Re-definition has become a very important concept to me in this class, so far, as re-visiting my previous entries, I have learnt to re-define “mapping” and “senses”. This week, however, Spirn's “The language of landscape” hits the spot for me, a re-evaluation of what landscape could mean. Doing a bit of research on the word “Landscape”, I learnt that the American understanding actually derived from the German geographical term “landschaft”, which means a restricted piece of land; on the other hand, in English, it has a double meaning, which extends to mean “appearance of a land as we perceive it”. Spirn precisely tackles this aesthetic side of landscape to structure a new way of understanding landscape. Beginning from the very first chapter, I was already captivated by her unique analogy between landscape and language : landscape has all the characteristics of language – basic grammar structure and formation, pattern, shape and function. I thought it was ingenious how she refers elements such as wind, rocks, water and trees as fundamental grammar, while additional man-built environments as the combination of words to make sense and meanings of the grammar and phrases themselves. She succinctly points out that landscape is “pragmatic, poetic, rhetorical, polemical. Landscape is scene of life, cultivated construction, carrier of meaning. It is language” [15]. It was great to see that she mentioned the sacred garden at Ryoanji in Japan as I have been there myself and have conducted a study on the Zen elements of rock garden in my Japanese History class before. The intentional exclusion of trees and water in a garden was prominent in Zen garden, which strives for simplicity, this proves Spirn's reference to how garden design could be a way of interaction between human and the environment.
Growing up in a condense city Hong Kong, Spirn's writing also provokes me to ponder upon the idea of urban-planning which is based on the merging of man-built and natural elements; Spirn points out “it is a radical theory [that landscape is language] in the sense of … demanding and enabling radical change in how we choose to think and act... to call some landscapes natural and other artificial or cultural misses the truth that landscapes are never wholly one or the other” [8]. Not only does this reflect that our modern thinking has advanced regarding urban-development based on ecological measurements as well as sustainability, moreover, people are more aware of the knowledge that urban and natural environment, nature and cultural structures are in fact forever interwoven entities that depend on each other. After reading this book, I truly believe and experienced that it is not enough to study landscape as a scenic text, a more substantial understanding would require not only focusing on the country or in the city, but must incorporate the mutual definition and interdependence of both.
Returning to the way of narrative that we discussed in class last week, Sprin's way of narrating is highly effective for me : firstly, her intentional emphasis on employing description to provoke emotional thinking in us readers ingeniously make the process of reading this book parallel to the actual experience of being in a landscape; secondly, Spirn inserts into the book many of her own photographs collection and landscape plans, which allow us to be in direct contact and engagement with different landscapes across time and locations.
The next book that I read was “Imagining Serengeti: A History of Landscape Memory in Tanzania from Earliest Times to the Present” by Jan Shetler, in which she tries to re-discover human history in this Eastern Africa area. To me, Serengeti is a more familiar sounding area in Africa due to current media's constant portrayal of its abundant wildlife environment, as well as countless international green organizations' focus on the human rights and wilderness conservation debate. Due to this common image of Serengeti as a wilderness, it was surprising for me to learn from Shetler that this signature wilderness is actually part of the colonial conservation policy, which entirely neglects this area's indigenous social and ecological history. For example, Shetler mentions that the colonial legal authorities' power to criminalize local hunting in the Serengeti as a way to preserve this nature, however, until it was fully renationalized in the 1950s, all the hunting laws were actually unenforceable and that natives in the western Serengeti would hunt for the sake of both food-provision for the households and to earn their own wealth, which makes perfect sense for a community living in such wilderness. It was more horrifying for me to learn that by the end of the 1950s, strong political power forced the National Park to become an ideal untouched wilderness, resulting in the Nyerere government's involuntary acceptance; due to Tanzania's large-scale relocation project in the late 1970s, the government was forcing all these indigenous people away from the National park's western boundary, completely erasing the shared historical memory of this sacred space. All these references by Shetler remind me of our last week's discussion on Mcgregor's “The Victoria Falls 1900-1940”, just like how Mcgregor ended the article by showing improvements shown by the government in conserving indigenous history, especially that of the people who lived there, Shetler focuses on learning the oral history of the forgotten population that lived in the Western Seregenti, which namely are the Nata, Ikizu and Ngrome people etc which brings to another feature that I found intriguing in Shetler's writing : her very refreshing way of narratives by a bulk collection of oral histories of the elderlies.
“Core spatial imagery” is crucial to Shetler's way of re-telling these elderlies' stories, this notion places emphasis on the preservation of landscape health, which leads to the everyday life of food security. Here, this very idea proves to me the importance of landscape or border conservation for the people as, since as hedge against possible famines and droughts, people would root their religious belief and spirituality in certain areas, which they faithfully believed possess the power of fertility and stability. Together, along with the well-known natural disasters such as drought and disease epidemics in the Western Serengeti, territories protection and claims of landscapes became a much more priority for people living there, constantly striving to pronounce their ethnic boundaries. Going back to Shetler's narrative of story-collecting, it was amazing how she revealed to us indirectly what is the supposedly “natural wilderness” form of Serengeti by using these elders' stories to revisit the abandoned ritual sites and hunting groups, which are now legally and forcefully incorporated into the greater Serengeti “man-made” wilderness. Her methodology in composing this book seems to ingeniously parallel her critique over the Colonial authorities : the book could not reveal the whole truth without the addition of these indigenous elders' stories, just like how the Western-style conservation of the Serengeti National Park could never be truly successful without incorporating the collective social memory of this sacred place.
