Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology - Dwelling

Architecture

Rebecca Tishler — Thu, 29 Feb 2024 18:29:07 +0000

The interior of a traditional Japanese house in Takayama, Japan. Photo by David A. LaSpina, 2009

Oxford Brookes University, Universidad Nacional de Jujuy

Initially published 29 Feb 2024

Abstract:

Anthropologists have shown an interest in architecture since at least the end of the nineteenth century, though not to the extent that may be expected given the prominent position that architecture plays in all human societies. Notwithstanding their relatively marginal position within the discipline, anthropological studies of architecture have made some significant contributions to our understanding of the dynamic and mutually constitutive relationships between architecture, culture, and environment. These contributions include the practice of making and its central role in the development of architecture over time; processes of change and how to understand and deal with them; and anthropology’s contribution to the study of architecture as a professional discipline. The anthropological study of architecture, defined as a continuous process of designing, making, and dwelling, requires a holistic approach that considers the diverse material, social, and symbolic registers of architecture, as well as its various scales. Such an approach can pave the way for more collaborative projects between anthropologists and architects that can explore the characteristics and possibilities of both existing and new forms of designing, making, and dwelling. Thus, this entry looks at the history of anthropology’s relationship with architecture to contribute to current debates about how both disciplines can forge new practices through making.

Introduction

Architecture is part of the history and everyday life of humanity. Not only do people live within architecture, they exist with it, progressing through life in a process of mutual constitution (Bugallo and Tomasi 2012). The very experience of living or dwelling ‘in, at, on, or about’ (Oliver 1987, 7) architectural environments and structures on a daily basis has led to a certain difficulty in comprehending what architecture is: it is difficult to define something that is so evident that it has become naturalised. Academic and professional discourse on architecture has tended to dissect the concept itself, separating the practices and experiences of, on the one hand, creating architecture and, on the other, using it. In the process, it has generated a rupture between its ‘material’ and ‘social’ or ‘immaterial’ aspects. As with the study of material culture in general, the anthropological challenge has been to dissolve a deeply ingrained dichotomy between subject and object (Miller 2005), and to focus instead on architecture as a totality, looking at its diverse material, social, and symbolic registers, as well as its various scales (Carsten and Hugh-Jones 1995; Vellinga 2007; Buchli 2013).

Architecture, of course, can be defined in many ways. In this entry we approach architecture as a physical entity, constituted as a process and shaped by the amalgamation of sets of diverse material elements. These material elements, in turn, are produced using a series of technologies and are arranged in such a way that they conduct the flow of physical forces towards the ground, regulating and distributing the energies of the physical environment. For example, the relationships between beams, columns, and walls must be balanced so as to allow the structure of a building to support the load of a roof. The type of relations between these material elements and their intrinsic conditions emerge from a diverse set of environmental and cultural variables, and from a range of material, spatial, and technological choices and options, mediated by possibilities, restrictions, and socially constituted preferences (Bourdieu 1977; Lemonnier 1993). The arrangement of the material elements shapes three-dimensional forms, generates textures, and delimits and characterises places, creating interior and exterior spaces of diverse character. One might consider that, ‘the spaces of dwelling are not already given, in the layout of the building, but are created in movement. That is to say, they are performed’ (Ingold 2013, 85; emphasis in original). The arrangement of the material elements emerges from the ideas, needs, and expectations of a society. Social actors participate in the production and reproduction of architecture—inculcating societal norms as much as enabling disruptive and transformative actions within the physical entity (Bourdieu 1977).

Our focus in this entry on the physical existence of architecture is not accidental. On the contrary, it is based on the observation that both anthropology and architecture need to take this material condition seriously: as, indeed, do the people who produce, inhabit, or otherwise experience architecture. For anthropology, this involves looking at the way in which materiality participates in the shaping of life and engaging with the very making of things. For architecture, it implies an understanding that the objects that are designed and built are part of social networks, and that their production cannot be reduced to individual creativity.

Anthropologists and architecture

In general, anthropologists have tended to study architecture as ‘a way into’ a society or culture. Houses (or, more rarely, other building types) have been of interest because they allowed the anthropologist to study and understand social relationships, cultural values, and symbolic meanings; the cultural context was normally the real focus of attention, rather than the architecture per se. In this respect, anthropologists have approached architecture differently from architects, for whom the cultural context (when it is considered in the first place) has been mainly a means to understand architecture and inform future design (Vellinga 2016). This different perspective may have contributed to the overstated claim that anthropology has never paid attention to architecture. Rather than being uninterested in architecture as such, for much of the twentieth century anthropology showed little interest in the material aspects of architecture and was more focused on its ‘intangible’ features. What lay ‘beyond’ a building (that is, the cultural values, beliefs, and relationships that a building expressed or embodied) was seen to be more important than the skilled practices that enabled its design and construction, or the material features that resulted from them.

The central question, more often than not, has been ‘how are they [built forms, built environments and constructive processes] imbued with cultural significance at all levels (material, symbolic, social)?’ (Amerlinck 2001, 3). To answer this question, anthropologists for a long time tried to ‘read’ buildings as texts, documenting how age, gender, power, or status relationship were symbolically reflected in design features, spatial layouts, or decorative elements.

This perspective on architecture goes all the way back to the beginnings of anthropology as an academic discipline. Most famously, Lewis Henry Morgan’s classic Houses and house-life of the American Aborigines (2003) argued that extended family households, which Morgan believed to be typical of pre-colonial Native American societies, practiced what he called ‘communism in living’—a communal way of life that found expression in the design and spatial layout of multi-family houses found across the continent. For instance, the Haudenosaunee or ‘people of the long-house’ constructed a variety of houses up to 100 feet long, with a central hallway giving access to subdivisions about seven feet long, with shared fire pits to accommodate up to twenty families. Of course, how architecture was read could differ between anthropologists. To Morgan (1877), the design, materiality, and construction of pre-colonial Native American buildings were indicators of the comparative social evolutionary status of the societies concerned. On the other hand, to Pierre Bourdieu (1973), the Kabyle house in Algeria illustrated the way in which the cultural characteristics of a specific society, like notions of purity and pollution, were objectified in the spatial layout of homes. Traditional Kabyle houses were divided by a low wall that created two distinct, oppositional spaces. The larger one, about two-thirds of the area, was elevated and was reserved for humans, especially guests. The smaller, darker part was the place for animals, but also where sexual intercourse and childbirth took place.

Many other ethnographic studies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries included information on settlement patterns, building forms, and spatial arrangements around the world to help gain an understanding of social structures and cultural value systems. For example, Raymond Firth studied the Tikopia houses in the Solomon Islands, noting that, even though ‘the external aspect [...] has little to recommend it’, an analysis of its spatial arrangements ‘will lead us immediately to some of the most complex features of the native social organization’ (1961, 75). Gender and status relationships were expressed through the allocation of spaces, the names of building elements, and seating arrangements, amongst other things. Altogether, anthropologists have provided an extraordinarily rich ethnographic record of the various ways in which architecture is intricately related to cultural values, social identities, and political or economic relationships.

The second half of the twentieth century saw a renewed interest in the anthropology of architecture, especially in the study of houses. In line with more general anthropological perspectives at the time, much of this work was concerned with the analysis of symbolic meanings as expressed in architectural form, spatial organisation, or methods of construction. For example, various anthropologists commented on the fact that traditional houses across insular Southeast Asia were anthropomorphised structures, with particular building elements (doors, façades, posts) symbolically referred to by their inhabitants as body elements (eyes, face, legs). This practice reflected a widespread tendency in the region to see houses as living entities (Waterson 1990). In the Amazon region, anthropologists noted that Indigenous longhouses expressed distinct gender relationships through the allocation and ceremonial use of spaces, with a clear axis separating a male end at the front of the house from a female end at the back (Hugh-Jones 1979). In all these instances, architecture was studied as an object, independent from any human interaction.

From the 1980s onwards, many anthropologists have been critiqued for treating buildings as fixed and finished objects and for ignoring the dynamic and contested nature of meanings and human behaviour, especially in the case of symbolic studies that treat buildings as ‘microcosms’ or structural models of cultural and cosmic orders. The process of ‘making’ architecture has commonly been ignored, whilst meanings have generally been assumed to be intrinsically present in buildings and to already exist prior to their objectification in architecture. In so doing, the agency of people (as designers, builders, and inhabitants, and as members of a community or society) and their ability to change or adapt architecture was disregarded at the same time as social and cultural relationships and identities were essentialised. In other words, ‘an illusion of certainty and uniformity’ was created that misleadingly suggested that buildings can ever be complete, and that architectural symbolism is arranged in exclusive and orderly ways (Ellen 1986, 28).

This renewed anthropological interest coincided with an increasing attention in architectural circles in the contribution that anthropology could make to the field of architecture; not just in relation to the so-called traditional or ‘vernacular’ architecture of the world (Oliver 1979), but to architecture as a design discipline (Toy 1996). An interest in the architecture of ‘Others’, the traditional subject of anthropology, had of course always been present in architecture (see Vitruvius 2012, Laugier 1977 and Semper 1989). However, the interest now shifted towards what anthropology could contribute to the discipline in terms of theory and methodology, and how both disciplines could collaborate more closely.

Building on the late-twentieth century studies that aimed to document and analyse specific building traditions around the world (mainly, though not solely, in southeast Asia and Latin America), attention began to shift to more thematic and theoretical issues during the early twenty-first century. Discourses around materiality, consumption, and agency gave rise to an increased interest in the anthropology of the home and on what goes on ‘behind closed doors’, inside architecture (Miller 2001; Daniels 2010; Pink et al. 2017). Expanding beyond the narrow focus on houses and homes, anthropologists also explored the processual nature of architecture and the way in which it may play a part in processes of political contestation, ethnic identification, or social gentrification. For example, among the Minangkabau in Indonesia, the construction of increasingly larger and more decorated traditional houses, using modern materials and technologies, was shown to help renegotiate long-established social status relationships, revealing the active, rather than passive, role played by the house in the constitution of society (Vellinga 2004). Conversely, Melanie van der Hoorn (2009) studied how the active destruction of unwanted buildings helped redefine national identities, both in times of conflict (as during the siege of Sarajevo in former Yugoslavia from 1992 till 1996) and post-conflict (such as after the collapse of the Soviet Union).

In line with similarly burgeoning interests in the relationship between anthropology and design, studies of craft, skill, and technology began to explore the role of ‘making’ and design in architecture (Ingold 2013), while ethnographic studies of architectural firms aimed to analyse the culture of professional architectural practice (Yaneva 2009; Yarrow 2019). Much of this work involved collaborations between anthropologists and architects. Altogether, it has given rise to ongoing discussions about what architecture is, about how it can be studied from an anthropological perspective, and about how the relationship between anthropology and architecture should be conceptualised (Amerlinck 2001; Jasper 2019; Stender et al. 2022). The publication of a number of textbooks that aim to introduce the anthropological study of architecture, written by both anthropologists and architects, indicates that the subject finally ‘arrived’ in anthropological discourse at exactly the time when anthropological approaches, in parallel, have entered architectural discussion and practice (for example, Buchli 2013; Lucas 2020). As will be seen, however, the characteristics and scope of this disciplinary ‘encounter’ still require exploration.

Making architecture

The word ‘architecture’ comes from the Greek words arkhi, meaning ‘master’ or ‘chief’, and téktōn, meaning ‘carpenter’ or ‘builder’, referring to the skills for making a building. ‘Architecture’, then, as a concept, refers to the physical process that constitutes a building. A building is formed through the transformation of materials and their particular arrangement in space, using a variety of technologies, and by actions that emerge from the ways in which the physical skills of the craftsmen join with the materials (Ingold 2013). Understanding architecture as a physical process implies a recognition of ‘making’ as a practice that is sustained over time. Buildings are not made after they have been designed and before they are used—the process of constructing them is continuous. Unlike architects, anthropologists problematise the distinction between design, construction, and use (RIBA 2020). For example, a 1998 ethnography of Aymara communities in Bolivia proposed that the act of building houses is an ‘art of memory’, whereby relationships with the ancestors of the household group are reproduced and strengthened through the process of making and the songs that are sung during the building process (Arnold 1998). Once the buildings are made, they continue to be adapted, repaired, or extended.

A concern for manual building practices and crafts was very prominent in the second half of the nineteenth century, mainly due to the influence of the Arts and Crafts movement and in particular William Morris’s position in favour of artisanal work and the collective experience of production, in contrast to the alienation of mechanised production systems emerging from the Industrial Revolution (Sennett 2008). In anthropology, an early interest in the practices involved in the creation of buildings was shown through the documentation of building materials and techniques (Boas 1966; Malinowski 1935). Later, a more systematic approach towards an ‘anthropology of technology’ emerged in France around the figure of anthropologist Marcel Mauss (1935; 1968), whose concept of ‘total social facts’ encouraged anthropologists to see technology and social phenomena as deeply intertwined. Building on Mauss’s writings, anthropologists began to see technical practices such as sawing, cutting, binding, or moulding as embodied thoughts rather than mere mechanical actions. André Leroi-Gourhan (1964) introduced the concept of ‘operating chain’ (chaîne opératoire), a methodological tool for the analysis of processes of making. More recently, this concept has been problematised for its sequential and fragmented character. Instead, some anthropologists propose an understanding of making processes as flows: ‘an unbroken, contrapuntal coupling of a gestural dance with a modulation of the material’ (Ingold 2013, 26).

The process of decision-making has also been at the centre of anthropological enquiries into making, starting discussions of the social and cultural reasons for ‘technological choices’. Pierre Lemonnier (1992; 1993) proposed this framework as a critical counterpoint to prevalent ideas of ‘technological determinism’, the notion that technology is a primary influence on social relationships. As in other fields, the use of the notion of ‘habitus’ (Bourdieu 1977)—the habits, skills, and tastes through which people with shared cultural backgrounds perceive and experience the world—has been proposed as a way to overcome the apparent dichotomy between the unconscious reproduction of structural patterns and purely subjective action. Specifically, anthropologists have shown that builders have margins of action within a wide, though not infinite, universe of available options that emerge from the material conditions of the actions and demands that produce them. They choose from these options based on their habitus. Thus, within the multiplicity of ways of making in a given place, it is possible to recognise ‘family resemblances’ among different procedures (Dietler and Herbich 1998). Roof structures in traditional Indonesian houses, for example, are made in a number of ways, resulting in distinctive roof forms in different parts of the archipelago that are far from identical, but that are nonetheless closely related to one another (Waterson 1990).

The collective nature of making has also been prevalent in recent anthropological thought. The apprentice-style ethnographic work of Trevor Marchand, who worked as a novice under the expert guidance of master builders in Yemen (2001) and Mali (2009), and who used this specific learning experience to collect ethnographic information, has shown the importance of training and knowledge transfer in the development of craftsmen’s practical skills, know-how, and values around discipline and commitment. Marchand’s work shows the importance of action in ethnographic research, as opposed to pure verbal communication, in a context in which ‘the builder's apprenticeship served to enhance concepts and judgements regarding space and assembly through training, practice, and inhabiting the “process of making”’ (Marchand 2001, 243). By actively producing mud bricks, constructing walls and ceilings, and sculpting roof crenelations, Marchand gained first-hand knowledge of construction practices—knowledge that would be difficult to gain otherwise or to convey in words alone.

Collective or collaborative making is also explored anthropologically, focusing not so much on the relations between the craftsmen but on their relationship with the materials. The actions of the builder operate with the material, rather than on it, insofar as their forces meet in mutual recognition. Materials and builders are in a continuous and sensitive movement within a shared process of making, ‘like melodies in counterpoint’ (Ingold 2013, 107). Caroline Gatt and Tim Ingold invite anthropology to engage in what they call ‘correspondence’ with materials and architecture: to participate ‘in building relationships and making things’ so as to enable both disciplines to grow based more on improvisation rather than on innovation (2013, 148).

Architecture and change

In keeping with recent attention to making and collaboration, recent scholarship has shown how architecture is not static, but is instead a creative and ever-evolving process through which people—as active agents, and using their past experience, knowledge, skills, and crafts—create environments that become places for dwelling or other purposes. Architecture evolves in line with changing cultural contexts, as well as dynamic environmental contexts (which were hitherto largely ignored in the anthropological study of architecture), and with current needs, ambitions, and requirements. In most instances, this process involves material construction, and it is this material aspect of architecture—the fact that it is made of stone, wood, steel, or earth—that often gives the impression that it is fixed and ‘concrete’. In reality, the materials that architecture is made of are as fluid and temporal as the cultural relationships that it embodies and the environments that encompass it (Ingold 2007). In time, the mechanical or chemical properties of architecture may transform in response to temperature fluctuations or physical forces; they may move, harden, or disintegrate, for example. In response to such material changes, as well as to larger environmental or cultural transformations, buildings may be adapted, moved, conserved, restored, or demolished. Consequently, at no point in time is architecture ever truly complete or finished (Maudlin and Vellinga 2014).

The dynamic nature of architecture is not only evident from the material-making process, but is also manifested in the activities that take place within it. Early anthropological studies, especially those that regarded architecture as an embodiment of cosmological relationships, often described spatial patterns of use in a rather static way, correlating particular activities (and the categories of people that performed them) with certain buildings or particular parts of them. Thus, a kitchen might be identified as the domain of women who use it to cook, or a monastery as the exclusive preserve of the members of a religious order. A famous example of this approach is provided by Clark E. Cunningham’s study of the Atoni house in Indonesia (1964). Postulating that a house is ‘a mechanical model of the cosmos as conceived by a people’ (66), Cunningham argued that the use of space was strictly defined in terms of a number of dualist oppositions (male-female, high-low, old-young) that determined who could use which space at what time and for what purpose. Often, as in the case of the Atoni, such patterns were seen to be customary or traditional and were believed to have been handed down from times immemorial. As such, they were implicitly perceived as fixed and repeated in the same way in the same location.

Recently, anthropological scholarship has put more emphasis on the dynamic and changing nature of the activities that take place in architecture. The things that people do in or around buildings (cooking, meeting, working, worshipping, cleaning, socialising, sleeping, and so on) are processes through which everyday life is continuously constituted and reproduced (Cieraad 1999; Miller 2001; Daniels 2010). While human activities will often be regulated and rather routine, they are never exactly the same every time they are performed, nor do they always take place in the exact same place—even if the people who perform them think or say they do. At the same time that environmental and cultural contexts change, so too will the activities that take place in or around architecture be adapted through continuous modifications and improvisations. In their study of energy demand reduction initiatives in the UK, Sarah Pink et al. (2017) showed that people might sometimes move their activities to different parts of a house to enable them to do two things at the same time: for example, a kitchen would be used to prepare food but might simultaneously also become a place to catch up on an urgent work email. New mobile digital technologies have played an important part in this, enabling people to more easily ‘move’ through buildings as they live out their lives. Functions of spaces may change, furniture and other objects may be rearranged, and activities may be relocated in response to events, challenges, or opportunities, making architecture ‘an ongoingly changing digital, material, sensory, emotional and atmospheric environment’ (Pink et al. 2017, 70).

Of course, the on-going changes in the things people do are intimately related to changes in the material aspects of architecture. ‘The most fundamental thing about life is that it does not begin here or end there, but is always going on’ (Ingold 2001, 172; emphasis in original). This has led to the adoption of a ‘dwelling perspective’ as opposed to a ‘building perspective’ in the anthropology of architecture. The latter is the perspective of the architect, where a building is designed and constructed and consequently used. From this point of view, a building will be ‘finished’, and ready for use, once the design and building stage are over. A dwelling perspective, on the other hand, sees the design, construction, and use of architecture forming a continuous process of ‘dwelling in the world’ (Ingold 2001, 185). As people dwell, their activities take place in the context of architecture, which partly defines them but is also defined by them; in the process, architecture, in its material form, may be designed, constructed, inhabited, adapted, renovated, conserved, abandoned, or demolished, as needs, opportunities, or requirements change, as part of an on-going process. These changes are creative and meaningful even if they are not always recognised as such, and often have no clear beginnings or endings. The dynamic nature of dwelling impacts the use and meaning of the architecture and forms part of its on-going state of becoming. Architecture, as such, does not have a clearly defined starting point, nor is it ever finished (Maudlin and Vellinga 2014); it is ‘a process that is continuously going on, for as long as people dwell in an environment’ (Ingold 2001, 188).

The continuous nature of architecture raises questions about how to deal with change. Changes may be manifold and take many forms that may interrelate in all kinds of ways. Physical alterations to architecture may or may not combine with changes in use or shifting meanings. They may raise questions or concerns about identity, heritage, and authenticity, or they may be applauded and encouraged as signs of development and progress (Orbaşli and Vellinga 2020). The way in which communities deal with such changes can reveal the significance of architecture in their lives. Anthropologists have studied architectural change in a number of contexts. Most of them have considered the impact of modernity on traditional buildings in the form of, for instance, new materials or technologies, and studied the ramifications of change in terms of status or gender relationships (Schefold et al. 2003). They have also studied architectural change in relation to heritage management and conservation. For example, a study of the city of Djenné, a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Mali, identified contrasting perspectives on how the city’s building heritage should be managed: that of the local participants, to whom the city is an everyday place to live in, and that of (international) heritage experts, who regard it as universal heritage to be preserved (Joy 2012). Similar discrepancies in perspectives have been identified all over the world (Tomasi and Barada 2021). Interestingly, the development of new architectural forms as a result of processes of cultural change (for example, multi-generational homes, communal living experiments, or so-called ‘tiny houses’) has received less anthropological attention thus far.

Architecture as discipline

The anthropology of architecture has also been affected by the disciplinary institutionalisation of architecture. This has involved the emergence of the role of the architect, separated from the role of the builder, the former being the designer or creator of a set of design concepts and the latter being the maker who materialises those ideas. Both architect and builder work in a hierarchical relationship in which the former dominates the latter (Carpo 2011, Ingold 2013). The beginning of this distinction can be located in the European Renaissance and goes hand-in-hand with the contemporary idealisation of Greco-Roman antiquity. From the seventeenth century onwards, architecture was institutionalised by the arts Academies (particularly the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris), which acted as the principal institutions for artistic education and took the lead in the provision of architectural training (Stevens 1998).

One way in which anthropology has problematised the increasing professionalisation of architectural practice, and the subsequent hierarchical nature of relations between builders and architects, is through studies of how construction practices, even in traditional contexts with supposedly more symmetrical relations, are characterised by hierarchies, expert knowledge, and strict power relations, without being explicitly mediated by professional roles (Marchand 2009, 2012; Tomasi 2012). Through professionalisation of the discipline, the architect is commonly presented as a kind of external, expert mediator between people and their spaces, restricting the margins of action of others. However, as previous stated, the architect does not absolutely determine the ways of dwelling (De Certeau 1984). Many other actors, including owners, builders, ritual experts, and, in modern societies, planners, insurance companies, and mortgage lenders, play major parts in the development of houses and other buildings. Within this paradigm, recent anthropological approaches have shifted their perspective from studying ‘architecture without architects’ (Rudofsky 1964) to studying ‘architecture with architects’ (Stender et al. 2022). An early, ground-breaking study of the social foundations of professional architectural prestige, success, and taste argued that successful architects do not owe their success so much to genius as to their social background: going to the right schools and aligning themselves with influential colleagues appeared to be more important than talent (Stevens 1998). Along the same lines, a number of ethnographic studies of design processes in mainstream architectural studios have shown how architectural design is less of an individual pursuit characterised by moments of brilliance, inspiration, and innovation—as it is often portrayed—than it is a collaborative, routine, and sometimes slow process of improvisation, and the recycling, repurposing, and rescaling of existing ideas and practices (Yaneva 2009; Yarrow 2019).

Considering that the establishment of national architectural canons was based on European models and became a central part of imperial ‘civilising’ projects in various parts of the world, current discussions have also aimed to rethink the relationship between architecture and anthropology, seeking new forms of mutual transformation and disciplinary action in design processes, as part of a decolonisation of practices (Stender et al. 2022). Decolonisation cannot undo the systematic stigmatisation and transformation of other, local, or Indigenous forms of architecture that became part of the ideological projects of many nation-states; however, efforts to decolonise look to local and Indigenous architecture to make visible the perspectives, demands, and struggles of diverse oppressed or minority groups. Local vernacular architecture is also often seen as a source of inspiration in relation to discussions about architectural sustainability (Vellinga 2013).

Finally, architecture has pursued new disciplinary roles that transcend individual creative genius and that move towards more collective forms of production (Blundell Jones et al. 2005). Thus far, anthropology has had very limited involvement in such pursuits, beyond occasional collaborations such as that between the anthropologist William Mangin and the architect John F.C. Turner during the 1950s and 1960s in Peru (Mangin and Turner 1969). Similar collaborations are today found in the field of design anthropology (for example, Gunn et al. 2013; Drazin 2019), which aims to imagine new forms of co-creation and collaborative production. In turn, what distinguishes an ‘anthropology of architecture’ and an ‘architectural anthropology’, as has been proposed in recent years (Stender et al 2022), is moving beyond the study of architecture that already exists towards the generative possibilities of an anthropological perspective that seeks to modify the world we inhabit (Ingold 2022). The challenge of ‘corresponding’ between disciplines requires a reflection on respective disciplinary biases and assumptions as well as a willingness to engage in forms of communication that focus on the architectural object and the practices related to its production. For architecture, this cannot be limited to the use of ‘ethnographic tools’ without the application of an interpretative theoretical framework, as noted by Marie Stender (2017). For anthropology, it requires an intention to move beyond studying what people do and an engagement with materiality and processes of making.

Conclusion

One of the foci of this entry has been what we call the ‘continuous becoming of architecture’, or how architecture is comprised of a constant process of designing, making, and dwelling that presents a relative stability within dynamic flows of people, materials, and environments. For decades now, these flows have been at the centre of an anthropological enquiry to understand ‘how the things that people make, make people’ (Miller 2005, 38). As in the case of material culture more generally, it is a dialectical relationship, in which architecture, culture, and environment mutually constitute one another. Architecture is not simply a way into cultural values or a response to environmental conditions that already exist; rather, it plays an active part in their formation and reproduction, just as much as the cultural values and environmental conditions help define the design, use, and meaning of the architecture.

The question of the relationships between people and their architecture continues to be at the core of anthropological interest in architecture. Such discussions require a holistic view that does not divide that which in our daily lives operates simultaneously. We design, build, and inhabit in overlapping moments. We seek shelter from a natural and social world, we arrange spaces that provide us with comfort and pleasure, and we define and present ourselves as persons through architectural actions that we cannot separate, nor prioritise, in clearly defined ways. Architecture can be designed and built, conserved or revived, or imposed or demolished to shape cultural identities and influence environmental conditions. It can be a place of comfort and protection, a model of the cosmos, a tool in environmental revival, and a source of pride, as much as it can be a prison, a place of fear and abuse, or a source of environmental damage.

Recognising the dynamic totality of architecture is a necessary starting-point for any shared project between architecture and anthropology. Such projects cannot be limited to understanding what already exists; rather, they should explore more egalitarian and collective approaches that allow for the creation of new forms of architectural production in pursuit of more diverse, inclusive, and sustainable ways of dwelling.

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Note on contributors

Marcel Vellinga is Professor of Anthropology and Architecture at Oxford Brookes University. Holding a PhD in Cultural Anthropology from Leiden University (the Netherlands), he has taught and published on a variety of topics including vernacular architecture, the anthropology of architecture, rural architectural regeneration, and Minangkabau architecture.

Prof Marcel Vellinga, School of Architecture, Oxford Brookes University, Oxford OX3 0BP, United Kingdom. mvellinga@brookes.ac.uk. https://orcid.org/000b0-0002-1390-3925

Jorge Tomasi is an architect (Universidad de Buenos Aires), with a Master in Social Anthropology (ISES-IDAES-UNSAM) and a doctorate in Geography (Universidad de Buenos Aires). He is a Senior Researcher at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET), and Professor at Universidad Nacional de Jujuy. He is an expert member of ISCEAH and CIAV-ICOMOS.

Jorge Tomasi, Rivadavia 642, Tilcara, Jujuy, Argentina. jorgetomasi@hotmail.com. http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8568-4426

Editor:

Rachel Cantave

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

Appadurai, A. 1996. Modernity at large: cultural dimensions of globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Basso, K.H. 1996. Wisdom sits in places: notes on a Western Apache landscape. In Senses of place (eds) S. Feld & K.H. Basso, 53-90. Santa Fe, N.M.: School of American Research Press.

Bender, B. 1993. Landscape: politics and perspectives. Oxford: Berg.

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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