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THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE LANDSCAPE IN THE RESEARCH OF ENVIRONMENTAL HUMANITIES 183 Diversity of interpretations So far, the landscape as a universal phenomenon has been discussed, and some important aspects reguired for a better understanding of it have been outlined. We now turn to the level of interpretation, progressing from the individual to the role of the body politic. A crucially important contribution was made by Sándor Békési, who says that "a landscape arises via the approach to it". This is at times a selective and constructive process. The “external environment” of individuals encounters mental and emotional factors, leading to diverse individual and social aspects, forms of interpretation and new symbols (Békési 2009: 189). In Peter J. Howard’s view, our “personal landscapes” are influenced by nationality, culture, religion, social status, rural life (aborigine status), gender, age, experience, occupation, fields of activity, and the media we use, which — like a sort of “perceptual lens” — changes the meaning of what we see (Howard 2016). Every personality approaches things, screens and distorts information differently, and re-presents the landscape in a selective manner (Muir 1999: 115). A person may conceive of a landscape as a personally experienced place or a remote area beyond his/her reach, or again, it may be a place in the realm of the imagination. Landscapes can be friendly, snug, exotic, appalling, valuable, inspiring. What is certain is that we ascribe to them diverse connotations. In his famous work, Beloved geography, Zoltan Szabé writes in an intimate and warm tone: “Certain angles of the mountain slopes, a water surface, the music of a gurgling brook, the nearby street corner, the procession of clouds over the plain, a piece of the landscape enclosed by the frame of a window, and in which familiar people like us are moving about [...]” (Szabö 1988: 16). D. W. Meinig conducted a highly informative study about diverse modes of perceiving a landscape. The term landscape is not only a general concept, but as part of the academic terminology, it is a word of specific meaning which elicits different schemes of interpretation from different specialists. In his essay “The Beholding Eye. Ten Versions of the Same Scene”, he looks at these interpretive frames one by one. He says that a landscape can be perceived as habitat, art work, system, problem, property, ideology, history, place, or aesthetic sight, to list the various schemes (Meinig 1979). An interesting example of individual landscape perception is given in John Connell’s The Running Book, a report of his experiences of the landscape during his running. Based on the specific perceptive medium of running, the book presents memories, knowledge fragments, and personal confessions of the landscape as though on a conveyor belt (Connell 2020). Ethnographer Vilmos Keszeg’s biographical study reconstructs the tradition of living in the landscape (Erdelyi-Mezöseg — Campia Transilvaniei) and the knowledge about the landscape and the environment based on the events and narratives of a person’s life. It demonstrates the extent to which the landscape shapes the trajectory and life of the individual, but also seeks to answer the question of how changes in the environment produce experiences. As revealed by the previous examples, the individual’s personality has a great role in perception and interpretation. At the same time, as Mitchell claims, the landscape is a cultural medium as well (Mitchell 2002a: 2; 2002b: 5): it is perfectly suitable for conveying messages. It may have
