Le jardin cosmique : considérations anthropologiques sur le paysage en Asie

Abstract

This paper reviews a number of cultural traits, philosophical and religious ideas, as well as ethnographic and historical data, in order to define an Asian representation of landscape, one that could aptly describe the kind of man- made landscape that mountain peoples of Northern Luzon have carved out of the slopes of the Grand Cordillera. Starting from a brief survey of the Western notions of landscape, the author proceeds to show how such a concept is rooted, in East and Southeast Asia, in the pre-Taoist view of nature, in the ideology of the miniature garden in China and Japan, and even in the relation between power and asceticism in pre-modern Indonesia. The notion of a life-giving energy in the form of water flowing downstream and then recycled in the opposite upward direction is instanced in the religious use of sacred water in Bali, in the ceremonies of the Hani of Yunnan, as well as in various mythological representations of the Cordillera people of Northern Luzon. These and other elements are conducive to the view that the terraced landscape is as a cosmic garden. Its intimate and meaningful structure is based on the concept of a life principle flowing downwards, which must be periodically recycled through rituals and ceremonies performed at the very center of the living space.