| dc.description.abstract | What is the problem for which landscape is the answer? In this paper, I offer a
response to this question, first posed at a meeting of landscape researchers
in Brussels in 2011. I argue that the problem can be defined as ontopology,
or what I call here homeland thinking, and I propose that a landscape cannot
be a homeland. The salience of landscape as a critical term instead involves
modes of thinking and feeling that chafe against invocations of homeland as
a site of existential inhabitation, as a locus of sentiment and attachment, and
a wellspring of identity. The paper explores the connections between ideas
of landscape and homeland through discussions of the European Landscape
Convention, phenomenology and the term homeland itself. I conclude by
arguing that a landscape must be understood as a kind of dislocation or
distancing from itself. There are, after all, no original inhabitants. | en_GB |
