The ‘Anthropology of Landscape’ as a Research Method

The Anthropology of Landscape is a relatively recent direction in contemporary anthropology. The term became popular through the volumes edited by Hirsch and O’Hanlon (1995) and Bender and Winer (2001). ‘Landscape’, in this context, refers to the interpretation of space. In other disciplines, like Art History and Geography, ‘landscape’ is used in a less interpretative way. For that reason, I shall here use the term ‘place’ instead of ‘landscape’, in line with Myers (1986), Rodman (1992), Feld and Basso (1996), Fox (1997), Bolton (1999) and Rumsey and Weiner (2001). ‘Place’, then, is a construct of collective history, memory, personal and