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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
