Managing Cultural Landscapes ed. by Ken Taylor and Jane L. Lennon (review)

Culture is rooted in place. It is the beliefs and practices developed to interpret our world and manage the everyday tasks of survival. Cultural landscapes are not only settings for the monumental, but also the ordinary places where traditions have developed in tandem with the environment that sustains them. They can also be associative, the settings of myth or religion, without a built component and sometimes encountered only intellectually. But like languages that are disappearing at an alarming rate, traditional land-based economies, management methods, and physical context are being lost to globalization, urban expansion, uncontrolled tourism, resource exploitation, natural disasters, and more. With the multiplicity of attitudes towards place and the gamut (local to global) of values placed on heritage assets, defining and managing cultural landscapes is complicated. Managing Cultural Landscapes is an ambitious anthology that presents case studies to clarify the working definitions of cultural landscape, to examine critical management issues, and to focus attention on regions that are underrepresented in World Heritage inscriptions. Its working premises are: cultural landscapes are both products and processes; cultural landscape preservation is critical for the preservation of biodiversity; and cultural groups have differing perceptions of landscape.

The book is organized into four sections that present case studies and topical discussions following a description of the concept(s) of cultural landscape within the framework of international conventions, charters, and protocols on world heritage sites.

Emergence of Cultural Landscape Concepts

Taylor begins by delving into the evolution of the ideas and definitions of landscape and cultural landscape while shedding light on historical missteps in inscription and management. He describes the critical conflict between local objectives and the global desire to preserve sites with outstanding heritage capital, and how the more western culture-vs.-nature dilemma has veiled the essential relationship of local communities to their environment. Lennon continues the conversation in Chapter 3, tracing the trends in cultural landscape recognition by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO) World Heritage Committee. She underscores how, as Western constructs, World Heritage conventions have been misapplied in non-Western contexts resulting in the alienation of local populations whose traditional landscape management processes are critical to authenticity. The next section’s case studies illuminate the challenges of cultural landscape management in the Asia-Pacific region, showing how the limits established by prescribed definitions cannot always contain the full complement of intangible cultural values.

Managing Asia-Pacific Cultural Landscapes

Unlike the prevailing Western attitude that nature is outside of culture, in the East humans do not perceive the physical environment (man-made or otherwise) as ‘other.’ Jusna Amin states that in Java it is believed that natural phenomena and features are manifestations of spiritual forces. Javanese landscapes reflect this belief on every scale, connecting everyday places to the universal. Hence, to place a boundary around heritage sites in Java is an artificial social construct. Rowena Butland, in the chapter on Angkor, discusses this problem of site definition and how “. . . economic, social, or political agendas construct the boundaries, or scale, of heritage sites” (205).

Feng Han asserts that the Western definition of cultural landscape has been confused in China where no landscapes are seen as purely natural and the best landscapes are “elevated by human culture with the attachments of subjective moral or aesthetic meaning” (97). This subjectivity has been detrimental to vernacular cultural landscapes in China where sometimes whole villages have been erased to heighten landscape beauty. Japan, on the other hand, recognizes organically evolving everyday landscapes as worthy of conservation and has established measures to preserve a number of unique cultural landscape types, according to Nobuko Inaba in Chapter 6.

In Chapter 8, Nalini Thakur explains that in India time is viewed as cyclical rather than linear and landscapes are experienced metaphysically (one’s relationship with the landscape is formed by cultural associations and beliefs more than by physical features). Heritage assets are considered part of the...