Keyword

landscape, visualization, embodiment

Objectives

While efforts to create local color are visible throughout our globalizing world, particular attention is being paid to nature, architecture and parks, in combination with local and ethnic history, to create landmarks. Anthropologists in Japan have not, however, sufficiently addressed the relationship between landscape and cultural politics. Landscape anthropology is not yet established as a distinct subfield. This joint research project will investigate the significance and role of anthropology in research on landscape, with a primary focus on competition between the variety of actors engaged in competition to define the meanings attached to landscape.
More concretely, this joint research project will examine the mechanisms of landscape formation around the world primarily from two perspectives. The first will be that of the local governments, planners, developers, travel agencies and mass media who visualize local culture in stereotyped terms. The second will be that of the processes by which residents, tourists and performers embody landscape through physical experience. Our goal will to develop a model combining these two perspectives, to promote development of landscape anthropology in Japan.

Research Results

Landscape anthropology was a field that appeared in the 1990s in Europe and the U.S.A, and an increasing number of anthropologists, including young anthropologists in Japan became interested in this field. This research discussed the issues and prospects for landscape anthropology with researchers specialising in ecological anthropology, archaeology and ethnomusicology centered on the social-cultural anthropology. At first, our discussions sometimes became confused because each researcher had different concepts of “landscapes” and different methods of dealing with “landscapes.” During a two and a half year period, however, we were able to find a comprehensive viewpoint covering the researchers’ studies and pursued a paradigm that went beyond conventional landscape anthropology. In doing so, a viewpoint for reviewing landscape anthropology from the following three approaches was presented:

The first was an approach to understand the relationship between external landscapes that were politically formed by local governments, planners, developers, travel agencies and the media and internal landscapes that were formed based on physical experiences by residents, tourists and artist groups. While conventional anthropology placed importance on the aspect in which both parties contended and contested with each other, it became clear from the cases of China, Japan, the U.S.A. and the Middle East that it also had an aspect in which both parties coexisted and integrated with one another. The second was an approach that focused on the relationship between a body and materiality. Landscape anthropology had paid attention to the aspect in which each group gave meaning to the environment under the influence of symbolic anthropology and cognitive anthropology. Based on this aspect, the environment was considered to have plenty of cultural meanings, and decoding of such meanings was adopted as one of the major methods for landscape anthropology. In contrast, this research team presented a viewpoint also focusing on the aspect in which people’s physical practice could accidentally change responding to the change in materiality (such as nature and architecture). The third was the relationship between politics and materiality. Various sciences studying landscapes had discussed the politics through which landscapes were physically formed through urban planning. In the course of this, ethnic cultures had often been used. For this reason, we confirmed that anthropologists could be involved in the political formation of landscapes and the landscape issues.

Thus, this research was able to present tripartite relationships between politics and bodies, bodies and materiality, and materiality and politics as “the three topologies of landscape anthropology” and worked to overcome the conventional discussions from the viewpoint of each topology.