Brief introduction of landscape and culture

Hello. my name is Ken Taylor. I’m an emeritus professor of the Australian National University in Canberra, in the centre for heritage museum studies. And I’m also a visiting professor at Silpakorn University in Bangkok, where I teach courses in history, places management and cultural landscapes. And in this talk,

I’m gonna cover Cultural Landscapes: Meanings, Values, Assessment, and Documentation. I’ll go through these various sections and complete the session with reference to a case study that I was involved in a few years ago. And I will start with this quotation on this slide. Any landscape is a condition of the spirit. In other words, it’s very much in our minds. And I’m going to enlarge on that as we go through. The first section is a brief introduction. So section one, my paper explores the contemporary challenge of recognizing, protecting, and managing intangible values of cultural heritage with specific reference to cultural landscapes. This is not to deny that cultural landscapes have physical, tangible shape.

But more importantly for this paper, what I want to show is that they demonstrate associative intangible values related to the meaning of a landscape. And then it goes up to people who make the landscape, the people who live in it, the owners, visitors, tourists, all those people will have an interest in the landscape. So, looking at it from the point of view of a community in its widest sense, and such an approach to cultural heritage generally, and cultural landscapes in particular marks a divergence from what we refer to as the Elite Kalisz connoisseurship approach to cultural heritage.

That is only being interested in famous monuments and sites and archaeological remains, which was the way heritage was seen until the mid1980s, when people started to talk about cultural landscapes and more intangible other aspect. So the emergence of the idea of values of meaning is now linked to the concept of cultural heritage and prompts the question, what is meant by the joining of the two words culture and heritage.

In other words, cultural heritage, the word culture or cultural derives from culture, in the way that Australian, an eminent Australian and the number of years ago, Donald Horne rather nicely phrased it as culture is the repertoire of collective habits of thinking and acting that give particular meanings to existence, the way we live and how we find meaning in our existence, and the world around us, the landscape. Denis Byrne, also from Australia, remarked 10 years ago, those of us who have pushed for the recognition of the intangible in heritage work are also those who tend to stress the cultural in cultural heritage, not just being interested in things and objects, but in the social side of heritage.

So I will present an overview of cultural landscape meanings and values, and associated research approaches that address intangible aspects and community values. I will then examine the way in which research knowledge informs methods used in practice to unravel landscape meaning, particularly from the point of view, that landscape

is not simply what is seen an assembly of physical components and natural elements, but rather as Dennis Cosgrove proposes, he is a geographer. It’s a way of seeing that has its own history, but a history that can be understood only as part of a wider history of economy and society; that has its own assumptions and consequences, but assumptions and consequences whose origins and implications extend well beyond the use and perception of the land; that it has its own techniques of expression, but techniques which it shares with other areas of cultural practice; that is trying to understand the world around us; and pivotal to critical research inquiry into these lines of thinking prompts the question.

And you should remember this question all the way through what I’m talking, whose values are we addressing and whose heritage is it?