Certeau’s Landscapes

The chapter alternates between a reading of Certeau’s L’Invention du quotidien centred on the practice and the issue of the image, and a wider theoretical reflection on the image’s agency vis-à-vis analytical categories through which we engage with the real of modernity. The image possesses agency in that it brings about a ‘rectification’ of prevailing representations of the everyday, by means of a holistic and therapeutic rationale that is distinctive. The mobility of forms that is the basis of Certeau’s vindication of the image is compared with the work of several more recent anthropologists, namely Tim Ingold, Philippe Descola and Eduardo Kohn, in whose writings comparable figures are subsumed into what can be termed an anthropology of sustainability.