The portable community: place and displacement in bluegrass festival life

Abstract

origins, and meanings, questions about how people experience the landscape are never far removed from the book’s discussions. Some of the most provocative ideas come in the final three chapters, which address the ways in which the scenic landscape becomes bound up with transcendent space and the implications of this. One concern involves how the scenic landscape works to deceive. Unlike radical and Marxist cultural geographers who highlight the ways that scenic landscapes disguise labor and power relations, Olwig focuses on deception via the illusion of what is real. At the risk of oversimplifying a discussion that stretches from Heidegger to Latour, the scenic landscape deceives though the illusion of the “verity of things” (p. 153). Strongly shaped by linear perspective, the scenic landscape constructs what is real and reifies abstract space. By educating us that the root of the word diabolic means to confuse, and revisiting Christaller’s work on the spatial planning of Poland for the Nazis, Olwig explains how landscape can simultaneously convey both reactionary and modern meanings. Olwig also calls attention to reactionary modernism in the work of E.O. Wilson and the journalist George Monbiot, drawing parallels between the former’s ideas about sociobiology and the latter’s views about rewilding. A critique of modernism informs many of these essays and gives additional resonance to Olwig’s “cubist collage” metaphor. The Meanings of Landscape succeeds in its elucidation of one of cultural geography’s most contested words. In the process, the book laments the loss of the substantive landscape, particularly the meaning and values of local decision making, and offers a cautionary account of how the scenic landscape can conflate, confuse, and deceive. The Meanings of Landscape deserves a place on our bookshelves for its contributions to the geohumanities, and as well as its valuable work on the evolution of the term landscape and the history of geographic thought.