![]() ![]() Their definitions are somewhat more narrow than those of cultural geographers, as they are not concerned with generic commercial landscapes such as those characterizing the Galactic City (for example). The US National Parks Service and the United Nations protect cultural landscapes. This fact was not legally recognized until the last 50 years, as British colonizers after 1788 denied that Aboriginal people and Torres Strait Islanders had been "owners." Now, the process of locating and protecting millions of sacred sites and restoring the cultural landscapes of the continent's hundreds of Indigenous groups is in essence a process of recognizing that Australia has been a cultural landscape for 40,000 or more years. In a cultural landscape, geographers can also find traces of those older cultural texts, even if these are buried in the ground (literally), or in place names, like the way the US is filled with Indigenous burial sites and toponyms in places where Indigenous people no longer live.Īll of Australia is Indigenous cultural landscape. With special tools, historians can detect some of what was erased. Therefore, what you get is like those ancient manuscripts that were erased and written over, again and again. When a new occupier moves in, the erasure of previous meanings, whether intentional or not, is usually incomplete. Most cultural landscapes function as palimpsests. 2 - Galen's palimpsest, an 11th-century AD text written over a partially erased 9th-century text A landscape read by someone who wishes to make a profit has a quite different interpretation than its reading as a place to be preserved in perpetuity, for example.įig. ![]() Meanings vary a single landscape can be read in many different ways. Text and PalimpsestĬultural landscapes, whether they are US suburbs or sacred groves in Benin, have meaning and therefore they can be "read" as what geographers call text. But on Earth, the essential human geographical activity is making places and landscapes. Where people haven't been and haven't inhabited, whether ice caps or other planets, cultural landscapes don't exist. People create geographic meaning, whether by farming, building a shack, naming local landmarks, or telling stories about mountains that turn into the basis of their religion.Ĭultural landscapes are networks comprised of places (locations with meanings) and the ways they interconnect (streets, paths, roads, etc.). Because all humans possess culture, the very act of dwelling in a location, whether for a season or permanently, turns that location into a place in a cultural landscape. ![]() Now, a cultural landscape may be recognizable by its smells, tastes, sounds, and tactile sensations, not just its visual aspects. This is important! In previous times, landscapes were characterized solely as visual artifacts, a holdover from the 17th-century Dutch landschap paintings that are at the origin of the concept. Human cultural artifacts can be detected by at least one of the five senses and/or subjective dimensions such as emotions (landscapes of fear or memory, for example). Thus "cultural landscape" signifies ANY landscape on Earth outside Antarctica, as long as you recognize present or detectable past signs of humans there. Most of Antarctica, where permanent human presence has never been felt (though scientific base areas are cultural landscapes).Īrctic areas: humans have inhabited, albeit sometimes intermittently, all places but ice sheets on Greenland and nearby islands, so few landscapes here are natural.Įven the remotest parts of Siberia, the Sahara, the Australian deserts, and the Amazon bear imprints of human cultures, and nearly every remote oceanic island has a research station, weather station, military outpost, or former whaling or sealing camp. 1 - Satellite photo shows the Grasberg Mine that has excavated a giant hole in New Guinea's tallest mountain, Puncak Jaya, a 16,024-foot peak sacred to Indigenous groups who struggled against Freeport McMoran, the company responsible for the damageīecause people inhabit most of the planet's land surface, what AREN'T cultural landscapes, in the broadest sense? If a mining company carves away the mountain or climbers defile it, they are destroying human culture because they are "messing with the deities," so to speak.įig. But mountains such as Kanchenjunga in the Himalayas and Puncak Jaya in New Guinea are cultural landscapes because they are sacred for the people who live nearby. To climbers or mining companies, a mountain might seem untouched: the ultimate natural landscape. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |