Book Reviews : Gender, work and space. By S. Hanson and G. Pratt. London, Routledge. 1995. xvi + 272 pp. £14.99, paper. ISBN 0 415 09941 2

Abstract

Montagne Sainte-Victoire, argues that peasant societies in general have worked with environments but never wondered about landscapes, and that rural landscapes were first conceived or ’invented’ by city-dwellers. The civilizations of ancient Greece and of India had no word in their languages for ’landscape’, and the Aboriginal civilization of Australia (which lasted for almost 50 000 years) produced pictorial representations of mythical, dream worlds rather than of the actual, real places they inhabited. An aesthetic conception of landscape in the full sense emerged for the first time in the world in China about 2 000 years ago, and then diffused to other parts of East Asia. The region’s languages have a rich terminology relating to landscape, and a powerful representation of landscapes exists in literature, pictures, and gardens. Berque shows that the idea of landscape here at that time