Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology - Space

Games

Felix Stein — Tue, 07 May 2019 15:54:36 +0000

Independent scholar

Initially published 7 May 2019

Abstract:

Though there is no universally accepted definition for what constitutes a ‘game’, games are typically defined as goal-oriented, rules-based activities closely associated with the notion of ‘play’. In anthropology, though seldom the primary focus of a monograph, games can serve as a window into the broader lives and valuations of their players. More practically, they can also be excellent vehicles for conducting participant-observation and building rapport with interlocutors. The three sections of this entry seek to provide a general overview of anthropological insights into the world of games. The first section covers attempts to define games as a concept. The second section asks what makes games meaningful. The third section examines anthropological approaches to the most recent major development in the world of games: the rise of digital games.

Games as a concept

The arenas that mark archaeological sites—like The Great Ballcourt of Chichen Itza or the Colosseum of Rome—and board games whose lineage can be traced back thousands of years—like Senet, Go, Mancala, and backgammon—are testaments to games’ longstanding place in human history. Games can also have strong geographic linkages. Global spectacles like the Olympic Games and World Cup draw participants and billions of spectators from most of the world’s nations. Some games, like cricket throughout much of the British Commonwealth, can make manifest linkages between distant nations. Other games, like the Sri Lankan board game Carrom or the Finnish ball game Pesäpallo, are played primarily within the borders of particular nation-states. Games are played by people of different ages and walks of life: from hopscotch in the schoolyard to bridge in retirement homes, and from improvised football to exclusive polo.

Although games are widespread and familiar to many of the world’s peoples, providing a compelling, overarching definition for what constitutes ‘a game’ has proved difficult. Rules are widely seen as an important component of games (e.g. Huizinga 1949; Caillois 1961; Suits 1967; Avedon & Sutton-Smith 1981; Meier 1995; Suits 1995; Salen & Zimmerman 2003). But of course, rules govern many aspects of human life and are not restricted to games alone. What ostensibly sets the rules of a game apart from other rules-based activities is not just the special reasons for which these rules are constructed, but also the players’ attitude toward those rules. As Bernard Suits, who spent much of his career working on a universal definition of games, put it:

To play a game is to attempt to achieve a specific state of affairs [prelusory goal], using only means permitted by rules [lusory means], where the rules prohibit use of more efficient in favour of less efficient means [constitutive rules], and where the rules are accepted just because they make possible such activity [lusory attitude] (2005: 54-5).

Suits connects his definition of games to a particular way of playing them (i.e. ‘the lusory attitude’). He does not, for example, consider those who cheat to be adopting a lusory attitude and thus does not consider them to be playing the game (2005: 25). Yet, as Angela Schneider points out, games seldom play out so neatly in practice: some players might play by the rules, but others will not; some players will be invested in the game, but others might not be (2001). Nonetheless, for Schneider, a game like rugby is still a game even if the motivations for playing and adherence to the rules differ from player to player. When it comes to adhering to a game’s rules, Schneider contends ‘[e]thically we should of course, but logically we needn’t’ (2001: 158). As we shall see in more detail throughout this entry, the diverse reasons people have for playing games and the different ways in which they go about negotiating a game’s rules are where games can take on their most important meaning.

Anthropologists have offered many insightful analyses of the extent of the relationships between games and play. For example, David Graeber has theorised that play is unpredictable, whereas games are clearly defined by rules (Graeber 2015). For Graeber, what is special about a game’s rules vis-à-vis the rules of propriety in regular life is that the rules of a game are easily discernible at any given moment, and thus present a ‘utopia of rules’. Thomas Malaby, one of the most prominent anthropologists writing on the subject of games and play, has posited his own definition of games—‘[a] game is a semibounded and socially legitimate domain of contrived contingency that generates interpretable outcomes’ (2007: 96)—and has praised efforts to

decouple playful experience from a determinate relationship with games, just as scholars of ritual (many of them anthropologists) have recognized ritual as a cultural form irrespective of whether it brings about religious experience (2009a: 212).

Malaby’s ‘decoupling’ stance is not intended as an outright separation of games and play, but rather, akin to the point made by Schneider, is meant to point out that the two concepts need not necessarily go hand in hand. The strength of Malaby’s approach is that it leaves the door open for interchange between anthropological work on games and anthropological work on play—such as that of Gregory Bateson (1987)—without fusing them into the same category.

Indeed, anthropological work on games and play, respectively, has greatly helped to refine understandings of games. For example, Roger Caillois, one of the twentieth century’s best-known theorists of games and play, emphasised the role of games as playful activities largely outside the sphere of economic productivity. As he put it, ‘[a]t the end of the game, all can and must start over at the same point. Nothing has been harvested or manufactured, no masterpiece has been created, no capital has accrued’ (1961: 5). However, subsequent anthropological work on play, like that of David Lancy amongst the Kpelle—who, Lancy found, see work and play not as mutually exclusive but as components of all human endeavours—has compellingly questioned a hard work/play binary (1980). Meanwhile, ethnographic work on certain games, like T.L. Taylor’s account of professional digital games players (2012), shows that there are most definitely games in which capital is accrued and all does not start over at the same point. It is in no small part because of these anthropological efforts that hard divisions like Caillois’ between games and work have now largely been abandoned by theorists of games and play. As Jesper Juul, a leading scholar within the relatively new field of games studies, explains, ‘both are clearly not perfect boundaries, but rather fuzzy areas under constant negotiation’ (2003: 4).

Anthropologists have compellingly argued that games and play are distinct, if often related, concepts. However, many who read about games in the English language will likely find this position discordant with the existence of games and play as interrelated words. As Johan Huizinga—a scholar to whose seminal work Homo ludens nearly all subsequent theorists of games and play make reference—noted, this connection seems inexorable: one plays a game (1949: 37). How might we reconcile these two facts? While Huizinga claims that ‘you do not “do” a game as you “do” or “go” fishing, or hunting […] you “play” it’ (1949: 37), it might actually be useful to think of the English term ‘to play a game’ in the sense of how one does a game (just as one sings a song or drives a car) in order to better distinguish between various ways in which people approach games. Thus one might play a game playfully—or angrily, or reluctantly—just as one might drive a car playfully, or angrily, or reluctantly.

Similarly, it can at times be useful to take a step back from efforts to precisely define games, and instead use a broader conceptualization of what games are. One prominent example of such a move comes from the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who said of the various types of games:

…we see a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing: sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities of detail.

I can think of no better expression to characterize these similarities than “family resemblances”; for the various resemblances between members of a family: build, features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament, etc. etc. overlap and criss-cross in the same way—And I shall say: ‘games’ form a family (1986: 31-2).

Wittgenstein by no means had the last word on games, a fact to which the subsequent accounts of Caillois, Suits, and others is testament. However, his description accords well with the implicit approach of most anthropologists to games, whose preoccupation—like when handling most subjects—is less with providing a universally tenable definition of games, and more with discerning what is meaningful about the particular games in which their interlocutors partake.

Indeed, some of the most insightful discussions of games within anthropology emerge when particular games are described in contradistinction to related themes. For example, Arjun Appadurai has examined the enduring popularity of cricket in postcolonial India as an example of decolonization being a ‘dialogue with the colonial past’ rather than a ‘dismantling of colonial habits and modes of life’ (Appadurai 1995). Roberte Hamayon, Harry Walker, and Ted Leyenaar have all shown how games can both impact and reflect relations between Indigenous peoples and the state (Leyenaar 1992; Walker 2013; Hamayon 2016). Leyenaar, for example, studied the ancient Mesoamerican ball game Ulama in contemporary Mexico and found that, like many of the Indigenous peoples who created and developed the game, Ulama had been pushed to the margins of the Mexican state. Victor Turner and others have made productive comparisons between ritual and games—for Turner, for example, both are notable for how they place their participants (and potential observers) in a transitional state that falls outside normal life (Turner 1982; Seligman et al. 2008). Ellen Oxfeld has studied Mahjong amongst Chinese entrepreneurs in Calcutta and found the nature of the game, with its risks and rewards, similar to the nature of her interlocutors’ business endeavours (Oxfeld 1993). Loïc Wacquant has discussed boxing and race in Chicago’s Southside neighbourhood, where for his interlocutors the order of a boxer’s regimen stood as a counterpart to the disorder many experienced in their lives outside the gym (Wacquant 2004). And Robertson Allen, T.J. Cornell, and T.B. Allen have examined the relationships between war and games – including those specifically made to acclimatise citizens to the military (Cornell & Allen 2002; Allen 2017).

This is not to say that in such accounts games are relegated to mere foils for understanding more important concepts; just as games can help to hone our understandings of other phenomena, these phenomena can help to hone our understanding of games. Such a fact has been famously displayed by Claude Lévi-Strauss in his comparison of games and ritual:

[a]ll games are defined by a set of rules which in practice allow the playing of any number of matches. Ritual, which is also ‘played’, is on the other hand, like a favoured instance of a game, remembered from among the possible ones because it is the only one which results in a particular type of equilibrium between the two sides. The transposition is readily seen in the case of the Gahuku-Gama of New Guinea who have learnt football but who will play, several days running, as many matches as are necessary for both sides to reach the same score (1962: 20).

What makes games meaningful?

Both the games an anthropologist chooses to focus on and what she or he reads into them can have significant implications. It goes without saying that not all games are equally meaningful, and one of the tasks facing anthropologists and others interested in analyzing games is figuring out how to parse the myriad varieties of games often on display. For example, Huizinga contended that ‘[s]olitary play is productive of culture only in a limited degree’ (1949: 47) and that it is the ‘play-community’ formed between players that gives games their social importance (1949: 17-8). Though much of Huizinga’s work has been critiqued by subsequent scholars of games, almost all of them focus on multiplayer games as sources for meaningful play—a point which takes on new importance with the rise of digital games, as we shall see in the next section. Monetary stakes are another way in which games can be meaningful to their players. Indeed, much of the anthropological literature on games focuses on those in which money is at stake (see, for example, the entry on gambling in this encyclopedia). Nonetheless, anthropologists have compellingly argued that money alone is seldom what makes games meaningful.

Likely the most famous such example, and perhaps the best-known account of a game within anthropology, comes from Clifford Geertz’s account of the Balinese cockfight. In Geertz’s analysis, the cockfight is not a mere spectacle upon which the Balinese wager vast sums of money, but a process through which ‘the Balinese forms and discovers his temperament and his society’s temper at the same time’ (1973: 451). Framed as such, the cockfight is meaningful for how it perpetuates the traditions and valuations of the past. Moreover, Geertz’s presence at one particular unsanctioned cockfight meant that he was also present for the police action which broke it up: by fleeing with the rest of the participants and hiding out alongside some of them, he finally established a convivial rapport with his interlocutors (1973: 415-6). While the fame of Geertz’s rendition of the cockfight might make it seem like it was the only game in town, Geertz’s own account shows otherwise. As he notes, in his field site there was a ‘sociomoral hierarchy’ of players and games:

At most cockfights there are, around the very edges of the cockfight area, a large number of mindless, sheer-chance type gambling games (roulette, dice throw, coin-spin, pea-under-the shell) operated by concessionaires. Only women, children, adolescents, and various other sorts of people who do not (or not yet) fight cocks—the extremely poor, the socially despised, the personally idiosyncratic—play at these games, at, of course, penny ante levels. Cockfighting men would be ashamed to go anywhere near them (1973: 435).

Geertz’s decision to focus on the cockfight gave us an arresting view into his field site. But one must wonder whether these other games were as meaningless as he made them out to be, or whether a closer look at them might have revealed a different type of ethnography more sensitive to the daily lives and valuations of Balinese who were not elite men. Indeed, children’s games have featured as a specific point of focus in other ethnographic accounts, from Stewart Culin’s writings about cat’s cradle amongst North American indigenous peoples (1907: 761-80), to Mizuko Ito’s work on digital games amongst Japanese and American schoolchildren (2009).

Newer anthropological accounts of games tend to criticise approaches like Geertz’s. Malaby, for example, critiques Geertz’s analysis of the cockfight because

[t]his treatment of a game…trades one kind of reductionism for another. In his zeal to trump whatever material stakes were in play with the different stakes of meaning-making, Geertz eliminated from consideration any consequence beyond the affirmation of meaning. On his view, games become static appraisals of an unchanging social order; and thereby one element that is vital for any understanding of the experience of play is lost. That element is the indeterminacy of games, and the way in which, by being indeterminate in their outcomes, they encapsulate (albeit in a contrived fashion) the open-endedness of everyday life (2009a: 207, 208)

The structure of Malaby’s argument is reminiscent of Lévi-Strauss’ distinction between ritual and games. In this case, Geertz appears to have inverted game and ritual by interpreting the cockfight ‘like a favoured instance of a game’ (i.e. Lévi-Strauss’ ritual) rather than as an actual game which might have different outcomes from one instance to the next. This, however, begs the question of whether the Balinese cockfight is really best considered a game, a ritual, or some combination of the two.

It is worth noting the work of Anthony Pickles for how it manages to highlight both the perpetuation of tradition found in accounts like Geertz’s, and the potential for changes to social order found in accounts like Malaby’s. Pickles offers a fascinating account of two card-based gambling games in Goroka, Papua New Guinea. One game, called kwin (queen), is strategic and slow-paced, slow to adopt changes in rules, and popular amongst older players, while the other game, called bom (bomb), is faster-paced, part of a quickly changing genre of games, and popular amongst younger players (Pickles 2014). Pickles’ dual focus allows us to see in kwin one game that is akin to Geertz’s interpretation of the cockfight, and in bom another which has more in common with newer anthropological interest in the negotiability of games. Crucially, meaning here is found not just in these respective games and what they stand for, but in the tension between them and their respective players—a point worth bearing in mind for anthropologists who encounter several distinct, prominent games in one field site.

Pickles’ account of bom shows us how new rules and new games can be created in a relatively short period of time. But it is also worth remembering Schneider’s aforementioned point that, while games may have a set of rules, these are not always universally and perfectly adhered to. Rather, rules are constantly susceptible to being undermined or renegotiated by their players, either inadvertently, as in a new player making an error out of ignorance, or purposefully, as in cases of cheating (Consalvo 2005, 2007, 2009). This process is not the corruption of games so much as it is an essential and important part of them. In other words, games are not just meaningful for the potential actions that their rules dictate, but for how players choose to go about adjudicating disputes about those rules. For example, Linda Hughes, studying American schoolgirls who play the ball game foursquare, finds that the game serves not simply as a playful pastime for the children, but also helps them to learn lifelong skills like problem solving and teamwork (1991, 1999). Indeed, in many games, adjudication of the rules is handled by the players themselves; think, for example, of playing a board game with friends.

When the financial or physical stakes of a game rise (and especially when both happen at once), very often adjudication shifts from the players themselves to a third party responsible for ensuring both safety and fairness. Think of the referees in many games typically referred to as ‘sports’, such as football or boxing, or the presence of dealers in casinos. As Geertz notes, the cockfight too has its ‘umpire (saja komong; djuru kembar)…[whose] authority is absolute’ (1973: 423, 424). The presence of a third-party adjudicator does not necessarily mean that a game is more meaningful than a game adjudicated by its players, but it can have important implications. For example, compare two different instances of the game football: one is a professional match with a referee, the other is a pickup match played in a public park. In professional football, the practice of ‘simulation’ or ‘diving’ is commonplace. It involves players exaggerating or outright feigning the effects of physical contact from opposing players in the hopes that the referee will be fooled and call a foul against the opposing team. In pickup football, where players determine fouls communally, this practice is far less prevalent. Both instances are technically the same game, sharing football’s rules and objectives, but nonetheless operate quite differently in practice.

As we can see from the works discussed in this section, determining what makes games meaningful is a tricky endeavour contingent upon many factors. One must consider what constitutes the particular game being discussed, how that game relates (or does not relate) to other games played within a particular field site, and the different ways in which players go about negotiating particular instances of gameplay.

New frontiers: the rise of digital games

The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have witnessed one of the most significant changes in the history of games: the rise of digital games, colloquially referred to as ‘video games’. Unlike their analogue counterparts, digital games are written in code, played on computers or consoles, and viewed on monitors or television screens. Their rise to prominence—concomitant with the profusion of ever more affordable, portable, and powerful home electronics—has brought with it numerous different types of digital games. These run the gamut from digital forms of games like chess and billiards, to ‘Massively multiplayer online roleplaying games’ (MMORPGs), which consist of vast spaces in which thousands of players simultaneously navigate their respective avatars. This profusion of new games has rejuvenated an interest in efforts to define ‘games’ (Juul 2003), and has given rise to the new discipline of games studies (Aarseth 2001; Jenkins 2004; Boellstorff 2006). Perhaps predictably, many analyses of digital games bemoan the potential influence of their violent or sexual content (Grossman & DeGaetano 1999; Anderson & Dill 2000; Breyer 2011)—in so doing repeating the same concern that faces nearly all new and popular entertainment media (McLuhan 1964: 314; Galloway 2006: xii).

That being said, the rise of digital technology represents a potentially fundamental shift in the world of games. Namely, one of the most important characteristics of digital games vis-à-vis their analogue counterparts is how they change spatial relations. While some analogue games are carried out by distance—such as correspondence chess—the vast majority are conducted with the participants in close proximity. Conversely, while some digital games are played with one’s teammates and/or opponents nearby—such as playing ‘splitscreen’ (multiple people playing a digital game on the same television or computer monitor) at home or in a group at an internet café—most multiplayer digital games involve people playing alone from their homes while sharing digital space with their peers.

This fact problematises distinctions like Huizinga’s between solitary and communal games, for players might be in one sense solitary—playing a game alone in their rooms—but at the same time be connected to other players through the Internet and in the game itself. This fact can perhaps help to explain some anthropologists’ findings on digital games. For example, Nicholas Long notes that the players and producers of the digital game Ultima Online often make note of amazing ‘community’ within the game, but that Long himself found the relations between players to be far more ephemeral and individualistic (Long 2012). Conversely, Celia Pearce notes how players of one particular game stuck together as a social group even after the game itself had been discontinued (Pearce 2006, 2007, 2010).

Another key facet of digital games is their role as goods. They are a multibillion dollar industry, and anthropologists have turned their attention to not just their players but their producers (Malaby 2009b). The role of gender can loom particularly large, as some digital games are primarily marketed to and played by men, whereas others are primarily marketed to and played by women (Mason 2013). Real-world gender inequities can manifest in digital games. For example, Julian Dibbell found that players whose avatars were women were often subjected to sexual harassment, whereas the same was not true for players whose avatars were men (Dibbell 1993). Race can play a similar role to gender in terms of both marketability and gameplay, as some have shown in games where racial stereotypes are part of a game’s content (Leonard 2003), and others have highlighted in games where players themselves use real-world racial slurs (Shanahan 2004).

The structure of digital games also raises questions about how best to approach them methodologically. There have been two primary ways in which anthropologists have gone about doing so. The first method conceptualises these games as ‘virtual worlds’ (Pearce 2006; Nardi & Harris 2006; Taylor 2006; Pearce 2007; Boellstorff 2008; Pearce 2010; Nardi 2010; Long 2012). Treating the space within these games in a similar way to a physical field site, these scholars conduct long-term participant-observation within them by registering accounts, creating avatars, and interacting with other players in the virtual world. In this vein, the title of Boellstorff’s book Coming of age in Second Life—Second Life being the virtual world in which he conducted his fieldwork—is purposefully designed to emphasise a similarity with Margaret Meade’s classic Coming of age in Samoa (1928). This approach gives us an in-depth view of what playing these games looks like in action and the type of interrelationships that it involves—though it is worth noting that, perhaps because of this approach’s emphasis on virtual worlds as a ‘space’, some who adopt it question these games’ status as ‘games’ at all (Boellstorff 2008: 22).

The second approach more pointedly engages with digital games from the vantage of the physical world, in so doing taking a page from the book of anthropologists who emphasise the local importance of various forms of media, such as television (Abu-Lughod 2005), radio (Englund 2011), and blogs (Doostdar 2004). Daniel Miller has studied Facebook use amongst Trinidadians, and he includes in his book a chapter on the Facebook game FarmVille. Articulating his methodological approach toward one interlocutor, Miller notes that he would spend ‘hours looking over his shoulder as he does Facebook’ for a view into this person’s online life (Miller 2011: 78). Similarly, Florence Chee has examined Korean gamer culture from within internet cafes (2005), and Mizuko Ito has studied the use of educational games by Japanese and American children in classroom and home settings (2009). Alex Golub has used his own experience with the MMORPG World of Warcraft to explicitly critique virtual worlds scholars for underemphasising important extra-game spaces, such as online message boards and real-world gatherings (Golub 2010).

While proponents of each respective approach can sometimes clash, both methods have their strengths when applied to specific genres of digital games. For example, it is unsurprising that the majority of virtual worlds work is conducted within MMORPGs like World of Warcraft. These games most closely resemble the physical world in the sense that players control an avatar within a broader game world, and often contain robust economies where significant amounts of real money changes hands (Castronova 2001). Meanwhile, many other digital games, such as those that require no Internet connection, single-player games, those in which players are disembodied manipulators of many variables (such as Real-time Strategy Games), or those where players are under the finite time constraints of individual matches, are often only practically observable from a physically in-situ vantage. Nor are the approaches inherently mutually exclusive. For example, virtual worlds scholars have more recently and explicitly acknowledged the need to at least be open to physical aspects of games when they arise (Boellstorff et al. 2012: 33, 34).

A final point to make about digital games has to do with adjudication and negotiability. The previous section noted the distinction between games that are adjudicated by their players and those games which are adjudicated by a third party referee. Many digital games present a third form of adjudication: the code itself. For example, the previous section took the example of football, and noted the difference between ‘diving’ in a match adjudicated by players and a match adjudicated by a referee. In a digital game where football is depicted, such as Electronic Arts’ popular FIFA series, diving is simply not an option coded into the game. Even if it were, unless the game also added human referees, it would involve trying to press the ‘dive’ button at the right time and hoping that the computer code would confirm it, rather than the process of tricking a human referee or negotiating with human teammates and opponents. When the ball goes out of bounds in FIFA, there is no arguing with the linesman or quibbling with teammates: the code simply confirms it. The implications of this third type of adjudication found within digital games are still not fully understood, but it may help to explain the ephemerality of social relations some anthropologists have found characteristic of certain digital games (see Watson 2015).

Conclusion

This entry has provided an overview of anthropological work on games. It has underscored key themes and developments in the world of games, from varying conceptualizations of what a game is, to how games are meaningful to their players, to the rise of digital games.

Games will continue to be important sources of anthropological theorization not just because new games are being crafted every day, as the advent of digital games makes clear, nor just because instances of games have unpredictable outcomes, as Malaby’s work reminds us, but also because new connections between games and other important phenomena can always be uncovered. As is often the case with ethnographic work, people engaging in a seemingly innocuous activity like a casual game can offer unexpected vantages onto significant issues. Like with most interesting themes, this means that a discussion about games will never be complete. Readers are therefore encouraged to take a closer look at games in both their own field sites and daily lives. Who knows just what you might find…

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Note on contributor

Max Watson holds Ph.D. and M.Phil. degrees in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge and a B.A. in Middle East Studies with a minor in Economics from McGill University. He currently works in the field of communications for the Government of Canada.

Dr. Max O. A. Watson. max.watson@mail.mcgill.ca.

Landscape

Felix Stein — Thu, 01 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Paola Filippucci

University of Cambridge

Initially published 1 Sep 2016

http://doi.org/10.29164/16landscape

Abstract:

When we think about landscape, we tend to think of natural scenery, empty of people; of a view, spread in front of our eyes; or of a backdrop, a stage for people’s movements and activities. The anthropology of landscape challenges all of these ideas. By sharing and observing local lives through ethnographic fieldwork, anthropologists have realised that landscapes matter deeply to people: they care about the landscapes they inhabit, materially shaping them and attaching meaning to them. Anthropologists have come to argue that people do not only live in landscapes but also through them: landscape is an intrinsic part of, or even actor in human social and cultural lives, constructed by them both physically and symbolically and, reciprocally, helping to make and unmake relationships and identities.

Landscape in the social sciences

The importance of landscape in human affairs was, perhaps predictably, recognised and studied by cultural geographers and archaeologists before anthropologists. Geography is of course centrally concerned with space, and throughout the 1970s and 1980s a number of studies focused on the experiential, subjective, phenomenological aspects of space and place (e.g. Buttimer & Seamon 1980; Tuan 1977); and on the symbolic meanings attached to landscape in the European tradition (e.g. Cosgrove 1985; Daniels & Cosgrove 1988). In particular, Cosgrove and others noted that the English term ‘landscape’ comes from the term of Dutch origin landschap, referring to a painted view of (usually rural) surroundings. As Hirsch notes (1995: 2), this means that the concept of landscape, if used unproblematically and uncritically, carries with it a range of culturally specific assumptions: that it is a visual phenomenon, implying a viewer and a view and so a disconnection between people and space; that it has aesthetic value, embodying a pleasing or ‘picturesque’ form; and that it is rural or to do with ‘nature’ and land rather than with people and urbanised surroundings. We will see below how Hirsch rethought the concept in a bid to produce a more culturally sensitive notion of ‘landscape’.

The other discipline that historically has had a close interest in landscape is archaeology. Particularly in Britain, landscape became a central focus of archaeological attention in the inter-war period. The journal Antiquity, founded in this period, introduced the potential of aerial photography, developed during the Great War, in making visible archaeological remains buried in the British countryside, and encouraged archaeologists to view and interpret sites and remains as part of structured, evolving ‘landscapes’, inaugurating the notion of ‘landscape archaeology’ as a way to grasp and understand ancient ways of life. In a fascinating analysis of these developments, Hauser (2007) suggests that this was in part a response to the sight of the devastation of the Great War in France and Belgium in particular, which led artists and others (including archaeologists) to reimagine and cherish Britain as an antique land, with a landscape that embodied its history and heritage and could and should be protected against the new technologies of war and destruction.

More recently archaeologists have discussed the heritage value of landscape in Britain and beyond: in particular, Bender (1993) introduced the idea, central to understanding the role of landscape anthropologically, that groups of people attribute different values to the same landscape; for this reason, landscapes are a focus, and indeed a means, of political contestation and of the formation of different and competing identities. For instance, Bender showed that the landscape of Stonehenge was in the late 1990s (and remains today) the focus of competing interpretations and claims by heritage agencies acting on behalf of the British government and also by ‘pagans’ and others such as tourists, each looking for rather different meanings and value within the same surroundings. This volume also introduced the idea that landscapes are not simply passive screens onto which people project values, but they can be actors in social and political conflict. Focusing on Belfast during the ‘Troubles’, anthropologist Neil Jarman (1993) shows that ideological divisions became embodied in the physical surroundings of the city, creating a feedback loop between space and people: boundaries between the warring groups were not only reinforced by erecting barricades and setting fire to homes, but barriers also became focal points for violent action and so fostered the cycle of violence and division (1993: 111-2). Landscape is not just a backdrop but exerts a sort of ‘agency’ in the unfolding of violent politics: because of its symbolic associations as well as its physical qualities (e.g. in creating barriers, regulating movement, etc.), space contributes to the production and reproduction of violent relations, and insight that helps to analyse many current conflicts, such as that in Israel and the Palestinian territories (see, e.g., Weizman 2007).

So, what anthropologists and other social scientists mean by ‘landscape’ is the human interpretation and manipulation of the physical surroundings in which our individual and collective lives unfold. A ‘landscape’ is something constructed by humans in the course of their daily lives and interactions, both physically and also symbolically, by being invested with meaning, memory, and value. But moreover, anthropologists argue that the two – investing with meaning and shaping physically – go hand in hand and cannot really be separated. One way to conceptualise this is the notion of ‘dwelling’ introduced by Ingold (1995). With this term, borrowed and adapted from the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, Ingold sought to challenge a separation between the cognitive organization of space (e.g. the creation of mental plans or designs) and its physical shaping through building. Ingold argues that humans ‘dwell’ in the world, i.e. produce and reproduce human lives and relations through practically engaging with their physical surroundings. So for Ingold, ‘building’ – humanly modifying space – is an integral aspect of ‘dwelling’: the physical outcome of the thoughtful, but necessarily embodied and emplaced business of social living, rather than an activity led by a disembodied intellect surveying its ‘environment’ as an object (see also Ingold 2000). This perspective invites us to view humans and physical surroundings as part of the same system: as Ingold puts it, the dwelling perspective treats humans as ‘animals in their environment’ rather than self-contained individuals engaging with the physical world as an object; dissolving ‘the orthodox dichotomies between evolution and history, and between biology and culture’ (1995: 77).

Ingold’s approach has been used productively especially by archaeologists as well as anthropologists working with nomadic hunter-gatherer populations (e.g. Ingold & Mazzullo 2008), perhaps because it seems to imply a sort of seamless harmony between people and their surroundings that is difficult to envisage in the case of urbanised and/or larger-scale populations (but cf. McFarlane 2011). However, the idea that ‘landscape’ should not be understood as a thing independent of people, or even as a thing made by people, but as the outcome of the physical and symbolic implication of people with their surroundings, informs other anthropological approaches of wider applicability. In particular, anthropologists’ comparative perspective and the encounter with non-European cultures leads them to question the very notion of ‘space’ as ethnocentric and to rethink what ‘landscape’ might be in even more radical ways.

Anthropological beginnings: ‘space’

The basis for anthropology’s refusal to take ‘space’ for granted as an objective reality external to humans’ activities and perceptions can be traced back to Durkheim’s seminal discussion of the social origin of the categories of human thought in his Elementary forms of the religious life (1912). In this text Durkheim addressed space as one of the fundamental ‘categories of understanding’, alongside time, number, cause, substance, and personality: these are ‘the solid frames that enclose all thought’ because without them no thought is possible (2001 [1912]: 11). Unlike Kant and other philosophers, however, Durkheim did not consider these categories to be innate, but rather ‘social things’, products of social life, and, in origin, of religious life and thought (2001 [1912]: 11). In the case of space, Durkheim argued that it is only perceptible as such insofar as it is divided and differentiated – into left and right, inside and outside, above and below, and so on: ‘inherently, there is no right or left, above or below, north or south and so on’ (2001 [1912]: 13). These divisions for him arise as people give an ‘affective colour’ to regions, adding that members of the same society hold in common these divisions, implying ‘that they are social in origin’ (2001 [1912]: 13). So the organization of space in each society is modelled on social organization ‘and replicates it’, not vice-versa; spatial divisions like left and right are not innate but originate from social and indeed religious thought. Indeed, for Durkheim the ‘sacred’ at the centre of religious thought is a form of spatial classification, insofar as he defines it as that which is ‘set apart’, separated conceptually but also, often, spatially, from the ‘profane’ (2001 [1912]: 36).

Durkheim’s ideas inspired some classic early studies of socio-spatial organization, such as Mauss’s ‘Essai sur les variations saisonnières des societés Eskimos’ (1904–1905) and, within British social anthropology, Evans-Pritchard’s The Nuer (1940). While neither refers to ‘landscape’, both suggest that the way people inhabit their physical surroundings is an important aspect of their society, but not as a determining factor: soil configuration and climate, writes Mauss, do not determine people’s decision to live dispersed or instead in groups: this is determined by social factors such as their technological skills (which control how they exploit natural resources) and their ‘moral, juridical and religious organisation’, which determines whether they can form groups, of what size and so on (Mauss 1983 [1904–1905]: 393, author’s translation). In his study of the Nuer of Southern Sudan, Evans-Pritchard writes about their ‘oecological space’, which he describes as the relationship between the ‘character of the country’ and ‘the biological requirements’ of the members of local groups: e.g. availability of water, the presence or absence of tsetse flies or of rivers and so on make the distance between local groups more or less impassable and so expands or shrinks ‘mere physical distance’ (1969 [1940]: 109). However, Nuer additionally give their spatial distributions ‘certain values which compose their political structure’. In particular Nuer lives are governed by ‘structural distance’, ‘the distance between groups of persons in a social system, expressed in terms of values’ (Evans-Pritchard 1969 [1940]: 110). Such values determine more centrally than physical factors the closeness or otherwise of villages from one another: ‘A Nuer village may be equidistant from two other villages, but if one of these belongs to a different tribe and the other to the same tribe it may be said to be structurally more distant from the first than from the second’ (Evans-Pritchard 1969 [1940]: 110). Social and political affiliations override spatial and territorial ones.

Evans-Pritchard’s ethnography of the Nuer is not entirely consistent on this point. For instance in some of his other works, it appears that physical proximity and cohabitation are important bases of social unity and solidarity in this society, so that physical space does matter to the Nuer as they structure their society, and is even constitutive of their ‘kinship’ structure (1950: 364; cf. 1951; cf. Kuper 2005: 205). However, whether or not it corresponds with ethnographic reality (cf. Kuper 1983: 95), the discussion of ‘time and space’ in The Nuer introduces the intriguing idea that anthropologically speaking ‘space’ need not be linked with physical surroundings at all, but could be a dimension of human life and identity defined and charted by values and relations, in this case those associated with kinship (more specifically descent from common ancestors) and political organization. So, in order to describe and analyse the Nuer’s culturally specific conception and perception of their world, Evans-Pritchard formulated a non-literal concept of ‘space’, abstracted from territorial factors and linked instead with personhood, itself an abstract and culturally variable social construct (cf. Carrithers, Collins & Lukes 1985; Mauss 1983 [1938]).

Although Durkheim’s notion of the social origin of knowledge was later criticised (see Bloch 1977), arguably a long-lasting contribution of these early studies for the study of ‘landscape’ is to suggest not only that people interpret physical space in different ways, but also that anthropologists need to problematise the very concept of ‘space’, treating it as a social construct with a culturally variable content. This insight is central to more recent anthropological studies of landscape.

Rethinking ‘landscape’

The division between sacred and profane space (and time) introduced by Durkheim is at the heart of William Christian’s study of a religion in a Spanish valley, published in 1972 (1972: xv). The book focuses on shrines and on the ‘supernatural rationale’ for their location in the landscape, presenting them as ‘control points at which the people attempt to influence the penetration of foreign material into their countryside’ (Christian 1972: xv). Christian inverts the earlier anthropological convention of landscape as an inert backdrop to the people studied by piecing together the social and cultural world of the population of a northern Spanish valley starting from their landscape. In this study, the environmental setting is understood as an integral element of the society, a ground for it in the most profound sense of providing the means of articulating physically, conceptually, and imaginatively the relationships among persons and also, centrally, between ‘person and God’ (referred to in the title of the book), people and the powers that preside over their world, be they ‘sacred’ or ‘profane’.

For instance, in a setting in which people move seasonally between village and uplands, changes of scenery are said to correspond to changing ‘moods’ among the population: in the upper pastures in spring and autumn, the mood is ‘airy, open and honest’ as people, ‘free from the village’, share food and tools, work together, often breaking into song (Christian 1972: 2). Back in the village, especially in winter, when the young are away on seasonal jobs and people live at close quarters, life ‘is more difficult’, the mood is of ‘competition’, ‘there are people with whom, for one reason or another, one does not speak’ (Christian 1972: 3). The landscape also articulates the villagers’ identity and positioning in the wider world. The villagers have a ‘series of identities’ including the house and family, the village and parish, the valley, the region and the nation-state (Christian 1972: 42). These correspond to the ‘matrix of human relations’ on the ground, formed of ‘what brings people together and what marks them off from each other’, visible in how people behave and communicate, name and create physical and symbolic boundaries (Christian 1972: 11).

For Christian, this also, importantly, helps us to understand people’s relations with the divine: the matrix of their relations ‘provides the context into which relations with the divine must fit’ (1972: 11). So, corresponding to the geographical levels of the inhabitants’ life and identity are specific divine figures (saints, or advocations of the Virgin Mary) to whom they pray, ‘implanted’ in the landscape through shrines: to levels of identity, correspond, in a memorable phrase, ‘territories of grace’ (Christian 1972: 44-5). Christian makes clear that, especially in the case of devotions that are unique to this valley and its population (as opposed to the ‘generalised’, national-level devotions) the shrines are one with the landscape: the images and their powers are immovable, people must go to them: the shrines are ‘transaction points in the landscape between the human group, the land, and the powers that influence the success of the group’s enterprises’ (1972: 45). In practice, the saints are approached as ‘patrons’, intermediaries towards God but also more broadly foreign, external powers, ‘above and below’ the here and now of the village, an aspect for Christian alluded to by the location of many shrines at ‘critical points in the ecosystem’ such as mountain peaks, springs, and caves (1972: 181). Also, like living patrons, saints are applied to individually and from different levels of identity, so that the heterogeneity (both physical and spiritual) of the landscape is one with the heterogeneity of local society. Overall, this study resonates with Durkheimian approaches but also, in its attention to the landscape (physical and spiritual) as a principle and means of heterogeneity rather than unity, it anticipates themes found in the ‘anthropology of landscape’ that started in the 1990s (for another, more recent study that directly rethinks space in relation to the Durkheimian ‘sacred/profane’ dichotomy, see Munn 2003).

The anthropology of landscape

In the mid-1990s, two edited collections (Feld & Basso 1996; Hirsch & O’Hanlon 1995) and a reader (Low & Lawrence-Zuñiga 2003) mark the self-conscious bid to develop a distinctively anthropological approach to landscape. Their central aim is to ‘unpack Western concepts’ of landscape, place, and space (Feld & Basso 1996: 6; cf. Hirsch 1995: 2) and make theoretically visible ‘spatial dimensions of culture’ (Low & Lawrence-Zuñiga 2003: 1). The most concerted (and complex) effort to do this is found in Hirsch and O’Hanlon’s volume in which Hirsch argues that the notion of ‘landscape’ as physical surroundings is culturally specific to the modern West (1995: 5). In order to develop a cross-culturally valid notion, he proposes an ego-centred approach in which ‘landscape’ is not a relationship with physical surroundings, but the relationship between two ‘poles of experience’ through which people negotiate everyday social life and practice (1995: 4-5, 22).

Specifically Hirsch defines ‘landscape’ as the ongoing ‘cultural process’ (1995: 5) by which we mentally and imaginatively locate ourselves in the world, through envisaging a ‘background’ and a ‘foreground’ to our existence at each moment, and their dynamic and changeable interplay. This can be understood spatially: being ‘here’ (at a specific location) is understood and experienced at each moment in relation to one or more ‘there’, which form its horizon in terms of my own experience (e.g. in my daily routine the ‘horizon’ for being ‘here’ at the office is being ‘there’ at home; in terms of my movements this month, the horizon for being ‘here’ in Cambridge is being ‘there’ in Italy and so on). However, for Hirsch moving away from a Western understanding of landscape means that we must take into account that people understand persons and their location in the world in culturally specific ways. This helps us to see that the familiar Western ‘place’ and ‘space’ are culturally specific metaphors for mutually constituted vantage points that do not need to involve land, objectively and physically understood, at all. Instead, cultures have specific ways of envisaging the dialectical tension between ‘here’ and ‘there’, understood as the more and less immediate reaches of human agency and personhood, practice and ideal, everyday experience and the ‘background’ to it. For instance, the ‘distant horizon’ for the here and now, which in Western understanding is objectified as ‘space’ and understood through the text-based metaphor of the ‘map’, can in other cultural settings be objectified and understood as a horizon made, for instance, by the stories, memories, and traces of the activities of ancestors (in Amazonia: Gow 1995; in Australia: Layton 1995; Morphy 1995), or by cosmic non-human energies accessed and harnessed via chiefly or shamanic powers (in Mongolia: Humphrey 1995). This approach also helps to denaturalise and relativise the Western notion of ‘landscape’. This seems literal and culturally unmediated (e.g. as a subject’s view of an object, ‘land’, which is given independently of culture and is immediately available to the senses, particularly sight). However, if we adopt Hirsch’s perspective, we can argue that what we call ‘landscape’ is not so much a thing ‘out there’ as the tension between the here and now of the viewer and ‘imagined worlds of being and potential’: for instance Green’s chapter in the volume by Hirsch and O’Hanlon shows that in nineteenth century France the emergence of the idea of ‘paysage’, identified with the countryside and as a space for ‘nature’, was part of how people rethought their position in society, formed a consciousness of class in an urban and urbanising context (Green 1995).

Gell’s contribution to the same volume introduces another way in which ‘landscape’ can be relativised. In an account of Umeda, Papua New Guinea, Gell argues that the actual physical environment which Umeda inhabit shapes the way in which spatial distance and proximity can be experienced. Umeda live in small clearings in thick forest and this ‘imposes a reorganisation of their sensibility’ (1995: 235), which makes hearing (and smell) a much more reliable means of sensing distance and proximity than sight. For instance, it was said that the first group of Umeda ever to visit the coast could not perceive the sea as a receding space, but instead perceived it as a vertical wall of water (1995: 235). Because of this, for Gell the Umeda landscape is first and foremost a ‘soundscape’ arising from the interplay between ambient sound and the body through different qualities of word-sounds which encode the experiences of ‘ambient sound’ and the body as a ‘sounding cavity’ (1995: 240). This is ‘mapped’, i.e. represented, not through visual means (such as maps or other visual images) but by sound ‘images’, specifically through verbal sounds in the local language that iconically render via the culturally specific connotations of consonant sounds the physical extremes of proximity and distance, of the village clearing, and the encircling forest and mountain escarpments. For instance, the sound ‘s’ found in sis for 'mountain' carries connotations of sharpness, danger, etc., making ‘audible’ the mountain, depicting through sounds the physicality of the sharp, tall ridges that constitute the ‘distant horizon’ of Umeda villages (1995: 242). Gell does not, like Hirsch, relativise ‘landscape’ by abstracting the concept from people’s embodied location in the world: instead, he roots culturally constituted landscape in the interplay between the sensing body and its particular surroundings (1995: 252; cf. also Feld 1996).

The interplay between body and surroundings is also explored in Feld and Basso’s volume (1996), which focuses on the idea of ‘place’ and on how from a subjective point of view, people transform ‘sheer physical terrain’ into an ‘existential space’ through their imagination and memory (Casey 1996: 14). In other words, the sensing, attentive subject and the geographical object come together. This crucially occurs through the body, as the vehicle for what could be termed the thoughtful sensing of the environing world (cf. Ingold 2000). For Basso, in culturally diverse ways people attend to their surroundings and in practice certain locations can trigger strong emotions or thoughts ‘of a richly caring kind’ (Basso 1996: 54). So he argues that the relationship with places, like all relationships, is reciprocal: ‘as places animate the ideas and feelings of persons who attend to them, these same ideas and feelings animate the places on which attention has been bestowed […] when places are actively sensed, the physical landscape becomes wedded to the landscape of the mind’ (1996: 55). Through this, ‘places come to generate their own fields of meaning’ (1996: 56). Basso illustrates this by showing the central role of places in how Western Apache develop ‘wisdom’. Apache define ‘wisdom’ as a heightened mental capacity that enables people to avoid harmful events by detecting hidden threats. It is developed by thinking about stories that instruct about wise and unwise ways of behaving, judging situations, etc. These stories for Apache ‘sit’ in places: that is, they feature and are associated with named places, which people visit bodily or in the mind in order to access and recall the narratives on their way to wisdom (1996: 73). Visiting, observing, and learning the names of places is the means to develop wisdom, so that for Basso the Apache’s ‘interior landscape’ – their sense of self and moral imagination (1996: 86) – is crucially constructed in constant interaction with the exterior one.

‘Landscape’ in a changing world

The case study above takes us back to the idea, introduced in an earlier section, that landscapes can be seen as actors in human individual and social life, directly involved with the making and unmaking of relationships and identities. We can see that not only do people use and interpret their surroundings as part of living and inhabiting, but land and surroundings help us ‘interpret ourselves’, so to speak: they feature in narratives we make about ourselves, help us tell ourselves ‘who’ we are individually or collectively. We can talk about being ‘attached’ emotionally to places and landscapes, but it’s almost more as if they were ‘attached’ to us, ‘ours’. There is a dialectic of recognition between familiar surroundings and those for whom they are familiar – the land comes to ‘resemble’ us as we inhabit it, it becomes charged with value insofar as it embodies an image of ourselves. While this may perhaps seem confined to populations, such as Apache, who live both physically and spiritually ‘close’ to the land, this is not the case:

Now that the heat of battle is extinguished, this chaos of soil and stones under a sky so gloomy seems absurd. Thought no longer finds ar elationship between that, which resembles nothing, and we, who have lived so many things in the course of our lives. (Pézard 1974 [1918], author’s translation).

These words, written by an army officer about the devastation in rural Eastern France during the Great War, show that even in this least ‘traditional’ of contexts, landscape is a ground for meaning and identity, so that its destruction causes shock, disorientation, and profound estrangement. So, too, it is in our industrialised, ‘modern’ societies that ‘place annihilation’ (Hewitt 1983) has become one of the most lethal weapons in contemporary warfare, which since World War I includes among its aims the eradication of whole enemy cultures and ways of life (Kramer 2007). It could also be argued, following Pierre Nora (1989), that catastrophic experiences of rupture and dislocation in modernity make people more, not less conscious of ‘places’ (both physical sites, and sites of the imagination) as repositories for belonging and meaning (cf. Filippucci 2010). This includes the conditions of contemporary modernity in which individual and collective experiences of, and relationships with, space are said to be transformed and unsettled by increasingly powerful technologies of speed, virtual connection, and destruction, leading peoples and identities to be displaced and delocalised or even acquire ‘a slippery, nonlocalized quality’ (Appadurai 1996: 48; cf. Connerton 2009; Gupta & Ferguson 1997; Harvey 1989).

So, in conclusion, the study of ‘landscape’ is shown to be anthropologically fertile, a ground for theoretical innovation, and for disclosing core aspects of the human social and cultural experience in a changing world.

References

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——— & K.H. Basso 1996. Senses of place. Santa Fe, N.M.: School of American Research Press.

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Note on contributor

Dr Paola Filippucci is a Fellow and Lecturer in Social Anthropology at Murray Edwards College, Cambridge. She studies war memory and commemoration in Europe, focusing on the First World War and its material legacy on the former Western Front. The impact of armed conflict on landscape is a central theme.

Dr Paola Filippucci, Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, Division of Social Anthropology, Free School Lane, Cambridge CB2 3RF, United Kingdom. pf107@cam.ac.uk