Landscape and Memory
Author
Simon Schama (b. 1945), British historian, University Professor of History and Art History at Columbia University, previously at Cambridge, Oxford and Harvard. He is known for large-scale cultural histories and for presenting them on television.
Publication Details
Landscape and Memory. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995. 652 pp. ISBN 978-0-679-40255-2. Winner of the W. H. Smith Literary Award.
Description
Schama's premise is stated in the opening pages: "Landscape is the work of the mind. Its scenery is built up as much from strata of memory as from layers of rock."
The book is a history of how Western cultures have imagined nature, organised around three elemental categories — Wood, Water and Rock — with a fourth section on the combination of them in the garden and the Arcadian tradition. Its method is associative rather than chronological: Schama moves between myth, painting, poetry, forestry policy, engineering, tourism and personal memory, following an image wherever it leads.
The material includes the German forest as a site of national identity from Tacitus through nineteenth-century forestry to Nazi mythology; the Polish-Lithuanian forest of Białowieża, where members of Schama's own family were killed; the Thames and the Nile and the meanings attached to river sources; Mount Rushmore, Yosemite and the American sublime; and the long history of the sacred mountain.
Key Ideas
- Landscape is culture before it is nature. The book's governing claim. A view becomes a landscape when a culture has learned to see it as one, and the learning is historically datable.
- Wilderness is an invention. Schama's most contested argument. The places designated as untouched wilderness — Yosemite most explicitly — were inhabited and managed, and their designation required the removal of the people who had shaped them. The idea of pristine nature is itself a cultural product, and a recent one.
- Myth is durable. Ancient associations survive in modern institutions that would disown them. Forestry policy carries the forest myth; national parks carry the sublime; hydraulic engineering carries the river cult.
- Memory is stratified in place. The landscape holds accumulated meanings in layers, most of them invisible to the people currently walking through it — an argument closely related to narrative archaeology.
Criticism
Reviewers divided sharply on the method. The book is enormous, digressive and organised by association, which some read as capaciousness and others as the absence of an argument. Environmental historians have objected that emphasising the cultural construction of nature risks implying that the material world is only what we think about it — a criticism Schama anticipates but does not fully answer.
Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology
Schama's demonstration that a seemingly natural perception is a cultural achievement, historically produced and traceable, is the same operation this field performs on technology. The parallel is exact: as there is no unmediated wilderness prior to the culture that saw it, there is no unmediated human prior to the tools that made them.
The book is also the strongest available corrective to the natural/artificial opposition that structures most anxiety about technological change. If landscape — the paradigm case of the natural — turns out to be a work of the mind, the opposition is not doing the work it is being asked to do.
