Simplifying the Challenges in Interpreting Cultural Landscapes

 

Simplifying the Challenges in Interpreting Cultural Landscapes

Charl Justine Darapisa

 

Cultural landscapes mirror the ways societies have interacted with their environment over time. The flowering of interest in and understanding of cultural landscapes result in the emergence of different values and shared meaning system inherent in such landscapes¹. However, these landscapes that anchor humanity and nature are continuously threatened by the ephemerality of their values and aging modernism². These threats extend to the cultural heritage that represents numerous communities across the globe. Along with the depreciation of these landscapes, the embodiment of cultural significance, relation to history, traditional knowledge, and even spiritual values also disappear through time. These cases strengthen the need to interpret and understand cultural landscapes before such innately beautiful and culturally significant spaces cease to exist.

The ephemerality of cultural landscapes is influenced by dissipating cultural values and meanings.

Challenges. Interpretation of cultural landscapes comes with different challenges. Landscapes entail a relationship that man and nature intrinsically and extrinsically possess. They have become both background and foreground of cultural expression and representation³, hence, a 360-degree way of understanding and interpretation is required.

Among these interpretation challenges include:

(a)    Difficulty in uncovering intangible values and meaning system. The complexity of interpretation requires uncovering embedded people’s spirituality towards the landscape, and inherently cultural traditions both in physical entities and mental images⁴. Revealing these values and meanings may only become significant if the collective categorization of representation is systematically done. However, oftentimes, these intangible values are constructed through the incorporation of heterogeneous knowledge that may have changed through time.

Interpretation requires uncovering spirituality in physical and mental images.

(b)   Natural cultural landscapes are threatened by the physical deterioration, and the collapse of social structure. The changing climate and the spread of modernization result in transformations Primarily, the principal aim of standardized framing of cultural landscapes should always inform the ‘views’ of an insider and the historical accounts an institution like local communities contain. The issue of the extent of the application of interpretation between the present and previous landscape structures may present.

The standardization of cultural processes should be time-specific, local in scale, and inclusive of the cultural components that present in various landscape structures. 

(c)    Concept of experience between everyday and beyond everyday may or may not regard as unconnected through the process of interpretation.  The concept of landscapes is hardly singled out in a distinguishable, simple idea. Oftentimes, concepts such as place and space, inside and outside, image and representation⁵ are difficult to isolate in different contexts. Concepts such as foreground actuality, place, inside, and image roughly correspond to the form of everyday and un-reflexive forms of experience⁶. While concepts like background potentiality, space, outside.

and representation equates to the context and form of experience beyond the everyday⁷. In the interpretation process, cases may require the disentanglement or reconfiguration of these concepts.

The concept of 'experience' in the everyday landscape requires disentanglement and reconfiguration.

Simplification of the challenges. These challenges should not discourage rather invite more researchers to power academic curiosities on cultural landscapes. Despite the issues that remain, cultural meanings may however present in various often easily cognizable forms. Previous researchers and historians crystallize the best strengths to view these concepts twofold:

(a)   How do we perceive the external physical world? Whether psychologically, historically, or socially, the answers to this question needs to be theorized, analyzed, and debated⁸.

Unveiling the perception of the external physical world based on the influences of cultural components may be done in creative, imaginative yet reflective communication processes. Here we invited the women of the community to discuss the plants that are typically included in their home gardens. 

Through community participatory planning, the locals identified spaces that
are culturally significant and spiritually respected in the community. 

(b)   How does representation exhibit in the landscape? The pair of perception or representation is historically shaped by a particular material, social conditions, or behavior that influence the landscape⁹.

Representation of cultural components in the landscapes may take the form of a particular material, social conditions, manifestation of behaviors, or simply an innate understanding of a cultural construct. 

To reiterate, the complexity of cultural landscapes may be simplified through the clearly defined landscape, and how the process shapes the behavior and mind of the humans around the landscape. The tedious interpretation process should extensively identify all the landscape elements that contribute to the way how cultural landscapes are viewed in the present. Generally, these elements and representations create a juncture between man and nature, tangible and intangible heritage, and biological and cultural diversity¹⁰. Since landscapes contain an insurmountable amount of collective human behavior left in the landscape through time¹¹, representations are likely possible to be simplified and further deducted.

Simplification by clearly defining the physical boundaries of the landscape,
and carefully deducting the intangible values and meanings that shape these boundaries. 

For example, research may focus on the seemingly new practice of exploration of vernacular landscapes. It is very much evident that landscapes across the globe echo unique cultural significance, imbued by innately beautiful aesthetics, and driven by specific historical time. These three components may exist simultaneously or have existed as a consequent result of permutations of one over the other. In the case of vernacular landscapes, the influence of embracing cultural beliefs into the landscape reflects most of the reasons behind the perception, formation, and biophysical changes imbued in both built and unbuilt environments. By studying vernacular landscapes, one’s traditions are preserved in the senses of community, security, and identity, and places are revitalized, united, or strengthened.

The formation of vernacular landscapes is influenced by the communities' perception, experiences in the biophysical world, and the manifestation of metaphysical beings that are believed to roam their environment. 

     While increased interests and flowering of new understandings on how vernacular landscapes operate evolve or formed, essential questions needed further research. In particular with the best practices in unveiling unique characteristics of the vernacular landscape. There should have a comprehensive comparative study and collection of research methodologies that are successfully laid out in one region or country. This will invite more researchers to get involved in the discussions and fill knowledge gaps.

Way of Seeing. Like culture, cultural landscapes are complex and attempted to define and redefine through time. For this study, cultural landscapes adapt the elitist natural heritage view where landscape pertains to what we see and a way of seeing ¹³.  In other words, the landscape itself was, and still is, explained as a cultural construct replete with humanistic meanings and values¹⁴. With this in mind, historically, researchers define the term ‘cultural landscape’ bounded by the cultural understanding of nature. For example:

(a)    China. Cultural landscapes include inter alia that it is more on humanistic rather than religious, aesthetic rather than scientific.

(b)   Italy. Cultural landscapes are held as a design or designed space that imitates nature.

(c)    Thailand. Cultural landscapes where interpretative presentation acknowledges the relationship between people and nature. 

(d)   France. Cultural landscapes are strongly linked to rural countryside with less density of built areas.

(e)    Indonesia. Cultural landscapes are dictated by sustainable land use management.

(f)    Europe and in North America. Cultural landscapes linked to the concept of wilderness or wild nature.

(g)   Europe. The original association of cultural landscapes is depicted in landscape paintings.

Heritage conservation in vernacular landscapes should embrace living history and encompass the full spectrum of people's sense of place, traditional knowledge, creativity, and innovations including equity and access. 

 

While there are undeniably congruencies in the cultural landscape among countries, particularly those considered as geographical neighbors, it should remain an utmost priority to investigate on distinctive features a country possesses in their cultural landscapes. Apart from the long-practiced conservation of architecturally outstanding heritage sites, the acknowledgment of heritage embraces living history and living heritage to encompass the full spectrum of people’s sense of place, traditional knowledge, creativity and innovation, including equity and access¹⁵.

 

Written by: Charl Justine Darapisa

Photographed by: Shaira Faye Salazar

 

References:

¹ Taylor, K., & Lennon, J.L (2011) Cultural landscapes: A bridge between culture and nature. International Journal of Heritage Studies. DOI: 1080/13527258.2011.618246

² Meier, A (2013) Five Issues Threatening the Destruction of Cultural Heritage Site. Accessed from: https://hyperallergic.com/87139/five-issues-threatening-the-destruction-of-cultural-heritage-sites

³ Hirsch, E (1995) Landscape: Between Place and Space. The Anthropology of Landscape: Perspectives on Place and Space. Oxford University ress. Walton: New York, 3

⁴ Taylor, K., & Lennon, J.L (2011) Cultural landscapes: A bridge between culture and nature. International Journal of Heritage Studies. DOI: 1080/13527258.2011.618246

⁵ Alpers, S (1989) The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century. Hanrmondworth: Penge Books

⁶ Bourdieu, P (1977) Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

⁷ Ibid.

⁸ Green, N (1995) Looking at the Landscape: Class Formation and the Visual. The Anthropology of Landscape: Perspectives on Place and Space. Oxford University Press. Walton: New York, 32

⁹ Barell, J (1980) The Dark Side of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting, 1730-1840. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

¹⁰ Rossler, M (2005) World Heritage Cultural Landscape in the Region. World Heritage. Cultural Landscapes: A global perspective ICOMOS-UK, 38-45

¹¹ Smith, A (2007) Pacific Islands Cultural Landscapes: Making Use of this Study. Thematic Study for Cultural Landscapes in the Pacific Islands, 15

¹² Taylor, K., & Lennon, J.L (2011) Cultural landscapes: A bridge between culture and nature. International Journal of Heritage Studies. DOI: 1080/13527258.2011.618246

¹³ Cosgrove, D (1984) Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape. Croom Helm: London

¹⁴ Taylor, K., & Lennon, J.L (2011) Cultural landscapes: A bridge between culture and nature. International Journal of Heritage Studies. DOI: 1080/13527258.2011.618246

¹⁵ Taylor, K., & Lennon, J.L (2011) Cultural landscapes: A bridge between culture and nature. International Journal of Heritage Studies. DOI: 1080/13527258.2011.618246