Editor’s introduction

Abstract

“Heritage landscape” is a slippery concept, consisting of two terms with broad semantic content. Nevertheless, it is this very ambiguity and vagueness that make it workable from a pragmatic standpoint. I well remember hiking a trail with my son, then a teenager, in Huangshan (Yellow Mountain) in Anhui Province, China. Designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site, it was overrun with tour groups of the sort seen commonly in Asia (and increasingly in places such as Yellowstone National Park), with a tour guide wielding a loudspeaker and flag, herding their groups in nearly military fashion. Compared with the experience of, say, sauntering through Wordsworth’s Lake District, the contrast could not be more dramatic. The serenity of the landscape (used as one of the main locations for the film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) was, for me, at odds with the sound of the guides, and the presence of large numbers of tourists. To me, that was not a “heritage landscape” moment; in part, because the landscape was not my “own” heritage. I will gladly “own” a landscape in the British Isles or even a Cycladic Island, but to me the landscape of Chinese poets and monks was a bridge too far. Even more, the reverential attitude towards the landscape, which I inherited through the Romantic tradition, as passed on via the Hudson River School, John Muir, Ansel Adams, etc., seemed, to me, utterly lacking in the selfie-taking tourists. Of course, as Michael Wilson argues, “heritage landscape” is an inherently ideological framework that is open to critical challenge by scholars, but which exists largely to bury such considerations. “We,” as world citizens, can all be welcomed under the umbrella of UNESCO’s World Heritage designation. This makes for, as Wilson notes, some awkward moments. How is a White American visitor to relate to an Aboriginal sacred site such as Uluru? I found myself in a similar situation with a good friend who is a hereditary Maori chief, visiting the Moeraki Boulders in New Zealand. Closer to (my) home, indigenous sites such as “buffalo jumps” are repurposed for a broad, North American audience who have no direct ties to the sites, which can, in fact, be used as part of a settler colonial discourse. On the other hand, in Europe, especially the British Isles, “heritage landscape” can be used to underwrite a highly fictional narrative of cultural continuity.