6.3 LANDSCAPE, POLITY AND LAW

In the course of his plea to couple landscape and justice, Mitchell raises the associated question of the relationship between landscape and law. This question, he notes, has been a central theme of the work of the ‘pan-Nordic’(Mitchell, 2003b) geographer Kenneth Olwig (1996, 2002, 2005a, b, c), and he goes on to describe a seminar in Trondheim, Norway, in which both he and Olwig had participated. Here, he writes, ‘landscape was something quite different than what we had come to think of it as in Anglo-American geography’ (Mitchell, 2003b, p.792). Olwig’s work has already been briefly touched on (see Chapter 4, Section 4.2) in the context of new cultural geography’s anxieties over the materiality of landscape. This section will be devoted to further discussing the distinctiveness of his own understanding of landscape in terms of polity, custom and law. A focus upon one individual’s work is merited here, I think, because Olwig’s writing represents perhaps the most ambitious recent attempt to thoroughly redefine the basic terms of landscape, its origins and its ambit as a conceptual tool. In turn, as will be discussed below, this is also now inspiring new substantive work on landscape and law (Olwig, 2005a).

Olwig’s redefinition of landscape, Mels (2003, p.381) notes, is based in an attempt to recover ‘the now ghostly and extremely complex traces of the original “Germanic” definition of landscape as a tract of land, regarded as a territorial and customary unit’.As this implies, Olwig (2002) attempts to work out, etymologically and discursively, an understanding of landscape that is in many ways distinctive from all those examined through the course of this book. Landscape here is not an empirical field to be studied morphologically (Chapter 2), nor is it a way of seeing the world (Chapter 3), or an associable set of cultural values, practices and governances (Chapter 4), or an ensemble of dwelling practices (Chapter 5). Instead, via an examination of the German word Ländschaft, the root of the present-day English word landscape, Olwig in a sense attempts to look behind and before all of these formulae, to recover an original meaning for landscape, one which can then inform contemporary critical thinking. Originally, Olwig argues, long before the invention of perspectival painting led to its pictorial and scenic redefinition, landscape was a particular sort of legal and political entity:‘the primary meaning of Ländschaft appears to have been a judicially defined polity, not a spatially defined area’ (Olwig, 2002, p.19). To put this another way,

custom and culture defined a Land, not physical geographic characteristics – it was a social entity that found physical expression in the area under its law. . . . The Land was [thus] initially defined by a given body of customary law that would have developed historically within and through the workings of the judicial bodies of a given legally defined community. (Olwig, 2002, p.17)

This claim on behalf of landscape has a particular geographical and historical context – that of pre-Renaissance northern Europe – and Olwig’s most comprehensive statement thus far, Landscape, Nature and the Body Politic (2002), is, like Cosgrove’s (1998) Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape, a historical account of how the meaning of landscape has changed over time and through space. In its original context, Olwig argues, landscape was understood above all as referring to a political community of people – a polity – and the set of customary, local laws through which they administered themselves. The term landscape thus denotes ‘a nexus of law and cultural identity’ (Olwig, 2002, p.19). Northern Europe as a whole was once composed, Olwig goes on to suggest, of myriad diverse local polities, or landscapes (Ländschaft), some larger, some smaller, although all were increasingly coming under the judicial and sovereign sway of centralising monarchies and nascent nation-states.The overall narrative of Landscape, Nature and the Body Politic is thus one in which landscape as local polity and place is gradually supplanted from the sixteenth through to the nineteenth century by a scenic, pictorial and formal definition – a definition which corresponds with the official discourse and legal tenure of modern nation-states. Landscape moves ‘from commonplaces to scenic spaces’ (ibid., p.214, original emphasis).The point, therefore, is not to deny that landscape has been, and is, an ideological way of seeing, but rather to offer a corrective to cultural geographies (e.g. Cosgrove, 1985; Cosgrove and Daniels, 1988) which have assumed that to be the only genealogy of the concept. Equally, landscape conceived as polity and place has subsisted through the centuries, and today retains the ability to undercut and query dominant ways of seeing.

The wider point to draw, perhaps, is that defining landscape historically in terms of locality, community, polity and law is one way of granting the term a distinctive and enlarged purpose in the present day. Thus, for Mitchell (2003b, p.788):

What Landscape, nature, and the body politic provides... is, along with an important historical excavation of the roots of our contemporary landscape way of seeing, an equally important excavation of a quite different way of seeing landscape’s relationship to law and social justice. [Olwig] suggests that beneath the dreamwork and groundwork of empire lies a very different relationship between people and their landscape, one that is never fully repressed: there is a struggle for landscape, and it is at the same time the struggle for justice.

A story of landscape told as a vernacular ‘people’s’ history of cultural use, value and transformation is certainly one message of Olwig’s work. But, as Mels (2003) notes, this work emerges at least as much from the traditions of humanistic geography and historical landscape scholarship as from Marxist thought (and it is worth noting that Olwig chose Yi-Fu Tuan, a luminary of geographic humanism, to write the foreword to Landscape, Nature and the Body Politic). In other words, the ethos here is anti-structuralist and anti-abstraction – what Olwig pursues is a history made by people rather than abstract forces.Thus,‘the landscape/country as a physical place was. . . the manifestation of the polity’s local custom and common law’ (2002, p.214). And further in this vein, to capture a sense of landscape as an evolving set of human cultural practices and customs, Olwig refers to Pierre Bourdieu’s (1977) notion of habitus, in stating that ‘landscape is the expression of the practices of habitation through which the habitus of place is generated and laid down as custom and law upon the physical fabric of the land’ (2002, p.226). This stress upon law and custom, it should be noted, sharply differentiates this account of landscape from what Olwig calls ‘blood-and-soil nationalism’: landscape is a historical and cultural entity, made through law, not nature – it belongs to a polity, not a species.