No community without spectacle: A comment on Olwig's Landscape, Nature, and the Body Politic

Abstract

It would be difficult to accurately summarize Olwig’s complex and rewarding book in short space. It is not at all difficult to summarize it with partial accuracy, however, so that is what I propose to do. I do this not only for the sake of brevity, but also because the intellectual impact of a book that permits a simple and partially accurate summary is so often an impact of the imperfect summary, and not of the book itself. So some of what I am about to say is directed not so much at Olwig’s book, as at statements that are likely to appear in coming years with Olwig’s book appended as a legitimizing footnote. Olwig basically posits two forms of landscape, what we might call the community form and the scenic form. In the community form, a landscape is a particular social order, a “historically constituted” system of persons and practices that gives shape to a particular piece of land. This is the landscape geographers most often study, because it represents the everyday political and economic arrangements of the community. To insider and outsider alike, experience of the community form of landscape is experience of the social order as complex and contingent, as diverse individuals and groups interacting through evolving, negotiated relations. The scenic form of landscape is a particular vista, or type of vista, that is thought to condense, epitomize, or represent a wide territory and the social order that occupies that territory. As the word scenery implies, such landscapes are more often extraordinary than typical, for they are presumed to manifest an essence that lies behind everyday appearances. As representations of the social order, scenic landscapes accomplish two things. By presenting an essential unity of scenery they obscure the actual diversity of persons and places in the social order that occupies that landscape. For instance, the great iconographic landscapes of the United States, preserved in national parks, present wild nature as a unifying American theme, while they obscure the diversity of everyday social, economic, and political life in America. By omitting from the scene representations of the intermediate institutions that stand between the individual and the state, scenic landscapes also, according to Olwig, aid centralization of political power. To view