Inhabiting modern landscape

Abstract

Archaeology, anthropology, human geography: three disciplines born out of a nineteenth-century imperative among Europeans to apply a coherent model of understanding (Wissen-schaft) to varied forms of social life within a differentiated physical world; three disciplines stretched between the epistemology and methods of the natural sciences (Naturwissenschaften) which promised certainty, and the hermeneutic reflexivity and critical doubt of the Humanities (Geisteswissenschaften) which promised self-knowledge. Each of these disciplines is today in crisis, and for the same reason. Europe as the place of authoritative knowledge, of civilization, has been decentred upon a post-colonial globe; the white, bourgeois European male has been dethroned as the sovereign subject of a universal and progressive history. Thus, the enlightened intellectual project represented by archaeology, anthropology and human geography, whose findings were unconsciously designed to secure the essentially ideological claims of liberal Europeans, are obliged to renegotiate their most fundamental assumptions and concepts (Gregory, 1993). The linguistic turn in the social sciences and humanities which has so ruthlessly exposed the context-bound nature of their scientific claims — what Ton Lemaire refers to as a critical awareness of their inescapable cultural and historical mediation — forces a recognition that their central conceptual terms, such as ‘culture’, ‘nature’, ‘society’, and ‘landscape’, are far from being neutral scientific objects, open to disinterested examination through the objective and authoritative eye of scholarship. They are intellectual constructions which need to be understood in their emergence and evolution across quite specific histories. Ton Lemaire seeks to sketch something of the history of landscape as such a socially and historically mediated idea: as a mode of representing relations between land and human life, which has played a decisive role in the development of archaeology as a formal discipline. On the foundation of this history he develops a critique of the social and environmental characteristics and consequences of modernity, and seeks to relocate archaeological study within a reformed project of sensitive contemporary ‘dwelling’ on earth.