ABSTRACT
ROXANA WATERSON Introduction: Landscape, Habitus and the Sense of Place The worlds of meaning that cultures create grow out of time and space. In their interactions with local environments, humans shape the landscape around them and read into it the traces of ancestral and historical activity. Over time, as meaning becomes sedimented in landscape, so people themselves become embedded, or, to use Peter Gow’s (1995: 51) turn of phrase, implicated in the landscape, able to understand its meanings. This, Gow emphasises, is not simply a subjective experience of gaining knowledge, ‘because implication depends on actively moving around in the landscape, and leaving traces in it’. This emphasis on a physical involvement, on process and movement, is a good starting-point for an understanding of the cultural specificity of people’s senses of place. We can connect it, too, to the germinal ideas of Pierre Bourdieu (1977, 1990a) which focus upon the role of practice in social life, as distinct from structures or abstract rules, and his concept of habitus, with its emphasis on embodied dispositions. Bourdieu himself makes use of a topographical image when he contrasts the notion of ‘culture’ as a map – ‘the analogy which occurs to the outsider who has to find his way around in a foreign landscape’ – with ‘the practical space of journeys actually made, or rather of journeys actually being made’. The sum of these journeys constitutes the practical mastery of the native, a mastery which itself involves an embodiment of orientations (Bourdieu, 1977: 2).
