TILLEY - 1994 - A Phenomenology of Lanscape Places Paths and Monuments

A Phenomenology of Landscape
Places, Paths and Monuments
Christopher Tilley
BERG
Oxford/Providence, USA
First published in 1994 by
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© Christopher Tilley
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Chapter 1
Space, Place, Landscape and Perception:
Phenomenological Perspectives
Introduction: Spatial Science to Humanized Space
During the past thirty years a striking series of parallels and con-
vergences have taken place in human geography and archaeolo-
gy. Until the 1960s both disciplines were largely empiricist in
outlook and concerned with distinctiveness and difference in var-
ious ways. Human geography was dominated by the study of
regions at various spatial scales - North America, Africa, Asia,
regions of Britain or Canada, etc., treated in a holistic manner.
The resulting syntheses tended to start by discussing geology, cli-
mate and soils and ended by considering such matters as welfare
provision and political systems. This was the geographical equiv-
alent of the anthropological monograph in which 'everything'
was brought together into a whole. In a similar way archaeology
was concerned with space-time systematics and the ordering of
artefacts and other evidence into cultural units within a delimited
territorial area with a putative ethnic significance.
The 'revolutions' of the 'new' geography and the 'new' archae-
ology consigned such a perspective to an unenlightened Dark
Age of superstition and misunderstanding. Replacing it all was
the white heat of positivism coupled with functionalism, in
which a notion of geography as spatial science and archaeology
as a science of the past were borne. The history of and the subse-
quent disillusionment with this approach are well known, and
there is no need to rehearse them here in any detail.
As a component of the retheorization of human geography
from the 1970s onwards and in archaeology during the 1980s the
usefulness of a 'scientific' conception of space abstracted from
human affairs has systematically been called into question (e.g.
Harvey 1973; Relph 1976; Gregory 1978; Gregory and Urry 1985;
7
8 A Phenomenology of Landscape
Soja 1989; Hodder 1982a,b, 1986, 1987, 1992; Miller and Tilley
1984; Shanks and Tilley 1987a,b,1989; Bender 1992,1993; Tilley
1994). The major differences between a 'scientific' or abstract and
a 'humanized' or meaning-laden space can be summarized as fol-
lows:
container medium
decentred centred
geometry context
surfaces densities
universal specific
objective subjective
substantial relational
totalized detotalized
external internal
system strategy
neutral empowered
coherence contradiction
atemporal temporal
ABSTRACT SPACE HUMAN SPACE
materialist, rational idealist, irrational

The list might be considerably extended, or the couplets abbrevi-
ated, since they clearly overlap. I have added a cross-over
between the lists of terms at the bottom in order to indicate that
the approach which has usually been claimed as the hallmark of
an objective, rational and materialist approach to space (the left-
hand column) now appears, in view of the weight of contempo-
rary arguments, as a form of irrational idealism and vice versa.
It is from the general perspective of the terms listed in the
right-hand column that this book both takes its starting-point and
attempts to develop in relation to a consideration of landscape.
While not wishing to dwell too much here on the antagonistic
history of past debates it seems necessary to explain and unpack
the columns of oppositions as a background to the rest of the
book.
Space, Place, Landscape and Perception 9
New geography and new archaeology considered space as an

abstract dimension or container in which human activities and
events took place. The implication of this perspective was that
activity and event and space were conceptually and physically
separate from each other and only contingently related. Such a
view of space decentred it from agency and meaning. It was
something that could be objectively measured in terms of an
abstracted geometry of scale. Space was quite literally a nothing-
ness, a simple surface for action, lacking depth. This space was
universal, everywhere and anywhere the same, and had cross-
cultural impact on people and society. People had to move across
this space, and movement through it, for example, created 'friction'
limiting human potentialities. The effects of distance and the
varying potentialities of site locations could be objectively speci-
fied on one and the same spatial scale of measurement. Space as
container, surface and volume was substantial inasmuch as it
existed in itself and for itself, external to and indifferent to human
affairs. The neutrality of this space resulted in its being divorced
from any consideration of structures of power and domination. A
space divorced from humanity and society provided a coherent
and unitary backdrop for any analysis, since it was always the
same. The space of the palaeolithic was the same as the space of
late capitalism, that of Vancouver identical to that of Canberra.
As a dimension in which human action took place it was directly
equivalent to and separate from time, the second primary and
abstracted scale according to which societal change could be doc-
umented and 'measured'.
The attraction of this perspective was, no doubt, its purity and
simplicity and the potential it offered for comparative studies of
the organization of artefacts, sites, populations, and flows of
information and exchange across regions and landscapes. All
could be objectively plotted on maps, distances measured and
expressed according to the same rigorous and quantitative scale.
Quantification, mathematization and computer modelling
seemingly offered unlimited potential for unravelling the spatial
fix of human affairs. Burning issues of the day in geography and
archaeology became what sampling fractions to use, how to con-
struct appropriate boundaries for a nearest-neighbour analysis,
what were the best statistics to use and the development of alter-
native methodologies for measuring and describing the abstract
geometry of space. Lurking beneath the distribution of the dots
on a map was a spatial process and causality to be discovered.
The linkages between new geography and new archaeology

were quite explicit. Clarke's Models in Archaeology (1972) was
itself modelled on Chorley and Haggett's Models in Geography
(1967), Harvey's Explanation in Geography (1969) found its archae-
ological counterpart in Explanation in Archaeology (Watson et al.
1971). Clarke (1972) identified a 'geographical paradigm' to
archaeological research which was simply the extension of the
spatial methodology of the new geography to archaeological evi-
dence, while Renfrew (1969) predicted that the texts of new geog-
raphers would provide source books in methods for future
generations of archaeologists.
Accordingly 'new' geography was systematically used to pro-
vide the basis for a mathematical spatial archaeology (Hodder
and Orton 1976; Clarke 1977). The traditional archaeological dis-
tribution map of sites and artefacts now became clothed with
thiessen polygons, site catchments, regression lines, trend sur-
faces and gravity models, all reflecting in various ways the 'fric-
tion' and impact of space on human affairs (for reviews see
Goudie 1987; Wagstaff 1987a).
The alternative view starts from regarding space as a medium
rather than a container for action, something that is involved in
action and cannot be divorced from it. As such, space does not
and cannot exist apart from the events and activities within
which it is implicated. Space is socially produced, and different
societies, groups and individuals act out their lives in different
spaces. Space in itself no longer becomes a meaningful term.
There is no space, only spaces. These spaces, as social produc-
tions, are always centred in relation to human agency and are
amenable to reproduction or change because their constitution
takes place as part of the day-to-day praxis or practical activity of
individuals and groups in the world. They are meaningfully con-
stituted in relation to human agency and activity. A humanized
space forms both the medium and outcome of action, both con-
straining and enabling it. A centred and meaningful space
involves specific sets of linkages between the physical space of
the non-humanly created world, somatic states of the body, the
mental space of cognition and representation and the space of
movement, encounter and interaction between persons and
between persons and the human and non-human environment.
Socially produced space combines the cognitive, the physical and
the emotional into something that may be reproduced but is
always open to transformation and change. A social space, rather
than being uniform and forever the same, is constituted by differ-

ential densities of human experience, attachment and involve-
ment. It is above all contextually constituted, providing
particular settings for involvement and the creation of meanings.
The specificity of place is an essential element in understanding
its significance. It follows that the meanings of space always
involve a subjective dimension and cannot be understood apart
from the symbolically constructed lifeworlds of social actors.
Space has no substantial essence in itself, but only has a relation-
al significance, created through relations between peoples and
places. Space becomes detotalized by virtue of its relational con-
struction and because, being differentially understood and pro-
duced by different individuals, collectivities and societies, it can
have no universal essence. What space is depends on who is
experiencing it and how. Spatial experience is not innocent and
neutral, but invested with power relating to age, gender, social
position and relationships with others. Because space is differen-
tially understood and experienced it forms a contradictory and
conflict-ridden medium through which individuals act and are
acted upon. The experience of space is always shot through with
temporalities, as spaces are always created, reproduced and
transformed in relation to previously constructed spaces provid-
ed and established from the past. Spaces are intimately related to
the formation of biographies and social relationships.
Such a notion of space is undoubtedly complex. There is and
can be no clear-cut methodology arising from it to provide a con-
cise guide to empirical research. The approach requires, rather, a
continuous dialectic between ideas and empirical data. From this
perspective, the intimate connection of space with the social, with
the formation of biographies, with action, event, power, context
and subjectivity, materializes or concretizes its specificity and
impact in the social world. We move from the irrational abstracted
idealism of a geometrical universal space to an ontological
grounding of space in the differential structuring of human expe-
rience and action in the world: a perspective which now requires
examination in more detail.
A Phenomenological Perspective
The key issue in any phenomenological approach is the manner

in which people experience and understand the world.
Phenomenology involves the understanding and description of

things as they are experienced by a subject. It is about the rela-
tionship between Being and Being-in-the-world. Being-in-the-
world resides in a process of objectification in which people
objectify the world by setting themselves apart from it. This
results in the creation of a gap, a distance in space. To be human
is both to create this distance between the self and that which is
beyond and to attempt to bridge this distance through a variety
of means - through perception (seeing, hearing, touching), bodi-
ly actions and movements, and intentionality, emotion and
awareness residing in systems of belief and decision-making,
remembrance and evaluation.
Let us think for a while of a farmhouse in the Black Forest, which was
built some two hundred years ago by the dwelling of peasants. Here
the self-sufficiency of the power to let earth and heaven, divinities
and mortals enter in simple oneness into things, ordered the house. It
placed the farm on the wind-sheltered mountain slope looking south,
among the meadows close to the spring. It gave it the wide overhang-
ing shingle roof whose proper slope bears up under the burden of
snow, and which, reaching deep down, shields the chambers against
the storms of the long winter nights. It did not forget the altar corner
behind the community table; it made room in its chamber for the hal-
lowed places of childbed and the 'tree of the dead' - for that is what
they call a coffin there: the Totenbaum - and in this way it is designed
for the different generations under one roof the character of their
journey through time. A craft which, itself sprung from dwelling, still
uses its tools and frames as things, built the farmhouse (Heidegger
1972: 338).
The fact is that if we want to describe it, we must say that my experi-
ence breaks forth into things and transcends itself in them, because it
always comes into being within the framework of a certain setting in
relation to the world which is the definition of my body ... Any per-
ception of a thing, a shape or a size as real, any perceptual constancy
refers back to the positing of a world and of a system of experience in
which my body is inescapably linked with phenomena. But the sys-
tem of experience is not arrayed before me as if I were God, it is lived
by me from a certain point of view; I am not the spectator, I am
involved, and it is my involvement in a point of view which makes
possible both the finiteness of my perception and its opening out
upon the complete world as a horizon of every perception (Merleau-
Ponty 1962: 303-4).
I have let Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty set the scene. From

rather different phenomenological perspectives, they have both
stressed important ontological characteristics of the relationship
between inhabited space and social Being-in-the-world. For
Heidegger 'spaces receive their essential being from locations
and not from "space"' (1972: 332). A mathematical 'space' of mea-
surement contains no spaces, places or locations, for it is not
humanized. Spaces open up by virtue of the dwelling of humanity
or the staying with things that cannot be separated: the earth, the
sky and the constellations, the divinities, birth and death. Space
is that something for which room is made. Building produces
things as locations and building and thinking both belong to
dwelling. Heidegger proposes a topological model for thinking
about the relationship between people and the landscape as a
matter of the 'thereness' of the self-disclosure of Being in and of
the world. Cognition is not opposed to reality, but is wholly
given over in the total social fact of dwelling, serving to link
place, praxis, cosmology and nurture.
If 'dwelling', in Heideggerian terms, forms a primordial part
of that which it is to be human, this necessarily requires a consid-
eration of the body as the privileged vantage point from which
the world is apprehended. The kinetic activities of human beings
orientate apprehension of the landscape and create it as human.
Space is existential, and existence is spatial in that it opens onto
an 'outside', a series of reference points (Merleau-Ponty 1962:
293). Merleau-Ponty, like Heidegger, attempts to chart a middle
course between an empiricist objectivism and a cognitive ideal-
ism. With empiricist objectivism, the perception of space and the
environment, like everything else, is an event in nature.
Perception is the causal physical or chemical action of a thing on
an organ which sensation registers. Everything takes place in a
world of pure objectivity, and there is no subject who perceives.
Conversely, a cognitive idealism posits an absolute subjectivity
involving a transcendental Ego who is the subject of experience.
In a relation of pure interiority the objective world exists only in
relation to a consciousness which projects that world before itself.
For Merleau-Ponty the problem of both of these positions is that
they systematically evade the problem of the phenomenon of
perception, empiricism because it makes an object of the subject,
cognitive idealism because it reduces the perception of the object
to an operation of thought (ibid.: 39). Merleau-Ponty argues that
the human body provides the fundamental mediation point

between thought and the world. The world and the subject reflect
and flow into each other through the body that provides the liv-
ing bond with the world. Notions of 'object' and 'subject',
'nature' and 'consciousness' are dialectically related moments of
a totality which is constituted through the Being of the body in
the world. The body constitutes a way of relating to, perceiving
and understanding the world. It is the manner in which a subjec-
tive attitude comes to both know and express itself. Perceptual
consciousness is not just a matter of thought about the world, but
stems from bodily presence and bodily orientation in relation to
it, bodily awareness: 'far from my body's being for me no more
than a fragment of space, there would be no space at all for me if
I had no body' (ibid.: 102).
While 'dwelling' occurs in different varieties and textures of
humanly created space, this social existence is, of course, rooted
in natural and non-humanly created environments. The concept
of dwelling, with its fourfold ontological implications as pointed
out by Heidegger, the human body as a focus for the perception
of a humanized world, and the groundedness of social Being in
that which is not humanly created constitute the fundamental
presuppositions for beginning to think about the relationship
between people and landscape in a fresh manner. Subjectivity
and objectivity connect in a dialectic producing a place for Being in
which the topography and physiography of the land and thought
remain distinct but play into each other as an 'intelligible land-
scape', a spatialization of Being, which I will now examine in a
less abstract manner.
Space and Place
If space allows movement, place is pause (Taun 1977: 6).
The relationship between space and place has been discussed and
theorized from one particular perspective within a phenomeno-
logical 'school' of geographical research (Taun 1974, 1975,1977;
Pickles 1985; Relph 1976; Buttimer and Seamon 1980; Seamon
and Mugerauer 1989). The key concern in this approach is the
manner in which places constitute space as centres of human
meaning, their singularity being manifested and expressed in the
day-to-day experiences and consciousness of people within par-

ticular lifeworlds. Such an approach starts from an initial presup-
position claiming the wholeness and indivisibility of a human
experience of place, and that meaning, defined in terms of struc-
tures of intentionality, is central to any understanding of place.
Knowledge of place stems from human experiences, feeling and
thought. Space is a far more abstract construct than place. It pro-
vides a situational context for places, but derives its meanings
from particular places (Relph 1976: 8). Without places there can
be no spaces, and the former have primary ontological signifi-
cance as centres of bodily activity, human significance and emo-
tional attachment. The meaning of place is grounded in
existential or lived consciousness of it. It follows that the limits of
place are grounded in the limits of human consciousness. Places
are as diffuse and differentiated as the range of identities and sig-
nificances accorded to them. People are immersed in a world of
places which the geographical imagination aims to understand
and recover - places as contexts for human experience, construct-
ed in movement, memory, encounter and association. There may
be a strong affection for place (topophilia) or aversion (topopho-
bia), but places are always far more than points or locations,
because they have distinctive meanings and values for persons.
Personal and cultural identity is bound up with place; a topo-
analysis is one exploring the creation of self-identity through
place. Geographical experience begins in places, reaches out to
others through spaces, and creates landscapes or regions for
human existence.
Attempts have been made in the literature to generalize the
specificity of place by erecting typologies of particular kinds of
spaces through which the identities of place are constructed.
Such classifications can only act as heuristic devices, since it can
be argued that places, by their very nature, contain sedimented
meanings which resist such boxing and bracketing of their
natures and significance. The following forms of space might be
identified:
1. Somatic space
2. Perceptual space
3. Existential space
4. Architectural space
5. Cognitive space
Somatic space is a space of habitual and unselfconscious

action. It is the space of sensory experience and bodily move-
ment. An understanding of this space takes as its starting-point
the upright human body looking out on the world. Space opens
out before the body and is differentiable in terms of front/back;
left/right; vertical/horizontal; top/bottom; within reach/
beyond reach; within hearing/beyond hearing; within sight/
beyond sight; here/there polarities (Relph 1976: 9; Taun 1977:
35-50). The very physicality of the body imposes a schema on
space through which it may be experienced and understood. An
experience of space is grounded in the body itself; its capacities
and potentialities for movement. Through time-space routines of
movement a person knows where she or he is in relation to famil-
iar places and objects and 'how to go on' in the world. Lived
body-space incorporates not only habituated movement in gener-
al but also modes of walking, turning, reaching in performing
particular acts: body-ballets (Seamon 1979,1980).
Perceptual space is the egocentric space perceived and
encountered by individuals in their daily practices. The centre of
such a space is grounded in individual perception of distances
and directions, natural objects and cultural creations. This space
is always relative and qualitative. Distance and direction are per-
ceived as near or far, this way or that way, moving along one
track or another. A perceptual space is one that links patterns of
individual intentionality to bodily movement and perception. It
is a space of personality, of encounter and emotional attachment.
It is the constructed life-space of the individual, involving feel-
ings and memories giving rise to a sense of awe, emotion, won-
der or anguish in spatial encounters. Such a space may as often as
not be felt rather than verbalized. It creates personal significances
for an individual in his or her bodily routines - places remem-
bered and places of affective importance.
Perceptual space is intricately interlinked with existential
space or the lived space as it is constructed in the concrete experi-
ences of individuals socialized within a group. The meanings of
existential space transcend the individual and form a grounding
for perceptual space rather than being some kind of summation
of individualized perception. Existential space is in a constant
process of production and reproduction through the movements
and activities of members of a group. It is a mobile rather than a
passive space for experience. It is experienced and created
through life-activity, a sacred, symbolic and mythic space replete

with social meanings wrapped around buildings, objects and fea-
tures of the local topography, providing reference points and
planes of emotional orientation for human attachment and
involvement. Places in existential space are foci for the produc-
tion of meaning, intention and purpose of societal significance.
Boundaries are of major significance in structuring existential
space both in and between places and regions. Boundaries are to
do with creating distinctions and marking out social oppositions,
mapping social and cultural difference and Otherness. The pres-
ence of boundaries, obvious natural prototypes being river cours-
es, mountain chains, or rock outcrops, and the coast, may be of
major significance in delimiting territories, the choice of locales
and the networking of paths through a landscape.
Architectural space only makes sense in relation to pragmatic,
perceptual and existential space, but involves a deliberate
attempt to create and bound space, create an inside, an outside, a
way around, a channel for movement. Architecture is the deliber-
ate creation of space made tangible, visible and sensible. This is
why buildings play a fundamental role in the creation and recre-
ation, production and reproduction of existential space and have
profound structuring effects on perceptual space.
Finally, cognitive space provides a basis for reflection and the-
orization with regard to understanding the others. It is the 'space'
of this discussion and analysis.
Space can only exist as a set of relations between things or
places. In this sense there is no space that is not relational. Space
is created by social relations, natural and cultural objects. It is a
production, an achievement, rather than an autonomous reality
in which things or people are located or 'found'. Having been
constituted by things and places spatial relations affect the way in
which they relate. In other words, there is a sociospatial dialectic
at work - space is both constituted and constitutive.
Locales, Social Action
Places may, of course, be experienced and conceptualized at any

number of spatial levels, from personal space to community
space to regional space and so on. Places overlap according to
scales of action, interest, movement and concern. Place is an
irreducible part of human experience, a person is 'in place' just as

much as she or he is 'in culture'. Place is about situatedness in
relation to identity and action. In this sense place is context, and
there can be no non-contextual definition of context or place. The
specificity of space always has to be understood from a particular
viewpoint.
In small-scale non-Western societies place, defined as a centre
for action, intention and meaningful concern, can be best consid-
ered in terms of locales and the wider context in which these
locales occur - the cultural and natural landscape. Most signifi-
cant places are located or positioned in space. Locales are places
created and known through common experiences, symbols and
meanings. They may be rooms, houses, monuments, meeting-
places, camps or settlements. Locales may offer a distinct quality
of being inside, or part of, a place. People both live out their lives
in place and have a sense of being part of it. Consequently, place
is fundamental to the establishment of personal and group iden-
tities and the formation of biographies. Place is both 'internal'
and 'external' to the human subject, a personally embedded cen-
tre of meanings and a physical locus for action. All places thus
have metonymic qualities (places and their contents consist of
part-whole relations) and differential densities of meanings to
their inhabitants according to the events and actions they wit-
ness, partake in and remember. A sense of attachment to place is
frequently derived from the stability of meanings associated with
it.
The naming and identification of particular topographical
features, such as sand dunes, bays and inlets, mountain peaks,
etc., settlements and sites is crucial for the establishment and
maintenance of their identity. Through an act of naming and
through the development of human and mythological associa-
tions such places become invested with meaning and signifi-
cance. Place names are of such vital significance because they act
so as to transform the sheerly physical and geographical into
something that is historically and socially experienced. The
bestowing of names creates shared existential space out of a
blank environment (Basso 1984: 27; Weiner 1991: 32). By the
process of naming places and things they become captured in
social discourses and act as mnemonics for the historical actions
of individuals and groups. Without a name culturally significant
sites would not exist, but only as a raw void, a natural environ-
ment. In a fundamental way names create landscapes. An

unnamed place on a map is quite literally a blank space. Names
may create places of human import; but they do so in relation to
the raw material at hand. For example, the vast majority of
Western Apache place-names are lengthy and made up of
descriptions of the locations to which they refer, for example tsekd
tú yahilíí (water flows downward on top of a series of flat rocks)
or 'coarse-textured rocks lie above in a compact cluster' (Basso
1984: 28, 37). Place-names are used in Apache story-telling as sit-
uational or contextualizing devices for locating narrative events
in physical settings. The description of the setting is accom-
plished by the use of the place-name itself (see below).
From the perspective of structuration theory Giddens has
emphasized the role of locales in processes of social production
and reproduction (Giddens 1979, 1981, 1984). Structure consid-
ered as a set of rules and resources for action is the medium
through which action is produced, both enabling and constrain-
ing it. Structure is also a product of action, and is created, repro-
duced and changed through the meaningful action of agents.
Action affects structure by virtue of its temporal and spatial
specificity. Time and space are components of action rather than
containers for it. Space plays an important part in defining the
manner in which social interaction takes place and the signifi-
cance it has for agents. Locales are settings in which interaction
takes place. 'A setting is not just a spatial parameter, and physical
environment, in which interaction occurs: it is these elements
mobilized as part of the interaction. Features of the setting of
interaction, including its spatial and physical aspects ... are rou-
tinely drawn upon by social actors in the sustaining of communi-
cation' (Giddens 1979: 206). Spatial contingency and difference in
this formulation have clear effects on the manner in which agents
interrelate, but this needs to be viewed as a dialectic rather than a
causal relationship in order to avoid the pitfalls of a spatial
fetishism or an environmental determinism (Saunders 1989;
Duncan 1989). Actors draw on their settings; and the manner in
which they do so depends upon the specificity of their relation-
ship to place. In this manner locales, in the most general sense,
can be defined as a presencing of potentialities on which actors
draw in the daily conduct of their activities.
Giddens extends the usage of the term locale to include large-
scale territorial aggregations such as nation states or empires. It
thus becomes a nested concept on a sliding spatial scale, in which

distinctions between locale, locality, region, etc. become blurred.
It is far better to confine the usage of the term to the small-scale
and the specific. Locales occur in localities, regions or landscapes.
Duncan (1989) seriously questions whether there is anything
such as locality which can be meaningfully distinguished from
the non-local recounting the quip that regional geographers are
'trying to put boundaries that do not exist around regions that do
not matter' (Duncan 1989: 238). But he is writing within the con-
text of the development of a theoretical geography of the modern
world system. While we might accept that it is virtually impossi-
ble to distinguish distinctive spatial parameters of whatever
might be defined as 'locality' within contemporary Britain such a
conclusion is anachronistic and unhelpful when transferred to
the past. A sense of 'placelessness' referred to by Relph (1976)
and others in contemporary society is, in essence, to do with the
systematic erosion of locality as meaningful. This discussion
inevitably brings us to the politics of space.
The Politics of Space

If space is to be regarded as a medium for action, a resource in
which actors draw on in their activity and use for their own pur-
poses, it inevitably becomes value-laden rather than value-free
and political rather than neutral. At a high level of generality it is
possible to distinguish between essential characteristics of
Western and capitalist 'spaces' and non-Western and pre-capital-
ist 'spaces':
infinitely open different densities
desanctified sanctified
control sensuousness
surveillance / partitioning ritualized /anthropomorphic
economic cosmological
'useful' to act 'useful' to think
architectural forms resemble architecture an embodiment
each other in 'disciplinary' of myth and cosmology
space
landscape as backdrop to landscape as sedimented

action ritual form
time linear and divorced from time constitutive of rhythms
space of social action in space-time
CAPITALIST/WESTERN PRE-CAPITALIST/
SPACE NON-WESTERN SPACE
The distinctions made above might be considered dominant

trends or 'ideal types', in that it is clearly not the case that capital-
ist or Western spaces are devoid of meanings or significances (see
for example the studies in Gold and Burgess 1982; Penning-
Rosewell and Lowenthal 1986); and pre-capitalist spaces were, of
course, 'useful to act', 'economic' places equally subject to
exploitation. However, it remains the case that numerous
authors, a massive environmental lobby, and a 'green movement'
have consistently remarked on the manner in which landscapes,
buildings, places and localities in contemporary society seem to
have lost, or be in the process of losing, their value and signifi-
cance. The space created by market forces must, above all, be a
useful and rational place. Once stripped of sedimented human
meanings, considered to be purely epiphenomenal and irrele-
vant, the landscape becomes a surface or volume like any other,
open for exploitation and everywhere homogeneous in its poten-
tial exchange value for any particular project. It becomes desanc-
tified, set apart from people, myth and history, something to be
controlled and used.
Foucault (1986) remarks on the manner in which the work of
Galileo and others 'opened out' a medieval space of emplacement
in which microcosm mirrored macrocosm, the celestial providing
a map for the worldly and vice versa. In the new space thus cre-
ated the division and 'rational' utilization of space comes increas-
ingly to the fore, and in modern Western 'disciplinary' societies
(Foucault 1977) the control and distribution of people in space
becomes of central concern. The map becomes a means of
inquiry, of examination and control - electoral maps, maps of
ethnic groups, taxation maps, etc. Discipline can only be effective
through the control and structuring of space; and hence it is not
surprising that prisons resemble hospitals, which resemble
schools, and factories, which resemble prisons (Foucault 1977:
228).
Relph comments that 'the paradox of modern landscapes is

that they are dehumanising because they are excessively human-
ised. There is almost nothing in them that has not been conceived
and planned so that it will serve those human needs which can be
assessed in terms of efficiency or improved material conditions.
But there is almost nothing in them that can happen sponta-
neously, autonomously or accidentally, or which expresses
human emotions and feelings' (Relph 1981: 104). This opposition
between a past of supposed 'spontaneity' and 'freedom' and a
present of rational calculation and control seems somewhat over-
drawn. If the political qualities of a capitalist landscape relate to a
dominant cultural construction of a 'useful', disciplinary space of
social control, pre-capitalist spaces are no less invested with
forms of power, but within a qualitatively different landscape
invested with mythological understandings and ritual knowl-
edges intimately linked with bodily routines and practices.
Landscape and the Scape of Praxis
Spaces and places relationally constitute wider contexts for social

practices-landscapes. Anthropologists and archaeologists have
been interested for a long time in the relationships between peo-
ple and the landscape, conceived rather narrowly as 'environ-
mental milieu', but for the most part research has tended to focus
on functional and supposedly adaptive parameters of these rela-
tionships, with matters such as population levels, resource 'ceil-
ings' and environmental constraints. The vast majority of studies
of hunter-fisher-gatherers have tended to concentrate rather nar-
rowly on issues such as the ranges of food resources exploited,
food-getting technologies, seasonality and scheduling in relation
to settlement size, location and group composition, and degree of
mobility. In this approach myths, cosmologies and symbolism
are largely deemed irrelevant to what is really going on. What
people think about the environment has little or no affect on the
practical exigencies of having to live in it. On the other hand,
there exists a vast body of literature concerned with the analysis
of ritual performance and cosmological and social structures in
which the environment is equally irrelevant, a mere backdrop to
the unconstrained ramifications of the human mind.
A naturalistic view of landscape as a neutral backdrop to activ-

ity is clearly of recent origin in thought, an irrelevance in consid-
ering pre-capitalist landscapes, and a hindrance in their
conceptualization. It is also a highly ideological construct which
requires deconstruction even in the context of capitalist land-
scapes. A culturalist view of landscape as a highly specific, sym-
bolic and cognitive ordering of space offers far more potential in
understanding but, as Ingold argues (Ingold 1992,1993), encloses
humanity into a series of separate cultural worlds constituted as
structured sets of shared representations divorced from 'nature'
or the physical world. This external world provides a source of
raw sense data, without order or meaning and, in perception,
these data become 'detached (as "stimuli") from the environment
and attached (as "sensations") to human subjects' (Ingold 1992:
51). They are then ordered into cultural schemata. The line of
argument taken here is akin to parts of that recently advanced by
Ingold, which he terms a 'dwelling perspective'. People and envi-
ronment are constitutive components of the same world, which it
is unhelpful to think of in terms of a binary nature/culture dis-
tinction. In the perception of the world and in the consumption of
resources (utilitarian or symbolic) from that world meanings
embodied in environmental objects are drawn into the experi-
ences of subjects. Perception of the world and the constitution of
that which is important or unimportant to people does not work
in terms of a 'blank environmental slate' on which perception
and cognition sets to work, but in terms of the historicity of lived
experiences in that world. The landscape is an anonymous sculp-
tural form always already fashioned by human agency, never
completed, and constantly being added to, and the relationship
between people and it is a constant dialectic and process of struc-
turation: the landscape is both medium for and outcome of action
and previous histories of action. Landscapes are experienced in
practice, in life activities.
Ingold argues that 'the cultural construction of the environ-
ment is not so much a prelude to practical action as an (optional)
epilogue' and 'culture is a framework not for perceiving the world,
but for interpreting it, to oneself and others' (Ingold 1992: 52-3). It
seems unhelpful to polarize, as Ingold appears to do, perception
and interpretation, practical activity and the cultural work of
explication and discourse. To ask: 'Which comes first: practical
activity or cultural knowledge?' is to set up artifical barriers
between practical activities and discursive levels of conscious-

ness that go to constitute each other, neither of which is amenable
to prioritization. The cultural construction of the environment is
both 'prelude' and 'epilogue', and it does not necessarily involve
'explication' or 'discourse', as Ingold assumes.
Features of the natural landscape may be held to have provid-
ed a symbolic resource of the utmost significance to prehistoric
populations. A number of ethnographies of small-scale societies,
discussed in Chapter 2, of both hunter-gatherers and subsistence
cultivators, indicate that rather than simply providing a back-
drop for human action the natural landscape is a cognized form
redolent with place names, associations and memories that serve
to humanize and enculture landscape, linking together topo-
graphical features, trees, rocks, rivers, birds and animals with
patterns of human intentionality. Significant locations become
crystallized out of the environment through the production and
recognition of meanings in particular places and through events
that have taken place. Humanized places become fashioned out
of the landscape through the recognition of significant qualities
in that which has not in itself been culturally produced (rocks,
rivers, trees, etc.) by association with current use, past social
actions or actions of a mythological character.
It is important not to forget that the contemporary term 'land-
scape' is highly ideological. Cosgrove and Daniels define land-
scape as 'a cultural image, a pictorial way of representing,
structuring or symbolising surroundings' (Cosgrove and Daniels
1988: 1). Such an image may be structured on canvas, in writing
and on the ground through earth, stone and vegetation.
Landscapes, in this rather limited definition, are images which
are created and read, verbal or non-verbal texts. Raymond
Williams (1973:120) notes that the very idea of landscape implies
separation and observation. A concern with landscape is one of
patrician control manifested in landscape painting, writing, gar-
dening and architecture. Cosgrove (1984) locates the origins of
the idea of landscape in early capitalist Italian Renaissance city
states: the city gives birth simultaneously to capitalism and land-
scape. Landscape is a particular way of seeing, the linear tech-
niques of perspective developed in landscape painting at this
time to create a 'realistic' image parallel the development of prac-
tices such as cartography, astronomy, land surveying and map-
ping involving formal geometrical rules. The whole notion of
landscape, Cosgrove argues, propagates a visual ideology mask-

ing the social forces and relations of production, relations of
exploitation and alienation.
Yet in a seemingly contradictory fashion Cosgrove also extols
the virtues of landscape as concept and image:
landscape is a uniquely valuable concept for a humane geography.
Unlike place it reminds us of our position in the scheme of nature.
Unlike environment or space it reminds us that only through human
consciousness and reason is that scheme known to us, and only
through technique can we participate as humans in it. At the same
time landscape reminds us that geography is everywhere, that it is a
constant source of beauty and ugliness, of right and wrong and joy
and suffering, as much as it is of profit and loss' (Cosgrove 1989:122).
Daniels (1989), discussing the work of Williams and Berger in

relation to landscape and its representation through artworks,
brings out a similar tension in their relation to the concept.
Representations of landscape have the potential to both obscure
and articulate lived experience. In other words landscape as
image has both ideological and ontological implications for the
way in which we think about the world. Daniels rightly con-
cludes that 'we should beware of attempts to define landscape, to
resolve its contradictions; rather we should abide in its duplicity'
(Daniels 1989: 218).
It is the ontological connotations of landscape stressed by
Cosgrove, in the passage cited above, that make it important to
retain the term, to abide in the duplicity of using it at all. As
should be clear from the preceding discussions, I reject a notion
of landscape as inhering solely in the form of mental representa-
tion and cognition. By 'landscape' I want instead to refer to the
physical and visual form of the earth as an environment and as a
setting in which locales occur and in dialectical relation to which
meanings are created, reproduced and transformed. The appear-
ance of a landscape is something that is substantial and capable of
being described in terms of relief, topography, the flows of con-
tours and rivers, coasts, rocks and soils, and so on. It is most usu-
ally clearly defined features, such as mountain peaks, ridges,
bogs and plains, that occur in geographical descriptions. The
locales in a landscape may be natural features such as bays or
inlets on a coastline or high points, or humanly created places
such as monuments or settlements. Humanly created locales, I
want to argue in this book, draw on qualities of landscape to cre-

ate part of their significance for those who use them, and the per-
ception of the landscape itself may be fundamentally affected by
the very situatedness of these locales. A fundamental part of
daily experience in non-industrial societies is the physical and
biological experience of landscape - earth, water, wood, stone,
high places and low places, the wind, rain, sun, stars and sky. The
rhythms of the land and the seasons correspond to and are
worked into the rhythms of life. A landscape has ontological
import because it is lived in and through, mediated, worked on
and altered, replete with cultural meaning and symbolism - and
not just something looked at or thought about, an object merely
for contemplation, depiction, representation and aestheticization.
Powers of Place
Precisely because locales and their landscapes are drawn on in

the day-to-day lives and encounters of individuals they possess
powers. The spirit of a place may be held to reside in a landscape.
Familiarity with the land, being able to read and decode its signs
allows individuals to know 'how to go on' at a practical level of
consciousness or one that may be discursively formulated.
People routinely draw on their stocks of knowledge of the land-
scape and the locales in which they act to give meaning, assur-
ance and significance to their lives. The place acts dialectically so
as to create the people who are of that place. These qualities of
locales and landscapes give rise to a feeling of belonging and
rootedness and a familiarity, which is not born just out of knowl-
edge, but of concern that provides ontological security. They give
rise to a power to act and a power to relate that is both liberating
and productive.
The relationship of individuals and groups to locales and land-
scape also has important perspectival effects. The experience of
these places is unlikely to be equally shared and experienced by
all, and the understanding and use of them can be controlled and
exploited in systems of domination - a consideration strikingly
absent in virtually all phenomenological theory and one that con-
stitutes a major theoretical void. In small-scale societies the major
axes of spatial domination are usually organized along the axes
of age, gender, kin, and lineage. Knowledge and experience of
particular locales and tracts of the landscape may be restricted

and hidden from particular individuals and groups. The powers
of spatial experience are clearly related to the manner in which
they are realized, to whom, when and how. Features of the set-
tings of social interaction may constitute 'disciplinary' spaces
through which knowledge is controlled or acquired in a highly
structured manner. The ability to control access to and manipu-
late particular settings for action is a fundamental feature of the
operation of power as domination.
Time, Memory and Movement
Human activities become inscribed within a landscape such that

every cliff, large tree, stream, swampy area becomes a familiar
place. Daily passages through the landscape become biographic
encounters for individuals, recalling traces of past activities and
previous events and the reading of signs - a split log here, a
marker stone there.
All locales and landscapes are therefore embedded in the
social and individual times of memory. Their pasts as much as
their spaces are crucially constitutive of their presents. Neither
space nor time can be understood apart from social practices
which serve to bind them together. The human experience of
encountering a new place or knowing how to act or go on in a
familiar place is intimately bound up with previous experiences.
Places are always 'read' or understood in relation to others.
While places and movement between them are intimately related
to the formation of personal biographies, places themselves may
be said to acquire a history, sedimented layers of meaning by
virtue of the actions and events that take place in them. Personal
biographies, social identities and a biography of place are inti-
mately connected. Memories of previous moves in a landscape
are as essential to understanding as they are in playing a game of
chess. Remembrance is a process solidified from things and spa-
tial encounters. Movement in the world always involves a loss of
place, but the gaining of a fragment of time. It sets up a series of
expectations for the paths of the future. Memories continually
provide modifications to a sense of place which can never be
exactly the same place twice, although there may be ideological
attempts to provide 'stability' or perceptual and cognitive fixity
to a place, to reproduce sets of dominant meanings, understand-

ings, representations and images.
There is an art of moving in the landscape, a right way (social-
ly constrained) to move around in it and approach places and
monuments. Part of the sense of place is the action of approach-
ing it from the 'right' (socially prescribed) direction. To mention
just one example here, the Gabbra camel herders of the
Kenyan-Ethiopian borderlands undertake ritual pilgrimages and
perform periodic rituals at holy mountain sites surrounded by
plains. These jila journeys are a return to the origin sites of indi-
vidual Gabbra lineages. The journeys establish spatial linkages
between different mountains or mountain peaks and given lin-
eages. Through the journey the lineage becomes 'mapped' in the
terrain. The shortest route to a ritual mountain from any point on
the plain is not taken but rather a prescribed walk in which it can
be approached and seen from the propitious direction (Schlee
1992).
A walk is always a combination of places and times- seasonal
and social times. De Certeau (1984: Part III) has described an art
of walking which is simultaneously an art of thinking and an art
of practice or operating in the world. Movement through space
constructs 'spatial stories', forms of narrative understanding.
This involves a continuous presencing of previous experiences in
present contexts. Spatial knowledge requires the coupling of an
accumulated time of memory to overcome an initially hostile and
alienating encounter with a new place. Flashes of memory, so to
speak, illuminate the occasion.
Pedestrian 'speech acts' may be likened to the speech acts of
language. Walking is a process of appropriation of the topo-
graphical system, as speaking is an appropriation of language. It
is a spatial acting out of place, as the speech act is an acoustic
acting out of language. Walking, like language use, implies rela-
tionality in terms of an overall system of differences. It is a move-
ment with reference to a differentiated series of locales, just as
language is constituted as a system of differences between signs -
'dog' is dog because it is not cat, and so on (de Certeau 1984: 98).
A spatial order of walking can be characterized in terms of an
order of possibilities - various ways in which an actor can move,
and a series of restrictions, for example walls or other boundaries
inhibiting passage. A walker actualizes only some of the possibil-
ities, which may be relatively open or closed in terms of the over-
all 'grammatical' system. These possibilities remain only as

potentialities in so far as they only exist in the act of their realiza-
tion through movement in the world. Through movement parts
of the system - places or paths - are ignored, condemned to iner-
tia, while others are activated through use or presence. De
Certeau goes further than this to refer to a 'rhetoric' and 'tropes'
of walking, which can be likened to turns of phrase. An art of
'turning phrases' provides an analogy for an individual's follow-
ing or diverging from paths; both of them constituting ways of
being, thinking and operating in the world. Synecdoche is an art
of speaking in which a part stands for a whole (sail for ship, tree
for forest, monument for landscape). In walking a street may sub-
stitute for a community, a path for a network of paths. The part is
expanded into something more, a totality. Asyndeton, an art of
speaking involving the suppression of linking words such as con-
junctions between or within sentences, finds a spatial expression
in the cutting out of places. Synecdoche then creates spatial den-
sities; asyndeton undermines or cuts through continuities.
A space treated in this way and shaped by practices is transformed

into enlarged singularities and separate islands. Through these
swellings, shrinkages, and fragmentations, that is through these
rhetorical operations a spatial phrasing of an analogical (composed of
juxtaposed citations) and elliptical (made of gaps, lapses and allu-
sions) type is created. For the technological system of a coherent and
totalizing space that is 'linked' and simultaneous, the figures of
pedestrian rhetoric substitute trajectories ... [which are a] stylistic
metamorphosis of space (de Certeau 1984:101-2).
The important aspect of this argument is its revelation of an art

of walking as simultaneously an art of consciousness, habit and
practice, that is both constrained by place and landscape and con-
stitutive of them. Walking is the medium and outcome of a spa-
tial practice, a mode of existence in the world. The analogy can be
taken further in the consideration of paths.
Paths, Inscriptions, Temporality
If writing solidifies or objectifies speech into a material medium,

a text, which can be read and interpreted, an analogy can be
drawn between a pedestrian speech act and its inscription or
writing on the ground in the form of the path or track. Both are
sedimented traces of activity, and both provide ways to be fol-
lowed. A strong path is inscribed through a forest or across a tract
of heathland through a multitude of pedestrian speech acts that
keep it open; a strong text is also one that is kept open, read many
times. Just as the writing of a text is dependent on previous texts
(it has the characteristic of intertextuality), the creation or mainte-
nance of a path is dependent on a previous networking of move-
ments in particular, and reiterated directions through a
landscape; it works in relation to a previous set of precedents.
The metaphor of the path is a common one in many small-
scale societies, and refers beyond itself to patterns of activity and
social organization. A path may be a way of doing something as
method, technique, pattern or strategy. In Oceania and Indonesia
fishing techniques, oratorical skills, patterns of exchange and
strategies of warfare are also termed 'paths'. Paths are also fun-
damentally to do with establishing and maintaining social link-
ages and relations between individuals, groups and political
units. Social paths and the paths followed through the forest may
become overgrown through lack of use in any particular (physi-
cal or social) direction.
Parmentier (1987: 109-11) notes three general features of the
semantic fields of paths on the island of Belau derived from
reflections on movements made along them. First, points linked
by a clear path have achieved a degree of structural homology
and hence positive cultural identity. The points linked by paths
share sets of common elements - sacred stones, trees, artefact
depositions, names and titles referred to in myths and stories and
linked to the activities of ancestors who stopped on the journey
which created the path. Second, linked places on paths can be
understood in terms of sequential precedence, a hierarchy of
ancestral origin points from which paths radiate to others.
Priority in time is linked to the ceremonial precedence and power
of places linked by paths. Third, paths structure experiences of
the places they link, they help to establish a sense of linear order.
A path brings forth possibilities for repeated actions within pre-
scribed confines. Only a high-ranking or wealthy person is likely
to be daring enough to invent a path or plant a relationship not
established before. Such action is most usually the domain of the
gods or heroic ancestors. Expert knowledge of ancient paths is

part of the responsibility of chiefs who can harness great power
by narrating stories recounting previous patterns of ancestral
movements (ibid.: 114-15).
A journey along a path can be claimed to be a paradigmatic
cultural act, since it is following in the steps inscribed by others
whose steps have worn a conduit for movement which becomes
the correct or 'best way to go'. Spatiotemporal linkages thus
established become obvious templates for future movements and
the maintenance of relationships. Linked places along the journey
may be read in terms of temporal relationships of precedence and
power. There is usually a good reason for following in a particu-
lar direction linking places in a serial trajectory, and the more
people who have shared in the purpose of the path the more
important it becomes. Paths form an essential medium for the
routing of social relations, connecting up spatial impressions
with temporally inscribed memories.
Spatial Stories, Landscape and the Arts of Narrative
In movement on a path through the landscape something is con-

stantly slipping away and something is constantly gained in a
relational tactile world of impressions, signs, sights, smells and
physical sensations. To understand a landscape truly it must be
felt, but to convey some of this feeling to others it has to be talked
about, recounted, or written and depicted. In the process of
movement a landscape unfolds or unravels before an observer.
Beyond one chain of hills another is revealed; the view from a
locale makes sense of its positioning. The importance and signifi-
cance of a place can only be appreciated as part of movement
from and to it in relation to others, and the act of moving may be
as important as that of arriving. The path may be a symbol not
only of interconnectedness and social relations but of movement
through life. If places are read and experienced in relation to
others and through serial movement along the axes of paths it
follows that an art of understanding of place, movement and
landscape must fundamentally be a narrative understanding
involving a presencing of previous experiences in present
contexts. Spatial and textual stories are embedded in one another.
Narrative structure and emplotment can easily be claimed to

have ontological significance for human existence, to be as uni-
versal as language itself. It is precisely because narrative is seem-
ingly so 'natural' a part of human existence that it is both an
important resource for analysis and understanding and some-
thing whose non-critical use as merely description is something to
be wary of. A critical understanding of spatial narrative requires
that we investigate precisely why we prefer some plots or config-
urations of things rather than others. In other words attention
must be played to the manner in which the story is creatively
orchestrated, how it guides, and what it passes through.
Narrative is a means of understanding and describing the
world in relation to agency. It is a means of linking locales, land-
scapes, actions, events and experiences together providing a syn-
thesis of heterogeneous phenomena. In its simplest form it
involves a story and a story-teller. In its mimetic or phenomeno-
logical form narrative seeks to capture action not just through
description but as a form of re-description. Events are given
meaning through their configuration into a whole requiring the
emplotment of action. A narrative must of necessity always be
written from a certain point of view. In relation to the past and
written from the standpoint of the present, narrative structures
play a similar role to metaphor - they describe the world in fresh
ways, bringing new meanings and new senses, and the produc-
tivity is, in principle, endless. Ricoeur (1983) rightly emphasizes
the poetic qualities of narratives in producing configurations of
events and objects that go far beyond a simple matter of succes-
sion, i.e. this occurs after or because of that.
De Certeau (1984) points out that every story not only involves
some kind of temporal movement, but is also a spatial practice.
Stories organize walks, making a journey as the feet perform it,
organizing places by means of the displacements that are
described. They are part of a human labour that transforms an
abstract homogeneous space into place - 'you go round the cor-
ner, turn left and you'll see...'. In other words the story is a dis-
cursive articulation of a spatializing practice, a bodily itinerary
and routine. Spatial stories are about the operations and practices
which constitute places and locales. The map, by contrast,
involves a stripping away of these things: 'it alone remains on the
Stage. The tour describers have dissappeared´ (de Certeau 184
121). If stories are linked with regularly repeated spatial prac-

tices they become mutually supportive, and when a story
becomes sedimented into the landscape, the story and the place
dialectically help to construct and reproduce each other. Places
help to recall stories that are associated with them, and places
only exist (as named locales) by virtue of their emplotment in a
narrative. Places, like persons, have biographies inasmuch as
they are formed, used and transformed in relation to practice. It
can be argued that stories acquire part of their mythic value and
historical relevance if they are rooted in the concrete details of
locales in the landscape, acquiring material reference points that
can be visited, seen and touched.
If naming is an act of construction of landscape, constituting
an origin point for it, then narratives introduce temporality, mak-
ing locales markers of individual and group experiences. Basso
(1984), in an excellent paper, demonstrates how individual
Apaches experience oral narratives: 'the land is always stalking
people. The land makes people live right' (Annie Peaches, cited
in Basso 1984: 21). Narratives establish bonds between people
and features of the landscape such as mountains, creating moral
guidance for activity. Both land and language are equally sym-
bolic resources drawn on to foster correct social behaviour and
values. In narratives geographical features of the landscape act as
mnemonic pegs on which moral teachings hang. The landscape is
full of named locations that act so as to fuse time and space.
Through the use of historical tales events are located at named
points, and the tales themselves are about correct codes of moral
conduct. 'Shooting someone with a story' is relating a historical
tale about misconduct that reflects back on their misdemeanours,
a tale that becomes anchored in space through specifying a
named geographical location where the event took place. Stories
are intimately connected with physical places on the land, fused
with geological elements: 'you cannot live in that land without
asking or looking at or noticing a boulder or rock. And there's
always a story' (Silko 1981: 69, cited in Basso 1984). Features of
the landscape become deeply symbolic of cultural lifeworlds,
omnipresent moral forces rather than mere physical presences
(Basso 1984: 46). Through narratives conceptions of the land
affect the way in which the Apache think of themselves and vice
versa.
Conclusion
A landscape is a series of named locales, a set of relational places

linked by paths, movements and narratives. It is a 'natural'
topography perspectivally linked to the existential Being of the
body in societal space. It is a cultural code for living, an anony-
mous 'text' to be read and interpreted, a writing pad for inscrip-
tion, a scape of and for human praxis, a mode of dwelling and a
mode of experiencing. It is invested with powers, capable of
being organized and choreographed in relation to sectional inter-
ests, and is always sedimented with human significances. It is
story and telling, temporality and remembrance. Landscape is a
signifying system through which the social is reproduced and
transformed, explored and structured - process organized.
Landscape, above all, represents a means of conceptual ordering
that stresses relations. The concept emphasizes a conventional
means of doing so, the stress is on similarity to control the under-
mining nature of difference, of multivocal code, found in the con-
cepts of place or locale. A concept of place privileges difference
and singularity; a concept of landscape is more holistic, acting so
as to encompass rather than exclude. It is to a discussion of vari-
ous ways in which landscapes may be organized that the next
chapter turns.
208 References
areas, differences in the composition of these scatters- waste,

flakes, cores, microlith forms and discarded tools would act so as
to recall memories of previous visits, activities, events and sea-
sons. Reading these signs from places visited by previous genera-
tions Mesolithic archaeologists would also be able to infer, like
the contemporary archaeologist, the types of activities that had
taken place.
What happens in the Neolithic is the constitution of a different
sense of time, place and social identity, through monument
building, and also by means of the herding of domesticates on
pathways across the land. Cultural markers are being used to cre-
ate a new sense of place, harnessed to legitimize patterns of social
control relating to restricting access to knowledges deemed
essential to group reproduction, while continuing to make refer-
ence or lay claim to already established ancestral connections
with, and pathways through, the landscape. An already encul-
tured landscape becomes refashioned, its meanings now con-
trolled by the imposition of the cultural form of the constructed
monument.
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

ISBN 0 85496 919 5 (Cloth)

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Introduction: Spatial Science to Humanized Space

materialist, rational idealist, irrational

New geography and new archaeology considered space as an

The linkages between new geography and new archaeology

than being uniform and forever the same, is constituted by differ-

The key issue in any phenomenological approach is the manner

Phenomenology involves the understanding and description of

I have let Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty set the scene. From

the human body provides the fundamental mediation point

Space and Place

If space allows movement, place is pause (Taun 1977: 6).

day-to-day experiences and consciousness of people within par-

Somatic space is a space of habitual and unselfconscious

through life-activity, a sacred, symbolic and mythic space replete

Locales, Social Action

Places may, of course, be experienced and conceptualized at any

irreducible part of human experience, a person is 'in place' just as

ment. In a fundamental way names create landscapes. An

thus becomes a nested concept on a sliding spatial scale, in which

The Politics of Space

landscape as backdrop to landscape as sedimented

The distinctions made above might be considered dominant

Relph comments that 'the paradox of modern landscapes is

Landscape and the Scape of Praxis

Spaces and places relationally constitute wider contexts for social

A naturalistic view of landscape as a neutral backdrop to activ-

between practical activities and discursive levels of conscious-

landscape, Cosgrove argues, propagates a visual ideology mask-

Daniels (1989), discussing the work of Williams and Berger in

want to argue in this book, draw on qualities of landscape to cre-

Precisely because locales and their landscapes are drawn on in

particular locales and tracts of the landscape may be restricted

Time, Memory and Movement

Human activities become inscribed within a landscape such that

to a place, to reproduce sets of dominant meanings, understand-

all 'grammatical' system. These possibilities remain only as

A space treated in this way and shaped by practices is transformed

The important aspect of this argument is its revelation of an art

Paths, Inscriptions, Temporality

If writing solidifies or objectifies speech into a material medium,

gods or heroic ancestors. Expert knowledge of ancient paths is

Spatial Stories, Landscape and the Arts of Narrative

In movement on a path through the landscape something is con-

Narrative structure and emplotment can easily be claimed to

121). If stories are linked with regularly repeated spatial prac-

A landscape is a series of named locales, a set of relational places

areas, differences in the composition of these scatters- waste,

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