrated by the following excerpt from the records of an English court quoted by the historian, E.P. Thompson: Gervas Knight … aged sixty seven yeares and upwards Maketh Oath that ever since he can remember … he has known Farming Woods Walk within the Forest of Rockingham … and says that ever since he was big enough … viz. from about the yeare 1664 until about the yeare 1720 he yearly or every two yeares … went with the Vicar and Parishioners of Brigstock to perambulate publickly for the same Parish and thereby make clayme of the Lands thereto belonging and to set forth their bounds. (Thompson 1993:98) When disputes over the interpretation of custom are taken to the courts, custom becomes the basis for common law, and when formalized by churches, it becomes the basis for morality and ethics (both words deriving from words meaning “custom”).

Doing custom versus performing tradition When discussing custom, it can be useful to distinguish it from tradition, even if the two words are often treated as synonyms. In my view, tradition, along with scenic landscape, is an invention of modernism and a corollary of its idea

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of progress (Chapter 2). This is yet another example of the logic of inversion, of turning pathways along which life is lived into boundaries within which it is enclosed (Ingold 2009). Eric Hobsbawm, as noted in Chapter 2, offers the following clarification of the difference: The object and characteristic of “traditions”, including invented ones, is invariance. […] “Custom” cannot afford to be invariant, because even in “traditional” societies life is not so. Customary or common law still shows this combination of flexibility in substance and formal adherence to precedent. The difference between “tradition” and “custom” in our sense is indeed well illustrated here. “Custom” is what judges do; “tradition” (in this instance invented tradition) is the wig, robe and other formal paraphernalia and ritualized practices surrounding their substantial action. […] Inventing traditions, it is assumed here, is essentially a process of formalization and ritualization, characterized by reference to the past, if only by imposing repetition. (Hobsbawm 1983:2–3) Custom, then, is something one does as part of an ongoing practice of dwelling through which a lived landscape and its ways are continually shaped. Tradition, on the other hand, is generated when custom is enacted on the stage of a landscape transformed into the frozen geometrical space of scenery, whereupon custom becomes costume, as discussed in Chapter 2. In times past, the beating of the bounds was both a religiously sanctioned ritual and a manifestation of customary law. Today, it is largely a nostalgic tradition, intended to establish a sentimental form of identity with location (Houseman 1998). There are however other ways in which pedestrian movement continues to reinforce both customary rights and the sense of belonging that comes with hefting to the land. When, in 1932, members of the Manchester Area committee of the British Workers’ Sports Federation staged a mass trespass on the open grouse-hunting moorlands of Kinder Scout, they were engaging in an ancient practice by which people hefted to the land by moving through it, as when herding the sheep that characteristically graze, and maintain, such moorland (Olwig 1984). The mere doing of the landscape in this way would probably have been enough to cause a dispossessed and propertyless factory worker, who may have remembered walks on the commons from childhood, to feel a sense of belonging (Barrell 1972; Olwig 2005a). The leaders of mass trespass, such as Benny Rothman, were highly conscious, however, of what they saw as “the history of the injustice of enclosures, which had stolen Common Land from the people” (Rothman 1982:28). After the trespass Rothman was arrested. The court, it turned out, did not share his beliefs concerning “the rights of ordinary people to walk on land stolen from them in earlier times,” and he was sentenced to four months in jail (Rothman 1982:36, 44). The leaders of the movement also understood, however, that society had changed, creating a huge urban proletariat, which meant that it was now necessary to work for a national

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rather than a village commons. This is why mass trespasses are considered to have been a significant factor in paving the way for Britain’s national parks. People today heft with their feet in different ways, ranging from villagers religiously walking the paths that join village to village, so as to maintain the right to use the paths, to hikers in national parks perambulating the mountains and vales of their nation. Not only do the hikers thereby maintain a right to the land, and the sense of belonging that goes with it, but because they often go in a group, they also help to generate a sense of belonging to a community, in relation to both the group of hikers and the larger community imaginatively identified with the nation (Darby 2000).

“All we like sheep …” Living in our cities, barricaded behind our computer screens, we readily lose touch with the quadrupeds that once taught us to heft to the land as landscape and to one another as a community or fellowship. We pay our college fees in the hope, perhaps, of one day becoming a fellow of the college with the right to walk across its carefully manicured commons. Under these circumstances it is easy to forget that the prefix in fellow derives from an ancient word for such herd animals as cattle or sheep: Middle English felawe, from Old English feolaga, from Old Norse felagi, from fe cattle, sheep, money + -lagi (akin to Old Norse leggja to lay). To lay sheep together means to pool them, and thereby to form a working community, or lag in the Old Nordic tongue, regulated by its own laws (law also derives from leggja) (Merriam-Webster 2000: law). And, of course, these jolly good fellows share between them the abstract quality of fellowship, which hefts them together within the landscape they share. The words “All we like sheep …” are taken from the libretto to Handel’s Messiah (Part 2, No. 26) by Charles Jennens, who, in turn, took it from Isaiah 53:6. It means, of course, that we are as sheep – though we may like them too. It is remarkable how many references to sheep are to be found in the Bible, in Christian art, and in Christian iconography, but also even in such pagan sources as Plato’s Statesman (Plato 1961 [ca. 70–60 BC]). Sheep are perhaps our most vital symbol of community, and that is why sheep that have gone astray, “turned everyone to his own way,” are a symbol of iniquity. Perhaps, in some sense, we are in fact like sheep, hefting to the land and to each other, doing landscapes to which we belong both bodily and socially, with all our senses; both eyes wide open.

Conclusion In Chapter 5, which focused on the construction and experience of the scenic landscape, it was the author, the scenographer, and the architect who set the stage

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upon which the actors performed and the spectators viewed, fixed within an enclosing space. The substantive landscape, however, is best experienced through the doing and the practicing of landscape through movement, as exemplified both here and in Chapter 4, where it was movement through the water, rather than the land, that was discussed. In this chapter this kind of movement has been exemplified via the age-old practice of grazing animals, which has had an important place in shaping the landscape attachment of both flocks of animals and communities of people. It is somewhat comical to think of sheep, reindeer, or horses as actors performing and networking within the space of the scenic landscape, as portrayed in The Masque of Blackness in Chapter 5. What has been seen in this chapter, however, is that animals and people shape the landscape they inhabit through habitual practices and customs whereby they move through a landscape of places (on practice and habit, see Bourdieu 1977; Thompson 1993). In this way entire environments, including the vegetation and the geology, can be woven together through practices of doing landscape, as when the ecologically valuable heather of a moor is maintained by grazing. This, however, does not involve performance and networking as actors under the authority of some unnamed author. It is rather a matter of interspecies practices as they develop through history. Such movement, furthermore, has apparently influenced human legal practices by establishing the notion of “hefted” precedence as a foundation for customary law, as well as religious morality tied to the way humans are “like sheep.” The focus here has been on grazing animals but there are a myriad of other ways that humans and animals share common practices enabling the inhabitation of places as substantive landscape. The shepherd’s dogs are thus key to the practice of shepherding in many places, but they are also important to the sociability of an area’s shepherd community when it meets at a “shepherd’s meet,” and herding trials are held as a competitive sport. Dog walking, in my experience, is also important to urban sociability, the heritage of park landscapes, and my own sense of community and place (Olwig 2015b). In the next chapter these themes will be taken up again, but this time in a more analytical context related to the way the substantive landscape is constituted in terms of things that matter, whereas the scenic landscape is constituted as an assemblage of things as matter.

7 HEIDEGGER, LATOUR, AND THE REIFICATION OF THINGS The inversion and spatial enclosure of the substantive landscape – The Lake District case

Preface In the previous chapters it has become apparent that there is an important distinction between the substantive and the scenic landscape. The substantive landscape is something that one does both in and through practice and movement, as part of a polity or community in which the sharing of common resources plays a significant role. The scenic landscape is something that one performs upon, like a stage, within a scaled, hierarchical, spatial structure of authority, as in state territorial systems of governance or a property regime in which private ownership is key to social position and power. Communality is relegated to a “traditional” past that is both old and in the way. Chapter 2 showed how history and progress, in the context of the scenic landscape, came to be perceived as a linear, step-by-step march of time that left the historical past behind, and often literally in ruins, and Chapter 3 detailed how the chorographic philological understanding of place and polity as creatures of historical and geographical narrative understanding became reduced to cartographic and perspectival pictorial representation in an eternal, abstract, and empty Euclidean space. Chapter 5 discussed how the reduction of the substances of air, water, fire, and earth to a quintessential essence, æther, inverted and transformed landscape into a performance space in which all matter of things acted under the authority of laws legitimated by nature and higher authority. This chapter will point to another distinction between the two landscapes: Whereas the substantive landscape was constituted both by and with things that matter, the scenic landscape is constituted as an assemblage of things as matter.

Introduction An important key to understanding the character and consequences of the reification of the meaning of thing is to be found in the relationship between thing

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and its linguistically “conjoined sibling” – landscape. Thing has thus undergone a process by which things went from being substantive, judicially founded meetings in which people discussed, and thereby constituted matters of common concern, to becoming physical objects, or things as matter. At the same time a parallel and intertwined reification of the substantive meaning of landscape occurred by which it went from being a political community, or res publica, constituted by the meeting of common thing assemblies (hereafter italicized) to becoming a spatial assemblage of physical things (hereafter not italicized) as matter. The thing assembly was “proto-parliamentary” because the ancient common thing meetings, or moots (a root of the word meeting), which existed throughout northern Europe were the historical predecessors of contemporary parliamentary or representative assemblies and meetings at varying levels of governance (Olwig 2002b:49). They also represented an early form of the more quotidian common meetings that continue to characterize social existence, ranging, for example, from the meeting of a parish council to that of a political or environmental organization or an academic society. Similar kinds of common meetings were held in southern Europe at, for example, the Greek agora, or the agora’s later Roman iteration, the forum (see Chapter 3, Figure 3.3). There are also, as will be seen, important similarities between the meaning of the Latin res and the Germanic word thing. Since, however, the primary subject here is the use of the word thing in English, the focus will be upon the shared evolution of the term in Germanic languages like English rather than the Romance languages. To fully grasp the contemporary meaning of both things and landscape it is necessary to understand the way in which those meanings are the intertwined outcome of a process of “revolutionary” inversion, or turning inside out, by which the meaning of things has been spatialized, enclosed, individualized, privatized, scaled, and reified as a constituent of the mental and social landscape of modernity.1 The potentiality of the concept of thing lies, it will be argued, in its continued containment of older, meanings that can work to empower an alternative “nonmodern” understanding of things along the lines of, but distinct from, the French anthropologist Bruno Latour’s notion of Dingpolitik, which will be termed “thing politics” here. This argument is analyzed in relation to the German philosopher Martin Heidegger’s concept of the “thing,” and exemplified by the mandate of the European Landscape Convention, and the modern planning usage of Landscape Character Assessment and Ecosystem Services, as applied to Northwestern England’s “Lake District.” This analysis will begin by examining the historical meaning of the concept of thing as understood by Heidegger and as developed in the present day context by Latour. Though the analysis is somewhat in agreement with their ideas, both authors nevertheless incorporate elements of the modern reification of things that arguably should be avoided if things are to be fully rethought outside the teleological box of progress and modernity presented in Chapter 2. The analysis will then turn to the meaning of landscape, as it changes and becomes reified together with the meaning of thing.

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After examining the interwoven historical origins of the concepts of thing and landscape, I will analyze the way the meaning of the concept of thing has been inverted, beginning in the Renaissance, through the same process of spatialization and enclosure which has been shown in the previous chapters to have effected landscape. This inversion provided the basis for the dominant modern meaning of thing, and of landscape, as an assemblage of things as matter. The present-day coexistence of both the modern and the nonmodern intertwined meanings of landscape and thing is later exemplified via a reading of the official text of the European Landscape Convention (ELC) and the nonbinding expert explanatory report appended to the convention (Council of Europe 2000a, 2000b). Finally, the conflicts and tensions between the modern and the nonmodern senses of landscape and thing are illustrated by examining the application of the methods of Landscape Character Assessment and Ecosystem Services to England’s “Lake District.”

Part 1: The concept of thing – Heidegger and Latour The relationship between society and the common things making up its environment has long been a major concern of landscape geography, a field that has gained contemporary relevance not the least through the work of Don Mitchell who views the political and material landscape as being substantively related through labor as a social process (Mitchell 2000, 2007). Latour has likewise contributed to contemporary landscape studies by drawing attention to the active role of things in the relationship between society, its environment, and landscape (Whatmore 2002; Latour 2004). The current discourse on things, in turn, often draws inspiration from the phenomenology of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. An example of this is Latour’s (2004:233) interest in the ancient northern European parliamentary and judicial institution called a thing: Now, is this not extraordinary that the banal term we use for designating what is out there, unquestionably, a thing, what lies out of any dispute, out of language, is also the oldest word we all have used to designate the oldest of the sites in which our ancestors did their dealing and tried to settle their disputes? Latour’s argument (as formulated together with Peter Weibel in Weibel and Latour, 2007:99) is that in the context of the discourse about material things it is important to understand that they first gain social meaning and identity when mooted in meetings, discourse, and debate: It turns out that the oldest meaning of the English and German word for “thing” concerns an assembly brought together to discuss disputed matters of concern. Hence the choice of the slogan “FROM REALPOLITIK

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TO DINGPOLITIK” … What we attempted to do was to compare modernist with non-modern attitudes to objects: a move FROM OBJECTS TO THINGS ... there are many other types of gatherings which are not political in the customary sense, but which bring a public together around things: scientific laboratories, technical projects, supermarkets, financial arenas – THE MARKET PLACE IS A PARLIAMENT, TOO –, churches, as well as around the disputed issues of natural resources like rivers, landscapes, animals, temperature and air – THE PARLIAMENTS OF NATURE. All these phenomena have devised a bewildering set of techniques of representation that have created the real political landscape in which we live, breathe and argue. Hence the question that can be raised in respect of all of them is: they may be assemblages, but can they be turned into real assemblies? Material things thus still gain their value through meetings and deliberation, much as they did under the ancient parliamentary and judicial meeting of thing assemblies, leading Latour (2005) to call this process Dingpolitik (Ding being the German spelling of thing). Latour’s text suggests that a transformation has occurred in which things formerly embedded in legal and political discourse have somehow been turned into something “out of language.” It can be added that since the historical, or nonmodern, thing assembly was foundational to the development of parliamentary institutions, and hence to present-day representative democracy, the thing is, as Latour (2005) has pointed out, of much more than antiquarian interest. The term “non-modern,” as used by Latour, derives from his modernism critique (Latour 1993). It is reused here because it provides a way of circumventing modernism’s teleological implication that all which is not modern belongs to an antiquated traditional past and is predestined to irrelevancy due to what is described in Chapter 2 as the march of progress. Latour’s approach to the relationship between the ancient and the modern idea of thing is largely inspired by Heidegger’s argumentation, as when Heidegger (1971:174) writes: To be sure, the Old High German word thing means a gathering, and specifically a gathering to deliberate on a matter under discussion, a contested matter. In consequence, the Old German words thing and ding become the names for an affair or matter of pertinence. They denote anything that in any way bears upon men, concerns them, and that accordingly is a matter for discourse. In English, “thing,” as Heidegger (1971:175) points out, has still preserved the full semantic power of this earlier sense of the word, as when it is said that “‘He knows his things,’ he understands the matters that have a bearing on him; ‘He knows how to handle things,’ he knows how to go about dealing with affairs,

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that is, with what matters from case to case.” Concerning the Latin word for thing, res, Heidegger (1971:174) writes: “The Romans called a matter for discourse res. … Thing means, not the state, but that which, known to everyone, concerns everybody and is therefore deliberated in public.” Res, it should be noted, is also the root of realis, and hence real, meaning “related to things (in law)” (Heidegger 1971:176; Merriam-Webster 1993, real). The implication, thus, is that it is the common public discourse concerning things that constitutes a thing, because it is through this process that things known and real to everyone as being of importance to their commonweal, and thereby generate a commonwealth or res publica – the political landscape of a republic.

The reified thing Though both Latour and Heidegger provide important insights into the meaning of the notion of thing, their analyses are nevertheless both incomplete and problematic. Heidegger and Latour thus focus on landscape in the modern sense as a spatial assemblage of physical things, and neglect to consider that the ancient thing was constitutive of landscape in its original nonmodern sense as a substantive political community, commonwealth, or res publica (see Chapter 1). This is important because the meaning of thing has evolved together with that of landscape. Furthermore, though Heidegger begins his essay on the thing with a lucid analysis of the relationship between the ancient idea of thing and the res publica, in the end the thrust of Heidegger’s concern is with things as physical phenomena. Heidegger (1971:177) thus finally dismisses the relevance of the historical thing meeting because this is “not the least help” to his pressing need “to discover and give adequate thought to the essential source” of the phenomenological nature of material things (see also Harman 2005). In this way he brings his argument back to the realm of the ancient essentialist discourses in which things are reduced to essences that are ultimately expressive of a holistic ætherial quintessence, as discussed in Chapter 5. He likewise shows no interest in the judicial and governmental meaning of thing in his book What is a Thing? (Heidegger 1967). Heidegger is a phenomenologist, a philosophical orientation concerned with phenomena, a word deriving from the Greek phainomenon meaning “thing appearing to view” (NOAD 2005: phenomena; emphasis mine). Heidegger’s lack of interest in the ancient common thing meeting makes sense in this context because it was the gathering of physical things as they appear to view, or as they become near and present in their essential being, that concerned him, not the invisible and immaterial working of discourse in the institution of the thing that puts things into social context. Phenomenology provided for Heidegger a means of overcoming what he perceived to be the modern alienation from material phenomena (Olwig 2005a). Heidegger therefore focused on the relationship of things to the phenomenological process of “gathering,” and this led him to compare the functioning of

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the thing to that of a “jug” – a vessel often identified with the feminine, which recalls Plato’s notion of chora as an encompassing receptacle (see Chapter 3; Olwig 2008c, 2011c). According to Heidegger the jug, because it is a thing that gathers things within it, becomes “a thing in-so-far as it things” by so doing. It was thus not a community gathering to discuss common things that matter that interested Heidegger, but the “thinging” of physical phenomena, like a jug that “things” by gathering physical phenomena within it (Heidegger 1971:177). He went on to exemplify how physical structures in the landscape (such as footbridges), understood in the modern sense as a spatial assemblage of phenomena, also have agency and can act to gather and give holistic phenomenological meaning to the plethora of phenomena making up a landscape in which material things become the actors (as in The Masque of Blackness, discussed in Chapter 5) (Heidegger 1971:182): Inconspicuously compliant is the thing: the jug and the bench, the footbridge and the plow. But tree and pond, too, brook and hill, are things, each in its own way. As Mathew Hannah (2013) points out, however, important as the experience of the phenomenal landscape might be, it still consists of things, for instance, the footbridge, pond, or tree, that have been placed and shaped through the workings of society. Unlike Heidegger, Latour is interested in the political landscape and the thinging of a polity through Dingpolitik, but for him the focus is nevertheless upon what he calls “object oriented democracy” (Latour 2005:4, 6). He basically follows Heidegger’s jug argumentation, but opposes Heidegger’s traditionalism, pointing out that for Heidegger: “the handmade jug can be a thing, while the industrially made can of Coke remains an object” (Latour 2004:233). For Latour, thus, contemporary industrial things go better with Coke cans than the craftsman’s jug. Nevertheless, as with Heidegger, Latour’s emphasis is primarily upon things as physical phenomena (things as matter) such as “rivers, landscapes, animals, temperature and air” (as quoted earlier). Landscape, in turn, is a form of “representation” (Latour 2005:6) that assembles things, and the Ding is a “site” in this landscape, as in a network (Latour 2004:233; 2005:6). It is problematic, however, to focus on things in the modern sense of things as matter if one’s intention is to criticize the modern relation to things. The original parliament of the thing was concerned with things judicial and social, and not with physical things except insofar as they mattered to the community gathered at the thing, and such institutions could not thus be regarded as a “parliament of nature.” Latour, furthermore, follows Heidegger’s line of thought to the degree that he is concerned with the way physical things, like physical landscapes, jugs, and Coke cans, gain agency as “actants” (Latour 2005). The problem is that the original thing was not primarily concerned with bringing “a public together around things,” to quote Latour. It was rather concerned to give substantive meaning to things that were not yet clearly defined and objectified – a sense of thing that is still common (e.g.,

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“What is this ‘thing’ called love?”; “How are things?”; “What is that ‘thing’ in your hand?”). To avoid confusion with Heidegger and Latour’s somewhat reified use of the concepts of thing and landscape, the term “thing politics” will be used to differentiate it from Latour’s Dingpolitik, and to make clear that this approach to things is rooted in the substantive legal and political landscape, found in the customary law, upon which parliaments were founded.

Thing studies The fascination with the “life” of “things” has become a significant contemporary academic interest. Thing studies, according to the anthropologist Martin Holbraad, is concerned with things as phenomenal objects that the researcher wishes to give “agency” as Latourian “actors” or “actants” in understanding their social roles (Holbraad 2011:7–9). In this way the approach to the state of nature in this area of study is similar to the approach to the state as theater taken by Hobbes, as discussed in Chapter 5. Thus, when Latour argues for the “political representation” of nonhumans via a “parliament of things,” or when the anthropologist Daniel Miller argues for a “dialectical republic in which persons and things exist in mutual self-construction and respect for their mutual origin and mutual dependency,” they are not referring to a thing as a meeting in which things are debated by beings who know their things, but rather, at least in part, to a republic of material things doing their own thinging (Miller 2005:37, cited in Holbraad 2011:3, 7). In reexamining his theoretical engagement with things as one of the editors of the influential book Thinking Through Things: Theorising Artefacts Ethnographically (Henare et al. 2007), Holbraad was surprised by his realization that the articles predominantly “wound around ethnographic phenomena one might broadly call ‘magical’ or even ‘animist,’” or, to put it in another way, were concerned with physical things as fetishes (Holbraad 2011:15). As shall be seen, what has happened, in both effect and affect, is that reified things have been animated as actors on the stage of a reified landscape, staged as scenery, much as was the case in The Masque of Blackness. Inspired particularly by the anthropologist Tim Ingold (2007), Holbraad (2011:12) has now revised his thinking and argues: “Put very simply: instead of treating all the things that your informants say of and do to or with things as modes of representing the things in question, treat them as modes of defining them.” This, of course, is just what the thing meeting did in defining the substantive meaning of things. Things first become fetishes when, as in the case of Heidegger’s landscape, it is not people who gather, but physical things like jugs that do their “thing,” and do the gathering – or, as shall be seen, when the gathering is done by material representational media such as maps or perspectival, pictorial, scenic landscape images. In the following the character of the ancient common thing, and similar institutions as they have developed through time, will be discussed as providing a means of developing a nonreified, nonfetishized notion of things and the political landscape that they constitute.

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Defining things in the substantive landscape The role of the ancient thing meeting in the constituting of the social and political landscape is well illustrated by the definition of the Old Norse concept of landscape, or landskapr. The legal nature of the “things” discussed and “organized” at a thing is suggested by the etymological development of the Old Norse Landskapr (Fritzner 1886–1896: landskapr; trans. by the author): 1. conditions in a land, its character, its practices or customs; 2. the organization of things in a land; 3. landscape district. The second meaning of Landskapr, “the organization of things in a land,” relates to the activity of the thing, which organized “things” according to its customary law, which constitutes the first meaning, creating what has come to be known as the “landscape laws” of the jurisdictions where they applied (e.g., Jyske Lov, the Jutland Law) (Skautrup 1941). Customary law is based upon the established practices people have for doing things within a particular polity, and in relation to the substantive places under the jurisdiction of that polity. It is thus through this process that things take shape and are given meaning as substantive things in law, culture, and society. Finally, the third meaning refers to the area of jurisdiction where these customs or things, as organized and given meaning as the place of a given thing, have authority. This legal and political landscape is thus defined from within by things according to cases involving people’s practices both between themselves and with regard to their material surroundings as they change and develop through time and season. The word for time derives from the word for tide, and the seasons are defined in relation to harvest, suggesting, as the anthropologist Kirsten Hastrup puts it, that they are defined “by content rather than by borders” (Hastrup 1985:65). Landscape, likewise, is not defined by an enclosing spatial boundary but by a core that establishes a variable jurisdiction, much as a modern court system or representational democracy has variable levels and overlapping jurisdictions. The character of the thing meeting, extending back into prehistory, varied through time and place, and according to the level of its jurisdiction it might refer to a meeting of village farmers, representatives of a regional “hundred,” a larger “landscape district” in Scandinavia (or the analogous shire or county in England), and even to the parliament of a larger nation (such as the modern Danish Folketing). Larger states were often formed historically through the amalgamation and subordination of landscapes or shires into larger state territories under the control of a regent, as occurred for example in Scandinavia and Britain (Olwig 2002b: 80–124). The thing meetings, such as those held at the Greek agora (discussed in Chapter 3) and the Roman forum, originally took place in the open air in a common public place and were founded on the spoken word and memory (hence the parl in parliament) (Merriam-Webster 1993, agora, forum;

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Dölemeyer 2005; Olwig 2008b). Thus, they were concerned with, as Heidegger (1971:174) put it, “that which, known to everyone, concerns everybody and is therefore deliberated in public,” and they dealt largely with issues revolving around disputes concerning common custom, the commonweal, and the constitution of the topos of common places, such as grazing commons. The Latin word forum literally meant “what is outdoors” and this sense is still preserved in the phrase “getting things out into the open,” because it is here that res publica is constituted. The judgment of the things thereby helped formalize, as common law, unarticulated assumptions concerning custom. The thing thereby served both as a legal assembly and as a kind of legal court, in that it made judgments concerning infringements of customary law, and these judgments could be tested at the various jurisdictional levels of differing courts. But it was also a kind of legislature because the thing, through its judgments, also participated in the articulation of custom as common law. A gradual differentiation eventually occurred between legislative and judicial functions so that the parliament, as exemplified by the case of the English/British parliament, primarily gained the power to make law, and retained its judicial function primarily in so far as the House of Lords acted (until 2009) as a supreme court (Olwig 2002b:47–61). In practice the functions of the legislature and the courts still often overlap in many places, as when a court interprets a law’s basis in custom or when it interprets or judges the constitutionality of a law passed by a legislature. Indeed, in contemporary Scandinavia the word ting can be applied both to a legislature and a court, as well as to things as matter. The thing established what could be called a substantive landscape through its “defining rights and duties” (NOAD 2005: substantive; Olwig 1996a). The substantive common knowledge of things created by the thing would have related to both use rights to shared common resources like a common pasture, and to individually delimited resources, such as the garden adjacent to a farmstead. The thing gave the matters discussed a substantive “independent” legal existence as things in law, and hence gave them “a firm basis in reality” making them “important, meaningful, or considerable” (NOAD 2005: substantive). This process applied to such things in law as the key role of the principle of precedence in establishing use rights of usufruct, for example, for the grazing of animals such as sheep, to turf in the commons. In this way the things that matter to which these legal principles were applied were constituted as objectively substantive and real, thereby paving the way for their contemporary meaning as things as matter – such as sheep, turf, commons.2 From an etymological perspective, the Oxford English Dictionary (O.E.D.) lists the first meaning of “thing” (from Old English, spelled þing) as “a deliberative or judicial assembly,” dating its first known use to 685 a.d. The meaning of thing as object, “that which is or may be in any way an object of perception [i.e. a phenomenon] … a being, an entity” is listed as number seven, with the first known use being in 888 a.d. (O.E.D 1971: thing; interpolation mine).

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While the primary meaning of thing was an assembly of people, not physical things/objects, the thing would generate not only a political community, a res publica, but also a characteristic physical environment. This environment, with its characteristic buildings, field structures, agricultural products and foods, becomes identified with the substantive character of a landscape community because its laws and customs govern people’s behavior in shaping their environment. These physical forms thereby come to stand as material signifiers, symbolizing the more abstract substantive identity of the land, its landscape community, and the things that matter to its res publica. Objective things as matter thereby come to be identified with the things that matter to the landscape polity. Thus in an area where people practiced pastoralism, a characteristic environment of open common grazing lands interspersed with groves of trees and dotted with herds of gregarious grazing animals would be the likely result. Such an environment might, in turn, provide the symbolic vehicle for representing the character of a pastoral landscape polity – as for example in Virgil’s pastoral poetry or in much pastoral “landscape” art – where the imagined pastoral stage of human development often represented a “natural” state. “Landscape” art and poetry is not, however, landscape in and of itself, but a representation of something more abstract, which is the character of a place and the polity shaping it. It is a form of reification to elide a physical environment, or its artistic representation, with the nature of the polity producing it (Olwig 1993a, 1993b). Oftentimes issues involving things that matter and things as matter will be intertwined. For example, what matters in the constituting of prescriptive use rights is the idea that the right derives from the fact that the use of a pasture must be maintained in a sustainable way, through steady and even grazing, if the land is to be maintained as pasture and not degenerate into bush and lose its grazing value. Therefore, under customary law, if you do not use it, you lose it. One of the things that characterizes commons is that they tend not to be fenced, so that in England the fencing of commons to this day is normally in violation of custom (Rodgers et al. 2011). This lack of fencing and hard property lines fosters even grazing because the boundaries between flocks can vary according to changing environmental conditions and flock size, and the flocks can move across the commons as conditions dictate. The things that matter, in this case, involve a complex interaction between the doings of people; flocks of sheep (and other grazing animals); and the grazed pastures with their flora, fauna, and geology. This is because particular flocks develop a kind of proto-use right (or ewes’ right), passed down from ewe to lamb, to the areas of the commons that they customarily graze, and the area of pasture grazed by a given flock thereby becomes, in the minds of the flock, theirs to use vis-à-vis other flocks. Particularly in areas of Britain settled by the Norse, such as the Lake District, this attachment of differing flocks of sheep to differing pastures within a commons is called the flock’s “heft,” “haft,” or “heaf,” and, by extension, the sheep farmer’s use rights to the grazing lands of the commons are

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exercised through the heft of the flock (Figure 7.1) – as discussed in Chapter 6 and further developed here. Such a use right, in turn, is dependent upon its maintenance, and to this end the possession of a hefted flock is vital because even consistent grazing is necessary to maintaining the sustainability of the turf. It is also important to the functioning of the commons as a socio-pastoral entity because hefted sheep tend to remain with their flock within their heft and thus do not create difficulties by wandering into the hefts of other flocks (Gray 2000; ADAS 2008; Rodgers et al. 2011). The term heft, as noted in the previous chapter, is also used in a more abstract way to refer to the attachment people develop to a particular place and landscape (Gray 2000). In Scandinavia from whence the term originates, and where it is used in similar ways, it refers to a “hefted right” (or a hævdvunden ret in Danish) gained through customary precedence (Olwig 2005d, 2008a). 3 In this way abstract legal principles, “things in law,” become intertwined with the things done by sentient beings (people and sheep), with regard to living plant communities, not to mention the effect that their activities have upon the soil and geology. Here we have something approaching the “parliament of things” desired by Latour, but in the English case an actual assembly, as a thing, moot, or related meeting, like a manorial court, has customarily been involved. To this day, the assembly of substantive thinglike institutions, such as the Verderers’ Court in England’s New Forest, play

FIGURE 7.1  This flock of iconic Lake District Herdwick sheep, thought by some to descend from early Norse flocks, is seen here maintaining its hefted prescriptive use right, or “ewes right,” to graze a “fells” commons. Note that there is no fencing between the road and the pasture. (Photo by author. Color version available in eBook edition.)

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a role in regulating the use of the commons according to custom, and thus help avoid a tragedy of the commons.

The enclosure and inversion of the landscape of things During the Renaissance the meaning of landscape, and with it that of things, underwent a revolutionary “inversion” in the sense that it ceased to be defined discursively from its core as place and became defined in terms of the spatial boundary enclosing material things, often with hedges or walls, like a jug or Coke can. This process of enclosure began with the spatial definition of the state itself, not the least through the development of cartography, as discussed in Chapter 3, which was strongly supported by the emerging centralized states (Strandsbjerg 2010). The absolute, isotropic, uniform geometric space of the map provided a means of transforming the state into a territorial property that lent itself to a uniform and absolute governance based upon principles thought to derive from scientifically based natural law (Olwig 2002b:31–34). Thus, as explicated by the philologist Chenxi Tang (2008:17): The Peace of Westphalia (1648) … linked sovereignty to territory, stipulating that states hold exclusive power within their territories, and thereby delegitimizing other forms of polity lacking a uniform central government and clearly defined territorial boundaries. The space of the mapped state was not simply a uniform isotropic space, it was a striated space enclosed and framed by the gridded network like the “graticule” of the lines of longitude and latitude, which facilitates scaling. This means that the bounded space of the state can be scaled down to smaller spaces, such as provinces, municipalities, private estates, and so forth, which, though qualitatively different, all belong to the uniform absolute space of the state. In many areas, “landscape” polities, counties or countries, which originally may have been relatively independent lands, were thereby enclosed as provinces, bounded and defined on a map, within a centralizing state (see Chapter 9; Olwig 2017). Sometimes preexisting polities were wholly enclosed by the space of the state, and at other times they might be divided, following the Roman principle of divide et impera. The inspiration for this enclosure came from imperial Rome, with its quadratic spatial organization of property, and it was therefore related to the Latinization of place names. The Roman name “Britain” was, for example, resurrected to provide a singular substitute for the names of England, Scotland, and Wales (see Chapter 1; see also Olwig 2002b:62–79) and Jutland, Denmark, was called by its Latin name, Cimbria (Olwig 2008b). This process of spatial enclosure of historically constituted places by the space of the state continues to this day, sometimes with deleterious effects for the communities that lose their heritage and identity thereby (Ekman 1991; Walton 2011) (Chapter 8). The spatial definition of the state according to its boundaries within the isotropic space

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of the map similarly was applied to the lands within the state, so that feudal and common land was alienated and enclosed, thereby transforming it into the space of individualized private property. Enclosure thus transformed the landscape into a bounded extent of uniform, isotropic, absolute, geometric space that subsumes the objects, or things, within it. Though the nation state, according to Tang, upheld “the territorial principle to the point of sanctification,” it was not: … merely interested in claiming sovereignty over a quantifiable territorial space and utilizing this space optimally … It also endowed the territory with a symbolic quality that it took to be the source of the cultural and spiritual identity of the nation. The territory ceased to be merely a physical space, but assumed in addition the status of a primeval ground that brought forth and nurtured national culture and history. (Tang 2008:17; see also Olwig 2002b) This was accomplished, Tang (2008:56, 57) writes, “by depicting particular portions of the earth as holistic units” which were usually called “landscapes,” and which were closely linked to a parallel “landscape” pictorial tradition in the arts that viewed the national landscape as a framed perspectival space organized by the eye. This pictorial, scenic vision of the state and its subordinate territories also was a creation of a mapping process and was often published in atlases called “theaters,” as in Abraham Ortelius’ 1595 Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (Cosgrove 1985; Olwig 2002b). By changing the angle of projection from vertical top-down to horizontal, as discussed in Chapter 1, it became possible to envision the space of the state as a theatre of state with the “primeval ground” of its landscape scenery being located on the stage floor, and the scenic landscape of national flora, fauna, and the cultural landscape layered above.This occurred not only in the medium of painting, but also through stage scenery, often in royal state or (later) national theaters, which thereby helped foster the image of the nation-state as a kind of theatre stage upon which the life and progress of the nation was performed (Olwig 2002b) (see Chapter 2). Until this time theatre had taken place largely out of doors, often in the same sort of common places as used by the thing (or in ancient Greece, near the agora). But in the Renaissance, theatre became enclosed within a building and internalized within an artificial space created through the use of perspective (see Chapter 5), thus paving the way for the modern way of looking at the world from a particular singular perspective (Cosgrove 1985; Olwig 2011b). Though the concept of landscape as a scenic assemblage of things as objectified in perspectival space can provide an overview, as can a map, in the end it is based upon visual illusion that can create the deceptive and “diabolic” (see Chapters 8 and 9) impression that human life actually takes place within an ideal geometric space. The map, however, is not the territory, and the earth is not a globe (Olwig 2011a). As Latour (1999:78–79) puts it: “We have taken science for realist painting, imagining that it made an exact copy of the world. The sciences

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do something else entirely – paintings too, for that matter. Through successive stages they link us to an aligned, transformed, constructed world.” The map and the perspectival landscape drawing give oversight, but as Latour (1999:38) points out, “in a beautiful contradiction, the word ‘oversight’ exactly captures the two meanings of this domination by sight, since it means at once looking at something from above and ignoring it.” The extent of the perspectival pictorial and scenic space within which the various objects within it are enclosed as landscape is coequal to that of the map. The major difference, from a spatial point of view, is that whereas mapped scale is layered vertically like the steps of a ladder, the horizontal perspective of the perspectival landscape creates the illusion of unbroken space, fading into infinity (Olwig 2011b). Both, however, frame and locate things within the same fixed, absolute space, creating the illusion that the world consists of such a space (see Chapter 9, Figure 9.1). Thus, according to the mathematician and philosopher Brian Rotman (1987:28), the perspectival “system” used in creating landscape scenery determines the verity of things: “The things that are ultimately ‘real,’ that is numbers, visual scenes, and goods, are precisely what the system allows to be presented as such. The system becomes both the source of reality, it articulates what is real, and provides the means of ‘describing’ this reality as if it were some domain external and prior to itself ” (see also Mels 2002). A similar argument concerning the role of pictorial representation is made by Heidegger (1977:134–135) in his essay “The Age of the World Picture,” in which he writes: The fundamental event of the modern age is the conquest of the world as picture. The word “picture” [Bild] now means the structured image [Gebild] that is the creature of man’s producing which represents and sets before. In such producing, man contends for the position in which he can be that particular being who gives the measure and draws up the guidelines for everything that is … [M]an [thus] brings into play his unlimited power for the calculating, planning, and molding of all things. In this way, through a mode of representation that creates world pictures, or cosmographies, the meaning of things is transformed from that given by the agreement of people shaping a res publica discursively, as at a thing meeting, to that created when things are represented and assembled in a spatial framework, such as a map or perspectival picture, as with the space of property represented on a cadastral map, or a perspectival painting of a landed estate.

The European Landscape Convention The European Landscape Convention (ELC), promulgated by the Council of Europe and ratified by most European nations, illustrates the contradictions and tensions between the nonmodern, nonenclosed idea of things that matter and landscape, and the modern spatially enclosed view of things as physical

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objects in a spatialized landscape. The ELC does not define landscape in terms of scenic space, but rather, in harmony with the older meaning of landscape as polity and its place, reflecting the meaning of landscape in the Romance languages, such as the French paysage, where pays does not mean land as soil but only land as country (Olwig 2007a). Landscape is thus defined as “an area, as perceived by people, whose character is the result of the action and interaction of natural and/or human factors” (Council of Europe 2000a: chap. I, art. 1). This definition thereby gives priority to the human perception of an area in relation to the action and interaction of natural factors, the action and interaction of human factors, and the action and interaction of natural and human factors. The ELC thus stresses the importance of the identity of a landscape as something perceived by people, requiring the signatories to “recognise landscapes in law as an essential component of people’s surroundings, an expression of the diversity of their shared cultural and natural heritage, and a foundation of their identity” (Council of Europe 2000a: chap. II, art. 5). The physical milieu, with its characteristic buildings, field structures, agricultural products and foods, thereby comes to stand for, and be identified with, the character of the landscape as an expression of the identity and character of the people and polity that have shaped it as their place, both physically and through their perceptions. This, in turn, means that signatories to the convention must promulgate a form of thing politics by establishing substantive “procedures for the participation of the general public, local and regional authorities, and other parties with an interest in the definition and implementation of the landscape policies” (Council of Europe 2000a: chap. II, art. 5; Jones 2007; Olwig 2007a; Jones and Stenseke 2011). The ELC specifies, as an aspect of its thing politics, that the signatories should respect “the principle of subsidiarity, taking into account the European Charter of Local Self-government” in identifying the landscapes which have received their character through their shared cultural and natural heritage, “taking into account the particular values assigned to them by the interested parties and the population concerned “ (Council of Europe 2000a: chap. II, art. 6). This approach has also been encouraged in the Recommendation CM/Rec (2008) 3 of the Committee of Ministers to member states on the guidelines for the implementation of the European Landscape Convention, where it is written (Council of Europe 2008: section II.2.3.A): the concept of landscape proposed by the convention implies an exercise in democracy whereby differences are accepted, common characteristics found and operational compromises eventually reached; these represent an alternative to the drawing up by experts of hierarchical classifications of landscape qualities. An analysis of this kind might reasonably involve knowledge gained from fields concerned with social and cultural values, such as anthropology, ethnology,

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cultural geography, history, and law. To the legally binding text of the ELC, however, has been appended a nonbinding expert “explanatory report,” presenting a conception of the ELC that is very different from that in the official text or in the recommendations for implementation. Thus, whereas the ELC defines landscape as “an area, as perceived by people,” the explanatory report alters this to read: “‘Landscape’ is defined as a zone or area as perceived by local people or visitors, whose visual features and character are the result of the action of natural and/or cultural (that is, human) factors” (Council of Europe 2000b: chap. I, art. 1). An area is defined in the dictionary as: “An expanse or tract of the earth’s surface,” and a tract as “a (1): a region or stretch (as of land) that is usually indefinitely described or without precise boundaries” (Merriam-Webster 1993: area, tract). The word zone, however, means “to surround with or include within a zone: ENCIRCLE” (Merriam-Webster 1993: zone). The convention proper thus defines landscape in areal terms that are commensurate with the historical meaning of landscape as a polity and place defined from within and below, whereas the expert commentary defines it in terms of a top-down, mapped, and visual scenic space. The explanatory report’s redefinition of the convention maintains the emphasis on mapped visual space by calling for procedures predicated upon the modern approach to landscape as a layered scene with soil and geology at its base. It therefore recommends: Geographical information systems and modern techniques of computerized mapping, also at urban level, are [to be] used to show up landscape characteristics, such as the physical relief, the settlement pattern, the main land uses, economic activities, residential areas, the presence or absence of features such as hedgerows and terraces, important wildlife habitats and the heritage of past human activity. The experts who have authored this report appear to distrust the ability of the public to engage in thing politics, preferring rather to first determine the scientifically “objective” character of the landscape themselves, before allowing the public to become involved (Council of Europe 2000b: art. 6, para. C): It may well be worth performing the evaluation according to objective criteria first, then comparing the findings with the various assessments of the landscape by people concerned and other interest groups. If necessary, this comparison could be carried out by public inquiry, with the interested parties having the right to express their opinion. Though the experts recognize that “There is no universally acknowledged method for studying, identifying and evaluating landscapes,” they also note that “a considerable body of knowledge already exists and should be tapped.” An example of a method of the type to which they refer is the so-called Landscape

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Character Assessment (LCA) developed in Britain. It has been promoted widely by British public agencies concerned with landscape, who describe it as fulfilling the ambitions of the ELC (Swanwick 2002). In the following, I will examine the role of the LCA method in an illustrative test case of thing politics supposedly in the spirit of the ELC, involving whether a section of the country of Cumbria should become part of the Lake District National Park or the Yorkshire Dales National Park.

Part 2: Betwixt and between landscapes – The Lake District vs. the Yorkshire Dales Cumbria (the Latinate spelling of Cumberland) was created in 1974 through the amalgamation of the ancient counties of Westmorland, Cumberland, and parts of Lancashire and Yorkshire (West Riding) through the Local Government Act of 1972. The counties of Westmorland and Cumberland are ancient territories that historically bear comparison in terms of size and governance with the “landscape polities” of Scandinavia (Olwig 2002b:43–61; Jones and Olwig 2008). It was, in fact, an area of sea-born Nordic settlement largely from the north and west in which the local language and place names have a Nordic heritage. Though the Nordic heritage is sometimes romanticized, it is an important source of local language and identity (Winchester 2006:197–210). The state’s amalgamation of these counties has met with local opposition, as when, in a show of defiance, the town council of the former county seat of Appleby changed the name of the town from simply Appleby to Appleby-in-Westmorland, and the name Westmorland likewise persists in the local regional newspaper (Walton 2011:18, 22). According to the historian John K. Walton (2011:16), Cumbria, though a county, “lacks the historical legitimacy conferred on its predecessors by the accumulation of a millennium of past life, of ceremony, organization and associated institutions.” Westmorland’s amalgamation with Cumberland nevertheless makes some historical and geographical sense in that both are characterized by their links to what the archaeologist Cyril Fox (1932) termed the “Atlantic Fringe” of Britain. This is an archipelagic area of island-like valleys isolated by mountains that are linked with the world via the Irish Sea and North Atlantic sea routes stretching from Iberia to Scandinavia (Walton 2011:22). Its dispersed, decentralized settlement patterns differentiated it from the more hierarchical and nucleated urban-centered and land-focused spatial organization of Britain’s core centered on London that dates back to Roman rule (Fox 1932; Olwig 2018b). Cumberland and Westmorland, together with parts of Lancaster, include the area called “the Lakes,” “Lakeland,” or the “Lake District,” that the poet William Wordsworth famously identified as a “Commonwealth” and a “Republic of Shepherds and Agriculturalists,” because it was known for its relatively egalitarian society of commoners and concomitant sense of neighborliness and place identity as compared with

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adjacent lowland areas (Wordsworth 2004 [1810]:74–75). The iconic status of the area, its poetry (Bradshaw 2011), and its attraction to ramblers who walked its commons in the footsteps of Wordsworth and the “Lake poets” (Winchester 2006:197–210; Olwig 2008a; Bradshaw 2011) made it an obvious choice for designation in 1951 as the Lake District National Park (LDNP), and now as a UNESCO World Heritage site. To the east of the LDNP the Yorkshire Dales National Park (YDNP) was established at the same time. As the name suggests, the Yorkshire Dales are known for their wide dales, or valleys, as opposed to the Lake District’s rugged upland “fells” (a word of Scandinavian origin), which are mountainous areas surrounding narrow Lakeland valleys. The Dales, furthermore, are part of the ancient eastern county of Yorkshire, belonging to the core area of England, as opposed to the upland Western fringe counties making up the area of the lakes. The distinctions between the character of the two areas have become a matter of dispute due to the fact that a bit of Cumbria (formerly Westmorland), notably the area around Orton Fells that had been deemed worthy of park designation, nevertheless was not included in either national park. There is now a central government supported move to include this area in one of the national parks, but the problem was which park? The decision concerning where this area belongs has created a complex situation involving essentially a threefold proposition for the local population: acceptance or rejection of national park status in general; acceptance of incorporation into YDNP, thereby implicitly becoming part of “Yorkshire”; and acceptance of incorporation into LDNP, thereby “remaining” part of Westmorland/Cumberland. The recommendation as to whether this area should be incorporated into a national park, and if so which park, was left to a relatively new non-departmental public body of the English government, Natural England.4 The nature orientation of the new agency is suggested by the mission statement, appended to its official documents concerning the extension of the parks (Natural England 2011: back cover): “Natural England is here to conserve and enhance the natural environment, for its intrinsic value, the well-being and enjoyment of people and the economic prosperity that it brings.” The groundwork for Natural England’s recommendations concerning which park to choose was outsourced to a landscape architectural firm that has done a number of LCAs in the area for public authorities. On this basis they were asked to prepare a report: “Lakes to Dales Landscape Designation Project: Boundary Recommendations. Final Technical Report” (Farmer and Martin 2009:76, 5.4.1) (Figure 7.2). This firm’s associates helped pioneer the standard LCA procedure recommended by Natural England. This procedure is used to substantiate LCA appeals to the ELC for legitimization, and it tends to follow the experts’ interpretation of the ELC in the unofficial explanatory report. The firm’s procedure is thus to make an “objective” assessment first, and then allow the public to comment on the basis of the framework established in the LCA. The method

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FIGURE 7.2 

Cover of the boundary recommendations assessment. Note the lack of people, animals, buildings, roads, or any sign of contemporary dwelling, in this scenic representation of landscape. (© Natural England copyright 2009. Open Government License for Public sector information. Delivered by the National Archives.) (Color ­version available in eBook edition.)

developed is largely cartography based and scenery focused, with geology forming the scenic foundation of the landscape and with flora, fauna, and culture layered on top. It thus emphasizes vertical nature–man relations rooted in the nationalist tradition as described earlier by Tang (2008:17), where the physical landscape forms “the primeval ground that brought forth and nurtured national culture and history.” It is the sort of approach that basically lost favor in academic

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Anglo-American geography after the nationalistic ideological excesses of the World War II era (Olwig 1996a, 2002), but which still is used in the planning professions, as discussed in Chapter 8. Though the task of the report was to simply lay the groundwork for Natural England’s recommendation, the report does make quite clear that the authors would have the part of Cumberland, née Westmorland, known as Orton Fells, become part of the YDNP (Figures 7.3 to 7.5). This is particularly because such a division would allow for a clean cartographic linear divide. The area that initially gained fame as the Lakes was without definite boundaries – the notion that the area formed a clear-cut “district” only became predominant later in discourse concerning the formation of the LDNP (Winchester 2006:197–210). Areas designated as national parks in England need not, however, have a hard edged boundary, but can allow for “wash-over” and “holes” whereby, for example, a motorway or a town is not designated as being part of a national park, even if it is within the perimeter of the park. Motorways, of course, frequently go through areas that are otherwise contiguous politically, economically, socially, and environmentally, hence the need for parks to be able to “wash-over” a space, like a motorway, which does not qualify for park status but may be part of the area as a whole.5 But, as noted, the unofficial expert “explanatory report” to the ELC emphasizes the need to zone, and the LCAs are based upon a zonal spatial and scenic approach to landscape. The authors of the report commissioned by Natural England clearly prefer to use the M6 as a sharp zonal boundary for the park, and they also conclude that such a “technical perspective,” including “administrative ease” and “physical contiguity,” ought to weigh heavily vis-à-vis local preferences in Natural England’s decision (Farmer and Martin 2009:76, 5.4.2): In determining which National Park the Orton Fells should be part of, Natural England will give consideration to local preferences as expressed during consultations. However Natural England will also need to consider other relevant factors including matters of administrative ease; physical contiguity with the existing National Park; ease of recreational movement and enjoyment; the nature and character of the landscape and issues which would require management by specialist teams. What the report means by “the nature and character of the landscape” is made clear in the evaluation of the “Landscape Context” of Orton Fells: “This landscape comprises an upland limestone core area and a lower lying fringe of rolling farmland. The upland area comprises expanses of limestone pavement and rocky scars, and an interesting and diverse moorland vegetation … Building materials reflect the local limestone geology” (Farmer and Martin 2009:19). The same report’s evaluation of “landscape quality” begins: “This is essentially an intact and high quality landscape in good condition. The upland core has extensive stretches of characteristic karst limestone scenery …” (Farmer and Martin 2009:19). Other weighted characteristics where limestone plays an

FIGURE 7.3 

Natural England’s map showing the proposed new boundaries for the Lake District National Park and the Yorkshire Dales National Park. Note how closely the boundary follows the M6 motorway, and how Tebay is left out of either park. (http​:// ww​w.nat​urale​nglan​d.org​.uk/I​mages​/Lake​s_to_​Dales​_Over​view_​Map_A​4_Sep​_2011​_ LQ_t​cm6-2​8586.​pdf. © Natural England copyright 2011. Open Government License for Public sector information.  Delivered by the National Archives.) (Color version available in eBook edition.)

FIGURE 7.4 

This map from the boundary recommendations assessment shows the landscape characterization evaluation areas that have been zoned for study. Note how Orton Fells (EA3) is neatly bounded by the M6 motorway. (© Natural England copyright 2009. Open Government License for Public sector information. Delivered by the National Archives.) (Color version available in eBook edition.)

FIGURE 7.5 

This portion of the boundary recommendations assessment shows a section of the criteria used to assess the character of the Orton Fells’ landscape. Note the focus upon landscape scenery as founded upon limestone. (© Natural England copyright 2009. Open Government License for Public sector information. Delivered by the National Archives.)

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important role are “scenic quality,” “relative wildness,” “natural heritage features” and “cultural heritage features” (Farmer and Martin 2009:19–20). The Natural England staff ’s final recommendation to its board, which drew upon the final technical report and the subsequent public response that it framed gives a clear idea of how their approach to landscape character and democracy works in practice. As in the LCA particular attention is drawn to the nature and character of places like Orton Fells as having a limestone geological foundation. Though limestone is also found in the LDNP, there is more in the YDNP, and limestone expertise is clearly deemed to be of significant importance for national park management (Natural England 2011:3): We have also considered the reasons consultees have given for their views. Strong opinions are held about the identity of the area, and fears about increasing administrative complexity. Inclusion in the Lake District would address these concerns to some extent. However, on balance we are most persuaded by those many consultees who stressed the Yorkshire Dales National Park Authority’s experience and expertise in limestone landscapes, and the similar types of management required in the Orton Fells. Inclusion in the Yorkshire Dales would also allow a more straightforward boundary to be drawn. We therefore propose that the Orton Fells should be included in a northern extension to the Yorkshire Dales National Park. Natural England also commissioned a somewhat perfunctory so-called Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) of the Lakes to Dales Designation Project from a consortium of landscape consultants because a European Union directive requires this. Its nine point objectives were first “1. To protect and enhance biodiversity and geodiversity” and eighth “8. To sustain the identity, vitality and viability of existing communities within and close to the National Park’ (LUC 2011:1). While broadly corroborating, post festum, that Natural England was judged to have fulfilled its statutory obligations, the SEA did note that “With the exception of the issue of cultural identity, no significant differences were identified in the SEA when comparing Orton Fells as part of the extended Lake District National Park with the proposed variation (i.e. to form part of the Yorkshire Dales National Park)” (LUC 2011:6). And in the SEA’s conclusion it reads (LUC 2011:11): The SEA did not identify significant differences in environmental impacts between the adopted variations and the reasonable alternatives of designating the Orton Fells as an extension to the Lake District National Park rather than the Yorkshire Dales National Park, primarily because of the cultural associations of these Fells, which some people felt strongly were linked to Cumbria not Yorkshire. Of course, it is not surprising that some may have emphasized links to Cumbria given that the area was historically bound to what has been Cumbria for nearly

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a millennium. Natural England’s board, in its submission to the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, who must determine whether to endorse the board’s recommendation, did also, in turn, recognize that the area indeed has a strong cultural and political identity (Wood 2011:2): Some objectors are in favour of National Park designation but only as part of the Lake District National Park (e.g. LDNPA). This is commonly because of the strong cultural identity of the area; issues of administration and pragmatic considerations; as well as the fact that the previous consultation suggested some local preference for this option. The issues of administration and pragmatic considerations, to which the board refers, are presumably related to local concerns that enclosure within the YDNP would mean that they would be under the authority of a park centered in Yoredale, Bainbridge, which is relatively far from the Cumbrians’ usual radius of action, which is more toward the area where the LDNP is headquartered in Kendal. This is important because the English national parks have a “thing political” tradition of engaging local community members in the board of the park. The physical and mental distance to the YDNP headquarters could hamper such engagement. The ELC furthermore, as noted, requires that the signatories respect “the principle of subsidiarity, taking into account the European Charter of Local Self-government,” and these are subverted when areas of local government are gerrymandered so that important areas of decision-making are removed to a more distant place. The Natural England board does recognize, furthermore, under the heading of “County boundaries and identity,” that: “A concern shared by a significant number of consultees is whether it is appropriate to include large areas of Westmorland in the Yorkshire Dales National Park” (Wood 2011:4). They also note that there are people in the Yorkshire Dales who question whether parts of Cumbria, like the distinctive Orton Fells, belong in the Yorkshire Dales (Wood 2011:4): “There are pragmatic concerns, regarding planning and administration, but also consultees, particularly statutory consultees in the Yorkshire Dales, express concern that the National Park not be ‘diluted’ by the addition of areas of a different character.” They nevertheless end by concluding: “Having taken the consultation responses into account, we are satisfied that the balance of evidence remains in favor of including the Orton Fells in the Yorkshire Dales National Park” (Wood 2011:2). The “primeval ground” of limestone, and the need to enclose landscape within a zonal isotropic space, thus appear to win out over both thing politics, rooted in substantive legal traditions, and centuries of regional landscape cultural heritage, despite the UK’s ratification of the ELC. The decision, however, needed to be approved by the Natural Environment Minister, and the Minister announced that a four-week hearing must take place before the designation is approved. Under the headline, “Controversial proposals to redraw national park boundaries that triggered a thousands-strong response are to be put before a public inquiry,” The Cumberland News reported that the move was taken “after five councils – including

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Cumbria county and Eden – lodged objections to the plans by Natural England” (Story 2013). This case brings out the problematic character of the zoning approach to landscape characterization, and the continued relevance of substantive thing politics. Limestone, as might be expected, eventually won out, and as the Yorkshire Dales National Park website reports: “On 1 August 2016, the National Park officially grew by nearly a quarter, with an extra 161 square miles (417 square kilometres) of stunning upland landscape. … The boundary covers new areas in Cumbria and, for the first time, a small part of Lancashire, too. To the north, it includes the stark limestone-terraced plateau of Great Asby Scar, the velvet rounded contours of the northern Howgill Fells, distinctive Wild Boar Fell and Mallerstang, and the settlements that surround them” (Yorkshire Dales NP 2016).

Community vs. nature’s space Besides the question of whether areas like Orton Fells should be part of one or the other national park, there is also the issue of whether one wishes to be part of a national park at all. For farmers this has become a vexing question because the chief executive of the LDNP, a physical geographer who came to the post in 2007 from a position at Natural England, was said to be promoting a plan to “restructure hill farming in the Lake District and to realign its purpose, turning it from food producer to environmental guardian” (Hunt 2011:16). In an interview in Farmers Weekly, he is quoted as stating that (Hunt 2011:16): In the Lake District there is a case for further reduction of sheep numbers – or even exclusion of sheep in some places – to allow other services covering environment and natural resources. It will allow more vegetation to grow to help water supply and enable more carbon sequestration. The United Utilities water company is already looking at one location where total exclusion of sheep is being considered. The sheep farmers argue, however, that the removal of a hefted flock from its heft destroys the balance between the differing hefted flocks, thereby damaging the basis for the sustainable maintenance of the pasture. This is not only vital to the pastoral economy, but also foundational to the sheep farmers’ sense of customary rights and justice, and thereby “their shared cultural and natural heritage” and the “foundation of their identity,” to requote the ELC. According to the act establishing Natural England, its brief includes (Parliament 2006:2; elided by the author): … promoting nature conservation and protecting biodiversity; conserving and enhancing the landscape; securing the provision and improvement of facilities for the study, understanding and enjoyment of the natural environment; promoting access to the countryside and open spaces and encouraging open-air recreation, and contributing in other ways to social

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and economic wellbeing through management of the natural environment. The purpose … [in the last instance] may, in particular, be carried out by working with local communities. Local farming communities are thus seen to exist largely to serve what is perceived to be interests connected to the natural environment, for example, biodiversity, conservation, and recreation, not the cultural character of a human dwelling place created through centuries of grazing and hefting (Emanuelsson 2009:138–183; Humphries 2008). Yet it was this iconic pastoral landscape, with its “Republic of Shepherds and Agriculturalists,” as Wordsworth put it, that played a key role in the designation of the area as a national park in the first place (Olwig 2016). There is added irony here in the reference to the water company’s plans to totally exclude sheep from an area. An historical milestone for the environmental movement was the late nineteenth century cause célèbre brought about by the Thirlmere Defense Association’s cogent, but ultimately unsuccessful, opposition to the damming of Thirlmere to create a huge reservoir to provide water for industrial Manchester, because it was seen to pose a threat to the area’s historical landscape (Ritvo 2003). But the inheritors of the Thirlmere reservoir, the United Utilities Water Company, are today perceived by the LDNP leadership as being exemplary for wishing to further protect the natural resources of the area by appropriating the farmers’ use of more Lake District land. This policy effectively amounts to rewilding, though no mention is made of the need to rewild the Thirlmere reservoir itself by returning it to its natural state. The stance taken here reflects the general rise in political and managerial strength of a form of radical ultra purist environmentalism, as discussed in Chapter Nine. This environmentalism is characterized by a fundamentally misanthropic belief that only wild nature, managed as wilderness, should form the baseline for the measurement and preservation of, for example, biodiversity based on an essentially national, proprietorial, and economistic idea of nature (Olwig 2016). This form of radical environmentalism breaks with traditional natural history with its concern for natural and cultural synergies in place and time (Söderqvist 1986) as expressed in the cultural landscapes of the classic English national parks. It also breaks with the growing consensus that biodiversity in meadowlands is often the outcome of long periods of sustainable human use involving grazing, and that the cessation of grazing in such areas is destructive to biodiversity (Emanuelsson 2009:346–349; Rodgers et al. 2011:199). For this reason, the wilderness mystique that drives rewilding tends to dichotomize and objectify nature and culture, and to have a correspondingly negative attitude towards human interaction with nature (Olwig 1995a). In support of rewilding policies, the park’s chief executive cites the findings of the government’s recently published National Ecosystem Assessment (Hunt 2011:16; see also UK National Ecosystem Assessment 2011): The assessment has tried to put a value on the services provided by the natural environment. It concluded that the value of the uplands to our

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society is strong in relation to eco-system services, but weak in relation to livestock. If you are looking at where to get the best value from managing the uplands, it’s not from sheep or from food production. The idea of ecosystem services emerged, according to the economist Richard Norgaard, one of its early proponents, in order to make use of “market metaphors” to “awaken a public deeply embedded in a global economy and distant from natural processes.” It quickly changed, however, from “eyeopening metaphor to complexity blinder,” leading Norgaard to become a critic of ecosystem services (Norgaard 2010:1219). A problem with the ecosystem services market metaphor, which elides the “eco” in ecology with the “eco-” in economy, is that it has become reified, so that economists have begun to put price tags on nature, and treat it as other economic services, which was not the original intention of the ecologists who first promoted the idea of ecosystem services. As Norgaard puts it, “there was a strong sense that, however revolting for those who intrinsically value nature, the use of market metaphors was necessary” (Norgaard 2010:1219). This has led to the charge that ecosystem services involves a “commodification, and on the whole a neoliberalization of nature, coupled with arguments for nature conservation” which is “made possible by a narrow and simplistic understanding of value disconnected from the complexities of the social world” (Setten et al. 2012:1). In the end, however, this metaphor has risen to become a central framework for scientifically assessing ecosystem change (Norgaard 2010:1219). This is especially problematic because, as Norgaard argues, “Today’s ecology does not have the predictive capacity to identify the sustainable use of any particular ecosystem service, to describe the tradeoffs between different uses of ecosystem services, and to be able to do this, furthermore, not only in particular contexts but in the face of ecosystem change from climate and other drivers” (Norgaard 2010:1220). “Furthermore,” he adds, “most ecological researchers do not address human well-being” (Norgaard 2010:1220). The chief executive of the LDNP illustrates this when he trades off, on the basis of ecosystem services, a supposed carbon dividend against the sheep farming community and their human wellbeing. The National Ecosystem Assessment, however, is, in fact, a multiauthored work that, although written largely by natural scientists, contains a diversity of opinions and caveats that are often in agreement with Norgaard’s analysis (UK National Ecosystem Assessment 2011:59; van der Wal et al. 2011). A problem, thus, with abstract concepts such as biodiversity, for example, is that although they are scalable in an absolute geometric, global sense, they are difficult to apply in specific concrete contexts. Thus, in Europe as a whole the widespread abandonment of grazing lands is generally thought to have both socially and environmentally deleterious consequences due to issues ranging from serious fires to loss of biological variety (Emanuelsson 2009:335–355; Krauß and Olwig 2018). In this context the efforts of an English environmental agency to foster grazing land abandonment seems anomalous.

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A recognition of the inadequacy of narrow natural science approaches has led Norgaard to suggest something approaching thing politics (Norgaard 2010:1225): The more we learn about the complexity of environmental systems and how phenomena interact across scales, the more we realize that compartmentalized science and specialization in social organization have increased transaction costs and facilitated our unsustainable economy. Somehow, we need to make a significant transition toward richer ways of understanding and governing. The current evidence indicates these ways will be more collective, participatory, and discursive forms of learning, knowing, and governing. This kind of participatory approach, where community representation is intended to guarantee that the National Parks are managed according to the wisdom of a multiplicity of people who know their things, is undermined by appeals to problematic totalizing technocratic economistic frameworks like ecosystem services. Within ecosystem services, carbon is given an acting role as a measure of ecosystem health and is believed to have agency within a network of physical things, but this is hardly a parliament of nature. It is rather a role determined by a perspective growing out of a reified “metaphor” that invests exaggerated authority, given the relative uncertainty of the science behind it, in a form of environmental governance that suits the agenda, and biases, of a professional management sector. The idea to exclude shepherding from zoned areas of the commons, and manage them according to the principles of ecosystem services, might well be termed a modern form of enclosure (Olwig 2016). The effective dichotomization and enclosure of the Lakelands ironically threatens the complex process of hefting that is vital to the historical pastoral character of the physical landscape and biological value (Humphries 2008; Olwig 2018b), which is what made the Lakes District a national icon in the first place. Some of those who argued for the founding of the English national parks saw them as commons writ large on a national scale (Olwig 2008a), but the reality of National Park management, as examined here, would suggest that the park managers engage more in what James Scott (1998) calls “thinking like a state,” than thinking like a commoner.

Concluding discussion As noted earlier, Brian Rotman argues that the perspectival “system” used in creating landscape scenery, which in turn derives from the uniform isotropic space of the map, determines the verity of things: “The things that are ultimately ‘real,’ that is numbers, visual scenes, and goods, are precisely what the system allows to be presented as such. The system becomes both the source of reality, it articulates what is real, and it provides the means of ‘describing’ this reality as if it were some domain external and prior to itself ” (Rotman 1987:28). The map

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and the perspectival landscape drawing give oversight but, as Latour put it: “in a beautiful contradiction, the word ‘oversight’ exactly captures the two meanings of this domination by sight, since it means at once looking at something from above and ignoring it” (Latour 1999:38). This, as has been seen, is what occurred in the Lake District in the context of an LCA and the eco-economics of Ecosystem Services, with the result that these spatial and ecological abstractions came to define, and overlook, the reality of a much more socially and environmentally complex landscape. The European Landscape Convention, in its official text, promoted what could be described as substantive thing politics, but the appended “explanatory report” introduced a technocratic zoned and GIS’d top-down approach to landscape that harmonizes poorly with the democratic ambitions of the convention. In this landscape “things” are isolated as quantifiable and scalable entities capable of being framed within the netlike gridded, uniform and isotropic cartographic space of property. Within such a network frame things like carbon and water are given agency when they, for example, are weighed against the inherited rights of sheep farmers. And they are seen to be the equal to each other when measured in terms of “ecosystem services.” The decision as to which landscape scenery to privilege in a given context might be wishfully described as a “parliament of things.” But such a “parliament” will inevitably be concerned with an assemblage of things as matter, rather than an actual assembly engaged in the substantive thing politics of things that matter. It is a parliament in the sense that a building might be called “parliament,” not in the sense of a living thing. The thing meeting where people meet to discuss things in common is by no means dead, nor are commons. Our world is full of assemblies where people meet to discuss the things they know, and things are shaped that are “not the state, but that which, known to everyone, concerns everybody and is therefore deliberated in public” (Heidegger 1971:174). From public plazas to the Internet there are still commons that facilitate thing politics, be those politics concerned with the environment, or with the social consequences of globalization and world trade (Ostrom 1990; Mitchell 2003; Hardt and Negri 2004; Mitchell and Staeheli 2005; Casarino and Negri 2008; Hess and Ostrom 2011). In discussing such things, however, it is important to remember the nonmodern past, and the historical development and enclosure of things and commons in order to understand how such processes continue into the present day (see, e.g., Krauss 2010). The commons of the Lakes may seem peripheral, but as an iconic site, with its ideal of a “Republic” of shepherds and their hefted commons, the Lakes are key to understanding things ranging from the origins of environmental concern and landscape conservation to the meaning of the right to roam for people, be they poets, workers, or both. The history of the lakes helps remind us that our commons, whether of literal and historical importance or iconic symbols, should be shaped from the inside by assemblies that know their things, not by the assemblage of things within the framed, netlike, and boxed space of cartographic/ scenographic space. As Ingold (2009:29) puts it:

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[There is] a particular logic that has a central place in the structure of modern thought. I call this the logic of inversion. What it does, in a nutshell, is to turn the pathways along which life is lived into boundaries within which it is enclosed. Life, according to this logic, is reduced to an internal property of things that occupy the world but do not, strictly speaking, inhabit it. A world that is occupied but not inhabited, that is filled with existing things rather than woven from the strands of their coming-intobeing, is a world of space. Our world, and the substantive landscape with it, has been effectively inverted, or turned inside out, when things like commons, and the communities that shape them, are mapped, landscaped, and transposed as reified objects into a fixed, enclosed, frozen, scalable, and abstract space.

Acknowledgments I would like to thank Don Mitchell for inviting me to participate in the Vega Symposium, and for being a good comrade in arms in landscape research for many years now. I would also like to thank Tord Larsen and the research project, “The Cultural Logic of Facts and Figures: Objectification, Measurement and Standardization,” based at NTNU (Norwegian University of Science and Technology), Trondheim, Norway, for incorporating me in the project and providing a most stimulating venue for the presentation of an earlier version of the article upon which this chapter is based. I would also like to thank both the diligent and sharp-minded peer reviewers and editors, and the many people in or concerned with the Lake District: park managers, NGO representatives, local politicians, commoners, and scholars who allowed me to interview them or who guided me through the landscape. Particular thanks to Graham Bathe and Andrew Humphries who are a fund of all things common and uncommon. The conclusions drawn, however, are my own.

Notes 1 On revolution and landscape, see Mitchell (2013). 2 Tim Ingold, commenting subsequently on this text, has felicitously encapsulated what I was trying to express, writing: “Thus from earliest times, there was an intrinsic connection between landscape and thing. On the one hand as a gathering, a knotting together of life courses and paths of activity, the thing enfolds the landscape. On the other hand as a source of law, the thing unfolds into the landscape – in the practices guided by it, of dwelling and habitation, and of tilling the soil” (Ingold 2013: 82–83). 3 Heft, as used here, is thought to derive from the Old Norse, whereas heft, as in the sense of heavy, derives from a word of common Teutonic origin related to the word heave (OED 1971:heft, haft, heaf ). 4 It is the result of the amalgamation in 2006 of the Countryside Agency, which was largely concerned with access and recreation; the Rural Development Service, a

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branch of government concerned with farming and rural management; and English Nature, a somewhat larger body that has come to predominate and which is largely concerned with nature conservation based upon natural science criteria. 5 The M6 thus bisects a picturesque Westmoreland farm at Tebay that owns an innovative rest stop with an attractive farm shop and restaurant selling local food and produce on both sides of the road.

8 TRANSCENDENT SPACE, REACTIONARY MODERNISM, AND THE “DIABOLIC” SUBLIME Walter Christaller, Edgar Kant, and the landscape origins of modern spatial science and planning

The chapters of this book have so far concentrated on the transition from ­landscape’s originary substantive meaning to the modern concept of landscape as spatial scenery. In the substantive, nonmodern sense the landscape is something that is done in and through practice as part of a polity or political community. There was no doubt nothing particularly romantic about life in Ferdinand Tönnies’ rural home landscape community of Eiderstedt, Friesland, discussed in Chapter 1. Farming on the often bleak flatlands along the Wadden Sea on the southwest coast of Jutland involved the continuous slog of diking and winning land, or rather mud, from a chilling, windy, and dangerous sea. The Jutland author and topographer Steen Steensen Blicher (Olwig 1974, 1984) described in the novella Telse from 1829 life in Eiderstedt’s neighboring Saxon landscape polity of Ditmarschen as being characterized not only by a strong sense of independence, but also by backbiting, jealousy, discord, and friction with its neighboring landscape communities, as might be expected in any small rural society (Blicher 1925). Beginning with Chapter 1 this book has stressed the role of customary law and representative “thing” assemblies, like those held in Eiderstedt and Ditmarschen, as core to the substantive landscape, and here again it is important to keep in mind the petty controversies and internal rivalries that can mar such a form of government, even if one supports democracy. Nevertheless, there are those who will tend to see what has been described as the substantive landscape as being either old fashioned and out of date or a romantic idyll. As noted in Chapter 2 the teleology of modernism has tended to bifurcate history into a pre-modern period driven by “tradition” and a modern period driven by science. Seen from this dualistic perspective the “premodern” will either be seen as being backward and therefore as something to be left behind and erased by the march of progress, or, alternatively, as the nostalgic romantic locus of an idealized, natural society in which people are perceived to be at one

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with their landscape and free from modern alienation (Olwig 2005a). Something like this was seen in the previous chapter with regard to the phenomenology of the influential German philosopher Martin Heidegger, where the handmade jug was preferred to the Coke can, and the landscape of things is described in the picturesque terms of “the jug and the bench, the footbridge and the plow. … tree and pond, too, brook and hill” – a veritable list of ingredients that are needed to compose a kitsch villa garden somewhere along the “Romantische Straße.” At the same time, however, Heidegger rejected the nonmodern sense of thing as linked to representative assemblies because it does “not the least help” his pressing need “to discover and give adequate thought to the essential source” of the phenomenological nature of material things, as revealed, of course, by the modern philosopher. This and the following, final, chapter argue that the bifurcation between the premodern and the modern need not be an either-or matter, where one is preferred over the other, but that they both together can form a duplicitous and “diabolic” mixture of the modern and the reactionary. This duality permeates the history of landscape scenery. The English landscape garden, also called the “romantic” garden, is, for example, characterized by nostalgic, parkland scenes decorated with picturesque follies calling forth imagined, romantic memories of an earlier and more leisurely pastoral golden age. At the same time, however, the gardens were typically laid out by modernizing “improvers” who, in the process, enclosed historic customary working commons as private property, and dispossessed the commoners and demolished their villages (Olwig 2002b). It was little wonder then that Oliver Goldsmith in his poem “The Deserted Village” portrayed these scenic landscapes as being both “a garden and a grave” (1966 [1770]). The landscape gardens, furthermore, were not just for nostalgic recreation because the animals grazing the parks contributed significantly to the modern economy of the manor (Daniels and Seymour 1998; Williams 1973). In this and the following chapter the focus will be particularly on the more contemporary diabolic duplicity of the Nazi use of landscape due to the contemporary revival of Nazism’s fascism and extreme nationalism. The present chapter will be concerned with spatial science and planning both generally and in relation to Nazism, and Chapter 9 will focus upon spatial planning, nature, and environmental management in the context of the roles played by scenic landscape, nationalism, rewilding, and Nazism. To show how the reactionary and modern were linked in the genesis of geography and planning as modern spatial sciences, this chapter traces the ideas and practice of two of the twentieth-century founders of spatial science, Walter Christaller and Edgar Kant, back to the origins of modernity in the Renaissance, when the “duplicitous” and “diabolic” cartographic space of the scenic landscape was constructed. Through this reexamination of the history of geography and planning it is argued that Christaller’s Nazism and Kant’s “anthropo-ecological” theories must be understood against the cartographic background of

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a nationalization of space that created a problematic situation for the Eastern European German diaspora, with its medieval and Enlightenment era origins. This study also reexamines the concepts of environmental determinism, possibilism, and Lebensraum.

Prelude The sky was blackening, but a dark smoky red glow from the sinking sun was still visible on the horizon (Figure 8.1). I was in Warsaw, standing with a Polish landscape architect on the thirtieth floor observation deck of what was once called the Joseph Stalin Palace of Culture and Science – a modern 237 meter erection that is still one of Europe’s tallest edifices (Figure 8.2). This was at the end of a disturbing day that began with a walk through Warsaw’s new “old” town – including its former Jewish ghetto – which the Poles had painstakingly sought to re-create after the Nazis razed it, murdering many of its Polish inhabitants, Jewish and non-Jewish alike (Figure 8.3). Cracks in the façades revealed the modern materials beneath, making it sadly clear that the continuity of a living past cannot be restored with concrete and plaster. Warsaw had been leveled, I was told, not so much during the battle for the city, as might be expected, but primarily after the city had been defeated and occupied by the Germans. Now, from this elevated vantage point, with the city spread out before me like a map or scenic landscape panorama, that which I had experienced below was once

FIGURE 8.1 

Warsaw sunset. The photograph is taken from the edifice formerly known as the Joseph Stalin Palace of Culture and Science. The reconstructed old town of Warsaw is in the middle ground of the photo. (Photo by author. Color version available in eBook edition.)

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FIGURE 8.2 Joseph

Stalin Palace of Culture and Science. (Photo by author. Color version available in eBook edition.)

again effaced. This time, however, it was effaced by my own gaze, which was irresistibly drawn out over the old town below and onto the glow on the horizon beyond, illustrating Bruno Latour’s observation, quoted in the previous chapter, that the word “oversight” expresses a double meaning of domination by sight because it means both looking at something from above, and overlooking and ignoring it (1999:38). The architect explained that in Poland it was believed that the obliteration of Warsaw was undertaken in accordance with the spatial planning theories of the German geographer Walter Christaller (cf. Rössler 1989:422, 424, 427). He was then a Nazi Party member employed by Heinrich Himmler’s Planning and Soil Department under the Himmler-led Reichs Commission for the Strengthening of “Germandom,” and working on the Nazis’ Generalplan Ost with special responsibility for Poland (Rössler 1989:420; Barnes and Minca 2013:670). This plan was part of Germany’s Lebensraum strategy, involving first the genocide and ethnic cleansing intended to sanitize Poland of particularly its “Slavic” and Jewish Polish populations, followed by the reconfiguration of the landscape as an

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FIGURE 8.3  Warsaw erased and re-created. The drawing shows Warsaw after the Nazis razed it. One building is left standing. In the background can be seen old Warsaw as recreated today. (Photo by author. Color version available in eBook edition.)

efficient, modern, planned, and cleansed Teutonic space (Gröning and WolschkeBulmahn 1987; Rössler 1989; Preston 2009:5; Barnes and Minca 2013). Recent research shows that Christaller entertained ideas concerning the need to erase preexisting inefficient Slavic settlement forms to replace them with a rational, Teutonic, modern, centralized settlement structure that was in character with an imagined historic, organic, and communitarian German Volksgemeinschaft (folk community; Preston 2009:9–10). It was thus at the same time both enlightened and despotic, modern and reactionary.1 According to Christaller, the destruction of the Polish state, and the integration of parts of it into the greater German empire, created a situation in which everything was “fluid” and for this reason: We have to create totally new units planned on the basis of knowledge of spatial laws, with the goal being to create viable German spatial communities in the East. … Our task will be to create in a short time all the spatial units, large and small, that normally develop slowly by themselves (often with unwanted results), so that they will be functioning as a vital part of the German Empire as soon as possible. (quoted in Preston 2009:23)

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The flattening of Warsaw, following this logic, could thus well have been undertaken to provide an isotropic tabula rasa suitable for reconfiguration through modern German spatial planning. This reactionary-modern approach to spatial planning and spatial analysis, however, did not begin or cease with Nazism. It was, for example, also characteristic of the influential modernist architect Le Corbusier, whose work has been linked to both fascists and communists, as well as to modern planning more generally. Le Corbusier thus emphasized the need to destroy existent environments in order to “BUILD ON A CLEAR SITE,” thereby providing a means of returning to the aesthetic ideals of antiquity, which included romantic pastoral parklands between the buildings (see Chapter 2; Olwig 2002c, 2008c:1857). After the Nazis’ defeat, Christaller showed an ideological lability like that of Le Corbusier in that he transitioned from Nazi planning to communist planning (becoming a communist himself ) and finally becoming a guru for the modernist spatial planning movement in capitalist countries. Stalin, following similar modernist ideals, leveled much of what was left of historic Warsaw to build the huge international-style tower upon which we were standing. I was shocked by what I learned from my Polish companion because I did not know at this time that Christaller, the icon of geography’s quantitative revolution that had transformed Western geography into a modernistic spatial science, had been a practicing Nazi. It was difficult to grasp that something so rational and modern as Christaller’s spatial models, as used for example in urban renewal, could have been intrinsically linked to reactionary nationalistic ideas. To answer the question of how the reactionary and modern were linked in the genesis of geography and planning as modern spatial sciences, I have reexamined the history of geography by following the ideas and practice of Christaller and his circle back to the origins of modernity in the Renaissance, as traced in earlier chapters, and the duplicitous and “diabolic” space of the scenic landscape that was then constructed.

Faust and the diabolic sublimity of modernity The philosopher and urbanist Marshall Berman (1982:60–71) in his classic study All That Is Solid Melts into Air exemplified key contradictions in modernism through a scene in the final part of Goethe’s Faust, part two, which resonates with my experience on Stalin’s tower. In this scene, as summarized by Berman, Faust takes an elevated position, the diabolic Mephistopheles at his side, overlooking a cozy pastoral scene framed by a distant sublime seascape: [Faust] and Mephistopheles find themselves alone on a jagged mountain peak staring blankly into cloudy space, going nowhere … [Faust] contemplates the sea and evokes lyrically its surging majesty, its primal and implacable power, so impervious to the works of man … Faust springs up enraged: Why should we let things go on being the way they have always

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been? Isn’t it about time for mankind to assert itself against nature’s tyrannical arrogance, to confront natural forces in the name of “the free spirit that protects all rights”? … It is outrageous that, for all the vast energy expended by the sea, it merely surges endlessly back and forth – “and nothing is achieved!” “This drives me near to desperate distress! Such elemental power unharnessed, purposeless! There dares my spirit soar past all it knew; Here I would fight, this I would subdue!.” … “And it is possible! … Fast in my mind, plan upon plan unfolds.” Suddenly the landscape around him metamorphoses into a site. He outlines great reclamation projects to harness the sea for human purposes: manmade harbors and canals that can move ships full for goods and men. (quoted in Berman 1982:61–62) The sublimity of distant space here penetrates both back to a primordial wild nature and forward to a modern future, and both are, as will be seen, counterpoised to the pastoral environs of the “overlooked” and mundane middle distance, where a generous elderly couple dwells, sharing the time-honored customs and resources of their community. It is here that Faust becomes obsessed with the couple and their little piece of land. The diabolic character of the scene is manifested by Mephistopheles’ unbidden murder of the aged couple in response to Faust’s subliminal desires: “That aged couple should have yielded, I want their lindens in my grip, Since these few trees that are denied me Undo my worldwide ownership …” They must be eradicated to make room for what Faust comes to see as the culmination of his work: an observation tower from which he and his public can “gaze out into the infinite” at the new world they have made (quoted in Berman 1982: quote 67, see also for context: 60–71; cf. Goethe 1912: Act V, 301–22). As with Stalin’s Palace of Culture and Science, erected on the last remains of Warsaw’s old town, there is something diabolic about Faust’s observation tower. In the case of Faust this is made explicit both by the presence of Mephistopheles and by Faust’s name – taken from a legendary Renaissance astrologist and alchemist who is reputed to have rejected Christianity and, in exchange for scientific knowledge, sold his soul to the devil as represented by Mephistopheles. The scene of Faust and the diabolic Mephistopheles recalls the devil’s famous temptation of Christ, which takes place first on the pinnacle of a temple and then on a mountain, as described most notably in the Bible, Matthew 4:8–10:

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Again, the devil taketh him up into an exceedingly high mountain, and sheweth him all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them; And saith unto him, All these things will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me. Then saith Jesus unto him, Get thee hence, Satan: for it is written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve. (King James Bible 1952 [1611]) Christ thus resists the devil’s offer of world dictatorship in favor of his role as the good shepherd, the pastor leading his human flock through green pastures by his example, rather than through global domination (Foucault 2007: Lectures 5–8). Faust, by contrast, embraces the diabolic and seeks to erase the mundane pastoral scene to make way for the worldview from his tower. For Christ, and hence for Christianity, the devil is a powerful symbol of the diabolic. The word symbol derives from the Greek symballein “to throw together” (Merriam-Webster 1993: symbol; Olwig 2016). Symbols are fundamental to creative thought because they throw together different things in a way that can lead to new and fruitful ideas by causing things to become “detached” and “disengaged” from their established meaning, and then, as “adaptable and infinitely plastic tools” reassembled in new and innovative ways (Piaget 1929:161) – as when Christ is symbolized as the good shepherd. Diabol-, the root of diabolic, in contrast to symbol, means to throw across, and thereby to confuse and mystify meaning (Merriam-Webster 1993). It is therefore appropriate that the devil, and thereby Mephistopheles, is often depicted with bat wings, because the bat is a confusing and mystifying combination of a rodent and a bird that has access to the elevated heavens, but also to caves in the hellish bowels of the earth. Faust, unlike Christ, is confused and confounded by the devil, a name deriving from the Greek diabolos (Merriam-Webster 1993: devil).

The Renaissance origins of the diabolical sublime of reactionary-modernism The sublime, elevated, diabolic perspective that is central to the scene from Faust arguably had its origins in the Renaissance (re)discovery of the perspectival mode of spatial representation discussed in Chapter 1, and its application in the enlightened despotism of the Age of Reason that followed. The origins of modernity are commonly traced back to the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, and it has been argued that the Renaissance itself owes its origins to the rediscovery of the cartography of the ancient Greco-Egyptian-Roman geometer, geographer, astronomer, and astrologist magus Ptolemy, as discussed particularly in Chapter 3. As the philosopher Joan Gadol (1969:157) puts it: The systematic origins of Renaissance art and of the Copernican astronomy can be found in a movement of thought which may be properly called

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a “Ptolemaic renaissance” even though Ptolemy was to be deprived of his authority because of it. We have seen how Alberti established the rules of artistic [perspectival] representation by modifying Ptolemy’s principles of projection. When scientific “pictures” of the world came to be constructed according to these same principles, modern astronomy and geography began their rise. … [B]efore the Alexandrian master could be surpassed, Europeans had first to relearn from antiquity and particularly from Ptolemy, the relational ordering of space. The core of Ptolemaic astronomy, cartography, and geography was the threedimensional globe, but when the globe is flattened into a two-dimensional space it is reincarnated as a map (Ptolemy 2000 [ca. AD 150]). This map, in turn, as described in Chapter 1, provided the basis by which the map’s graticule could be reconfigured as the lines structuring a three-dimensional perspectival scenic illusory representation of space (Edgerton 1987; see Chapter 9, Figure 9.1). When this scenery, in turn, is presented in stages, as in a modern theater, we then get a four-dimensional representation that includes the progressive, uniform, movement of time (Chapter 2). This mode of representation via the science of geometry fostered an Enlightenment mode of perception in which spatial infinity became the “muse” of modern science and mountains came to be seen as the sublime site of sublime infinite sights (Nicholson 1959, 1979). Thus, as Tuan (1974:129) expressed it, “In Europe, some time between 1500 and 1700 a.d., the medieval conception of a vertical cosmos yielded slowly to a new and increasingly secular way of representing the world. The vertical dimension was being displaced by the horizontal; cosmos was giving way to a flat nonrotary segment of nature called landscape,” or, to be more specific, landscape spatial scenery. From the perspective of the three-dimensional solid of the earth represented as a globe, the celestial bodies of the cosmos vertically above appear to have the earth as their central focus. When the globe is flattened as a map and the map is reconfigured as a perspectival landscape scene, the lines of perspective converge on an illusory central point of infinity. The classic perspectival landscape image of a sunset thus often has the sun marking a transection with the point of infinity on which the perspectival space is focused. The cosmic sun, in outer space, thus becomes, in effect, the focal point in space of a horizontal cosmos around which the earth revolves, as a measure of time, as in the Copernican cosmos (Olwig 2001, 2005c). The lines of perspective, however, not only converge on an infinite point in space beyond the horizon; they also converge, at the opposite end of the perspectival framework, within the globe of the spectator’s eyeball (see Chapter 1, Figure 1.2). There is thus something empowering about the perspectival view as focused on both the individual’s eye and the God-like realm of spatial and temporal infinity, so that all the world is perceived as a stage commanded by the eye of the spectator, as described particularly in Chapter 5. Faust’s observation tower, like Stalin’s Palace of Culture and Science, creates a viewpoint on the world as scenery that mimics that of single-point perspectival

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spatial representation. This is because perspective represents landscape as “a portion of land or territory that the eye can comprehend in a single view” (MerriamWebster 2000: landscape). Normal vision is stereoscopic, involving both eyes. It thereby creates a complex, many-faceted depth perception of the immediate environment. At a distance, however, the stereo effect is lost and one effectively sees a scenic totality, framed within a single, focused space, as if one were looking at a perspectival representation of space that focuses on one eye. The individual who is able to view the world in this elevated perspectival way can feel empowered by the singly focused, unified vision and perspective that it illudes, and which thus appears to give a sublime overview over the complex mundane middle ground overlooked below (de Certeau 1984:91–95). The notion of the sublime is also of theoretical interest to geographers because one of the central figures in defining the sublime was the Enlightenment philosopher and geographer Immanuel Kant, whose ideas also played a formative role in defining geography as a spatial science (Hartshorne 1958).

Perspectival space and the origins of the sublime The German translation of the term sublime used by Immanuel Kant is das Erhabene, meaning “the elevated or raised up,” and hence affectively transcendent, like the knowledge provided, according to Kant, by geometry.2 This notion is relevant to the understanding of Kant’s approach to the famous conflict between the seventeenth century German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s concept of relational space and Isaac Newton’s absolute space (cf. Elden 2013:296–98, 321), which came to play an important role in geographical thinking about space (Richards 1974). As Kant put it: Most Germans, following Leibniz, hold that space is nothing but a relation between existing things, vanishing if the things vanish. Most geometricians, following the English [i.e. Newton], conceive it as a boundless receptacle of possible things. The receptacle theory is an empty figment. The first opinion comes into conflict with geometry. (quoted in Richards 1974:3–4) The dilemma Kant describes is solved by regarding the absolute space of geometry as being transcendent, abstract, and ideal, and thus sublimely elevated above the worldly relational space created and known through the interaction of existing concrete, perceptible things (Olwig 2002a). The perspectival representation of this world is effectively a representation of this idea because the invisible lines of perspective, that both structure and enclose things within an abstract endless space and simultaneously draws the eye out to the infinite distance, are expressions of an absolute Newtonian and Euclidean geometry that, as a form of knowledge, is epistemologically elevated above the relational realm of material things visible, for example, in a perspectival landscape painting. This is also

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true of the geometry of the lines of the graticule of a map, which are invisible on the ground. The geographer Robert Sack (1980:328) thus argued that “the laws of Euclidean geometry, which explain the structure of the spatial system, do not include substances in their terms,” adding that “the laws in fact assert that substance does not affect the structure of space.” He concludes, “the only truly spatial laws are those of geometry but these are not about the substances and subject matter of geography.” A similar division between a sublime absolute transcendent Euclidean space and the material world of relational space can also be found in Leibniz’s conception of the constitution of a modern state. Leibniz recognized, following the Treaties of Westphalia (1648) effectively establishing the modern territorial state, that there was a need to define the state’s sovereign territory in absolute spatial terms, as defined by the space of a map. He thus effectively linked a transcendent and sublime sovereignty to territory. As the political geographer Stuart Elden (2013:319) puts it: In stressing the high right of territory (sublime territorii jus) as more than mere territorial supremacy, Leibniz [draws] … a direct relation between suprematus, understood as high right of territory, and the notion of la souveraineté. There is therefore a duality of space in which absolute, cartographic, space of territory is elevated and hence sovereign, ruling implicitly over the relational space of the polity enclosed within it. The German concept of Raum, used by Kant, encapsulates this duality because it means both space in the geometric Euclidean/ Newtonian sense and room as in the enclosed space of a living room. When space in the sense of “room” elides with space in the Newtonian and Euclidean sense, a confusing, “diabolic,” notion of space can arise. The first sense of Raum in a term like Lebensraum can thus generate the meaning of an organically ecological habitat or biotope, whereas the second can generate the meaning of the territory of the state, which can be incorporated on a map, and thereby Lebensraum as the “territory believed especially by Nazis to be necessary for national existence or economic self-sufficiency” (Merriam-Webster 1993: Lebensraum; Olwig 2002a). Lebensraum is problematic and “diabolically” “bat-like” because the two senses of space are combined and conflated, thereby confusing the organic and biological with the geometric and the socio-political (Olwig 2002a). The “invisible” Euclidean lines of the map’s graticule, and thereby also the lines of perspective, represent an absolute space that in principle extends to infinity, and that Ptolemy identified with the science of mathematics. The lines used to surround phenomena such as chorographic areas, regions, or territories, on the other hand, are drawn, according to Ptolemy, as a form of art (Chapter 3). They connect geometric locational points on the grid, but drawing the lines between is an artistic rather than mathematical endeavor (Olwig 2008c, 2011c) (see Chapter 3, Figure 3.2). On a chorographic, or regional, map these lines encircle within an absolute cartographic space the relational space of a particular assemblage of

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phenomena, for example, a forest (which is an assemblage of differing forms of flora and fauna), or nation-state (which in practice is usually an assemblage of differing ethnicities, “races,” and cultures), thereby giving the assemblage a uniform appearance (as when an area on a map is given a particular color, or hatching). Furthermore, the Euclidean boundary line drawn around the phenomena is in principle infinitesimally narrow. The transition from one mapped chorographic relational space to another, in other words, is marked by a sharp boundary line that does not allow for gradual relational transitions. Although the phenomena encircled on the map (e.g., a forest, “race,” or nation) can be seen as constituting a relational space, they are represented within a structure of absolute space that makes the phenomenon appear more uniform than it actually is (see Chapter 9). The chorographic map might be described as being literally “diabolic” in that it appears to represent diverse relational phenomena at the same time as it also frames them within a “transcendent” absolute and abstract space. The historian of cartography David Woodward (1989:14) illustrated the potentially “diabolic” quality of maps when he wrote: There is a good reason why the rectangular Mercator projection of the world is still used on the wall of the strategic planning room, despite its immense distortion of the area of the higher latitudes. … The rectangular grid is somehow a Western metaphor; the more abstract the geometry, the more powerful the image. The coordinates become targets of opportunity or destruction, divorced from the reality beneath. He went on to clarify: The semantic distinction between the map and the territory has often been expounded. The map is not the territory; the graticule is not the world. When parallels and meridians become “merely conventional signs,” we need to understand not only their abstract nature but also their rhetorical power. Curiously, the representations are thus not mere shadows of reality, poor substitutes for or trivializations of the physical world they represent, but are agents of human thought and action, worthy of study on their own terms. (1989:15) When these “agents of human thought” are not recognized, and acknowledged, they become secret agents of thought, and thereby potentially “diabolic.” The tendency for the abstract, absolute space of the map’s geometrical representational structural framework to transcend, and trump, the reality of the relational space of the down-to-earth places represented, is compounded when this framework is reconfigured as the lines of perspectival scenery. Now the world represented actually looks three-dimensional and familiar, unlike the world as viewed top-down on the flat surface of the map. It is for this reason that one might describe perspectival representation as being both duplicitous and

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“diabolic” because it uses illusion to represent relational mundane space within the “transcendent” framework of absolute space.3

The space of Christaller’s reactionary modern models Christaller’s archetypal hexagonal spatial model (Figure 8.4), by which one is supposed to be able to determine the ideal hierarchical spatial relationship between settlement nodes of differing sizes ranging from the rural to the

FIGURE 8.4  Christaller’s model. Christaller used a map of historically constituted places to abstract this geometric model of the hierarchical relation between the spatial locations of “central places” in southern Germany as plotted on an isotropic plane. In this way he showed that the ancient organic and communitarian German Volksgemeinschaft (folk community) of a historic core area of Germany expressed a rational, hierarchical, and organizational principle rooted in abstract geometrical theory. It was this principle that he used to plan the construction of modern Teutonic settlements in areas cleared of their Polish landscapes so that the new settlements were to be constructed on a literal isotropic tabula rasa. (The figure is taken from Walter Christaller 1933. Die zentralen Orte in Süddeutschland. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft.)

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urban, was developed on the basis of his cartographic analysis of the settlement pattern characteristic of southern Germany (Christaller 1966 [1933]). It thus involved, on the one hand, the plotting of settlement nodes as locations in the transcendent, abstract, geometrical space of the map and, on the other hand, the representation of the relational space of actual historical, substantive German places and landscape polities. For Christaller this was thus not simply an exercise in geometry, but also a representation of an organic relationship between the communities that constituted the German nation and its empire. As Christaller put it, “Every part of a nation has an organic relationship to the whole. An important task is the study of the laws of development of such a division” (quoted in Preston 2009:12). We are thus dealing with a batlike combination of a transcendent geometric spatial “structure” and places expressing a relational organic German folk communitarian Volksgemeinschaft in which separate families were thought to live as a community within a larger nucleated whole (Preston 2009:9–10). Christaller’s model, however, applied not only to settlements in the territorial core of Germany, but also to historical patterns of German nucleated settlements that extended well beyond the borders of the territorial states. The diasporic spread of German settlements had been ongoing since the Middle Ages through the merchant activities of the German city-states of the Hanseatic League as well as through settler colonization under the auspices of, for example, the Teutonic Order of Knights. There were thus dispersed nuclei of German settlements in central and Eastern Europe, sometimes manifested as walled enclaves within walled cities (as in Tallinn, Estonia, and Sibiu, Romania). The German population dwelling within these enclaves normally formed an economic and social elite that was spatially separated from the native population. A parallel to this form of diasporic German settlement was that of the Jews, who often spoke Yiddish, a language of German origin, and who also frequently lived, in part for religious reasons, in spatially segmented areas (“ghettoes”) within nucleated settlements. The German settlement pattern was not happenstance, as it could be carefully planned as exemplified by eighteenth-century Denmark, where one of the founders of German economic science, Johann Heinrich Gottlob von Justi, planned a large-scale German colonization of the Danish Jutland heaths (Olwig 1984:20–21). The Danish king, an enlightened despot of German extraction and culture, welcomed von Justi’s plan to settle Germans, deriving from an area with intensive market-driven agriculture and nucleated settlements in The Palatinate (Pfalz), in the Jutland heathlands that were characterized by irregularly scattered native settlements and extensive agriculture (Olwig 1984:20–21). Von Justi was a predecessor of the pioneering spatial modeler von Thünen, whose spatial model of economic centrality, as applied to an isolated city (von Thünen 1842 [1826]; Figure 8.5), was, in turn, an important predecessor for Christaller’s theories. Christaller effectively took von Thünen’s isolated state and located it within a hierarchical spatial net of nucleated settlement locations, thereby

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FIGURE 8.5  Von Thünen’s rings. The diagram shows von Thünen’s original model of an isolated city within a uniform “isotropic” space. It illustrates how decreasing land value causes a series of rings signifying different forms of land use to form according to the distance of the land from an urban market.The area closest to the city is used most intensively because it is closest to the market and therefore fragile products such as fruit and vegetables are grown here. Farthest out extensive grazing is favored because much land is required, and the animals can walk to market.The space of the model is uniform, “isotropic,” geometric space, but the circular bands on the lower half of the model are distorted by a river flowing from the city, and the presence of another smaller city. (From Thünen, Johann Heinrich von 1842 [1826], Der isolirte Staat in Beziechung Landwirthschaft und Nationalökonomie [The isolated state in relation to rural economy and national economy], Rostock: G.B. Leopold’s Universitätsbuchhandlung.) (Color version available in eBook edition.)

integrating the rural and the urban within the absolute transcendent space of the map (Figure 8.4). Christaller’s spatial settlement models expressed not only ideas of economic spatial rationality, but also, implicitly, ideas of ethnicity and by extension, as will be seen, race. At the time Christaller was writing, it was common to use the geographical, historical, and archaeological study of settlement and field patterns to draw imaginative conclusions concerning the social organization, ­ethnicity, race, and nationality of an area’s population. It was thus thought that one could, on the basis of settlement patterns, document the ethnicity and race of

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the prehistoric settlers of Germany, Scandinavia, England, and New England as being Nordic (Olwig 1984:11–22; 1992; Wood 1997). The ideas also played a role in Nazi ideology and propaganda (Barnes and Minca 2013:674; Widgren 2015:197–98). Christaller’s model, therefore, should be considered in the wider context of the construction and demarcation of a greater Germanic space (Großraum) beyond that of territorial Germany (Barnes and Minca 2013). Thus, although Christaller’s theory was abstracted from the nucleated settlement form of the territorialized German territorial core, it could theoretically be extended beyond the boundaries of the German state(s) to areas of German extraterritorial settlement. The space of Germany can thereby be envisioned both in terms of the absolute and bounded cartographic space of Christaller’s nucleated model, and in terms of Immanuel Kant’s description of relational space, referred to earlier, as being “nothing but a relation between existing things [e.g., German settlements], vanishing if the things vanish.” Kant himself lived in Königsberg, a Prussian enclave wedged between Lithuania and Poland. After World War II it was, in fact, emptied of its German population and made part of the Soviet Union, as Kaliningrad, so that Königsberg effectively “vanished” along with its German population. The threat of being thus “vanished” became particularly acute for the German (and Jewish) diaspora in the course of the nineteenth century due to the rise of the nation-state with its dream of ethnic homogeneity within a homogenous, bounded, and mapped territorial space. At a time when the science of cartography was coming to the fore following the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, the nation-state developed as a bordered space that combined the relational space of the nation as an imagined ethnic community with the absolute space of the state as mapped onto the uniform space of the Ptolemaic map (Agnew 2007; Strandsbjerg 2010; Barnes and Minca 2013:672; Elden 2013:322–30). Cartographic representation suggested that within homogenous space there ought to be a homogenous nation-state with a homogenous ethnicity and culture. A nation-state, in fact, is defined as “a sovereign state whose citizens or subjects are relatively homogeneous in factors such as language or common descent” (NOAD 2005). This became a key issue at the height of nineteenth-century nationalism, notably in the Austrian empire, where a pan-Slavic movement was agitating for a stronger independent Slavic voice in the governing of the Slavic-populated nations within the empire. This, in turn, created a situation whereby some in the native German population feared for its own cultural hegemony within Austria proper. Hitler exploited such fears in Mein Kampf when he called for Germany’s Anschluß with Austria to form one consolidated German nation-state, in contrast to the multinational Austrian empire, thereby making Germany great again (Hitler 1941 [1925]:85–162). The nationalist desire for ethnic purity within the nation-state led nationalists in some emerging European nation-states, including some Slavic nationalists, to attempt to “vanish” the German populations that often formed an elite, and this led to a German desire to spatially consolidate the German state. This desire

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reached an apogee in Weimar Germany during the period building up to World War II. The equation of the map with German national identity was captured by German writer Eugene Diesel (1931:13): Former ages, to whom exact cartography was yet unknown, conceived of the frontier in quite a different way from us. … But nowadays we Germans naturally think of Germany as an exactly drawn, precisely demarcated map. We have grown up with this, as earlier races grew up with fasces or swastika. … There it is with the eastern boundaries long drawn out, with thin lines marking the seceded territories and dotted lines round Austria and the other German-speaking districts. As an expression of Fate and the play of forces this conglomeration of lines and contours is a more potent and more up-to-date symbol than is the flag with all its emotional significance. This infatuation with the map likewise led to an infatuation with space, as illustrated by this statement by the contemporary journalist, Paul Fechter, writing in a January 1929 conservative German newspaper, Deutsche Rundschau: Raum has become current to a heightened degree in the last few years. One finds discussions of Raum problems, Raum formation, Raum systems, etc. One begins to sense that it is more than the divinely ordained residing place of our small life, that in the one word Raum a sum of the most wonderful things and concepts has been summarized. (quoted and translated in Murphy 1999:121; see also Murphy 1994) It is against this background not surprising that Hitler began Mein Kampf with this statement: Common blood belongs in a common Reich [realm]. As long as the German nation is unable even to band together its own children in one common State, it has no moral right to think of colonization as one of its political aims. Only when the boundaries of the Reich include even the Last German, only when it is no longer possible to assure him of daily bread inside them, does there arise, out of the distress of the nation, the moral right to acquire foreign soil and territory. (Hitler 1941 [1925]:3) Hitler argued that the Slavic states, beginning with Russia, owed their level of development to their German population, which in Hitler’s view had either been expelled from these states, or was in the process of being expelled. As Hitler put it of Russia, “The organization of a Russian State structure was not the result of Russian Slavdom’s State-political capacity, but rather a wonderful example of the State-building activity of the German element in an inferior race”

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(Hitler 1941 [1925]:951). “Inferior nations with German organizers and lords as leaders,” according to Hitler, “have more than once expanded into powerful State structures, and endured as long as the racial nucleus of the constructive State-race maintained itself ” (Hitler 1941 [1925]:951). This constructive State/race, however, had now been destroyed according to Hitler: “For centuries Russia drew nourishment from this Germanic nucleus of its superior strata of leaders. Today it is uprooted and obliterated almost without a trace. The Jew has replaced it” (Hitler 1941 [1925]:951–952). The term Slavic as applied, for example, to the Russians or Poles, is derived from the name for the Slavic family of languages to which Russian or Polish belongs, but because racial theorists in Hitler’s day believed that language was a marker of race, the speakers of a Slavic language were seen to form a Slavic race, just as the speakers of a Semitic tongue were seen to form a Semitic race (Poliakov 1974). The possible etymological link between the Germanic and Romance language words for slave and Slav could furthermore generate the idea that the Slavs were a slavish-minded race (Merriam-Webster 1993: slave). This idea, in combination with ancient Greek and Roman beliefs that the spatially northern Germanic peoples were by nature an independent-minded, freedom-loving people (Olwig 1984 1992; Schama 1995:75–134), provides an ideological and spatial basis for comprehending Hitler’s low regard for the Slavic “race” as opposed to his admiration of the supposedly freedom-loving Germans.

Christaller and the bordering of a borderless Germany On the one hand, Christaller’s spatial model was derived from the analysis of the settlement patterns of the German people within what had become encompassed by the bounded, territorial space of the German nation-state. In this sense he was concerned with the relational space of the German nation as it had developed organically as a people on German soil. It was in the context of this supposed nucleated pattern of settlement that the Germans developed their imagined communitarian Volksgemeinschaft. On the other hand, his model also drew on the absolute, “nomothetic,” transcendent laws of geometry as applied to territory – a notion of space and territory that was also promoted by, for example, Nazi theoreticians such as the jurist Carl Schmitt. Like Christaller, Schmitt based his theories on nationalistic Germanic imaginaries of past settlement, in this case particularly the sublime landscape territoriality of the Icelandic Vikings as imagined by Icelandic nationalists under the heading of Landnám (Schmitt 2006 [1950]; Barnes and Minca 2013; Olwig 2015). There is thus, theoretically, no limit (within the space of the globe) to the expansion of the nuclear settlement pattern modeled by Christaller to include the German settlements beyond the borders of the German state. This makes it clearer how Christaller’s spatial modeling and planning fit into Generalplan Ost. The conquest of the East was intended in part to create a new absolute bordered German space, or Lebensraum,

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to encompass the unbordered, relational, nodal, space of the German colonization of earlier centuries.

Edgar Kant and Walter Christaller The Estonian geographer Edgar Kant (no relation to Immanuel Kant) played a key, but largely behind-the-scenes role in the spread of Christaller’s theories among Western geographers and planners after World War II. His international influence was attained primarily while teaching at Lund University in Sweden after he fled Estonia (Hägerstrand 1978; Jauhiainen 2005). To understand Kant’s relation to Christaller it is necessary to understand the peculiar situation of Estonia in the war era. Estonia was a non-Slavic-speaking, newly independent nation caught between its most recent imperial overlord, Russia, and Germany, the historical homeland of its Balto-German feudal elite, which was both a potential ally against Russia and also a potential ally of the BaltoGermans. Estonia, like other Baltic states, had been Christianized by conquering German Teutonic knights in the Middle Ages. The Balto-German descendants of the knights and other German settlers formed a feudal upper class that held the native population in virtual bondage as serfs on their landed estates (serfdom was first abolished in 1816; Raun 2001:15–34, 37–56). The Estonian educated cultural elite was thus German, and along with a number of bourgeois Estonians who were often of mixed ancestry, it dominated trade and Estonia’s ties to the outside world (Raun 2001:37–56). Until independence in 1918 Estonia did not exist as an independent state, but was more a designation for a region with a majority population of Finno-Ugric Estonian language speakers living under, and often divided between, various empires and feudal overlords (including those of Denmark, Sweden, Livonia, and Russia). Important minorities of Slavs, Swedes, and Jews were also living in Estonia (Raun 2001). The 700-year-long era of Balto-German settlement in Estonia effectively came to an end in the 1930s after a long period of dwindling population and influence due to complex factors related to the breakdown of the feudal manorial system and the rise of an Estonian educated class, and with it Estonian nationalism, as well as the increasing influence of Russia on Estonian society. This Russian influence culminated at the time of the rise of Slavic nationalism in Russia, and the subsequent conflicts between the Soviet Union and Germany, which led much of the remaining German population to flee (Raun 2001:130). Late nineteenth-century pan-Slavic nationalism and Russification, however, also posed a threat to the Estonians, and in the aftermath of World War I, the Germans provided an occasional ally against first the Russian Empire and then the Soviet Union. Much of Estonia’s cultural and social legacy, despite the loss of the Baltic Germans, continued to be German, and there were many Estonians of German ancestry, but also many who simply bore a German name. Edgar Kant thus had a German name, although he was not necessarily of German ethnicity. In the struggle against Russia, the non-Slavic Nordic countries bordering the

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Baltic region also offered a Nordic “Balto-Scandinavian” alternative to “Slavic” Russia or Germany as a model for nationalists. This situation left the problem of how to justify the national borders of Estonia, and how to determine and construct the ethnicity of the Estonians’ nation. Kant, an ardent Estonian patriot, played an important role in this through his work defining the geography of the Estonian nation-state and in his “anthropo-ecological” studies. In his geography Kant, like Christaller, combined the relational space of historic settlement patterns with an analysis based on the transcendent, nomothetic, absolute space of Euclidean and Newtonian geometry. Using these approaches in works such as Bevölkerung und Lebensraum Estlands: Ein Anthropoökologischer Beitrag Zur Kunde Baltoskandia (The Population and Lebensraum of Estonia: An Anthropo-Ecological Contribution to Knowledge of Balto-Scandia) (Kant 1935), and “Problems of Environment and Population in Estonia” (Kant 1934), he divided Estonia into geological “landscapic” regions to which historically constituted geographic and ethnographic regions were correlated as reflections of human adaption and social and spiritual character (Kant 1934:3). Kant succinctly explained his approach, writing: In the following study of Estonia the emphasis will lie on the confrontation between population and Lebensraum – from “anthropozoonosis” and “anthropotop,” whereby the eco-relationship [denizen–host relationship] between [the human] population and Landschaft is actually established. This anthropo-ecological contribution certainly does not form hereby a complete sociographical monograph, but rather only the part of it that deals with the population’s dependence on environmental and spatial conditions. The second part that is primarily concerned with the racial character of the population; with its physical and psychological characteristics and peculiarities; with its geno- and phenotype; with its social traits [tropes], instincts, sentiments, and acquired habits; with the history and results of these factors, all social institutions and constructs and all psychoses and cultural forces and doing this necessarily on the basis of regionalism – this work is waiting to be completed [literally: waiting for its achiever]. (Kant 1935:VI; translated from German by the author)

Edgar Kant’s “landscapic” regions In his approach to regionalization, Kant took his point of departure in the chorographic, cartographic, physiographic regionalization of the Swedish geographer Baron Sten De Geer, who had a combined interest in physical and social geography in which he emphasized chorological spatial distributions (Leighly 1933:685; Buttimer and Mels 2006:39–44).4 According to the geographer Anne Buttimer (2005:177): The geographer he [Kant] most admired … was the Swede, Sten De Geer, and he was especially keen on the latter’s ideas about Balto-Skandia. His

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own work on national and regional identity followed the lines set down by De Geer, thus claiming a central role for geography in the promotion of patriotism on the one hand, and laying the foundations for more rational planning of Estonian space on the other. Following De Geer, Kant included Estonia within the natural region De Geer called “Balto-Scandia.” Within Estonia, Kant made an important distinction between, on the one hand, the area termed the “highest marine,” or “super­aquatic,” area which is the hilly area in the central and southern parts of the country that have the greatest amount of cultivatable moraine deposits and, on the other hand, the “subaquatic” regions of the lowland west and the low-lying district north of the Peipus in the northeast (Kant 1934:5, 12; Enequist 1936). Kant orthographically emphasized that this boundary is: “of great significance, especially from the point of view of the geography of civilization and human ecology” (Kant 1934:5; boldface in original). In De Geer’s (1926) study “The Kernel Area of the Nordic Race within Northern Europe: An Attempt at Synthetic Mapping, on the Basis of the Distributional Areas of Three Racial Characters,” he correlated race effectively with the Balto-Scandia region (Figure 8.6). These studies, according to Buttimer and the geographer Tom Mels (2006:42), “point towards a deterministic and damaging racial sentiment,” and this is indeed suggested by his maps’ chorographic correlation of race and territory. In De Geer’s study, Estonia is located within what he termed the “Scandinavian Transition belt” (De Geer 1926:169). Here Estonia belongs to a space called “The Outer (Wider) Nordic Racial Area” that is characterized by one or two racial factors or traits (in terms of, e.g., eye color, height, and skull shape). For Kant (1934), the differentiation of this space is of particular consequence for the measurement of “the social development of the population” as well as for the “appreciation of the influence of geographical environment” (Kant 1934:4; see also Buttimer 1994). Kant thus here shifted the emphasis from race to social development, and showed that he was not an environmental determinist. It is vital for Kant to distinguish his approach from that of the environmental determinists. As he put it, “It is of the greatest importance, therefore, that human synecological research does not decline to geographical determinism … but that it should develop along the lines of geographical possibilism” (Kant 1934:4). Kant was an ardent nationalist with strong right-wing views. In Jauhiainen’s (2005:197) delicate phrasing, “Kant made direct observations during his travels and published these often rather political commentaries in major Estonian newspapers. As was common at that time, he had a certain appreciation of right-wing and authoritarian politics.” Possibilist arguments were common among rightwing theorists of the time, such as the influential biologist and philosopher Jakob Johann Baron von Uexküll, who was an Estonian Baltic German emigrant to Germany. These thinkers were opposed to environmental determinism because they saw race, not environment, as determining the character of an area’s population (Stella and Kleisner 2010:40), and hence the population’s ability to make

These two maps by Sten De Geer correlate the physical geography of what he termed “Fennoskandia” (Karte [map] 1) with another map of the “Core area of the Nordic Race” (Karte [map] 3) in the area he called Baltoskandia. As can be seen there is a good fit, with the exception of Denmark, which has a different physical geography.The inner solid line, in both maps, shows the core area, whereas the outer solid line shows the border of the transitional zone that extends from the core zone and encompasses most of Estonia. The dotted solid line shows peninsular Northern Europe. (From “Das geologische Fennoscandia und das geographische Baltoskandia,” S. De Geer, Geografiska Annaler 10:120, 128, copyright © Svenska Sällskapet för Antropologi och Geografi, reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis Ltd., http://www.tandfonline.com on behalf of Svenska Sällskapet för Antropologi och Geografi.)

FIGURE 8.6 

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use of the possibilities of the area. This did not mean, however, that the environment of the area where a given race evolved prehistorically did not affect the character of the race – as, for example, with relation to the idea that the cold climate of the spatial north bred the freedom-loving Germanic Nordic race. Thus, once a race’s character is established, then it becomes the key factor determining that race’s ability to make use of the possibilities provided by a given environment. The appeal to race was thus basically reactionary because race was something that was evolved in the distant past. Once this natural racial character was formed, however, people brought the racial characteristics with them when they expanded to areas outside their indigenous environment in competition with other races for Lebensraum. They could thereby develop as a modern, freedomloving master race capable of generating modern progress and enslaving others. Kant, however, did not here emphasize race, a reactionary category deriving from the ancient past, but economic and cultural stages of modern evolution. His discourse, nevertheless, as has been seen, is deeply implicated with notions of race and biology, so it could be termed both reactionary and modern. Kant later clarified what he meant by possibilism, writing: “the influence of natural environment on the population is not, in itself, determinant, but depends to a very great extent on the economical and cultural stages of the evolution of the population itself ” (Kant 1934:11). This means that a society at a lower level of evolution will be less able to make use of the possibilities of an area than one at a higher level of evolution. One of the geographical measures of this higher level of evolution within the superaquatic region is thus related to the population’s development of factors that are also key to Christaller’s locational models. These are, in Kant’s words, “positional factors and spatial and temporal distantial relations, which, as we have seen do not depend on only natural environment, but also on man’s intervention in environment through artificial roads and means of communication” (Kant 1934:13; see also Kant 1935:105). The conclusion is: “With a few exceptions the subaquatic region is more backward, whereas the superaquatic region is more advanced in the agricultural stage. In the first – self-supporting economics predominate, with the raising of food-cereals (rye, barley) and potatoes, in the second – market-economy with dairy-economics and fodder-raising” (Kant 1934:17). The explanation for the difference, however, is not that the environment determined the level of development, but that people with a higher level of development were able to transform the area into a modern, urbanized, nucleated, economic landscape of the type fitting Christaller’s spatial models. There are, however, in Kant’s study, also areas where identical environments show different levels of development depending on the level of social development of the people in question. The Petseri hinterland, with a relatively large population of Slavs, and correspondingly low population of Estonians, due to its locational proximity to Russia’s sphere of cultural and religious influence, is thus, “although situated in the superaquatic region,” the district that “economically shows the greatest resemblance to the most backward areas of the Estonian subaquatic region” (Kant 1934:19). Kant concluded, with reference to the population

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of the area, “This again confirms the standpoint in our introduction that in the same or similar environmental conditions various socio-economical types depend on different stages of economic development” (Kant 1934:19). The situation of Estonia during the World War II era, caught between Germany and the Soviet Union, was disastrous for the Estonians, no matter which side was in control and which side one might take. The questions of race, Lebensraum, and landscape with which Kant dealt in his academic work became politically toxic during the war era, and this came to color the postwar perception of his work, especially among populations identified as “Slavic.” This toxicity was particularly due to bitterness aroused by the 1941 Nazi “Estonian Holocaust” under the General Plan Ost, as planned by the Reich minister for the Occupied Eastern territories, the leading Nazi and racial theorist Alfred Rosenberg. Rosenberg was a Tallinn-born Baltic German who had moved to Germany where he became an early Nazi leader (Raun 2001:160–61; Buttar 2013:51–74). The Estonian Holocaust involved the extermination of ethnic Russian Slavs as well as Jews and Romani. Rosenberg felt that 50 percent of the Estonian population had reached Germanization through its Nordic ties, leaving 50 percent as potential candidates for extermination or removal to make room for German settlers. Concentration camps for the enslavement and liquidation of non-Estonian “inferior” races and Soviet prisoners of war were established (Buttar 2013:103–32). During the Nazi German occupation of Estonia, Kant was appointed chancellor of the Estonian national university in Tartu, but when the Russians reoccupied Estonia in 1944, he found it necessary to make a dramatic escape to Sweden. The anti-Slavic implications of his Balto-Scandinavian definition of Estonia, coupled with his known reactionary views and political activity, led the Soviets to regard him as a tool of the Nazi German occupiers, and he, and his geographical legacy with him, became persona non grata in the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic (Tammiksaar, Pae, and Kurs 2013:56–58). His unpopularity with the Soviet occupiers, on the one hand, and his patriotic efforts to help build Estonia’s geographic identity, on the other, gave him the aura of a victim and academic model among many Estonians and Western geographers (Buttimer 1994; 2005). He lived the remainder of his life in exile in Sweden, where he became an important force in developing Lund University geography as a mecca for spatial scientists from, particularly, Scandinavia and Anglo-America (Hägerstrand 1978; Tammiksaar, Pae, and Kurs 2013:57–58). Kant became a professor in the Geography Department at Lund University, and it was from this platform that he worked to promote, largely through protégés such as Torsten Hägerstrand, his theories and those of Christaller, and thereby geography’s quantitative revolution as a spatial science and planning discipline (Hägerstrand 1978; Buttimer 2005; Buttimer and Mels 2006:69– 75; Tammiksaar, Pae, and Kurs 2013). Kant was thus instrumental in having an honorary Lund doctorate bestowed on Christaller in 1968. Kant’s planning efforts to enlarge and centralize the Swedish regional structure could

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be regarded as a follow-up to the administrative reorganization, partially inspired by Christaller, that Kant had sought to promulgate earlier in Estonia (Hägerstrand 1978; Tammiksaar, Pae, and Kurs 2013). The effects of the erasure of place identities built up over centuries that this regional restructuring and centralization caused are by no means as destructive and dramatic as the leveling of Warsaw, but for those whose communities have become the victims of such spatial planning exercises, they can be quite pernicious (Ekman 1991; Olwig 2002c). During the postwar era, positivistic geographical quantitative revolutionaries flocked to Sweden to learn about and witness the brave new world created by a spatial science identifiable with Christaller’s models. A number of these geographers, such as Gunnar Olsson, Allan Pred, David Harvey, and Torsten Hägerstrand (Hägerstrand 2006:xi), subsequently developed serious second thoughts about varying aspects of the quantitative revolution (compare Harvey 1969, 1973), but in the modern geographical discipline, space still seems to reign transcendent. Peet’s (1998:341–342) Modern Geographical Thought thus indexes well over twenty kinds of “space,” including everything from “authentic space,” to “relative space,” to “relational space,” to “existential space,” and “topographical space.” Even though many geographers, following Harvey, claim to work with Leibniz’s “relational” concept of space (Harvey 1973:13), in the final analysis absolute space tends to transcend relational space. Großraum is very much still with us, be it in the Middle East, on the Russian border, or in the Balkans (Agnew 2007), and the issue of bordered space is controversial on both sides of the Atlantic, but the most dominant and transcendent form of absolute Euclidean space in contemporary geographical discourse is no doubt globalism (Olwig 2011a). Gibson-Graham’s (2002) critique of the epistemological domination of absolute space thus refers directly to contemporary geography’s fetishization of the transcendent space of the globe and globalism, but it also brings to mind Faust’s felt need to level the dwelling and the linden grove of the old couple: We are all familiar with the denigration of the local as small and relatively powerless, defined and confined by the global: the global is a force, the local is its field of play; the global is penetrating, the local penetrated and transformed. Globalism is synonymous with abstract space, the frictionless movement of money and commodities, the expansiveness and inventiveness of capitalism and the market. But its Other, localism, is coded as place, community, defensiveness, bounded identity, in situ labor, noncapitalism, the traditional. (Gibson-Graham 2002:27)

Postlude The revelation of Christaller’s Nazism led some of the revolutionary quantitative geographers to defend his geography as being a form of modern objective science,

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like physics, that was simply put to questionable ends (Rössler 1989:426; Barnes and Minca 2013), as when nuclear physics was used to build the atom bomb. It could be argued, however, that there was a built-in diabolism in Christaller’s spatialism that can be traced back to the sublime, transcendent, scenic landscape view, which trumps place, as seen from Faust’s and Stalin’s metaphorical towers. Faust’s dispossession of the old couple with their linden trees can be extended to the dispossession of countless numbers of other people because they are deemed to be backward and traditional, or to have a lower level of economic or racial development. Seen from this perspective Christaller’s diabolism lies not in the taking hostage of his objective science by racist Nazi ideologists, but rather in the batlike doublethink of reactionary-modernism. This doublethink derives from a notion of space that sublimely transcends historically constituted substantive landscapes of the present, in favor of the spatially and temporally distant Fata Morgana manifested in both the modern and the reactionary sublime horizons of scenic, spatial vistas. From such a distanced vantage point, one can imagine modernity’s dawn, its rosy fingers advancing on the edge of a far off horizon, but one can also, as with a glorious sunset, be prompted to imagine ideals of natural origins in a distant past. The first view is modern but its dialectical scenic spatial complement is reactionary.

Acknowledgments The author owes a special debt of thanks to Kommissarie TG (also known as Tomas Germundsson) for his detective assistance, in the spirit of the Swedish– Danish TV crime series, The Bridge, in researching and editing this case. Thanks are also due to the anthropologist Werner Krauß for his assistance with German translation, and the mathematician Marius Buliga for his help regarding things geometrical.

Notes 1 On reactionary-modernism, cf. Herf (1984), Barnes and Minca (2013), and Olwig (2017). 2 On the sublime and scenic space, see Olwig (2002b:159–165). 3 For another take on the “duplicity” of landscape, see Daniels (1989). 4 According to Leighly (1933:685), “At the focus of Sten De Geer’s methodology the map occupied an unquestioned first place, not only as an illustrative adjunct to verbal exposition but also and chiefly as an instrument of research, with the aid of which heterogeneous masses of factual data were displayed areally and by their groupings disclosed mutual relations and inter-dependence.”

9 GEESE, ELVES, AND THE DUPLICITOUS, “DIABOLICAL” LANDSCAPED SPACE AND WILD NATURE OF REACTIONARY MODERNISM Holgersson, Hägerstrand, and Lorenz

As seen in the previous chapter, reactionary modernism is identified with Nazism, but modernism itself often has a reactionary dimension that can be traced partially back to the Renaissance construction of the modern map and, from it, perspectival, scenic landscape. The perspectival space of scenic landscape thus characteristically creates a dialectical hybrid consisting of, on the one hand, an invisible, lawful, geometric spatial framework expressing a modern scientific rationality, and on the other hand, a visible and holistic but illusory visual scene of organic nature, place, and community appealing to reactionary affect, nostalgia, and emotion (Figure 9.1). This “duplicitous” dialectic I have termed “diabolic” as opposed to “symbolic.” Whereas the previous chapter analyzed primarily the modernist concept of space, this chapter is concerned more with the relationship between nationalism and the landscape of a nature that is often identified with a sentimentalized premodern past by those reacting against modernity. The chapter takes its point of departure in The Wonderful Adventures of Nils Holgersson, a Swedish geography school reader cum international children’s literary classic by the Nobel Prize– winning author Selma Lagerlöf. It examines, on the one hand, how the book influenced the modernism of Torsten Hägerstrand’s influential time-geographical spatial science and, on the other, its effect on the reactionary modernism of Konrad Lorenz’s Nazi biology, ethology, and its relationship to contemporary non-Nazi rewilding. Lagerlöf’s book has surprisingly much in common with the 1605 Masque of Blackness, which has been treated especially in Chapters 1 and 5. As with Blackness, the lead characters are not people, but natural beings, and rich use is made of the “pathetic fallacy,” by which there is an attribution of human feelings and responses to inanimate things like the water of the Niger river, but in this case it is animals that come to humanlike life. Furthermore, as with Blackness

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FIGURE 9.1 

This drawing by Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) illustrates how the technique of constructing perspectival representation involves the use of rational, Euclidean, geometrical forms, notably a grid resembling a map’s graticule, to construct the illusion of organic forms capable of arousing an affective, emotive response from the viewer. The artist is using a miniaturized version of the technique of triangulation used by surveyors. Note the perspectival landscape framed in windows.

the element of air plays a key role in unifying the elements into a quintessential whole, not unlike Heidegger’s phenomenological essence of landscape. It is through this air that various species of geese who also land on water and earth, moving through space in accordance with the changing seasonal climate as fired by the sun. As also is the case with Blackness, the point of the story is to portray a state, in this case that of Sweden, as being a creature of nature, defined by its boundaries as marked on a map and as experienced in cartographic, perspectival space.

Duplicitous landscape Something duplicitous happens, as shown in the the previous chapter, when the meaning of landscape ceases to be thought of in terms of historically constituted substantive polities and places, and instead becomes perceived from the perspective of scenic space (Daniels 1989; Olwig 1996b). The lines of perspective structuring the scene, like the lines on a map, represent the behindthe-scenes geometric rationality of a modern Newtonian or Cartesian kind of science. The visible scene, on the other hand, is often of nostalgic, idyllic, and romantic scenes of nature or people in an organic natural state (Olwig 2002c: Figure 9.1). Within the same pictorial space we thus can have a geometric frame and an infinite perspective identifiable with the modernism and individualism of the Enlightenment, Rationalism, and the Age of Reason (Cosgrove 1984), as well as a visible but illusory image of nature, place, and community identity that can be identified with Romanticism’s affective and emotive reaction against the Enlightenment and modernity (Buttimer 1982). Jeffrey Herf ’s (1984) concept of reactionary modernism finds this sort of paradoxical combination in Nazism’s simultaneous appeal to the technological sublimity of modernism and

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to a reactionary, emotive, primeval national identity. This paradoxical combination, however, is also arguably characteristic of modernism more generally. Reactionary modernism thus suggests a more general “dialectic” resembling Horkheimer and Adorno’s (1972 [1944]) “dialectic of enlightenment” concerning the intrinsic link between the Enlightenment’s rationality and the diabolic (ir)rationality of some of its apparent outcomes, such as the reactionary racism practiced in modern factory-like Nazi death camps in the name of the eugenics “science.” The word symbol, as discussed in the previous chapter, derives from the Greek symballein (to throw together) from syn- + ballein (to throw) (Merriam-Webster 1993). Symbols are fundamental to creative thought because they throw together different things in a way that can lead to new and fruitful ideas by causing things to become “detached” and “disengaged” from their established meaning, and then, as “adaptable and infinitely plastic tools,” reassembled in new and innovative ways (Piaget 1929:161; Olwig 1991). Diabol-, the root of diabolic, in contrast to symbol, means to throw across, and thereby to confuse meaning, leading to a kind of Orwellian “doublethink” (Orwell 1964 [1949]).1 This arguably happens when the illusory space of perspectival visualization and the substantive materiality of landscape as historically constituted place and polity are conflated and confused. The consequences of the delusory potential of perspectival illusion, and the reason why it can become diabolic, are illustrated here through the case of a Swedish geography schoolbook that became a classic international children’s storybook. This book had an early influence on two children who became internationally influential modern thinkers: the Swedish spatial scientist Torsten Hägerstrand, who here exemplifies the modernism of the progressive spatial and ecological planner, and the pioneering German ethologist Konrad Lorenz, who here exemplifies Nazi reactionary modernism in relation to natural science and the romanticization of the wild. This influential schoolbook communicates the history and geography of a modernizing Sweden through the tale of an elf and boy hero, Nils Holgersson, who circumnavigates Sweden on the back of a domesticated goose when it heeds the call of the wild and flies north with a passing flock of Nordic wild geese. This flight of geographical fantasy, plotted on a map, is not only important for its role in generating a modern (Swedish) national identity. It also inspired related reactionary modern, international, scientific and biopolitical disciplines and sensibilities as represented here by the work of Hägerstrand and Lorenz, both of whom operated with a potentially “diabolic” approach that coupled the invisible uniform geometric spatial framework of the map with a holistic vision of living organic life.

Nils Holgersson’s Swedish journey Selma Lagerlöf, a former schoolteacher soon to become a Nobel Prize Laureate in literature, was commissioned in 1902 by Sweden’s progressive National Teachers’

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Association to write a geography reader that would capture the imagination of children in the lowest grades (Ahlström 1942:31, 41, 45; Grönkvist 2013:40). It was published in 1905 and 1906 as Nils Holgerssons underbara resa genom Sverige (The Wonderful Adventures of Nils Holgersson on His Journey Through Sweden) (Lagerlöf 2011 [1905–1906]). Hereafter Holgersson refers to the book, and Nils to the fictional boy for whom it is named. For more than a half-century Holgersson served as a Swedish school geography reader, simultaneously becoming an international children’s literary classic, translated into more than fifty languages (Thomsen 2007:9–10). Holgersson not only shaped children’s understanding of Sweden’s geography, it also had a scientific impact. It thus is seen to have informed the quantitative, spatial time–geography of Lund University geographer Torsten Hägerstrand, whose work and institute, under the influence of Edgar Kant (Chapter 8), played a key international role in transforming geography and planning into modern spatial sciences. He influenced, for example, the work of spatial theorists ranging from his academic disciple Allan Pred to Nigel Thrift (Carlstein, Parkes, and Thrift 1978; Thrift 2005), and the sociologist Anthony Giddens (1984). Holgersson also had an important impact on the organic, biological imagination of the Nobel Prize–winning pioneering ethologist Konrad Lorenz. The literary backstory to Lorenz’s ideological development has been largely uncharted, however, probably because it is counterintuitive. How could a Swedish children’s book about a boy and elf, written by an anti-Nazi author with close Jewish ties, have inspired reactionary modern Nazi science, or even spatial science? Precisely because it is counterintuitive, though, the book can shed light on the way the literary symbolism can be transmuted into the diabolism of reactionary modernity and Nazism. The devil (diabolos) in this case is more in the structure of landscape scenic representation than in conscious ideologies.

Holgersson and geographical science Nineteenth-century Swedish geography texts were dominated by a formalistic scientific objectification and classification of knowledge. The progressive pedagogues of Sweden sought school texts with a more holistic geography that would appeal to the wonder and emotions of children. An internationally influential exponent of this pedagogy was Ellen Key, the Swedish author of the book The Century of the Child (Key 1909), which inspired many educators around the world, including Lagerlöf. Key encouraged a holistic pedagogy in the German romantic Bildung tradition (Ambjörnsson 2014), where Bildung, meaning “education” in German, was linked (through a false etymology) to the German word Bild, meaning “picture,” and thereby to bilden, meaning “to form or shape,” as when forming a picture – in this case for didactic purposes (Markus 1993: 14–15). This pedagogical didactic theory was related to the evolutionary idea that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, so that individual psychological evolution parallels cultural evolution, and this could be measured by the ability to

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imagine and conceptualize the world through images (Olwig 2002b:148–77). The Swedish word for education, which is derived from the German word Bildung, is bildning or utbildning, which is also related to the Swedish bild, meaning picture. This image-oriented pedagogical approach meant that instead of “talking,” the teacher should “show” and thereby form the child’s imagination through “object lessons” designed to teach abstract concepts through concrete objects and images, such as maps and colored engraved lithographic perspectival images of landscape scenes (Olwig 1982; Ambjörnsson 2014:154). These lithographs’ combination of a behind-the-scenes scientific, modern, geometrical spatial structure with surface scenic images of nature and place, was ideal for the teaching of both systematic and regional geography. The holistic notion of bildning fostered Artur Hazelius’ 1891 pioneering Stockholm open-air museum called Skansen, to which representative regional buildings were transported, after being disassembled and removed from their original place in a substantive local landscape, and exhibited in appropriately landscaped Swedish scenery in the capital. Another example was Gustaf Kolthoff ’s 1893 Biologiska Museet (Biology Museum), created near Skansen, where stuffed animals, plants, and geology were displayed in panoramic landscape dioramas, designed with the help of the wilderness landscape painter Bruno Liljefors (Wonders 1993). This approach also fit the holistic ecological science promoted by the German biologist, founder of ecology, and racial theorist Ernst Haeckel, who promoted the evolutionary developmental idea that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. It is thus notable that in 1907 Lagerlöf, Haeckel, and Kolthoff were awarded honorary doctorates in the same ceremony at Uppsala University, and that Haeckel competed (unsuccessfully) with Lagerlöf for the Nobel Prize in literature (Olsson and Hossfeld 2003; Oscarson 2009:99–100). Holgersson expresses the trends represented by Skansen and the Biologiska Museet, but discards the fixed museum format by taking readers on a moving imaginative temporal and spatial flight of fancy through Sweden itself.

Holgersson and the two landscapes Lagerlöf ’s point of departure was the differing historically constituted Swedish landscape polities, spelled landskap in Swedish (in both the singular and plural). As discussed in Chapter 1, like many similar European landscape polities (e.g., the German Landschaft), the landskap historically were semiautonomous political entities with a representative government and laws founded in custom. They also, however, usually owed reciprocal fealty to a higher feudal authority, in this case an elected common monarch who must swear to respect the landskap’s law (Olwig 1996a; 2002b). These were substantive mundane polities characterized by the conflicts and compromises characteristic of representative governmentality; they were not ideal utopias. Over time the balance of power between the landskap polity and the monarchical central state changed in favor of the state, making the landskap effectively provinces of the state.

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In the seventeenth century the landskap were replaced by state administrative districts called län that were often roughly coterminous with the landskap, but which were defined from without based on the state’s maps and statutory law (Bladh 2008:221–22). Because the landskap, however, had been shaped by their customary law, as rooted in unwritten practice, they continued to exist in everyday practice and consciousness, and hence as places with which people identified – as opposed to the län that were top-down administrative entities (Bladh 2008:223). The memory of the landskap also inspired nineteenth-century nationalist proponents of a nation-state based on liberal democracy, leading to a “national-romantic” movement in the arts in which pictorial and literary images (landskapsbild) of the landskap often created an idealized imaginary of the landskap’s nature and folk in which custom was frozen as costume and tradition. As the art historian Michelle Facos (1998:47; see also Mels 2002) puts it: The National Romantics’ imperative to construct an art expressing the national identity and a common culture and history was tied to regional romanticism. … These emphases were rooted in a folkish ideology that stressed the interconnectedness of beings with their natural surroundings. The Folk’s essence issued from the landscape. Mystical bonds between the individual, the Folk, and the landscape were embedded in prehistory. It was this sort of landskap image that was brought to life in Skansen and that generated interest in Lagerlöf ’s stories from her home regional landskap of Värmland (Bladh 2008). In the early twentieth century, massive emigration, largely by Sweden’s impoverished lower classes, was emptying the countryside, and there was a felt need to encourage young Swedes to develop a common shared identity and remain in Sweden (Thomsen 2007:126–29). At the same time, Norway was wresting itself from Swedish rule, thereby eliminating the last remnant of Sweden’s dreams of a greater Nordic empire. This created a need to consolidate Sweden as a nation within its modern state borders as established largely in the era of the 1648 Peace of Westphalia. It was at this time, at the end of the Thirty Years War, that the idea of the modern, spatially bounded state was consolidated, and that Sweden defeated Denmark and took over the now southern Swedish provinces of Blekinge, Halland, and Skåne, or Scania in English, thereby creating a peninsular water boundary for much of Sweden. These boundaries were then demarcated, along with those of the newly established län, by the Swedish state’s pioneering cartographers. This meant subsuming local, historically constituted landskap place identities under the modern, cartographically constituted spatial unity of a modernizing Swedish nation-state. It is in this historical context that Selma Lagerlöf was asked to write the geography textbook cum children’s story that became, according to the Swedish geographer Gabriel Bladh (2008:245), “an important actor in developing a shared understanding of what constituted Sweden’s geography and landscape” (see also Thomsen 2004; 2007:27).

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The various landskap have differing histories and cultures, ranging from Blekinge, Halland, and Nils Holgersson’s home landskap of Scania that were Danish until 1658, to Härjedalen and Jämtland, which were Dano-Norwegian until 1645 (Germundsson 2006, 2008). Furthermore, some historical landskap have ethnically mixed populations, such as Lappland with its Sami population, and Norrbotten and Värmland, which have significant populations of ethnic Finns (Bladh 2008:223). Many of the school children reading Holgersson thus might well have identified more with the differing ethnic groups of these landskap than with the notion of a culturally homogenous Sweden (Oscarson 2009). Nils’ home in the landskap of Scania, for example, had a portrait of the Danish royal family on the wall next to the father’s gun (Lagerlöf 2011 [1905–1906]:15). There are twenty-four Swedish landskap, and in Holgersson Lagerlöf plots the migration of the flock of wild geese, and Nils with them, up through the landskap on the eastern side of Sweden to the north, where the flock nests, and then back down through the remaining landskap on the western side (Figure 9.2). According to Lagerlöf, Holgersson was to be a “description of the country, landskap after landskap, and so of its inhabitants, everything from the Laps to the Scanians” (quoted in Ahlström 1942:41).2 Her plan was to “depict my land through small localized stories … from legends and folk ballads, from hunters and skippers, from history and natural history, from poets and novelists” (quoted in Ahlström 1942:42). In this way the historically and culturally constituted landskap were to provide the humanistic, artistic content of the book, which would appeal to children’s imagination and feelings. Lagerlöf ’s weaving of legend and folklore into the story is exemplified by Akka from Kebnekaise, the female leader of the flock of wild geese with whom Nils circumnavigates Sweden. Kebnekaise is the name of Sweden’s highest mountain and Akka is the Swedish spelling of the Sami name for another northern mountain (named for a Sami goddess) that in modern Sami (and Finnish) means grandmother or, by extension, a wise older woman. Nils often refers to this goose as “mother Akka,” and Akka often responds with caressing signs of affection. The fairytale figure of the “elf ” is also rooted in landskap folklore, in this case that of Scania (Ahlström 1942:161–62). The Swedish word for elf is tomte, and tomte is also the word for the plot of land on which a farm, for example, is built. Tomte is a shortened modern version of tomtenisse. Nisse, the corresponding Danish word for elf, is also shortened to Nis, a Danish nickname for Nils, so Nils Holgersson, like Scania itself, has both a Swedish and a Danish identity. The etymology of the word thus also makes a link between the elf and the plot of a family’s farm (Ahlström 1942:161–62) and the ancestral grave mounds (hög) for which Nils Holgersson’s home village, Västra Vemmenhög, is named. Lagerlöf ’s focus on the differing qualities of the different landskap was important to her perception of Sweden: “It has been of great interest for me to characterize the diverse landskap. And I was quite surprised, myself, that they all had such differing characteristics, that they could be so differentiated. Our land is really very rich and diverse” (quoted in Ahlström 1942:94).

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FIGURE 9.2  Map showing the historical landskap of Sweden as divided between MidSweden, Northern Sweden, and Southern Sweden. (By Koyos [Sverigekarta-Landskap. svg by User:Lapplänning] [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/ by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons. Color figure available in eBook edition.)

Although Lagerlöf valued her country’s landskap variety, she nevertheless felt that in her geography book she should emphasize the importance of situating the facts of places as locations within the geometric space of Sweden’s map. Thus, “everything should relate to a certain locale, a certain location and contain factual information,” whereby “all the stories should be incorporated so as to create

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a link in a greater whole” (quoted in Ahlström 1942:42). The result will thus be that “Even though the story in itself will be a poem the local depiction shall be true” (quoted in Ahlström 1942:42). Nils’ flight plan thus links together the varied and different ancient landskap, and their historical cultural identities, generated from within and below, within the spatial locations found in a modern uniform national cartographic, scenic space demarcated from the outside and above. (Figures 9.2, 9.3, and 9.4). The motion of flight through air, in other words, creates a “virtual mobility within and familiarization with the nation,” as the literary scholar Bjarne Thorup Thomsen (2004:120) put it. Bladh (2008:246) likewise pointed out that: Through Nils’ goose-eye view, the nation shrinks into perceivable proportions. This vertical top-down axis is complemented by the north-south axis connecting Nils’ home in Scania with the home of the wild geese in Lapland. In this way Lagerlöf successfully communicates “the unity of differences” inside Sweden’s territory, which can be seen as one of the defining elements in the concept of nation. As a geography reader and children’s classic with much pictorial literary imagery, Holgersson was destined to become richly illustrated with maps and perspectival pictures (Oscarson 2009). The end result is that although Lagerlöf herself rarely used the term landskap in a scenic pictorial sense, the subsequent literature on the book almost universally uses the term in this way (e.g., Lagerroth 1958). Lagerlöf ’s literary point of departure was primarily her renowned work as an author of regional historical fiction based in her native landskap of Värmland. This literature was rooted in saga, legend, folklore, and the orally transmitted customs that provided the substantive legal foundation for the ancient customary “landskap laws” that defined the differing landskap of Sweden (Bladh 2008). In Holgersson she endeavored, however, to write a geography text where she sought to combine the oral and textually communicated legend, folklore, customs, and her own previous texts, with the graphic images used to communicate scientific geographical knowledge. Here, the point of departure was the map, but by having Nils fly both north and south horizontally, and up and down vertically, a narrative of movement in time, scale, and space through a three-dimensional image of scenic landscape is created. This is why Holgersson demanded the rich cartographic and scenic landscape images that have subsequently accompanied the many versions of its text and which even have been printed on Swedish national currency (Figure 9.3). This is also why subsequent literary critics have tended to think of Holgersson in terms of landscape as scenery, rather than landscape as polity and place. Holgersson thus, in the mind’s eye, transformed the historical landskap into the uniform, space of the landscape scenery of the modern state and the map of its territory. It thereby had the intended effect of transferring the child’s geographical identity from its home landskap polity to the space and landscape scenery of the whole Swedish nation-state. As the political scientist

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FIGURE 9.3 

This Swedish twenty crown note, recently discontinued, shows the flight of Nils Holgersson on the back of Mårten gander over Scania (with Glimmingehus castle in the foreground). It illustrates how the lines on the map, and the lines of perspective, structure the space of landscape scenery. These lines would normally be invisible, but here they have been materialized as enclosed property boundaries. (Color figure available in eBook edition.)

Benedict Anderson (1991:173) has pointed out, in the context of delimiting the nation-state the map does not represent a preexisting reality, but rather a model for a spatial reality anticipated, or hoped for, in the future. The mapped space of the nation-state provides a modernizing vision, whereas the landskap, when transformed into a landscape scene, creates an affective image of tradition rooted reactively in the past and in nature. Lagerlöf ’s hope was that by incorporating the sense of place and history of the historically constituted landskap into the space of the map “life would be given to the map and, so to say, to the little ones’ imagination” (quoted in Oscarson 2009:102). This is a motif that is also found in the poem “Sveriges karta” (The Map of Sweden) by Carl Snoilsky, which prefaces Holgersson. “Sveriges karta” takes its point of departure in the pictorial impression imprinted on Snoilsky as a schoolchild by the schoolroom’s map of Sweden, with each landskap “province” in a different color, and the mental picture it made of Sweden’s national historical heritage. The poem concludes with the following lines on the map’s ability to … imprint [prägla] living and warm a picture of Sweden in the child’s bosom, that the adult shall retain, to which he will happily dedicate some day his life’s deeds or song and die to defend! (Snoilsky 2011:9)

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Holgersson moves, as has been seen, from the historic place of a political landskap community to the space and pictorial scenery of the Swedish nation-state, bringing “life” to that space, and in this Lagerlöf was following in the footsteps of Snoilsky’s pictorially oriented poetry. We are dealing here with a hybrid of the two dimensions of the scenic landscape dialectic. On the one hand, there is the historically constituted landskap from which the nation is built, and that is the affective place of national romantic art and literature. On the other hand, these historical places are subsumed by the modern scientific rationality of cartographic space, the modern state, and perspectival scenery. Torsten Hägerstrand was one of those Swedish schoolchildren who read Holgersson and who was inspired particularly by its spatial dimension when he later developed his theory of time geography, which enabled the modeling of social movement through space and time.

The modern time-space geography of Holgersson The geographer Kajsa Ellegård and the physicist Uno Svedin argue, based on Hägerstrand’s archives, that Hägerstrand’s reading from childhood of Holgersson helped shape his theories. This led him to “identify the basic importance of making the dimensions of time and space visible [e.g., as landscape scenery] in order to explain chains of events and patterns – what happens when individuals from different types of populations (human, animal, artifact, natural) coexist and exert power over each other in the landscape” (Ellegård and Svedin 2012:19–20). As they explain, “From the back of the goose, Nils sees the landscape from above from a perspective in which spectacular natural panoramas and big buildings seem small and limited. But since Nils is a tiny, small character, he also had to see the world from below” (Ellegård and Svedin 2012:20). It is “through his experiences with the geese and widened perspectives both from above and below” that Nils gradually develops “a broader view and grew and matured in his understanding of social relations and about the relation between humans and nature, that is, ecology in a broad sense” (Ellegård and Svedin 2012:20). This “double perspective from below and from above,” they suggest, “inspired Hägerstrand’s time-geography,” especially the need to move in both temporal and spatial scale, and hence “to move from micro to macro level” (Ellegård and Svedin 2012:20). This jibes well with Thomsen’s (2007:154) observation that: “If Nils Holgersson is a pedagogical text, this is not the least because it trains its reader to (re)create correlations, think in models, play with positions and scale.” The macrolevel thus provides a top-down, modern, analytic, spatial-science perspective on the holistic, organic, biological, affective world experienced from below. Hägerstrand was well aware of the historical meaning of landskap as the place of a polity. He grew up at a rural school where his schoolmaster father, and the maps and pictorial landscape lithographs used in the Bildung approach to education, were significant influences. Each picture, as Hägerstrand saw it, used

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landscape scenic space to provide a perspective on the historically constituted landskap, and in this way the “two meanings merged” (quoted from Hägerstrand 1991:49; see also Wonders 1993:93). Hägerstrand thus, in effect, merged the two meanings of landskap by subsuming the historically constituted landskap within the cartographically based, perspectival landskapsbild (landscape picture), thereby reducing it to something quantifiable and lawful (or “nomothetic”) according to the measurable qualities of clock time and Euclidean space. Hägerstrand’s spatial reduction is facilitated by the fact that the Swedish word for space, rum, like the German Raum, encompasses, as discussed in the previous chapter, both the geometrical sense of absolute Euclidean space and the lived, relational, organic, and ecological meaning of place as historically constituted habitat and habitus – Lebensraum (livsrum in Swedish) originally simply meant habitat (Olwig 2002a). It is not the experience of the historical landskap, but its perspectival spatial perception as location, space, and time that gives Hägerstrand his double perspective as a time geographer. As the geographer Daniel Sui (2015:8) has argued: “By shifting the conceptualization of space to concrete place and landscape, Hägerstrand had in a sense also achieved his goal of transcending the map. This entailed Hägerstrand’s subtle shift from an orthogonal view of the earth’s surface (according to the map) to a more oblique view of the world (according to the landscape).” It was the shift to landscape as perspectival scenery, with its illusion of three-dimensional space, that allowed Hägerstrand to transcend the map and turn it into a four-dimensional pictorial space–time model. Hägerstrand wrote in words echoing those of Lagerlöf, that he sought to make geography “rise up from the flat map with its static patterns and think in terms of a world on the move, a world of incessant permutations” (Hägerstrand 1982:323; see also Sui 2015:8). This train of thought might have been inspired by a well-known scene in Holgersson memorialized on a Swedish twenty-crown note used until recently (Figure 9.3). Shortly after Nils flies off on the family goose, he looks down in wonder at the checkered fabric of different-colored square fields of differing crops, recalling the colored segments of the map in Snoilsky’s prefatory poem (Lagerlöf 2011 [1905–1906]:27–32). This scene, as represented on the Swedish bank note, looks a bit like a chessboard, complete with a castle, Glimmingehus (built by Jens Holgersen Ulfstand).3 This living scene of a maplike world on the move occurs at the outset and provides a scalable pedagogical model for comprehending the geography of not only Sweden, but the world beyond Sweden’s borders (Lagerlöf 2011 [1905–1906]:758–760; Thomsen 2007:150–151). The resemblance to a map is not coincidental because the farmland of Scania was enclosed and landscaped into these squares with the aid of surveying and maps (Olwig 2004; Germundsson 2008). Enclosure meant that land that formerly was held in common and farmed and grazed according to systems adapted to the seasonally shifting flux of the interwoven topology of the terrain was turned into fixed properties divided into segments of uniform Euclidean space (Olwig 2016). Enclosure, in turn, encouraged the

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transformation of the land into equally regular and uniform fields through leveling and drainage, thereby creating the monocropped fields giving the land the checkered fabric experienced by Nils. Also, as with the checkered surface of a chessboard, there can only be one ownership at a given time on a given square. The checkered chessboard character of the landscape’s cartographic spatial structure plays a key role in Hägerstrand’s theory because it means “that individuals cannot overlap in time and space due to their materiality” (Ellegård and Svedin 2012:21). As in both chess and time geography, “the concepts’ side-byside-ness and before-and-after-ness are closely connected, where the former relates to place/location and the latter to time (sequence)” (Ellegård and Svedin 2012:21). The checkered fabric of this landscape also recalls the chessboard that structures Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass (Figure 9.4). Here, however, this perception of the earth as one with cartographic space is not treated as scientific, but as absurd, as when Alice exclaims, “It’s a great huge game of chess that’s being played—all over the world—if this is the world at all, you know” (Carroll 2015 [1871]:40). Carroll satirized the absurdity of landscape as chessboard on which animals and people play the game of life, because as a geometer he knew that the “chessboard” squares are constituted in utopian Euclidean space, not in the “topian” realm of the earth (Bayley 2009).

Nils Holgersson, Konrad Lorenz, and biological reactionary modernism Whereas Hägerstrand focused on the spatiotemporal dimension of Holgersson, Konrad Lorenz was more influenced by its natural, organic, emotive, and biogeographical content, although there are important elements of holism and ecology

FIGURE 9.4 Illustration of landscape as chessboard by John Tenniel from Lewis Carroll’s

1871 Through the Looking Glass.

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in Hägerstrand, and key elements of space and scientific analysis in Lorenz. Lorenz’s reactionary Nazism promoted the call of the northern wild with its freedom-loving geese and wolves, but he was also a modern scientist involved with “scientific” eugenics, racial hygiene, and euthanasia. Hägerstrand was not a Nazi, just as Lagerlöf was not a Nazi, but spatial science at Lund University did have Nazi conections, as discussed in the previous chapter. The devil, however, is not so much in the elusive ideology of Nazism, but in the subtle dialectics of reactionary modernism, as embedded in a landscape scene that morphs between modernity and reaction, diabolically crossing and confusing meaning as dobbelthink, rather than symbolically generating meaning. The aspect of Holgersson most relevant to Lorenz’s reactionary modernism is its tale of how a Scanian farm boy, who had become a dissolute modern youth, neglects his studies and his chores, and teases the farm animals and resident elf. This enrages the elf, who vengefully transforms Nils himself into a tiny boy elf, able to speak with and ride off with the wild geese. The wild birds navigating directionally in a V formation suggests at one and the same time the perspective of future modern progress under hierarchical authoritative leadership, and primordial origins in a wild natural past. Lorenz saw his career and ideas as having been importantly determined by having had the story of Nils read to him by his nanny, who parented him in lieu of the distant, alien, and authoritarian figures of his parents (Krebs and Sjolander 1992: 212). Lorenz who, like Key, “considered early childhood events as most essential to a man’s scientific and philosophical development,” recalled that after having had Holgersson read to him: I yearned to become a wild goose and, on realizing that this was impossible, I desperately wanted to have one and, when this also proved impossible, I settled for having domestic ducks. In the process of getting some, I discovered imprinting [Prägung] and was imprinted myself. From a neighbour, I got a one-day-old duckling and found, to my intense joy, that it transferred its following response to my person. At the same time my interest became irreversibly fixated on waterfowl, and I became an expert on their behaviour even as a child. (Lorenz 2014:1; see also Lorenz 1952) The concept of imprinting was used by Lorenz to label the phenomenon, described here, whereby the duckling came to perceive the little Lorenz as its mother, but, as Lorenz pointed out, he, too, was imprinted by the duck (and by extension by mother Akka’s flock) (Deichmann 1996:182). The root of ethology is ethos, meaning “the characteristic spirit of a culture, era, or community as manifested in its beliefs and aspirations,” and ethology itself means “the science of animal behavior, and the study of human behavior and social organization from a biological perspective” (NOAD 2005). Lorenz’s ideas are therefore relevant to the way the discipline thinks about the ethos of a society as it can be seen to

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derive from biology. Imprinting is Prägung in German, and prägla in Swedish, as used in Snoilsky’s prefatory poem concerning the way the map stimulates attachment to a nation and its landscape scene. Lorenz, as will be seen, used imprinting to refer both to the development of attachment between living individual beings (e.g. geese and people) and to social and territorial attachments. Lorenz’s interest in geese and the role of hybridization and domestication as symptoms of evolutionary decline preceded his involvement with Nazism and, as Lorenz claimed, might well have had its origins in Holgersson. This was also suggested by the biologist T.J. Kalikow (1983:49, 56), who argued that originally Lorenz’s “beliefs may’ve come from his childhood reading, his education, his family situation; [but] they may have been given added impetus by their association with Haeckelian Monism.” Thus, “the process of reciprocal legitimation, whereby the Nazis lent political power and prestige to already accepted ideas, may help explain Lorenz’s increasing emphasis on animal and human degeneration after 1938” (Kalikow 1983:56). This appraisal is also suggested by the conclusions from an evaluation of Lorenz’s work by the English Royal Society: “His methods seemed to owe as much to his fondness for animals in his early youth and his medical training … as to any formal scientific protocol” (Krebs and Sjolander 1992:227). This, furthermore, helps explain why “it is not surprising that in most aspects, his claims have shown to be partially or totally incorrect” (Krebs and Sjolander 1992:216).

Fictional lies and real geese and Nazis Lorenz’s version of how he became involved with Nazism begins with the results of research done in Austria in 1937. According to Lorenz, the individual geese on which he conducted experiments “aroused my interest in the process of domestication”: They were F1 hybrids of wild Greylags and domestic geese and they showed surprising deviations from the normal social and sexual behaviour of the wild birds. I realised that an overpowering increase in the drives of feeding as well as of copulation and a waning of more differentiated social instincts is characteristic of very many domestic animals. I was frightened – as I still am – by the thought that analogous genetical processes of deterioration may be at work with civilized humanity. Moved by this fear, I did a very ill-advised thing soon after the Germans had invaded Austria: I wrote about the dangers of domestication and, in order to be understood, I couched my writing in the worst of nazi-terminology. … None of us as much as suspected that the word “selection,” when used by these rulers, meant murder. I regret those writings not so much for the undeniable discredit they reflect on my person as for their effect of hampering the future recognition of the dangers of domestication. (Lorenz 2014:3–4; see also Kalikow, 1983:39)

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The evidence, however, is that Lorenz significantly downplayed his Nazi membership, and his cognizance of the racial hygienic “‘extermination of ethically inferior people’” (Müller-Hill 1988:184; Deichmann 1996:184–98, Brüne 2007:4). During the war Lorenz first served as a psychologist (1942) in occupied Posen, where he was connected with the Race Political Office of the S.S. and the Reich Foundation for German Eastern European Research working on Polish “half-breeds.” He was assigned to perform tests that would allow distinctions to be made between Poles and Polish-German “hybrids” to see if the latter were fit to breed (Klopfer 1994:206; Deichmann 1996:185). He argued that there was a homology between the degenerate characteristics that animals have acquired in the course of their domestication and that humans have acquired through civilizing processes. He used the terms species, race, and Volk synonymously, seeing a direct relation between “Nordic” wildness and the moral habitus leading to intraspecies loyalty (Deichmann 1996:185–89). Lorenz’s Nazism was later largely forgotten by the public because, as the psychologist Peter Klopfer (1994:207) put it, “the popularity of his books, and the charisma of the man himself, diverted attention from his past, and he became widely loved and honored, his work, until very recently, generally accepted” despite “a subtle resurrection of Nazi themes” (see also Kalikow 1983:70–73). In the postwar period, Lorenz developed subtle, implicitly racial theories of genetic degeneration. The word breed in German translates as Rasse, which also means race, and, in the manner of Haeckel who is believed to have influenced both Hitler and Lorenz (Kalikow 1983), Lorenz differentiated between breeds of geese in a way that suggests multiple sources of racial inheritance. This approach, as applied to Lorenz’s conception of the wild goose versus the more tame and tamable graylag goose, might well have stemmed from his childhood exposure to Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book, another children’s classic that, not incidentally, also inspired Lagerlöf (Ahlström 1942:53). Here a distinction is drawn between the subservient jackal that, like Lorenz’s graylag geese, is described as becoming degenerate when coming into contact with people, and the freedom-loving wild wolfpack and its lone wolf leader. The jackal is thus a “dish-licker” despised by the wolves: “because he runs about making mischief, and telling tales, and eating rags and pieces of leather from the village rubbish-heaps” (Kipling 2014:94). In Kipling’s stories, Nils’ role is taken by Mowgli, a feral boy who is raised by wolves. The books by Lagerlöf and Kipling have a parallel position in Lorenz’s autobiographical narrative: The mental development of my own early childhood was, without any doubt, influenced in a most beneficial way by two books of animal stories which cannot, even in a very loose sense, be regarded as true. Neither Selma Lagerlöf ’s Nils Holgersson, nor Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Books contain anything like scientific truth about animals. But poets such as the authors of these books may well avail themselves of poetic license to present the animal in a way far divergent from scientific truth. They may

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daringly let the animal speak like a human being, they may even ascribe human motives to its actions, and yet succeed in retaining the general style of the wild creature. Surprisingly enough, they convey a true impression of what a wild animal is like, although they are telling fairy tales. In reading those books, one feels that if an experienced old wild goose or a wise black panther could talk, they would say exactly the things which Selma Lagerlöf ’s Akka or Rudyard Kipling’s Bagheera say. (Lorenz 1952:xx) The popularity of Lorenz’s books might thus have owed something to his imprinting of the Jungle Book and Holgersson template on his own persona, whereby he, as author, portrayed himself as a veritable Nils or Mowgli, who learns to speak with and love the animals, as in the German title of one of his popular books: Er redete mit dem Vieh, den Vögeln und den Fischen (He Talked with the Cattle, the Birds and the Fishes) (Lorenz 1949). The English edition, referring to Solomon’s ability to talk with animals, is titled King Solomon’s Ring: New Light on Animal Ways (Lorenz 1952). The key difference between Holgersson and Jungle Book is that Kipling wrote in the ancient tradition of folkloristic animal stories that belong to the realm of fiction (Sale 1987), whereas Lagerlöf wrote Holgersson to teach science in the schools. The latter is the modern tradition that Lorenz follows. Lorenz’s ideas about a fictional truth, complementing scientific truth, that emerge through the anthropomorphizing of animals are comparable to the ideas of the pedagogues who sponsored Holgersson. The early twentieth century, in fact, saw a whole international spate of books, popular with educators, that anthropomorphized animals (Lutts 1990). Traditional scientists, however, were critical of this trend (Lutts 1990; Thomsen 2007). One of them was Einar Lönnberg, a Swedish natural scientist and curator of the traditional Naturhistoriska Riksmuseet (National Natural History Museum), who wrote a critical review of Holgersson: “If one uses a fantastic approach when one is going to communicate a fact, not the least concerning natural history, then fantasy is drawn down and transformed into falsehood. And from this one must attempt to protect oneself, and first and foremost the child. Children have an impressionable mind” (quoted in Oscarson 2009:107). Lorenz’s case suggests that this criticism was not without foundation. It was, in part, Lorenz’s holistic, organic, and anthropomorphic vision of nature that made his ethology popular among readers. It was also this kind of holism, though, that appealed to the Nazis. As Hitler put it, “Biology teaches those, who can learn anything, to think holistically, organically, and thus is in the best sense a politicized science, as all science should be” (quoted in Klopfer 1994:206). Lorenz’s holism was, however, not simply of the organic biological kind. The geographer David Harvey (1973:24), writing of the interface between “the sociological and the spatial” imaginations, listed Lorenz’s ethology as an example of a discipline that has recognized “the significance of the spatial dimension in social process.” This sociospatial imagination was manifested here

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in the way Lorenz picks up on the spatial differentiation in Holgersson, so that the cardinal directions of the map become signifiers of natural northern wildness, southern domesticated degeneracy, and eastern hybridity. As Kalikow (1983:66) noted, “the Nordic Movement has been emotionally guided, from time immemorial, against the ‘domestication’ of human beings.” Ideas of this kind led to an early twentieth-century cult of the wild north that inspired Nazi campaigns to rewild the German landscape through forestation and the replacement of foreign species by imagined or real native species (Gröning and Wolschke-Bulmahn 1987; Schama 1995:75–134). This spatial imaginary fostered Lorenz’s foray into ethnic cleansing.

Holgersson’s “natural” landscape and ethnic cleansing Lagerlöf frequently described the physical landscape of Sweden as if it were a modern built structure, whereas the cultural landscape was an organic product of nature (Thomsen 2004:129). In this way the apparent opposition between the cultural and the natural, the modern and the innate inborn, is dissolved. It is through the cultural “lens” (optik) as Thomsen put it, “that it becomes possible to create a holistic picture of the national territory as the imprint or product of (the folk’s) constructive contribution through time; and through the other (natural science) lens the same territory is viewed as an organic, essential basis for the folk’s endeavors” (Thomsen 2004:129). The national geometric space in Holgersson thus enframes both Sweden’s culture and its physical geography. An example of the holistic melting of the cultural and the natural in Holgersson is a dramatic scene in a chapter called “Glimmingehus: Black Rats and Grey Rats” (Lagerlöf 2011 [1905–1906]:82–86) where the last survivors of the native Swedish black rat defend themselves against invading gray rats of foreign origin. These gray rats originated from a couple of poor gray rat immigrant refugees that a hundred years earlier had jumped ship in Malmö. They are described as homeless, starving wretches that hid by the harbor and subsisted on garbage, much like Kipling’s jackals. As their numbers grew, though, they expanded their territory and eventually conquered the entire country, laying the last remnant of the black rats under siege in the abandoned medieval fortress of Glimmingehus. The black råttfolk (rat folk) Lagerlöf told us, were admired by the other native Swedish animals for their bravery in defending themselves against these foreign attackers, and she declared that it is “nearly impossible” to understand why the black rats did not gather together for a great collective war effort and destroy the gray rats while there were still relatively few of them. The black rats, she speculated, “were so certain of their power that they did not realize that they could lose it” (Lagerlöf 2011 [1905–1906]:82–86). The Swedish twenty-crown bill (Figure 9.3), as described earlier, shows the checkered, flat landscape of Scania with the Glimmingehus castle fortress occupying one of the squares. The uniform space of the map’s chessboard space, as noted, seems to demand that there can be only one occupant in each square at a

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time (Ellegård and Svedin 2012), and the fate of Lagerlöf ’s anthropomorphized råttfolk, checkmated in their castle, suggests that this applies to rats as well as to humans. Invasive species do sometimes displace local species in nature, but this is not the norm, because the earth is not a chessboard, and the flora and fauna, indeed even the soil, are constantly changing in shape and composition. For this reason, “fortress conservation” has come under increasing criticism (Karieva and Marvier 2011; Max 2014). This sort of chessboard fortress castle logic, however, might well have induced Lorenz to be concerned about the loss of Lebensraum as a factor leading to degeneration (Kalikow 1983:64), and thereby to the need for ethnic cleansing. There is another dimension to Holgersson that leads directly to Lorenz’s lifelong goose fetishism, however, and to his key ethological theses and phobias. This is the story about Mårten gander’s abandonment of his adopted flock and family and the lack of flock and species loyalty in the family of a semidomesticated gray goose (Greylag) named Dunfin. This story foreshadows Lorenz’s early ethological studies where he writes that “hybrids of wild Greylags and domestic geese” show “surprising deviations from the normal social and sexual behaviour of the wild birds” (Lorenz 2014:3).

Goosey miscegenation, racial hygiene, and euthanasia The Holgersson adventure begins when Nils and Mårten gander fly off to join a flock of wild geese identifying themselves as “mountain geese of the best lineage” (Lagerlöf 2011 [1905–1906]:42). These wild geese, who fly north in the spring from the direction of Germany, are depicted as normally flying over land, within the coastal borders of the Swedish state to the mountains of the north where they nest. The path taken by the flock, however, deviates from the norm because they fly eastward out to sea where they wind up on the Swedish Baltic island landskap of Öland. They do this ostensibly to avoid a fox that (rather improbably) has been trailing them, but the actual reason is clearly that Lagerlöf ’s flight plan requires the flock to travel through each of the ancient landskap, and they therefore must fly over the sea to Öland, which is unfamiliar to them, and hence difficult to find (Figure 9.2). Once on Öland, Mårten, with Nils’ help, saves the life of Dunfin. She had been abandoned by her family flock because she had sprained her wing and could not fly, and her flock was anxious to get to their island nesting place before the arrival of other gray geese. The gray goose, an ancestor of the domesticated goose, lives and breeds along coasts and agricultural fields and is relatively tame (Stamp 1977:391–97, 413–22). Dunfin’s flock nests on a small island near Stockholm where a local fisherman has treated the geese as pets, virtually domesticating them, which, Lagerlöf tells us, has led to an overpopulation of geese and territorial conflict for living space. Dunfin’s flock does not display the fierce kin and breed loyalty characteristic of the wild geese under Akka’s strong authoritative leadership. Dunfin, it turns out, had been purposely injured on Öland by her devious and jealous sisters, who later also indicate a desire to mate with the

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handsome domesticated Mårten in preference to their natural gray goose beaus. Mårten cares for and mates with Dunfin, who joins Akka’s flock and bears him a family of goslings. When the flock eventually heads back south toward Scania, Mårten becomes homesick and returns with his goose family to Nils’ farmyard where he had led a comfortable, well-fed life. They are all, however, captured by Nils’ mother, who takes them to be slaughtered to be sold and served for dinner on “Mårten’s Evening,” a harvest holiday when goose is traditionally eaten. But Nils, who has been restored to his normal size, saves Mårten and his family at the last minute. Nils has been toughened and given moral fiber by his trip north with the wild geese, losing his degenerate ways in the process. According to Lagerlöf, “The Nils Holgersson who had gone away in the spring had a heavy and slow walk, a sluggish voice and sleepy eyes, but the boy who came home again was light and agile, quick in speech, and his eyes lit up and flashed” (Lagerlöf 2011 [1905–1906]:764). When Nils wanders off the next morning to bid farewell to the flock of wild geese, including Dunfin and her goslings, that are heading farther south, “mother Akka” and the other geese give him a final caress with their wings. Nils goes alone, however, because Mårten would rather return to his comfortable life as a domesticated goose, and his goose flock and family therefore leave without even a goodbye: “He [Nils] had been in the shed with Mårten gander and tried to wake him. But the big white one did not want to go away from home. He had not said a word, just put his head under his wing and continued sleeping” (Lagerlöf 2011 [1905–1906]:775). The dissolute behavior of Dunfin’s siblings and Mårten gander’s abandonment of his adopted flock and family foreshadows Lorenz’s conviction that “an overpowering increase in the drives of feeding as well as of copulation and a waning of more differentiated social instincts is characteristic of very many domestic animals,” and by extension his reoccurring fright at “the thought that analogous genetical processes of deterioration may be at work with civilized humanity” (Lorenz 2014:3). Lorenz could also have learned from Holgersson that the domesticated goose was born and bred for slaughter.

Past and contemporary non-Nazi reactionary modern parallels: Edward O. Wilson and George Monbiot Chasing the ghost of Nazi ideology, which is notoriously elusive (Herf 1984), is as difficult as chasing after Akka’s flock of wild geese through the landskap of Sweden. The reactionary modernity of modernism can be benign, but, as Kalikow has pointed out, “those ethologist sociologists, and popularizers who have adopted Lorenz’s traditional biologistic view of society have also accepted, wittingly or unwittingly, its presuppositions, its implications, and its history of use in justifying race-political ways of thought and action” (Kalikow 1983:72–73). Influential contemporary examples of Lorenz’s influence can be seen in the

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ethology of Edward O. Wilson and in the modern rewilding movement, as elucidated by the popular journalist George Monbiot. Here, we see the same transposition between, on the one hand, an affective vision of a natural landscape community of organic beings and, on the other, an invisible underlying geometric, “checkerboarded” and scalable territorial spatial frame that harks back to the space of Lorenz’s, and the Nazis’, Lebensraum, as well as the native Swedish black rats defense of Glimmingehus castle against foreign gray rat immigrants. Wilson, an American entomologist, ethologist, sociobiologist, biogeographer, and popular author, experienced an epiphany when he first heard Lorenz lecture in 1953. Wilson recounts, “He was a prophet of the dais, passionate, angry, and importunate,” proclaiming that: “Instinct has been reinstated,” and that “the role of learning was grossly overestimated.” “He had my complete attention,” Wilson explains, continuing: “Still young and very impressionable, I was quick to answer his call to arms. … Instinct, the great ethologist made clear to me, belongs in the Modern Synthesis of evolutionary biology.” Now, “the fixedaction patterns are what count,” and “they can be understood only as part of the adaption of individual species to a particular part of the natural environment.” What counts is “One kind of bird compared to another. One kind of ant against another” (Wilson 1996:285–287). One might add one kind of goose against another and one kind of rat against another, and, in his sociobiology, one kind of person and gender against another. Here we thus see a recurrence of Lorenz’s appeal to both organic, holistic, heroic, emotive affect, on the one hand, and the rationality of science on the other. The similarity between the approach of Wilson and that of the man who called him “to arms” is striking – beginning with a rhetorical style in which “great,” heroic traditional field biologists are called to arms against various demonized enemies, particularly laboratory scientists in Wilson’s case. Much as Lorenz followed the anthropomorphizing narrative tradition of Holgersson, Wilson followed Lorenz to the point of writing Anthill: A Novel (Wilson 2010), and his books likewise come with cute illustrations in the style of Lorenz’s books, Holgersson, and children’s books more generally. Wilson, like Lorenz, made much of his childhood attachment to nature as a source of inspiration. As a lonely visually impaired child he developed a fondness for the social company of the nearly blind ants that, with their marching lines and their fixed action, and genetically determined autarchic rule, became his specialty as an adult entomologist. Much like Lorenz’s infatuation with geese, he proudly described ants as “a focus of a near obsession” (Wilson 1996:285). As with Holgersson and Lorenz, his books appeal to the inner child. Wilson saw himself as an old-fashioned field biologist David reacting against the Goliath of modern laboratory molecular biology personified by his Harvard colleague James Dewey, the codiscoverer of the structure of DNA and, in Wilson’s words, “the Caligula of biology” (Wilson 1996:218–219). Dewey, whom Wilson termed “the most unpleasant human being I had ever met,” saw “traditional biology – my biology” as being “infested by stamp collectors who lacked the

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wit to transform their subject into a modern science” (Wilson 1996:219). It was, however, precisely Wilson’s Linnaean tradition of the natural historian, surveying the landscape, and putting each species into its appropriate box, that appealed to the broader public (Olwig 2016). It was thus attractive to anyone who felt alienated by the abstractions of modern laboratory science and who had ever been a collector as a child or adult. Like Lorenz, Wilson used cartographic scale to draw apparently modern “sociospatial” implications from his biogeographical studies, notably in his problematic cartographic scaling up from the bounded landscapes of tiny islands to continents, or from anthills to human communities. This chessboard cartographic approach to space justified his fortress conservation solution to the perceived threat of invasive species because, given the view that there can only be one species in a given square, if one adds an invasive foreign species to the game board, the native species must be lost, thereby reducing biodiversity (Takacs 1996; Macarthur and Wilson 2001; Max 2014). Finally, he argued for a sociobiology focusing on genetic primordial beings with their “fixed-action patterns” adapting “individual species to a particular part of the natural environment.” In this approach the role of learning is seen to be overestimated (Wilson 1975). This was a mode of thought that Wilson learned from Lorenz and which he shared with the possibilists Edgar Kant and Jakob Johann Baron von Uexküll, discussed in the previous chapter. This application of apparently modern science to society, however, has been seriously criticized for its reactionary reductionism in which everything from agression to male infidelity is genetically predetermined – Wilson thus might well be termed a “reactionary modernist” (Wilson 1996:307–364; see also Sahlins 1979; Segerstråle 2000).

Rewilding landscape The most recent iteration of the Lorenzian idolization of the wild can be found in the heritage of the contemporary rewilding movement as promoted and elucidated by the popular British journalist George Monbiot in his book Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life (Monbiot 2013). Monbiot notes here the historical links between rewilding, Lorenz, and Nazism, but seeks to distance his approach from the racism and totalitarianism of Lorenz and the Nazis, recognizing that Lorenz’s “notions of racial purity corresponded to Nazi conceptions of wildness” (Monbiot 2013:285). Of Lorenz, Monbiot (2013:285) argues: He claimed, wrongly, that domestic dogs had two genetic origins: the northern wolf and the Mesopotamian jackal. Dogs descended from wolves, he believed, inherited the characteristics of animals which form “a sworn and very exclusive band which sticks together through thick and thin and whose members will defend each other to the very death.” Dogs descended from jackals, by contrast, were obedient, but infantile and lacking in loyalty. These traits corresponded to Nazi characterizations of the Aryan tribes of the North from which they claimed the Germans were descended,

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versus the “degenerate” peoples of the South among whom, they maintained, the Jews arose. Monbiot’s approach to rewilding’s Nazi heritage is to try to dissociate rewilding as ecological science from Nazism as ideology. The problem, however, as presented in this and the preceeding chapter, is that it is difficult to cleanse this kind of populistic science of its ideology because it involves a rhetoric in which there is a holistic, entangled mixing of what passes for modern objective science with reactionary narratives appealing to romantic sentiment and chivalric heroism in the spirt of Holgersson and Wilson. Monbiot is his own heroic environmentalist warior, and this is a rhetoric the popular Monbiot masters.4 For Monbiot, however, a key point of supposed differentiation between his rewilding and Nazi rewilding is that the latter rewilding programs were promulgated without the consent and engagement of the people who live on the land, noting that “forced rewildings” offer: a pungent warning of how this project [rewilding] could go badly wrong if we are not mindful of its hazards and antecedents. Rewilding must not be an imposition. If it happens, it should be done with the consent and active engagement of the people who live on and benefit from the land. (Monbiot 2013:291) Forced rewilding, unfortunately, is just what is occurring under the banner of environmental restitution (M.F. Olwig et al. 2015), often empowered by the popular rhetoric of Monbiot himself (Olwig 2016). Furthermore, although Monbiot distanced himself from Lorenz’s “Mesopotamian” jackal, he nevertheless terms the sheep of upland Wales and the Lake District an “invasive ruminant, from Mesopotamia” that is “sheepwrecking” the natural landscape of England (Monbiot 2013:103, 311) – a good example of his implicitly anthropomorphic rhetorical style. Rewilding thus turns sheep that have been grazing the uplands since at least the Bronze Age (Yalden 1999) into immigrant scapegoats (scapesheep?) for the loss of the noble northern native wolf that rewilders wish to have repatriated. The wolves are, in fact, returning to wolf-free areas of the European Union, where they are a protected species, but the sight of the bloody bodies of sheep and lambs ripped apart by wolves is fueling a polarizing controversy. The sheep, in this case, are actually scapegoats for a larger reactionary-modern environmental issue in which some environmentalists together with agribusiness interests are lobbying to have environmentally marginal areas of extensive agriculture “restored” as wilderness, while core agricultural areas will be allowed to intensify production using presumed “intelligent” modern methods of controlling fertilizer, herbecide, and pesticide use. The result is a landscape effectively polarized between “reactionary” wilderness and “modern” agriculture, to the detriment of the mixed, extensive, agriculture of marginal agricultural areas such

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as the Lake District (discussed in Chapter 7) whose sheep, for Monbiot, are a veritable bête noire (Figure 7.1) (Woestenburg 2018; Krauß and Olwig 2018; Olwig 2016). The popular “science” behind the rewilding movement, as with the “science” of Lagerlöf and Lorenz, also meets criticism from the harder sciences. In an article in Current Biology titled “Rewilding Is the New Pandora’s Box in Conservation” (Nogués-Bravo et al. 2016:R87) four scientists thus point out “that scientific support for the main ecological assumptions behind rewilding, such as top-down control of ecosystems [e.g., by introducing animals like wolves that are at the top of the food chain], is limited.” They also noted that “ecological systems are dynamic and ever-evolving, which makes it difficult to predict the consequences of introducing novel species,” be they extinct wolves or new species. It is, in other words, problematic to predict the effects of “invasive” species on the basis of the cartographic, checkerboarded notion of territorial space.

Conclusion: Diabolic thought and reactionary modernism Nils and the geese are fictions that play a symbolic and metaphorical role in a hybrid geoliterary text that combined the “objective” modern science of cartography, perspectival spatial representation, and biology with the affective realm of saga, legend, folklore, place, and (animal/human) community. When this text, and its illustrations, were experienced by Lorenz as a little boy, he took them quite literally, conflating the objective, invisible, analytical science of its spatial structure and biology with the affective holism of the narrative scenes depicted. When this happens, symbols can become “diabols,” and this is apparently what took place when Lorenz became a practicing Nazi, combining the modern logic of science with a reactionary organic longing for the northern wild. Although he was not an overt exponent of Nazism throughout his entire career, the insipiently diabolic mixture of organic holism and geometric spatialism that characterized the notion of Lebensraum persisted in his work and that of those following in his footsteps. Although Hägerstrand was by no means a Nazi, he nevertheless did come to fear that there might be something disquietingly diabolic about the relationship between the cartographic geometries of his time geography and its organic ecological ambitions. This fear became manifest when he met the humanistic geographer Anne Buttimer: [She] said to me that the worldview depicted in my kind of diagrams reminded her of a “dance macabre.” I felt a startling flash of light. I was alarmed. My whole effort had for decades been to work towards a holistic view of geography which should be able to catch evolving life. [… But for Buttimer it was] “a dance macabre—a chilly recording by a detached observer, a hollow rattle of bones.” (Hägerstrand 2006:xi–xiii)

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Toward the end of his life, Hägerstrand sought to correct the impression of time geography as a dance macabre, writing that time geographical trajectories “should not be understood as a path assigned to an empty and abstract Cartesian coordinate system.” This impression, he suggested, reflected the need for and effect of graphic representation. The time geographical weave was not meant to be a fabric in the material sense. It was, as he put it, “a theater curtain not to be hung up to be viewed in any other way than as an image” (Hägerstrand 2009:96–97). The diabolic dance macabre, as Hägerstrand recognized, thus lies in the gap between his intentions and the form of graphic representation that time geographers used, and this is the duplicitous problem with scenic spatial landscape representation that has been a key topic in this book. Time and abridgement, however, have allowed Holgersson to become much less duplicitous. Now that it is no longer a geography school text, the presentday revised editions of Holgersson have been amended and transformed into the children’s book Lagerlöf also sought to write, and now most of the “science” has been removed and, with it, most of the material that appears to have inspired Lorenz’s dark biology. The book now belongs to the tradition of fictive folk and literary animal stories, which can inspire fantasy and reflection, without the delusion of objective scientific fact. It has now become a literary classic that one can encourage children to read without dreading that they will be imprinted with reactionary modern ideology, or that which is worse.

Acknowledgments I owe a special debt of thanks to Tomas Germundsson for his assistance in researching and editing this article. I also owe thanks to Graham Bathe, particularly for his help with the ornithology of geese. I would also like to thank Tord Larsen and the research project “The Cultural Logic of Facts and Figures: Objectification, Measurement and Standardization,” based at Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Trondheim, Norway, for incorporating me in the project and providing a venue for the presentation of thoughts stimulating this article.

Notes 1 This counterpoising of the symbolic and the diabolic was suggested to me by the late Venetian geographer Gabriele Zanetto. 2 All translations from non-English texts are by the author. 3 This is the Danish spelling of Holgersson. Ulfstand means “wolf ’s tooth.” 4 The history of British ecology is also tainted by elements of Nazi heritage (Bramwell 1989:104–174).

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INDEX

Note: Page numbers in italics indicate figures. absolute space 181–184, 196, 209; see also reactionary modernism, transcendent space, and diabolic sublime Accademia Olimpica (humanistic Renaissance society) 107 actor, meaning of 59, 128–129n4; see also performance Adorno, Theodor 200 aesthetic approach to landscape 22 æther 9, 16, 104–105, 109–115, 117–119, 126–127, 140, 242, 246; see also ætherial space; performance; physics and æther; space vs. æther; theater ætherial space 9, 16, 104, 105–106, 109, 111, 116–118, 123, 126, 130, 140 Akka from Kebnekaise (wild mother goose) 204, 211, 214, 216–217 Agamben, Giorgio 12 agency of things 146 agora 7–8, 9, 84–86, 85, 86n2, 88, 120, 141, 148, 152 Alexander the Great 88 Altdorfer, Albrecht 27 amter 23 Anderson, Benedict 73n4, 207 Anglo-American language history 19 Anglo-Saxon heritage 42 Anne, Queen of Denmark 48n18, 56–58 Anthropocene theory 14, 44 anthropo-philological approach 16 Apian, Peter: Cosmographicus Liber 81, 82

Aristotle 72; Ethics 48n22 armies and marching 73n4 art and landscape 31–32, 35–36, 47–48n16, 48n19, 138; see also Landschaft; theater landscapes Association of American Geographers (AAG): Annual Conference (2008) 104–105 astrology 6, 57 astronomy 80–81 Athens 9, 72, 85 “Atlantic Fringe” of Britain 156 Atlantic Ocean, Norwegian 97 Austrian empire 187 Bacon, Francis 35, 61; The New Atlantis 61, 68, 71 Balto-German population (Estonia) 190 Balto-Scandinavian identity 191, 192, 195 Bathe, Graham 222 beating of the bounds tradition 27, 55, 136–137 “behind the scenes” expression 132 belonging see sense of belonging Benveniste, Emile 30 Berman, Marshall 69; All That Is Solid Melts into Air 177 beskaffenhed, meaning of 47n9 biblical verses: Isaiah 53:6 138; Matthew 4:8–10 178–179 Bild and Bildung 40–41, 201–202

Index 

binocular vs. monocular perspective 129, 132–133 Bladh, Gabriel 203, 206 Blake, William 11 Blicher, Steen Steensen: Telse 172 Bloch, Marc 24, 29–30 blood-and-soil fascist ideology 42; see also fascist landscapes; Nazis and Nazism bodily experience and landscape 100 Bosse, Abraham 60 Boston, Massachusetts 104–105 Boyle, Richard 64 Brahe, Tycho 57 British unification efforts 54–56, 58–59, 62–64, 115, 118–119; see also United Kingdom British Workers’ Sports Federation, mass trespass staged by 137–138 Brueghel, Pieter 27, 28, 130 Brunner, Otto 56, 73, 225 “built,” meanings of 25–26 Buliga, Marius 127n3 Bunkse, Edmunds V. 15 Bunyan, John: The Pilgrim’s Progress 65 Buttimer, Anne 191–192, 221 cadastral maps 48n19, 51, 131, 153 Camden, William 108, 115, 118 Carleton, Dudley 108 Carroll, Lewis: Jabberwocky 4; Through the Looking Glass 1–3, 210, 210 cartography 9, 34–35, 77, 78, 151–152; see also maps Casey, Edward S. 84–85, 97 central point perspective 9, 33, 34, 36, 58–59, 115, 131–132, 180–181 Charles I, King 31 Chaucer, Geoffrey: Canterbury Tales 65 chessboard landscapes 2–3, 207, 210, 210, 215–216, 219 Chicago 100–101 chora 9, 77–79, 79, 83–86, 145, 228, 229 chorography: defined 6, 78–81, 83; as diabolic 183; vs. scenic concept of landscape 21–22; of Strabo 84; term usage 87n5 choroi 6, 89 choros, place and spatialization of landscape: and choros, meanings of 6, 8, 77–78, 79, 83, 85, 86, 87n4, 88, 89, 104; and landscape scenery, dualistic nature of 76–77; and place, space, region, notions of 83–86, 110, 116; and Platonic chora 77–79, 83–86, 145, 228,

249

229; and Platonic cosmology 80–83; and Ptolemaic chorography 78–81 Christaller, Walter 175–177, 184, 184–186, 189–190, 195–196 Christian art and iconography 138 Christian IV, King of Denmark 56 Coke, Sir Edward 31, 32, 35, 55 commoners and common law 27, 47n15 “common usage” and custom 31, 55 commonwealth, process of 52–53 communism 67–68, 177 communities 71, 72–73n3, 73n4 Condorcet, Antoine-Nicolas De: Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind 66–67 conservation 165–167, 169, 171, 221; movement 14, 216, 219; see also environmental justice and regeneration Constable, John 29 constitution 23, 27, 38, 81, 84, 115, 148, 182; meaning of 25, 26, 41, 55 Copernicus 117 Cosgrove, Denis: and humanistic approach 15, 76–77; on modern English concept of landscape 78; and “new cultural geography” 6–7, 86; on Palladian landscape 36; on portolan charts 97; on post-modern landscapes 20–21, 127; and vertical geometric space of maps 117 cosmography 27–28, 80–81, 92, 153 cosmology, Greco-Roman 109, 113 “country” concept 5, 29–32, 37, 73n5, 74n7 “county” concept 29–31 Cresswell, Tim 15 Cromwell, Oliver 31 cultural heritage attached to landscape 4, 49n31, 154–155, 165–166, 215; see also “new cultural geography” The Cumberland News 164 Cumbria 156–157, 163–164 Current Biology: “Rewilding Is the New Pandora’s Box in Conservation” 221 customary law: Coke on 31; and custom, pillars of 31, 55; and habitual movement and rituals 135–136; Ladurie on 47n12; and Landschaft 26–28; and monarchy, legitimization of 53–54; as natural 32–33, 35; and pastoral country 37, 149–150; and renewal practices 55; and substantive things 147; and thing meetings 148; and tradition 137; and usage, necessity of 149

250 Index

Dana, Richard H. 102nn1–2; Two Years Before the Mast 98 Daniel, Samuel: The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses 57–58 Daniels, Steven 6–7, 15, 20–21, 49n31, 86, 127 Darwin, Charles 68 Davies, Sir John 32–33 da Vinci, Leonardo 10, 117, 118 Debray, Régis 59 Dee, John 74n12 De Geer, Sten 191–192, 193, 197n4 Deleuze, Gilles 82, 119 Denmark: archipelagos of 97; Eiderstedt 23–24; and St. John, establishment of 94 Derrida, Jacques 83–85 determinism 44, 192–194 “deterritorialization” 82–83 development through space 51; see also sense of place and state of progress devil as symbol 179 Dewey, James 218 “diabolic” landscapes 17, 153; see also reactionary modernism, transcendent space, and diabolic sublime; wild nature and “diabolic” landscape “dialectic of enlightenment” 200 dialectic of modernity 52, 56; as destructive 67–69; and natural utopia vs. historical inauthenticity 68, 72 Diesel, Eugene 188 Dingpolitik (thing politics) 141, 143, 146, 233, 234; see also things that matter vs. things as matter Dithmarschen 46–47n5 divide et impera principle 151 Dixon Hunt, John 38 Dodgson, C. L. 2; see also Carroll, Lewis domestication process (Lorenz) 212–213, 217 Dresden school of landscape painting 40 Drummond, William 33, 48n17 Dryden, John 37 dry land 47n7 Duncan, James S. 49n30 Dunfin goose 216–217 Dürer, Albrecht 27, 116 ecosystem services 167–169 Eddington, Arthur S. 118, 127 Einstein, Albert 118, 126–127 Elden, Stuart 182 Elizabeth I, Queen 52

Elkins, James 117 Ellegård, Kajsa 208 elves 3, 200–201, 211; meaning of 204 emotive responses and perspectival representation 198, 199 enclosure see inversion and spatial enclosure of substantive landscape; spatial enclosure Engels, Frederick 68, 69 England; see also Natural England (public body); specific areas and places: countries and counties in 29–31; customary law in 31; estates in 37–38, 46n5, 48n19; National Ecosystem Assessment 166–167; national memories in, diverse 45–46 English Royal Society 212 Enlightenment period 45, 179, 180 ether 127n1; see also æther etherial see ætherial Entrikin, Nicholas 85 environmental determinism 192–194 environmental justice and regeneration 44, 45, 166 Esprit Nouveau ( journal) 70, 75n17 essentialist discourses 144 estates 37–38, 46n5, 48n19 Estonia and Estonian Holocaust 190–195, 193 ethology 211, 214–218 Euclid 2, 9, 16, 77–78, 80, 99, 102n4 Euclidean space 16, 51, 80, 89, 99, 109, 115–116, 130, 132, 133, 140, 181–183, 191, 196, 199, 209–210; see also absolute space European Landscape Convention (ELC, Council of Europe) 6, 141, 154–159, 164, 165, 169 ewes’ right (play on words) 149, 150; see also rights: use rights Facos, Michelle 203 fascist landscapes 42–43; see also Nazis and Nazism Fechter, Paul 188 fee, etymology of 134 fellow, etymology of 138 fertility and nature 8, 12 fetishes, things as 146–147 feudalism 25–27, 38 Finland: Landskapet Åland 47n10; and Scandinavian Peninsula, landscape of 94 fishermen see Nevis fishermen Fleure, H.J. 49n31 Florence, Italy 37

Index 

Florio, John: Queen Anna’s New World of Words 74n7 Fludd, Robert 74n12 Fontenelle, Bernard le Bovier de 74n15; Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds 66 forum 148 Foucault, Michel 86, 123, 134, 179 Fox, Sir Cyril 156; The Personality of Britain 119 Francesca, Piero Della 34 Frederik II, King of Denmark 48n18 Friedrich, Casper D. 40; Wanderer over a Sea of Mist 41 Frisia 24, 26, 47n10, 49n26 Frye, Northrop 61–62 Gadol, Joan 179–180 gardens: iconography of 38, 173; and Kent 107; and Palladian landscape 37–39; progress, signifying 64, 131, 173; and scenery 132; and theater 74n14; and theatrical landscape 119 gathering (phenomenological process) 145 geese 199–200, 204, 206, 211–213, 216–218, 221–222 Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft 24 geography 42–44, 78–82, 142, 195–196 geometers 116 geometric space 2, 3, 32, 47–48n16 Germany; see also Nazis and Nazism: Land and Landschaft ancient ideals 39–42, 49n25; Lebensraum strategy under Nazis 175–176, 182, 189–190; Weimar Germany 188 Germundsson, Tomas 197, 204, 209 Gibson-Graham, J.K. 196 Giddens, Anthony 201 Glacken, Clarence J. 15, 45 global space 51, 196 globe, Earth as 100, 102n4, 180 Globe theater (London) 106, 120, 121–122, 128n6 Glorious Revolution (1688) 36, 63 gnomon 109, 125, 127n3; see also sundials Goethe: Faust 177–180, 197 Goldsmith, Oliver: “The Deserted Village” 173 Gombrich, Ernst H. 48n21 Gothic architecture 36, 37 Gray, John 134 Greece: Aristotle on 93; as islandic civilization 88, 89, 92, 97 grevskab 23 Grimm brothers 41

251

Großraum concept 187, 196 Grundgesetz 41 Guattari, Félix 82, 119 Guyot, Arnold 40, 44 Haeckel, Ernst 212, 213 hævd/hæfð 135 Hägerstrand, Torsten 195, 200, 201, 208–209, 221 Handel’s Messiah 138 Hannah, Mathew 145 harmony concept 72, 75n22 Hartshorne, Richard 44; The Nature of Geography 21, 42, 43 Harvey, David 196, 214–215 Hastrup, Kirsten 102n4, 147 Hazelius, Artur: Skansen (open-air museum, Stockholm) 202, 203 hefting/hafting 134–135, 137–139, 150, 170n3 Heidegger, Martin 12; “The Age of the World Picture” 153; jug metaphor 145, 173; on physicality of things 146–147; on public deliberation 148; on thing concept 141–145; What is a Thing? 144 herd animals and pedestrian landscape 133–135, 138, 139, 149–150 Herder, Johann G. 49n25 Herdwick sheep breed 150 Herf, Jeffrey 199–200 Hitler, Adolph 214; Mein Kampf 187–189 Hobbes, Thomas 123, 146; Leviathan 9, 59–60, 60, 114–115 Hobsbawm, Eric 55–56, 137 Holbraad, Martin: Thinking Through Things: Theorising Artefacts Ethnographically 146 Holgersson (The Wonderful Adventures of Nils Holgersson) see Lagerlöf, Selma holistic geography (in Sweden) 201–202; see also Lagerlöf, Selma Holst, Gustav 113 Homeric epics 80, 88, 89, 92–93, 99 horizontal space of landscape scenery 2, 117, 153 Horkheimer, Max 200 Hotman, François 26, 31, 32 humanists, Renaissance 107, 117 humanities discipline 76–77 human perception of landscapes 154 Humboldt, Alexander von 14, 40, 42, 84 Iceland 12, 189 idea concept 77, 80–81, 85

252 Index

ideal abstractions 2 imitatio picturae 80 imprinting (prägla or Prägung) 211–212 improvement and progress 64, 133, 173; see also sense of place and state of progress industrial society 11, 119, 145 Ingold, Tim: in Aberdeen 130; “Against Space: Place, Movement, Knowledge” 129; on choroi 6; and inversion 131, 133, 169–170; on landscape and thing, connection between 170n2; on lived experience 16; on musical resonance 113 insularity 92, 94, 95; see also islandic landscapes inversion and spatial enclosure of substantive landscape 131, 137, 142, 151–153 islandic landscapes 88–103; and islandic civilizational primacy 92–94; and island identity 91–92, 99; and islecentrality 99–100; navigation methods 97–98; Nevis fishermen navigating 95, 95–97 isolated city (concept) 185–186, 186 isolation see insularity Italianate scenic ideals 32–34, 37, 38, 47–48n16, 74n9 Jackson, John B. 15 James I, King of England ( James VI of Scotland) 33, 53–54, 58, 73n5, 119, 121 Jena circle of thinkers 39–40 Jennens, Charles 138 Jewish communities 185, 195 Johnson, Samuel 9, 11; A Dictionary of the English Language 5–6 Jones, Inigo: Albion’s Triumph 63; “An Expostulation with Inigo Jones” 59–60; architecture, career in 107–108, 123; Banqueting House project 116, 121, 121–122; Boyle and Kent, inspiring 64, 107; Covent Garden project 107, 116, 121, 122, 124; and Euclidean space 51; The Fortunate Isles, and their Union 51; and masque landscapes 57–60, 70, 107; The Masque of Blackness 33–34, 48n20, 106–111, 115, 139; Masque of Queens 107, 123, 125; mathematics and mechanics, use of 74n12; and Palladio 36; on surveying 123; “The House of Fame” building (in Masque of Queens) 123; visual prioritization in designs by 122–123

Jones, Michael 15 Jonson, Ben 108; “An Expostulation with Inigo Jones” 122–123; The Fortunate Isles, and their Union 51; The Masque of Blackness 19, 33–34, 57–58, 62, 106–110, 115, 139, 198–199; The Vision of Delight 48n20 Joseph Stalin Palace of Culture and Science (Warsaw) 174, 174–175, 180–181, 197 jug metaphor (Heidegger) 145, 173 Jutland: incorporation of lands within 47n6; Landskabslov (landscape law) 25–26, 47n10, 54 Kalikow, T.J. 212, 215, 217 Kant, Edgar 173–174, 190–196, 201, 219; Bevölkerung und Lebensraum Estlands: Ein Anthropoökologischer Beitrag Zur Kunde Baltoskandia 191; “Problems of Environment and Population in Estonia” 191 Kant, Immanuel 181, 182, 187 Kebnekaise Swedish Mountain 204 Kent, William 64, 74n14, 107 Kepler, Johannes: Harmonice Mundi 113 Key, Ellen: The Century of the Child 201, 211 Kipling, Rudyard: Jungle Book 213–214 Klopfer, Peter 213 knowledge, concept of 109; see also gnomon Kolthoff, Gustaf: Biologiska Museet (Biology Museum) 202 Königsberg (Kaliningrad) 187 Krebs, Norbert: Natur- und Kulturlandschaft 43 Kulturlandschaft paintings 49n28 Ladurie, Emmanuel Le Roy 47n12 Lagerlöf, Selma 215; The Wonderful Adventures of Nils Holgersson 198, 200–210, 207, 213–214, 215–216 Lake District National Park (LDNP) 150, 156–165, 160; description of 156–157; management of 164, 168; and Natural England report 157–164; rewilding in 166–167; sheep farmers and grazing lands in 165–169, 220–221; and Thirlmere reservoir 166 Land, meanings of 25, 30–31, 47n7, 53–54 land and propriety 37, 48n23 Landnám 12–13 land of lands concept 54–55

Index 

Landscape Character Assessment (LCA) 156, 157, 159, 169 landscapes; see also individual types of landscapes: core vs. spatial boundaries of 147; cultural meanings of 4; defined 6, 49n24, 132, 133, 154, 155; as “the face of the earth” 119; and natural law 35–36; and nature 8–9; as scenery 5, 16–17, 21–22, 39, 76–78, 133, 199, 206 landsceap and landscipe 46n2 Landschaft: as art genre 26–28, 28, 74n9; as body politic 25; and country 31–32; and geography 43–44; and law 25–26; meanings of 21, 22, 30–31, 47n9; and scenic landscapes 39–40; and social estate and community justice 24–25; term, use of 46–47n5, 46n3; as territory and community 23–24 landskaber 23, 26 Landskabslov (landscape law, Jutland) 25–26, 47n10 landskap 18, 47n6, 47n10, 202–209, 205 larboard 96, 102n2 Las Vegas and Vegas Strip 105–106, 124–126, 125–126, 128n5, 129 Latour, Bruno 12, 141–146, 150, 153, 168–169, 175 Lebensraum 191, 194–195, 209, 216, 218, 221; see also Lebensraum strategy Lebensraum strategy (Nazi Germany) 175–177, 182, 189–190 Le Corbusier 69–71, 75nn17–21, 177 Leibniz, Gottfried W. 181, 182, 196 Leighly, John 197n4 light 109–110, 112, 117 Liljefors, Bruno 202 limestone in Cumbria 159–165 linear movement, spatial and progressive 52, 53, 64–66, 86 lines, written 2, 89, 207 livestock see herd animals and pedestrian landscape location vs. place 7 London fire (1666) 36 Lönnberg, Einar 214 Lorenz, Konrad 200–201, 210–217, 218–219, 221 Louis XIV, King 71, 75n21 Lowenthal, David 14, 15, 21, 29, 44, 45, 46, 103 Lucretius 9 Lukermann, Fred 84–85 Lund University (Sweden) 190, 195, 201, 211

253

Machiavelli 61 magic see mystical traditions Mälaren Sea region 99–100 Manhattan (New York City) 91, 100–101 maps; see also cadastral maps; cartography; ideal abstractions: and boundaries 131, 133; De Geer's focus on 197n4; vs. globes 180; as models vs. reflections 207; and nation-states 188; and scientific geographical study 10; vertical space of 2, 117, 131, 153; Woodward on 183 march of progress 51–52, 66; see also linear movement, spatial and progressive; sense of place and state of progress Mårten gander 207, 216–217 Marsh, George P. 14, 15, 44–45 Marx, Karl: Communist Manifesto 67–68 masque landscapes 33–35, 48nn20–21, 58, 62–63, 108, 114–115; see also Daniel, Samuel; Jones, Inigo; Jonson, Ben; performance, theater and ætherial space mass communications 133 mass trespasses 137–138 Mauss, Marcel 123 McManus, Clare 123 Mels, Tom 97, 132, 153, 191, 192, 196, 203 Melville, Herman: Moby Dick 88, 94, 96, 98–101 memory and substance of land 27 Mercator chart 97–98 Merriam-Webster Dictionary 92 Michelangelo 48n16 Miller, Daniel 146 Mitchell, Don 15, 49n28, 142, 169, 170 modernity and modernism; see also dialectic of modernity; reactionary modernism; “reactionary modernism”: and landscape as scenic space 13; landscapes shaping 4; and Le Corbusier 69; origins of 179; and pre-modern past 172–173, 198; Serres on 116 Molesworth, Robert 38, 42 monarchy as natural law 35 Monbiot, George 218; Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life 219–221 Moser, Justus 49n25 movement and sense of belonging 133–135 musical resonance 113 mystical traditions 74n12, 77 Nantucket Island 94 national identity 152, 158–159; see also nation-states, development of

254 Index

national parks 10, 12, 38; see also specific parks nation-states, development of 184–189, 203 native populations 12 Natural England (public body): act establishing 165–166; “Lakes to Dales Landscape Designation Project: Boundary Recommendations. Final Technical Report” (Natural England) 157–163, 158, 160–162; Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) of Lakes to Dales Designation Project 163; structure and purpose of 170–171n4 natural law and landscape 35–38, 48n22, 118 “natural philosophers” 14–15 natural science perspective 9–10, 14–15 nature 1–2, 4–6, 8–17, 19–21, 29, 32–42, 45–46, 46n21, 49n24, 61, 66, 76–77, 81, 115, 117–118, 140, 143, 145–146, 157–158, 165–167, 171n4, 173, 178, 180, 198–199, 202, 207–208, 214–216, 218 Nazis and Nazism; see also individuals by name: and British ecology 222n4; in Poland 174–176, 213; and rewilding 219–220; spatial ideals of 12–13 neptunists 40 Netherlands: political structure in 47n6; portolan charts made in 97; surveying in 48n19 Nevis fishermen, navigation methods of 95, 95–97 “new cultural geography” 44, 49n30, 86 Newton, Isaac 118, 181, 182, 191 New York Harbor 91 nomos 12–13 “non-modern” term 143 Norgaard, Richard 167–168 Nørgård, Per 113 Northern Europe: concept of landscape 22; customary law in 26–28; landscape art in 48n19, 74n9; states of 26–28 North Friesland 23, 24, 46n5, 47n6 Norway: and Denmark 56; landscape of 94; languages in 18 “object oriented democracy” 145 “offshore” global enterprise 93 Old Norse 134–135, 138, 147, 170n3 Old Paphos theater (Cyprus) 120 Old Whigs 36, 38–39, 42; see also Whig country gentry

Olsson, Gunnar 196 Olwig, Kenneth R. 101 Olwig, Karen Fog 101 Orgel, Stephen 63 Ortelius, Abraham: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum 152 oversight 168–169, 175 Oxford English Dictionary (O.E.D) 46n2, 46n5, 65, 87n5, 148 Paése, defined 74n7 Palladio, Andrea 36–39, 70, 107, 124, 125 parades and processions 52–53, 73n4 Paris: Le Corbusier’s vision for 69–70, 75n19, 75nn17–18 parks; see also national parks: Le Corbusier’s 70, 75n20 “parliament of things” 146, 150, 169 Passmore, John 32 pastoral society and landscapes 8–9, 149–150, 165–166; see also herd animals and pedestrian landscape “pathetic fallacy” 198 Patiner, Joachim 27 paysage 74n9, 86n1, 154 Peace of Westphalia (1648) 151 Peacham, Henry 32 Peet, Richard: Modern Geographical Thought 196 peninsulas 94 performance, theater and ætherial space: and ætherial vs. spatial scenery 117–118; and inversion of architecture 116; and The Masque of Blackness, ætherial elements of 108–115, 111, 118–119; “outside in” and “inside out” transformations of theatrical landscape 119–124; and performance, meaning of 127–128n4; and Pygmalion 123–126; and substantial masks vs. ætherial performance space 111–116; theatrical practice and landscape 106–108 performing on vs. doing landscape 129–139; and custom vs. tradition 136–138; habitual movement and rituals 135–136; herd animals and pedestrian landscape 133–135, 139; sensing landscape and sense of belonging 132–133 peripatetic steps 50–51, 72n2 persona 59, 114 personification 114, 118–119; see also prosopon and prosopopoeia perspectival representation 9, 65–66, 76, 107, 153, 168, 183–184

Index 

perspective drawing 131 Petseri hinterland (Estonia) 194–195 phenomenology 144–145, 199 philological approach 1–2, 7, 14; see also anthropo-philological approach physics and æther 127 picture, world as 153 “picturing,” creation and development 40 pilgrimage 50–51, 73n4 pillars in Greek theaters 127n3 place 6–7, 7–8, 72–73n3; see also choros, place and spatialization of landscape; sense of place and state of progress platea or plateia 7–8, 84, 87n4 Plato: on chora/choros 77, 83–85, 116; cosmology of 80–83; and Ptolemy 80; Republic 61; Statesman 138; Timeaus 77, 83, 85 Poland: Nazis in 174–176, 213 portolan charts 97 possibilism 192–194 precedence principle 148 Pred, Allan 196, 201 “presentic space” 72n1 “Privy Council” (secretive institution) 61 Progress 4, 11–12, 16, 39, 41, 50–56, 58, 61–67, 69–72, 74n6, 137, 140, 142–143, 152, 172, 194, 211; see also sense of place and state of progress property ownership 133; see also cadastral maps; estates proportion, neo-Platonic conception of 34 prosopon and prosopopoeia 113–114, 119; see also personification prospect concept 2–5, 9–12, 132 Ptolemy: and absolute space 182; and chora/choros 6, 77–78, 89; and chorography 78–81, 85, 182–183; Earth focus of space conceptions by 117; Geographike Uphegesis 78; as geometer 116; globe concept 51, 81–82, 82; and navigation 97–98; and Renaissance period 179–180; “sciential” power of states 61; surveying techniques of 34 Pythagoras 61, 74n13, 112 racism 42, 192–194; see also Nazis and Nazism rat folk (in Holgersson) 215–216 Raum concept 43, 182, 188, 209 reactionary modernism, transcendent space, and diabolic sublime 172–197; Christaller’s models and rise of

255

nation-state 184–189, 196–197; and Edgar Kant’s landscape and regionalization 190–196; Faust and diabolical sublimity 177–179, 197; Herf ’s concept of 199–200; and Nazi strategy in Poland 174–177; overview 13, 17, 172–174; perspectival space and origins of the sublime 181–184 receptacle theory (chora) 181 regions and landscape as region 4, 5–6, 15, 18, 21–22, 26, 28, 30, 32, 42, 46n2, 74n7, 78–79, 83–86, 86n1, 102n3, 120, 130, 132, 154–155, 164, 182, 191–192, 194–196, 202–203, 206 reification of things 141–142, 146, 149; see also things that matter vs. things as matter relational space 182–183, 187, 196 Renaissance period 113, 152, 179 res publica 141, 144, 148–149, 153 rewilding (movement) 17, 166, 173, 198, 218–221 rights: use rights, prescriptive use of 25, 27, 37, 47n14, 51, 64, 134–135, 148–150 Ritter, Carl 40 rituals in customary law 27, 47n14, 51–52, 61–62, 136, 137 Rogation week 51, 55, 61 Roman Catholic Church 26 Romani communities 195 romanticism see universal romanticism Rosenberg, Alfred 195 Rosenthal, Michael 27, 130 Rothman, Benny 137 Rotman, Brian 153, 168 Royal British Absolutism 35 Rubens, Peter Paul 121 rural picturesque scenery 29 Russian Slavic population 188–190 Rygg, Kirsten 74n13 Sack, Robert 182 sædvane 54 St. John (U.S. Virgin Island) 89–92, 90 St. Paul’s Church (London) 121, 124 Salamis Theater (Cyprus) 120 Sauer, Carl O.: on choros 77–78, 84; and cultural geography 15, 86; Daniels on 49n31; “The Morphology of Landscape” 21, 42–44, 49n29 Scamozzi, Vincenzo 107 Scandinavia: hefting in 150; heritage of 42; things meetings in 148–149 Scandinavian Peninsula 94

256 Index

“Scandinavian Transition belt” 192 -scape suffix 54, 130 scenery: etymology of 106; landscape as 5, 16–17, 21–22, 39, 76–78, 133, 199, 206; nature managed as 10; perspective 65–66; and rational geometric space 35 scenic (perspectival) illusion 2–3, 10, 33–34, 58, 62–63, 65, 78, 81, 106, 115–117, 120, 124, 125, 131, 133, 153, 184, 199, 200, 209 Schama, Simon: Landscape and Memory 4 Schelling, Friedrich 39 Schiller, Friederich: Wilhelm Tell 39, 49n26 Schlegel, August W. 39 Schlegel, Friedrich 39 Schmitt, Carl 189; The Nomos of the Earth: In the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum 12 Schouw, Joachim F. 13–15, 42; “Scandinavia’s Nature and People” (lecture) 14 science: and æther 127–128; and art in landscape design 76–77; etymology of 61; and progress 65–66 Scotland 56; see also British unification efforts; James I, King of England Scott, James 168 seascapes 9 seasonal rituals 52, 61–62; see also rituals in customary law sense of belonging 132–135 sense of place and state of progress 50–75; court vs. country (lord vs. landscape) conflict 54–57; and custom vs. modern progress. 70–72; and garden parks as symbols of progress 64; and masque landscapes 57–63; and nonplace of modernity 69–70; overview 50–52; and political landscape 53–54; and progress, meanings of 64–65; progressive customs and common law 52–53; and revolutionary progress 67–68; and stages of progress 65–67, 74n15 Serres, Michel 116 settlement patterns and ethnicity, imagined connections between 185–186 shadows (and knowledge) 110, 113, 116, 125, 183 Shakespeare, William: The Merchant of Venice 112–113; seasonal rituals in works by 61–62; Tempest 61, 67, 127 Shaw, George B. 128n6; Pygmalion 121, 123–124

sheep as symbols of community and landscape place identity 134–135, 137, 138–139; see also herd animals and pedestrian landscape -ship suffix 25, 46n2, 74n9, 130 “shire” (suffix) 5, 23, 29–30, 53, 147–148; see also “county” concept single-point perspective see central point perspective sky-scrapers 69–70 Slavic populations 12, 175–176, 187, 189–191, 195 Snoilsky, Carl: “Sveriges karta” 207, 209, 212 sociobiology 218–219 Sommarteater på Krapperup theater troupe 111 sound in space 110, 112 sovereignty of state territory 182 space vs. æther 126–127 spatial enclosure 151–152, 210; see also inversion and spatial enclosure of substantive landscape spectacle (landscape as) 53, 57–58, 65, 74n12, 105, 108, 122–123, 126; see also Las Vegas and Vegas Strip spectators, arrangement and ranking of 110, 122 Spengler, Oswald 49n29 spirit, meanings of 117–118 squared landscapes (and spaces) 2–3, 97, 210 stage 4, 10, 11, 16, 33, 34, 36, 39–41, 51–53, 57–59, 65–68, 74n12&15, 104, 106, 108, 110, 114, 116, 119, 120, 121, 122–123, 125, 127, 131–132, 137–139, 140, 146, 149, 152–153, 180, 194–195; definition of 65, 106 standardized languages 19 starboard 96 “Star Chamber” (secretive institution) 61 Staten Island and Staten Island Ferry (New York City) 91, 101, 101–102, 102n5 statutory law 6, 32, 35, 56, 61, 203 steering ships 96–97 Steffens, Henrik 40, 43, 49n27 stemme 75n22 Stowe gardens (England) 38, 64 Strabo 83–84 Stuart court 53, 58–59; see also British unification efforts; James I, King of England sublime 9, 11–12, 72, 177, 179, 180–182, 189, 197, 197n2

Index 

substantive landscapes 18–49; see also inversion and spatial enclosure of substantive landscape; and customary law 32–33; defined 8, 16, 20, 46n1; elements of 44–46; in England 29–31; and fascist landscapes 42–43; and Landschaft concept 22–28, 31–32, 39–44; overview 20–21; and Palladian landscape 36–39; scenic vs. chorographic concept 21–22; vs. scenic landscapes 129, 140; and theater landscapes 34–35; and “things that matter” 17 Sui, Daniel 209 Summerson, John 107 sundials 4, 109, 110, 116, 120, 125; see also gnomon surveying techniques 34–35, 48n19, 107, 116, 123, 133 Svedin, Uno 208 Sweden: East Gothland 47n6; free farmers in 46n5; and landscape concept 18; “national-romantic” movement in 203; pedagogical approach in 201–202; Scania 94; twenty crown note 3, 206, 207, 209, 215–216 Switzerland 28; Land and Landschaft ideals 28, 39, 49n26; political structure in 47n6 symbols 17, 169, 179, 200, 221, 222n1 Tacitus: Germania 27, 47n11 Tang, Chenxi 151, 152, 158 Taub, Liba C. 80 Teatro Olimpico (Vicenza) 36, 107, 125 terraferma villas 36 territorial meaning of landscape 22–23 Teutonic settlements (Poland) 176, 184 theater landscapes; see also masque landscapes: in gardens 74n14; Greek 106–107, 110; and national identity 152; and progressive customs in England 53; Shakespearean 106; stages of 11 thing and things, defining 141–144 things that matter vs. things as matter 140–171; see also Lake District National Park; defining 141–144, 146–147; and enclosure and inversion of landscape of things 151–153; Heidegger and Latour, contrasting approaches of 144–146; Heidegger and Latour defining thing concept 142–144; landscape, thing as constitutive of 144; and nonmodern vs. modern view of things 154–156; and

257

Old Norse concept of landscape 147; overview 140–142; and thing meetings generating landscape 25, 86n2, 107, 141–143, 147–149; and thing studies 146–147 Thirlmere Defense Association (England) 166 Thomas, William L.: Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth 119 Thompson, Edward P. 136 Thomsen, Bjarne T. 206, 208, 215 Thoreau, Henry D. 73n4 Thrift, Nigel 201 Thünen, Johann Heinrich von 185–186 time, etymology of 147 time geography (Hägerstrand) 209, 210, 221–222 “time out of mind” precedent 26, 27, 51 Tönnies, Ferdinand 23–24, 172 topianism 71–72 topography 78–80 topos and topology 99, 102n3 Tortola (British Virgin Islands) 91, 93 tourism 133 Townshend, Aurelian: Albion’s Triumph 63 townships 25, 45, 105, 129–130 tradition vs. custom 55–56, 136–138 transcedent space see absolute space; reactionary modernism, transcendent space, and diabolic sublime transoceanic travel across open spaces 97–98 Tsing, Anna L. 8 Tuan, Yi-Fu: humanistic approach of 15; on place and culture 7, 72; on “presentic space” 72n1; on progress 51; on scenery vs. landscape 131–132; on sense of place 50; on vertical dimension of cosmos 180 Turner, James 14 Turner, Victor 73n4 Uexküll, Jakob Johann von 192–194, 219 Ulrik of Mecklenburg, Duke 48n18 United Kingdom (UK) 45–46, 49n30; see also individual countries United States; see also individual areas and cities: and the American West 11; cultural geography in 43–44; as nation of seafarers 94; vernacular landscape in 45 universal romanticism 39 University of California, Berkeley 45 use rights see rights utopian autocratic society 61 utopias, communist 68

258 Index

van Paassen, Christiaan 84 Venice, Italy 37, 124–126 Vergunst, Jo L. 130 Vermeer, Jan 131 Vestin, Martha 111 Virgil 149; The Georgics 37 Volksgemeinschaft concept 176, 184, 185, 189 Wadden Sea 97, 172 Walpole, Horace 74n14 Walton, John K. 156 Warsaw 174, 174–175, 176 Werner, A. G. 40 West Indies 93; see also individual islands Westmorland 156–157, 159, 164 Wheelock, Arthur 131 Whig country gentry 36–38 Whitehall court (London) 53, 58, 60–61, 121 wild nature and “diabolic” landscape 198–222; see also Lagerlöf, Selma; and duplicitous landscape 199–200; and ethnic cleaning, links to 215–216; and geese influencing Lorenz 212–217; and landskap in Sweden and Holgersson 202–208; and Lorenz and biological reactionary modernism 210–212;

and modern time-space geography of Holgersson 208–210; and non-Nazi reactionary modernism 217–219; and rewilding 219–221 Wiles, David 114, 123 Willey, Basil 37–38 Williams, Raymond: The Country and the City 30 Wilson, Edward O. 217–220; Anthill: A Novel 218 wolves in rewilding context 220–221 Woodward, David 183 Wordsworth, William 156–157, 166 world, etymology of 102n4 Wren, Christopher 36 Yates, Frances 74n12 Yorkshire Dales National Park (YDNP) 156–165, 160; description of 156–157; limestone in 159–165; management of 164; and Orton Fells 159–160, 161–162, 163, 164 Zagorin, Perez 29 Zanetto, Gabriele 222n1 Zealand 47n6 zoning approach to landscape characterization 155, 159, 164, 165