Oldal 180 [180]
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE LANDSCAPE
IN THE RESEARCH OF ENVIRONMENTAL
HUMANITIES
Gábor Máté
Frameworks and landscapes
Attraction to the landscape in different fields of scholarship is not new. Before the
emergence of environmental problems, it was a sort of crystallization point from
the emergence of human geography in researching the relations between humans
and the natural environment. (On the evolution of Hungarian human geography,
and the connection between ethnography and geography, see Novák 1997).
Significantly, the notion has risen to an important level of analysis in the natural
sciences and the humanities. This is also indicated by the emergence of diverse
disciplines such as landscape ecology, landscape geography, landscape history,
landscape archaeology, and landscape aesthetics. The essence and flexibility of the
concept were revealed by the words of Pal Teleki, who said: “The landscape is an
excerpt, a large sample from the Earth's surface area, from the multi-rhythmic life of
the world where many such rhythms coexist[...] The observation of the landscape, the
perception of the known and unknown in combination, in the part of the universe in
more — or most — direct contact with us, is a valuable complement to our knowledge,
the generator of problems, and a guide along the path of deepening our thinking”
(Teleki 1937: 138).
Since Teleki’s landscape geography, a lot of time has passed, but his thoughts
— with due flexibility — still show where the landscape can serve as a suitable
framework. English landscape historian Richard Muir illustrates the increased
interest in landscape in recent decades with the growth of a tree. He says that in
time, the foliage of a tree becomes ever more extensive and the branches grow
away from one another. In such a way do new approaches to the landscape evolve.
In other words, this symbolizes the increase of differences between scholarly
interpretations of the landscape and the separate development of the concept of
landscape. According to Muir’s concrete example, the representatives of
postmodernist perspectives would hardly be able to interpret the patterns of
perished villages on the Earth’s surface (Muir 1999: XIII-XIV). To explain why
the “branches” have diverged so far from each other, the impacts of two “turns”
need to be mentioned. One of the greatest changes in attitude was precipitated
by the “cultural turn” in geography in the 1970s, which relativized the role of
space, including the landscape. It called attention to non-material characteristics
of units of the landscape, pointing beyond the physical parameters, such as, for
instance, the importance of language, meaning, and representation. Landscapes
are not things by themselves, but have cultural significance; they are enculturated
(Atha — Howard — Thomson — Waterton 2013: XXI; Békési 2009: 185). The
“spatial turn” that took place in historiography revalued the role of place and its