ABSTRACT
Recent years have witnessed a growing interest in both heritage and landscape; as categories of scholarship and education, of experience and performance, of entertainment and commerce, of policy engagement, and as markers of identity. Indeed, the two often fit nicely together, tagged as being cultural and/or natural; tangible and/or intangible; personal and/or collective, and especially national; as mutual reference points within popular, policy and scientific narratives. Not surprisingly, therefore, the recent histories of heritage and landscape studies have been closely intertwined, with their epistemological, ideological and methodological twists and turns progressing amid a common, broad and interdisciplinary intellectual space. This has not been a co-dependent evolution as such, although their trans-disciplinary connections would seem to relate to a common theoretical resource. Rather, our enquiry into landscape and heritage would appear to be a mutually supporting and sometimes parallel endeavour of intellectual effort, which explores their significance as meaningful categories of emergence and process. Furthermore, this recognition of both heritage and landscape as dynamic processes would seem to be at odds with a commonly cited (and often reactionary) aspiration to fix; to preserve; to stabilize and otherwise monopolize the meaning of both categories. While other chapters in this collection implicitly cover the emerging heritage of landscape studies from a variety of perspectives, therefore, this chapter reviews the terrain of a dynamic relationship between these categories. Rather than seeking to reify a series of dualities, the chapter traces the co-ordinates of how such relations can be blurred, what consequences this line of thinking has, and what opportunities heritage and landscape scholars have. Reflecting a wider ‘postmodern turn’ in academia, the pursuit of intellectual questions sur-
rounding both landscape and heritage has transformed over the last couple of decades.1
Interestingly, however, while there appears to be much commonality in these developments, very few texts have sought specifically to review this disciplinary evolution in parallel.2 Recent work in landscape studies has emphasized the subjective nature of the term, with new questions being asked, novel approaches utilized, and a much more sophisticated commitment to social theory on the research agenda (see Wylie 2007, and other chapters within this collection). Research in heritage studies has witnessed a similar practice of destabilization and increasing
engagement with social theory (see, for instance, Graham et al. 2000, Harvey 2001, 2008; Howard, 2003; Smith 2006; Ashworth et al. 2007). As a result, both fields of research have now tended to emphasize the contingent and processual nature of their subjects. While Tunbridge and Ashworth (1996) and David Lowenthal (1998) emphasize the dissonance and conflict that lie at the heart of heritage, Gunhild Setten (2006: 73) articulates this dissonance bound up within landscape heritage as a series of tensions – between nature and culture, past and present, public and private. Resonating with these sentiments, Wylie (2007: 1) simply notes that ‘landscape is tension’. A further parallel theme in the trajectory of heritage and landscape studies is the notion of
‘becoming’; that both landscape and heritage are in a constant state of ‘cultural construction, deconstruction and reconstruction’ (Kelly and Norman 2007: 173). Drawing from earlier work by Barbara Bender (1998, 2001) that landscapes are never inert or passive, this more dynamic understanding of heritage and landscape has been a powerful and resonant idea. Lee (2007: 88) for instance, notes that a processual approach provides the ‘locus for the active “becoming” or “re-imagining” of social relations, land-use and identity’. This dynamic understanding is invoked in the work of Werner Krauss (2006, 2008: 427) as he explores landscape and heritage not as entities that are simply ‘there’, but which are ‘poly-semantic, processual and relational’. Work suggesting that heritage is not a ‘thing’ nor a ‘site’, but a ‘cultural process of engaging and experiencing’ (Smith 2006: 44), draws attention towards ‘being in the world’; with heritage as a verb, related to human action and experience (Harvey 2001: 327). In this respect, the question is less about what heritage is, and more about what it does. As Setten (2006: 74) notes, heritage is acted out in a ‘situated contextual and narrative mode of knowing in certain pasts and presents’. It is this ‘narrative mode of knowing’ that is bound up with the contextual and dynamic
reading of heritage, which can help us more fully understand the contested arena of landscape studies. In other words, moving beyond the recognition of a series of parallels within the intellectual terrains of landscape and heritage studies, I would argue that these mutually supporting conceptual developments have consequences for the study and understanding of both landscape and heritage.
