The Meanings of Landscape: Essays on Place, Space, Environment and Justice

Kenneth R. Olwig. New York, NY: Routledge, 2019. xviii and 258 pp., illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $112.00 cloth (ISBN 9781138483927); $37.56 paper (ISBN 9781138483934); $37.56 electronic (ISBN 9781351053532).

Introduction by Kent Mathewson, Department of Geography and Anthropology, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA.

This year's AAG Review of Books special event at the American Association of Geographers (AAG) meeting in Washington, DC, featured an “Author Meets Critics” session devoted to Kenneth R. Olwig's The Meanings of Landscape: Essays on Place, Space, Environment and Justice. The edited collection brings together nine essays that span the breadth of Olwig's wide compass, plumbing the depths of landscape's multiple and duplicitous meanings. The foreword, by anthropologist Tim Ingold, salutes Olwig's penchant, even passion, for philology, signaling one of the paths on which this “philophile” takes the reader. Chapter 1, perhaps the author's best known and most widely cited piece, “Recovering the Substantive Nature of Landscape,” excavates landscape's premodern meanings. Wielding his philological scalpel, Olwig peels away landscape's modern surficial layers that fixed it as spatial scenery, to expose its earlier meanings as a polity and its places that ideally form the nexus of community. Chapter 2 examines how history and progress, via the scenic landscape, came to be perceived as a linear, progressive march of time that left the historical past behind and often in ruins. Chapter 3 shows how chorographic or philological conceptions of place and policy became reduced to cartographic and perspectival pictorial representations in an atemporal, abstract, and empty Euclidian space. Chapters 4 through 7 explore what Olwig calls the “anthropo-philological” approach. Here Olwig's philological probes and prods interrogate a selection of questions. Chapter 4 asks “Are Islanders Insular?” Drawing on personal experience as an islander, Olwig suggests that islands can be seen as parts of an archipelagic world of places, or as isolates enframed in cartographic space. In Chapter 5 he elucidates how the four classical elements, or essences—air, water, fire, and earth—were reduced to a fifth essence (quintessence), aether. In turn, “aetheriality” (as opposed to reality) informed the conceptions of space as materialized in the landscape scenery constructed in the theater. The aetherial performance space of the theater, in turn, inspired the architectural landscapes of the world outside the theater, effectively turning the world into performance spaces. Chapter 6 queries the differences between the performance of walking through a scenic landscape and the practice of walking in a substantive landscape. Chapter 7 follows the previous chapter in discussing how the meaning of thing and things changes radically depending on the meaning, practice, or performance of landscape. The last two chapters introduce Olwig's concept of “diabolic” landscape. Etymologically, diabolic derives from diabol, or to “throw across” or to confuse or mystify meaning. In contrast, the root of symbolic refers to “throwing together” or bringing different things together, potentially producing new and fruitful ideas and combinations. One confuses, the other fuses. Confusion between the symbolic and actual nature in scenic landscape can produce reactionary-modern landscapes as illustrated in Chapter 8, with the example of Nazi spatial planning, or in Chapter 9, with the Nazi idealization of wild nature, and its relation to the modern rewilding movement.

The commentaries are also selective in their questions and foci. There is far too much packed into a couple of hundred pages to cover it all, but each commentator skillfully engages salient portions of Olwig's collection. Taken together, the commentaries are more archipelagic than insular, just as Olwig might wish. Viewing the essays as an ensemble, Olwig has produced a more than substantive contribution to critical humanistic geography. Building on foundations laid by his two main mentors, Yi Fu Tuan and David Lowenthal, this collection forcefully and effectively demonstrates the power of philology to create whole new landscapes of meaning, and to show how language and landscape are indissolubly linked.

Commentary by Tom Mels, Department of Social and Economic Geography, Uppsala University Campus Gotland, Visby, Sweden.

Kenneth R. Olwig's The Meanings of Landscape is an outstanding piece of creative thinking delivered with an originality of style second to none. It weaves together a multifaceted storyline that stretches over decades of unique and consistent scholarship, time and again advancing from a place-oriented rage against space, and forever changing the way landscape used to be. The seminal substantive nature of the landscape paper (Olwig 1996), published at a time when it seemed that we were witnessing a disciplinary “melting of landscape into cybertextual space” (p. 21) leaves little guesswork as to the author's impatience with the academic postmodernity of the 1980s and 1990s. Instead of landscape's volatile existence in a world well lost, the approach Olwig proposed was the recognition and painstaking unearthing of landscapes as places of polities. I got a copy of the proofs in my mailbox weeks before its publication, with a few scribbles and corrections and other not-for-dissemination cyphers, sensing that the author knew this was what I needed, and it was. Passing through a truly bedazzling lineup of philosophers, geographers, lexicographers, historians, and artists brought in from an equally wide-ranging detailing of local contexts, the landscape attained a substantive body as a contested “nexus of community, justice, nature, and environmental equity,” or, in the author's hindsight, “a practiced place of a polity” (pp. 22, 104).

In my comment, I would like to linger for a moment on Olwig's defense of landscape as substantive place in the light of a recurring melting of place into space. From the various instances of melting in Olwig's dispatches, the exaggerations of postmodern cybertextual space are probably most familiar to landscape scholars, and for good reasons. After all, it is a melting based on a narrow idealism that turns landscape into representations of space that do not allow for the broader substantive nature of landscape as practiced place.

In Meanings, empirical examples abound where practiced places are carved out under conditions where the spatial appears as border, contrast, distinction, and outside. Depending on what the empirical circumstances are like, this could well be defended from a normative vantage point, against alienation, and I believe the text indeed breathes an inclination toward the values of community and place justice, perhaps with a mildly anarchistic penchant. Yet taken as an ontological and historical principle (with substantive referring to the real and practiced), the question might arise as to what extent we are dealing with an original meaning of landscape as place and polity with a life and logic of its own, that can be divorced from space—the realm of the utopian, unreal, unsubstantive, imagined, statist, or globalist. Accepting the contested, struggled-over nature as a foundational principle of the substantive landscape suggests such divorce is too tidy. From my own intuitions and research on substantive landscapes, I believe that the contested element could be viewed as a problem of often alienating spatial practices and relations that produce space. This asks for a theory of space that relates dialectically with landscape as practiced place, in a vein that is best developed in Lefebvre's work on modernity, everyday life, and the production of space. It is a theory that highlights the alienating spaces of capitalism: a vital ontological ingredient in earlier theoretical developments in landscape studies and one that transcends empirical matters of language and episteme.

Although such a theory cannot be immediately extracted from a dictionary, the virtues of etymology offer some striking preliminary indications, as Olwig has demonstrated. Of course, the dictionary remains a series of qualified judgments: a court of justice leveling verdicts about what is right and wrong, but also a minefield where the solid ground under our feet can detonate at every step. For critical theorists it therefore lets us peek into the contested world of justice, while keeping attention on the presence of ruling ideological languages and their distortions. Qualifying this or the next definition of landscape as an erroneous mistake is not the main point. It is rather to recognize the human practices on which the constituting of those very definitions depend. Your standard dictionary could thus be mobilized as one partial resource to carve out what Adorno (1973) dubbed a constellation: the work of a critical scholarship wherein “theoretical thought circles the concept it would like to unseal, hoping that it may fly open like the lock of a well-guarded safe-deposit box: in response, not to a single key or a single number, but to a combination of numbers” (163). As Olwig has shown, there is no single key to landscape. In fact, dictionary at hand, it has a chaotic mess of a history. When it comes to the bunch of keys, though, I would say that the production of capitalist space looms large, too: the recognition that the contested nexus of community, justice, nature, and environmental equity, and the practiced place of a polity, have all for a long time been articulated with the rise of accumulative society, to a point where the subterfuges of spatial prospect and the practiced place of a polity are no longer easily recognized as independent worlds.

What Olwig describes, various dictionaries in hand, are in several cases precapitalist formations, or places of polities undergoing processes of original accumulation, colonial expansion, and other instances of capitalist space. The historical rise of the Dutch republic in the sixteenth century is a case in point: Its avowed customary (and precapitalist) freedom of place and polity at home (Landschap) was vehemently mobilized in ideological rhetoric, practice, and landscape art, but it was hardly a struggle against some generalized abstract space alone. The wars were fought over Spanish territorial expansion in the Low Countries, but they simultaneously extended to a global scale of lengthy battles over Spanish and Portuguese trading posts, sugarcane plantations, slave ports, and overseas territories stretching from the Philippines to Brazil, Africa, and Sri Lanka. The constellation is one where we can no longer easily distinguish landscape as a place and polity from capitalist space, except if we allow a single key to take ideological precedence, such as the representative order of the Dutch landscape polities or fights over religious monopoly. The constellation reveals a duplicitous landscape of sorts, but one where the politics of representation becomes less a question of how to draw the line between the real and represented (as poststructuralist theory would insist), or of how political representation is embodied (as political theory asks), than of taking a serious look at the ways landscape is the product of a space–place dialectic.

Olwig's engagement with the substantive landscape, of course, has no immediate footing in such Marxian formulations. In fact, in Meanings we find the latter as guilty of a melting game bearing striking similarities to the postmodern idealists. We encounter Marx and Engels as pursuing “the revelation that the apparent substantiality of our historically constituted society is, in fact, a vaporous ideological construct,” awaiting “the cleansing crucible of modernity,” destined to be “melted into air” (p. 69). What is at stake here is the emergence of space as the portent of a utopian geographical end game, teleologically requiring the destruction of a “place of the past.” There is an alternative, and I believe more fruitful reading, one that brings Marx's original formulations, and, by extension the Marxian-humanist tradition, far closer to Olwig's substantive landscape than his own statist-modernist reading suggests. Whenever vaporous ideological constructs in past realities of place and community come by, it is as a warning against the misappropriation of history in mystified form, but it is not to deny the substantiality or community values of place tout court. To the contrary, I would argue that such substantive landscapes are at the heart of Engels's studies of customary practice, whereas in the more famous chapters on precapitalist economic formations in the Grundrisse, one encounters the multiple ways in which the division of labor ultimately disintegrates primitive communal society: an ugly story of alienation, removal and dispossession rather than of history as the necessity of progress and the victory of utopian space. It is also a story with a philological angle, insisting on, as The German Ideology had it, a tense relationship between the language of real life and the language of politics.

In the final analysis, then, I would argue that such a reading brings Olwig's own critique of spatial power, his rightful rage against space, a bit closer to the historical materialist indignation at original accumulation, the encroachment of capitalist society, and the material ground of alienation. It is an indignation, furthermore, that is shared and extended today in studies on so-called land grabbing, commons, environmental injustice, and the attendant meltdown of place-based communities and livelihoods around the globe. This, too, is where Meanings remains a truly indispensable read.

Commentary by Theano S. Terkenli, Department of Geography, University of the Aegean, Mytilene, Lesvos, Greece.

On the first page of his book The Meanings of Landscape, Kenneth R. Olwig declares, “The heart of this book lies in the humanities, or more specifically in a philological approach,” but this body of work is far more than that. Olwig's line of thought takes us through history and geography, putting ends together in geographical thought and making sense of various aspects of humans' relationship to space, place, and landscape in the Western world. In these ways, the book also “belongs” to the social sciences, to planning and design sciences, and to legend and lore. In guiding the reader to piece together and make sense of the complex, confusing, and intertwined meanings and uses of “landscape” in the Western world, he helps understand and elucidate the evolution of the concept and various interpretations or notions of it. Whether we see it his way or not, his writing, punctuated with brilliant insights, exciting, fearless, and humorous, invites the reader to an interminable dialogue, constantly opening up new prospects and paths of thought, while connecting to older, more established ways of thinking about landscape—as if holding an easy, enlightened conversation, on the basis of a never-ending astute and acute observation of everyday life in the landscape.

To me, this reviewing task has been a thoroughly enjoyable experience, very much like our talks on numerous occasions, as well as serving as a reminder of the reasons why I involved myself in landscape studies in the first place: “complications and entanglements also mean that landscape is good, and fun, to think with, and even to do in practice” (p. 4). My own effort to “place” landscape and draw meaning out of such placing led me to an attempt toward its definition and understanding or analysis, and so on, but also to an effort to distinguish it from “place” (the Greek word for landscape, τoπío, literally means a miniaturized or diminutive place). My tentative response to this problem has been landscape's property of relationality (the ways in which humans interrelate with space, in body, mind, and spirit), which I see as congruent with Olwig's line of thought in the book. Landscape is distinct from place, as an ever-evolving, mutually informing medium of human association with the world, both in the first sense of landscape (the substantive landscape) and in the second sense (the scenic landscape). There are, however, several ways and degrees by which this relationality plays out in the book, such as the idea of aether, the affective or emotional dimension of humans' connection to landscape, and so on. Furthermore, islands make this landscape property clearer, because in Olwig's words, “the islander relates to the world in terms of topologically defined bodies of land, which, like people, retain their identity” (p. 99). The Greek definition of landscape includes not only the notion of view, but also the notions of opposite, facing, across, and against (απέναντı, αντıκρύζω). Furthermore, if the bipole islecentrality versus insularity could be seen as an analogue to the bipole substantive landscape versus scenic landscape, the implication here would be that the continental worldview has managed to dominate and subsume the islecentric worldview and is responsible for its marginalization, isolation, and so on; that is, for its insularity (e.g., state of Greek islands before the onslaught of tourism).

That is not the only way I found myself engaging with Olwig's book, though; I hereby quote a few. The first is through his use of the notion that, in the end, the postmodern perspective landscape turns into thin air (Chapter 5), a notion I have been grappling with in my work on “landscapes of a new cultural economy of space” (Terkenli and d'Hauteserre 2006) and issues of consumption and spectacle. The second is through a series of insights concerning development theory, stemming from his sketching “of the origins of the linear conception of a state of progress” (p. 53), and showing how, as with the notion of “development,” this linear conception of progress aims at rendering all other forms of life and ideational systems redundant and obsolete. Third, my perspective on “choros-topos” resonates with Olwig's, in his attempt to put order into the confusion of “chora” ~ ”choros” in the history of geographic thought (Chapter 3), which I have been grappling with since my PhD days with my dear advisor Fred Lukermann, and thus leading me to make sense of the modern Greek term for landscape τoπío. The latter always carries a relational definition in Greek dictionaries, replete with all the Western notions of the concept. It is also very interesting to note that, in modern Greek, my place (o τóπoς μoν) means not just the substantive milieu invested by my meaning, but also my home, in the sense of my home place, as opposed to my space (o χώρoς μoν), which carries exactly the same meaning as in English.

I will pause at one specific point of reference to the book, however, and discuss it in the context of my own work in tourism, which has led me to a deeper exploration into the interrelatedness between tourism and the landscape. This work comes to affirm and extend Olwig's ideas and theoretical schemata enlivened through his empirical life experiences, in the realm of recreation, and specifically in tourism practices and norms vis-à-vis the landscape. In this task, two metaphors long employed to elucidate human–landscape interrelationships become useful, theater and mirror. These metaphors have played a historically significant role in Western landscape representations and experiences and might also serve to decode and understand the multiple and fluid interpretations of the complex tourist–landscape relationship.

Being a tourist is not only to consume place, landscape, and culture; it is also to produce it poetically, physically, emotionally, performatively, and bodily (Squire 1994). If, in Olwig's words, “it is hard to understand the geography of the world without considering … sea changes” (p. 93), I would argue that today it is becoming very hard to understand the geography of the world without considering air changes (the role of air transportation, infrastructure, and communication). The concept of aether possibly also plays a role here, as, in modern Greek, it is sometimes used unconditionally as a synonym to air or sky, as in the expression “to conquer the aethers” (κατακτώ τoνς αıθέρες).

The application of the metaphor of theater, scene, stage, and mask employed by Olwig (Chapter 5) is extremely apt in the case of tourism. I simply quote one such statement: “the lines of perspective … not only converge on an infinite point in space beyond the horizon, they also converge, at the opposite end of the perspectival framework, within the globe of the spectator's eyeball … so that all the world is perceived as a stage commanded by the eye of the spectator” (p. 180). For instance, in Olwig's words, “the scenic landscape is something that is performed upon, like a stage, within a scaled, hierarchical, spatial structure of authority” (p. 16), as in the context of a guided tour or a holiday package offered by a tour operator. Furthermore, the degree of a tourist's involvement in the destination place or landscape, through a variety of activities and experiences, varies from overtly superficial to existentially participant, akin to the different ways of walking (hefting) illustrated by Olwig. In other words, there are different ways of seeing, or walking, or doing the landscape, in the context of tourism, just as “the performance of walking within a scenic landscape is contrasted to the practice of walking a substantive landscape” (the contract being linked to place identity and legal custom; p. 16). Accordingly, Olwig writes about how the two different senses of landscape (the substantive and the scenic) are linked to two different ways of seeing (and I would add sightseeing, in its broader sense), binocular and monocular vision (p. 129).

There are several extensions of this line of thought with special relevance to the practice of tourism in the landscape. Besides many different (more or less conscious or involved kinds of tourism), tourism itself could be seen as typical of the second modality of seeing and doing the landscape, in contrast to the first one, which refers to dwelling in the landscape, highlighting the very essence of tourism itself, namely traveling away from home; exploring, claiming, and consuming the unfamiliar, the distant, and the nonhome. If “the substantive landscape … is best experienced through the doing and the practicing of landscape through movement” (p. 139), however, then this movement is circular and takes us “back home,” defined through our rituals of cyclical time invested in time, place, and people, just as in the case of the tourism trip emanating from and returning to the place of residence. On the other hand, and on another scale, walking in the context of tourism very much differs from walking to claim civic space through enacting customs as dwelling practices, like festival parades, religious litanies, or political demonstrations (πoρεíα, in modern Greek, means a walk). Thus, we can distinguish between the production of (civic, home, political, etc.) space and the (tourist or other) consumption of space. Such landscape consumption, through tourism, could well be described as an “oversight,” expressing “a double meaning of domination by sight, because it means both looking at something from above, and overlooking and ignoring it” (Latour 1999, cited by Olwig, p. 175).

Finally, an analysis of the metaphors of landscape as theater and landscape as mirror might reveal the relevance, interrelatedness, and historical continuity of the themes of vision and image, sight and spectacle, and performance and speculation in decoding the tourist–landscape relationship. I argue that the construction and consumption of the tourist experience greatly stems from and rests on the visual and performative character of the tourism landscape as enriched by its spectacular (theatrical) and specular (reflective) properties (speculum is mirror in Latin), enhanced by the participation of all human faculties (mind, body, and spirit). In the performative—albeit ambivalent and contested—(re)construction and consumption of place and landscape through tourism, the dramaturgical metaphor of landscape as theater elicits multiple ways of individually and collectively produced “stages” for tourism performances and tourist role-playing (relevance of Olwig's work on the mask), just as the mirror metaphor continues to capture the infinite possibilities of reflection and representation of the human being and the tourism landscape in each other. Although Olwig elaborates on it elsewhere (Olwig 2001), in this book he indirectly alludes to the metaphor of landscape as mirror, and specifically through the words of Marsh, Jonson, or Serres (pp. 44, 112, 116). The significance of reflective knowledge of the self vis-à-vis the other and the idea of identity (place/landscape, personal, or collective), have already been well-established. As we must remain before our mirror to discover our dual self (Melchior-Bonnet 2001, 98), body and soul, so we must place ourselves in the world and—through our contemplation of the landscape—articulate and speculate about all these questions, as they pertain to human life and identity: the essence of tourism (Montaigne, cited in Burgess 1894).

The relevance of metaphors remains contingent on place, time, and culture, representing specific perceptions of particular social groups at particular historical periods. Nevertheless, we could postulate that these two metaphors increasingly illustrate the ongoing transformation of human everyday reality into a vast landscape for the voyeur, the viewer, the visitor—in conjunction with the “touristification” of humanity, turning the world into a staged spectacle or a playground, to be variably experienced and consumed.

Commentary by Tim Waterman, The Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, London, UK.

Early in 2006, two fishers, Sunder Raj and Pandit Tiwari, lay in a drunken sleep after illegally fishing for mud crabs off the shore of North Sentinel Island in the Andamans. During the night they drifted onto the shore after their boat slipped its anchor. They were attacked and killed by the Sentinelese while they slept and then were buried in shallow graves on the beach (Foster 2006). Some years later a similar fate awaited a missionary bent on fishing for souls rather than mud crabs. The isolation of the Sentinelese protects them from sexual exploitation, alcoholism, and influenza, measles, and other diseases to which they have no resistance. The story of the Sentinelese seems to confirm every commonly held notion of insularity. It also, perhaps, helps to underscore the territoriality of the human species and of islands. Bhabha (1994) told us, “Etymologically unsettled, ‘territory’ derives from both terra (earth) and terrēre (to frighten) whence territorium, ‘a place from which people are frightened off’” (99–100). North Sentinel, with its watchful place name and defended perimeter, itself defended by a five nautical mile exclusion zone, will serve here as the nearly Platonic model of the “insular island.”

In “Are Islands Insular? A Personal View,” in his new collection of essays The Meanings of Landscape, Kenneth R. Olwig challenges the contemporary conception of islands as insular. The essay purports to differ from his usual approach to the philological examination of landscape, rather he uses his “personal experience and background as an islander”—Staten Island, that is (p. 89). Olwig, however, gets stuck right into literature and language in his preface, in which the meaning of choros is explored via Ptolemy, and a literary framework is established through mention of The Odyssey and Moby Dick. The essay does exercise a personal view, but through this seeks to define islands through the evaluation of the underlying actions and ideas that shape Western understanding of them in much the same way etymology excavates words to find evidence of the actions and ideas contained within them. As such, then, this essay differs from Olwig's accustomed philology primarily only through an increased intimacy of tone.

Olwig's philology gains its power from its operation on three separate registers, each interdependent. “The philological approach taken here does not only have the traditional philological focus primarily on language and text, but also focuses on the semiotics of pictorial representation in relation to text,” he writes in his introduction (p. 3). His examination of the actions, processes, forces, and relations contained within words is not just augmented by a similar observation of imagery, but also acts on and interacts with the study of landscape forms, land uses, and place imaginaries. The stories written into places, told through wind and water, planting and harvesting, politics and justice, are explicated through a mode that broadens and deepens philology by an alignment with geography, topography, and chorography: a frame for thinking that, although Olwig has not himself used the term, I like to call toposophy. Olwig uses the term environmental geohumanities, which is useful, if clunky, but lacks the sense of a set of tools and ethics for structuring thinking held in the ideas of philology and toposophy.

If one thinks through word, image, and landscape form, it is clear that islands are insular, a point Olwig seeks not to refute, but to augment. Islands are isolated. Both of these terms arise from the Latin insula. The situation of the Sentinelese people exemplifies this. There are other ways of being islandic, though, that are radically different and that enrich the ways in which islands could be conceived. It is Olwig's gift to the reader in all he writes, to provide not either–or, but both–and.

Olwig's work has been a profound influence in my own thinking, writing, and teaching. His habits of relentless investigation and delightfully, imaginative word and image play (including elaborate puns) showed me I could nurture and gain from such practices already present within my work. Here is an example pertinent to the task at hand: When I teach about the British Isles in ancient times, I present my students with a north-up map view of Scotland and the tip of Norway, centered on the Orkney archipelago. Then, speaking of the difficulty of traveling over land in the interior and the naturalness of seafaring, I invert the map, which completes the process of forcing the students to see the island not as remote, but central from the perspective of a voyager on the North Sea, from the perspective Olwig calls “islecentrality.” “From the sea,” Olwig writes, “the world is made up of islands and peninsulas, and that which is unreachable by water is isolated terra incognita and the true home of insularity. The word for insularity should really be in-continentality” (p. 94). Olwig's inversion (and his pun) here also helps to show the world in a profoundly different way. This does not, of course, negate the fact that, in the contemporary world such a place as Orkney can legitimately be seen as remote, insular, and isolated, but that it is also simultaneously and fruitfully near, embroiled, and central. Such manifold and often contradictory meanings are precisely and always what landscapes hold and display, a fact that helps to explain the plural meanings employed in the title of this book. Without various and contradictory meanings, word play would not be possible, and so the pun, much maligned as a witticism, can here be elevated to an emblem of an approach to thinking about landscape meanings philologically, toposophically, and playfully.

Over the past century or so, philology as a practice, as a mode, has fallen into obscurity. Olwig's body of work, however, along with the work of several other writers who have been close to Olwig both intellectually and through friendship, including Ingold, Lowenthal, and Tuan, have worked, each in their own way, to reclaim the wide-reaching philological base of the (geo)humanities. Olwig's work helps us to see philology not as a remote, depopulated island, but as a realm that, once one has escaped from the in-continentality of disciplinary silos, can be discovered as a field of intellectual endeavor with its own islecentrality, linking together all the islands and peninsulas into newly intelligible coastlines in an ocean of playful and profound knowledge.

Commentary by Claudio Minca, Department of Geography and Planning, Macquarie University, North Ryde, NSW, Australia.

This is a wonderful book that gives a clear sense of the amazing breadth of Kenneth R. Olwig's lifelong project on the history of landscape and of his unique capacity of moving in between languages and cultural contexts. Reading this book had almost a paralyzing effect on me: What else can be said on landscape? Where to take landscape research after The Meanings of Landscape? How to teach landscape and explain the genealogy of its diabolic duplicity?

This is a much needed intervention, in geography, and beyond. Many geography departments today do not teach or do research on landscape, and many other disciplines use this concept in problematic ways, as shown by this book. I have worked for many years in the Netherlands with spatial planners and landscape architects who often used the term landscape as synonymous of place or space, showing no interest whatsoever in the history of the concept. I would thus like to start by praising Olwig's reflections on the relationship between the daily living experience of place, and people's understanding and appreciation of landscape and also for presenting “landscape thinking” as a practice embedded in our daily whereabouts and social relationships. This is indeed one of the first things that I attempt to teach when introducing geography to first-year students. I find Olwig's description of the tension between “substantive landscape” and “spatial landscape” very convincing and beautifully presented, especially when he shows how these two approaches are still present within contemporary practices and in policy and academic documents. The European Landscape Convention (ELC) is an important example of this. Olwig's critique of the ELC, and of the implications of the emergence of “eco-services,” is in fact important and very effective. I would certainly circulate the chapter dedicated to that topic among my students and colleagues.

If I must report a few critical comments, I should admit that I was a bit surprised that the book says relatively little on the Italian Renaissance in relation to the emergence of landscape as a spatial concept; although the Italian context is kept as a reference and mentioned for its impact on the English context, it is never really discussed. In particular, I believe the social history of landscape in the Italian Renaissance might have helped to better explain how it affected the rest of Europe, including Britain, and, perhaps, Scandinavia. Because of this omission, the reader might be left with the impression that the Renaissance was the same and emerged in similar ways across Europe, which is certainly not what the author believes (as demonstrated by his previous writings). Additionally, the emergence of “spatial” understandings of landscape happened in different ways, moments, and places in Europe: Is this, then, a deliberately British and Scandinavian-centric reading of the history of landscape? If so, why is this reading particularly relevant in understanding “the meanings of landscape” (or landscape in general, as the title seems to imply)? Given the importance assigned by Olwig to the Renaissance in his reconstruction of the “spatial turn” that has affected modern conceptualizations of landscape, I would have also expected an engagement with the development of the concepts of paesaggio in the Italian context and paysage in the French context. These developments, in my view, are possibly as important as the ones discussed in detail in this book. It would have been very interesting to learn more about how these “southern” European traditions were in a dialogue with the northern European ones, or, if not, why? Considering the fact that the term paesaggio is normally translated into English as landscape, is the history of paesaggio, a concept that emerged in Italy during the Renaissance, in any way different from that of landscape? If so, how? Is the tradition of the French paysage, a concept that has played an important role in the development of European academic geography in the twentieth century, different from that of landscape? Although possibilism is mentioned in the book, little is said about how this very influential geographical approach conceptualized landscape and place following Vidal de la Blache and his school of regional geography. Arguably, the “French way to modern geography” also had something in common with the substantive understanding of landscape and place discussed in the book.

Finally, perhaps more could have been said on community as a concept in relation to the premodern “substantive landscape.” As we all know, community can be an exclusionary and conservative social formation; as the history of Europe has often shown, specific organic understandings of community might be at the origin of different manifestations of racism, discrimination, and even genocide. This is why I would like to provocatively ask this question: Is there also an implicit risk of organicism in celebrating the substantive landscape? Did it incorporate the search for an ideal combination between a local community and their elected living spaces and places? If so, how do we avoid what was one of the main problems with possibilism; that is, its organic understandings of this relationship? I understand that these questions have been discussed by the author's previous work; however, I still believe that a clarification on this point would have helped readers of The Meanings of Landscape to better appreciate the importance of the last two chapters, both reflecting on reactionary modernism in relation to, respectively, the “landscape origins of modern spatial science and planning,” and the “duplicitous diabolical landscaped space.” I would thus like to turn my attention to these two chapters in the remainder of this commentary.

I found these two chapters very rich and relevant in a time when the resurgence of neofascist parties and the voicing of racist views in Europe seem to gain legitimacy in public debates. What I like in particular about these two chapters are the ways in which Olwig connects the history of Western thought to the development of a specific duplicitous understanding of landscape that has had, and continues to have, important consequences on how, in public discourse, this geographical concept is often associated to community and the nation state, but also to the “right to mobility” and the “right to a place.” Due to the limited space available here, I would like to briefly comment on two main aspects addressed in those two chapters: The first is how the ambivalent nature of landscape in spatial science and planning is inherently associated with conservative and possibly authoritarian understandings of place, nature, and community; the second is the ways in which this is exemplified in Christaller's work in geography.

Olwig's analysis starts with a few considerations on how Kant's understanding of space could be seen as one of the reasons for the consolidation of what he defines as a confusing, diabolic notion of space that had significant implications for the ways in which modern academia has since understood and applied other spatial concepts. For Olwig, “the German concept of Raum, used by Kant, encapsulates this duality because it means both space in the geometric Euclidian/Newtonian sense and room as in the enclosed space of a living room. When space in the sense of ‘room’ elides with space in the Newtonian and Euclidean sense, a confusing, ‘diabolic’, notion of space can arise” (p. 181). This confusion, according to Olwig, has critically infused the modern notion of landscapes, and the ways in which geography has contributed to a fundamentally reactionary modern understanding of the political, a key example of this contribution being the way the discipline has provided the epistemological ground for the emergence and the popularization of a concept like that of Lebensraum. Lebensraum, as it is well known by contemporary historical geographers, was a key geographical concept for the Nazis and their spatial ideologies of expansion and genocide (see Bassin 1987; Abrahamsson 2013; Giaccaria and Minca 2016b): “Lebensraum is problematic and ‘diabolically’ ‘bat-like’ because [in it] the two senses of space are combined and conflated, thereby confusing the organic and biological with the geometric and the socio-political” (p. 182). The diabolic nature of this concept has had significant biopolitical implications for the genocidal strategies implemented by the Nazi spatial regime (Giaccaria and Minca 2016a).

For the same reasons, Olwig sees Christaller's central place theory as a diabolic project not only for its implications in the preparation for the invasion of Eastern Europe and the associated planning of the urban reorganization of that region, but also, crucially, because “for Christaller this was thus not simply an exercise in geometry, but also a representation of an organic relationship between the communities that constituted the German nation and its empire” (p. 183). In other words, Christaller's modeling incorporated, since its inception, precisely that duplicity that Olwig identifies in the modern spatial understandings of landscape and in Kant's conceptualization of space: “we are thus dealing with a batlike combination of a transcendent geometric spatial ‘structure’ and places expressing a relational organic German folk communitarian Volksgemeinschaft in which separate families were thought to live as a community within a larger nucleated whole” (p. 183). This is a crucially important point for me: What we learn from Olwig is that our rejection of Christaller's popular spatial model should not only come from his personal implication with the Nazis (Rössler 1989; Barnes and Minca 2013), but also because of the inherently duplicitous (read: diabolic) conceptualization of space and spatial planning of his central place theory: “seen from this perspective, Christaller's diabolism lies not in the taking hostage of his objective science by racist Nazi ideologists, but rather in the batlike doublethink of reactionary-modernism” (p. 197). The implications of this realization are enormous. If, as shown by Olwig, the history of modern landscape and that of spatial planning intersect and, at some point, merge, then our readings of the geographies of the nation-state need to be fundamentally revised together with the ways in which we understand the related “landscape thinking” as part of a broader project of modernity and its scientific views on space and place. If it is true that after “the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, the nation-state developed as a bordered space that combined the relational space of the nation as an imagined ethnic community with the absolute space of the state as mapped onto the uniform space of the Ptolemaic map” (p. 187), then Olwig's work provides new lenses to appreciate the deeper reasons behind the failure and, at the same time, the resilience of the nation-state project. If the nation-state is an eternally deferred project due precisely to the diabolic spatial nature of its constitution—a project that can never be fully accomplished, always to come—it is precisely this (cartographic) constitution and its related operational contradictions that have opened the ground for the experimental biocracy of the Third Reich; a risk that, in different forms, possibly persists even today.

This brings me to what I believe is one of the most important achievements of this book: What we learn from Olwig is that landscape is not only a concept that deserves to be studied for its powerful effects on the places we inhabit; landscape could also be seen as analytics; that is, a lens that allows us to appreciate how its modern duplicity is entangled in the duplicitous nature of the nation-state and in its inherently reactionary rhetoric. After reading these two chapters one cannot avoid reflecting on some contemporary manifestations of reactionary modernism: the “rewilding movement” and the ELC, as rightly observed by Olwig, but also the populist rhetoric of the new sovereigntist parties in Europe, which are once again referring to the national community as an organic entity and the protection of its material borders as a key, vital political objective. This rhetoric, like that celebrating the nation-state as a supreme universal value, is in fact imbued with the diabolic duplicity illustrated by Olwig in these two memorable chapters.

I would like to conclude by saying that I am immensely grateful to Olwig for having written this book and sincerely hope that he will continue engaging with these questions, because I believe they are key to understanding our modern present, in geography, but also in our society at large.

Commentary by Michael Jones, Department of Geography, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, NO.

The first time I met Ken Olwig was almost thirty years ago at a Nordic critical geography conference in Joensuu, Finland. We walked in the rain discussing landscape research. From 1996 to 2001, he was my colleague at the Department of Geography in Trondheim, Norway. Olwig's ground-breaking article, “Recovering the substantive nature of landscape” (Olwig 1996), appeared the year he came to Trondheim and is now republished as the first chapter in The Meanings of Landscape. While in Trondheim, he wrote his book, Landscape, Nature, and the Body Politic (Olwig 2002), and asked me to read through and comment the manuscript before publication. During the academic year 2002–2003, he was a member of the Landscape, Law & Justice research group that I led at the Centre for Advanced Study in Oslo. In 2008, our co-edited anthology, Nordic Landscapes, was published by the University of Minnesota Press (Jones and Olwig 2008).

In The Meanings of Landscape, Olwig has edited nine of his influential articles published from 1996 to 2017. Having read through these in their new attire, I have no doubt in my mind that the whole is more than the sum of the parts. Using a philological approach, Olwig's project has been to trace the transition from the original substantive meaning of landscape as the shaping of land by the political community to its modern connotation as scenery. Etymologically, the term “landscape” derives from the medieval concept of landscape in the Germanic and Scandinavian languages, meaning: “1. conditions in a land, its character, its practices or customs; 2. the organization of things in a land; 3. landscape district” (p. 147). As Olwig explains, the second meaning, “the organization of things in a land,” related to the historically combined law assemblies and courts known in Scandinavia as ting, or things. The thing assemblies organized things in the sense of matters, in accordance with customary law and practice (the first meaning), within an area of legal jurisdiction (the third meaning). Things and thing-like assemblies, under various names, continue to this day to shape the land at various levels from village meetings to national parliaments. Using examples from the Nordic countries, I will dwell particularly on thing-like assemblies at the local level, which are less prominent in Olwig's book. My intention is to illustrate how Olwig's concept of the political landscape can be fruitful for understanding the everyday shaping of local landscapes.

Olwig and I found our common interest in exploring the relationship between landscape and law. In my early work, in the 1960s and early 1970s, I investigated human responses to postglacial isostatic land uplift in the Vasa archipelago and adjoining mainland in western Finland. This is a flat region where the land rises at a rate of 86 cm every century. I studied how village institutions, local conventions, and the interaction between local customary practice and national legislation helped shape the new land areas that emerged from the sea due to shore displacement. Emergent land belongs initially in common to the landowning farmers of the village. It is generally divided after some years among the landowners according to their proportionate share of the village's historical land tax assessment. However, new common land continually emerges from the sea, and it is the village council, or bystämma, that decides in accordance with the village regulations on how the emergent land is to be used until it is divided. By means “village” and stämma has several related meanings: “voice,” “vote,” and “council” or “meeting.” Hence it has the characteristics of a thing assembly at the local level. It is democratic up to a point in that all village landowners have the right to take part in its meetings, although at the same time discriminatory in that women frequently do not attend while non-landowners are excluded.

Village institutions of this type have existed over much of Finland, Sweden, and Denmark, and have long historical roots. The Danish legal historian Poul Meyer (1965, p. 223) defined village local self-government in the Nordic countries as generally comprising three components: (1) a council that met regularly to judge on matters within its competence; (2) by-laws; and (3) a leader or spokesman elected by the council. Except for Iceland, village or neighborhood councils existed in some form or other in all the Nordic countries, going back to the Middle Ages, when they were mentioned in provincial laws termed “landscape laws.” Their task was to regulate the use of common grazings and other resources owned in common as well as fragmented, individually owned land with intermixed plots where there was a high degree of mutual dependency. They organized cooperation necessary for the maintenance of fences, paths and bridges, and were entities for resolution of conflicts. Customary usage varied from place to place, expressing the varying needs of local communities, and reflecting differing local geographical conditions. Village councils constituted a form of local proto-democracy, although communities were not necessarily egalitarian and councils reflected local power constellations.

A matter of historical debate has been how far village self-government derived from orally transmitted customary practice predating the medieval landscape laws or how far it was a result of these laws. It has also been debated how far later state-directed regulations were impositions or how far they codified older customary practice. For example, in Sweden the central government passed a model set of bylaws in 1742; these appear to have been adjusted, modified and supplemented locally as needed. Swedish ethnologist Sigurd Erixon recorded over one thousand village by-laws in Sweden and mapped their distribution, the oldest from 1594. In 111 cases, traces of outdoor meeting-places have been found in the form of stone constellations or mounds. Olwig mentions that holding thing assemblies in public places in the open air was a common historical practice.

In Denmark, the oldest known village by-laws date from c.1500. The first known depiction of an outdoor village meeting-place in the Nordic countries is on a map of the island of Hven from c.1584. A square of stones shows the legal forum of the peasants. Hven was given as fief by the Danish king to the astronomer Tycho Brahe, who built his observatory there. The meeting-place is dwarfed on the map to insignificance by an outsize pictogram of Brahe's Renaissance mansion, built on the common grazings, as if to confirm visually that the island now belonged to him and not the farmers. Tycho Brahe used for the first time in Scandinavia the newest methods of triangulation to produce his map, which was the first Scandinavian estate map. Olwig mentions Tycho Brahe in passing twice (pp. 57, 61), although he is much concerned in his book with the role of surveying and cartography in the transition from landscape as a political entity to landscape an object that could be treated as private property. Surveying and mapping were pre-conditions for the consolidation and enclosure of fragmented farm land and the division of commons, which from the eighteenth to early twentieth centuries considerably reduced the importance of self-governing village councils in Denmark, Sweden, and Finland.

In Norway, there were no formalized villages and no state-sanctioned standardized village regulations. The historical settlement pattern consisted of single farms and multiple farms, i.e., clustered farm groups with intermixed arable plots and with other land held in common. There was little interference by the authorities in how peasant farmers regulated relationships among themselves. Local custom was largely oral, but documentary evidence indicates that farm neighborhood councils and local leaders existed in many places to administer resources held in common.

The councils had various names in different places, among them gardsting (multiple farm thing) and other variants of ting. Such institutions disappeared in many places after official land reorganization, yet elsewhere have continued to the present time. In Saltdalen, North Norway, negotiations concerning acquisition of land for road construction were facilitated in the 1980s and 1990s when it was discovered that there already existed landowner associations, established to administer common resources. Examples of thing-like assemblies taking care of common areas are also found in present-day Norwegian towns, ranging from allotment gardens through house-owners' associations to experimental housing foundations.

Similar local institutions have been found in other areas once under Scandinavian rule. On North Ronaldsay, Orkney, the sheep court administers to the present day the maintenance of stone dykes for sheep grazing in common on the foreshore. Formerly Swedish-speaking islands along the coast of Estonia had village councils (bystämmor) before World War II. The farmers on the Estonian island of Runö referred to their village council as the “landscape” (loandskape).

In his book, Olwig refers to thing assemblies as proto-parliamentary institutions existing at different levels of governance in a nested system. Olwig sees the “landscape of custom” as favoring “the growth of democracy” (p. 72), but he also notes that the democratic character of thing assemblies could be marred by “jealousy, discord, and friction with neighboring landscape communities” and by “petty controversies and internal rivalries” (p. 172). I would suggest that their democratic character might be further marred by power constellations related to class, gender, or other social differences. Historians and archaeologists have in recent years conducted systematic investigation of thing assemblies in the Viking world and elsewhere in northwestern Europe in the Middle Ages, with a focus on thing sites and associated administrative districts. The idea that things were intrinsically democratic has been criticized. Their character varied both regionally and temporarily. They played a role in medieval state formation by legitimizing growing royal power and the codification of law. On the other hand, Olwig's research shows that they could also be instruments of resistance to growing royal power.

Olwig mentions but does not on elaborate on thing-like institutions at the village or neighborhood level. I provide here empirical evidence indicating that they have been widespread in the Nordic world and are still to be found, under various names. Despite democratic imperfections, they form local landscape polities regulating common areas and through their work actively shape the land.

Olwig's philological, etymological approach has led him in a different direction. He finds equivalent terms for the landscape polity in different parts of the world, e.g., Landschaft, township, county, country, paysage, chora /chorus; similarly for the thing assembly, e.g., moot, parliament, agora, and even again Landschaft. Importantly, he arrives at the Council of Europe's Landscape Convention (ELC) of 2000, deriving its authority from Europe's regional authorities, which Olwig implicitly considers as political landscapes. The Convention promotes a discursive, participatory understanding of landscape, which the signatory nations are to cement by law. However, studies of the workings in practice of the Convention's “landscape democracy” indicate that public participation tends to be top-down rather than bottom-up (Jones and Stenseke 2011). Perhaps more attention should be paid to the existence, functioning, and potential of present-day thing-like assemblies in local landscapes. Indeed, Olwig has himself used the collective commons of the courtyard of the group of apartment buildings where he lives in Copenhagen as an illustration.

Response by Kenneth R. Olwig, Department of Landscape Architecture, Planning and Management, The Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Alnarp, Sweden.

I am highly grateful to the reviewers for their insights and their tactful criticism, which also thankfully provides a useful opportunity to clear up misunderstandings. In the following response I will focus on the interrelated issues of space, reactionary-modernism, the nation-state, the archipelagic and community.

The Question of Space, Reactionary Modernism, and the Nation-State

Claudio Minca makes an important point when he writes:

If, as shown by Olwig, the history of modern landscape and that of spatial planning intersect and, at some point, merge, then our readings of the geographies of the nation-state need to be fundamentally revised together with the ways in which we understand the related “landscape thinking” as part of a broader project of modernity and its scientific views on space and place. (p. 299)

It is my impression that many of those who have identified with the modernist redefinition of geography as a “science of space” do not choose to engage with critical landscape scholarship because landscape is dismissed as being intrinsically unmodern, or even reactionary. They are thus not made aware of the way that the meanings of landscape challenge the epistemology of the spatial paradigm, suggesting a need for a reevaluation of its premises. The early-modern redefinition of landscape, by which the materiality of substantive polities was “melted” into scenic space, was a prerequisite for the later, parallel, modernist reduction of geography to a spatial science. This means that the fundamental duplicities associated with landscape scenery are also shared by spatial science. It is thus unfortunate, as Minca points out, that “Many geography departments today do not teach or do research on landscape, and many other disciplines use this concept in problematic ways, as shown by this book” (p. 297).

To begin with, a distinction should be drawn between modernism, understood as an ideology oriented toward an idealized future, which is thus never fully present, and the present-day, which is the present present. Modernism began in many ways in the Renaissance with the rediscovery of the Greek and Roman classics. Of particular importance for geography was the rediscovery of Ptolemy's Platonic cartography and cosmology from the era of the Roman Empire, and the subsequent transposition of cartographic, Euclidean space into landscape scenery. The modernist's project was thus largely to transcend the present by reconstituting an idealized past in an idealized future. In this endeavor the Roman Empire, and its imperial Ptolemaic space, often provided the model. To the degree that leading modernists of the twentieth century, such as the architect le Corbusier, found their inspiration for the spatial planning of the future in the idealized scenic landscapes of an imagined Greco-Roman space of the past, they were simultaneously modern and reactionary (Chapters 2, 8, and 9).

In the book I have argued that the modernist combination of the reactionary and the modern is duplicitous and “diabolic”—the latter in the literal sense of the term as something that confuses and misrepresents. I have also argued that the space that figures in present-day spatial planning and research elides surreptitiously with the modernists' Euclidean, global space, even when it is claimed otherwise (Chapters 8 and 9). Much as modernism is an ideology, modernistic space can be regarded as “spatialism,” or a “spatialist” ideology that is likewise “diabolic.” I have illustrated this particularly with the case of the Nazis' physical erasure of old Warsaw and its Jewish ghetto, apparently to apply to the planning of the remaining tabula rasa the spatial models then being devised by the geographer Walter Christaller for use in the Nazis' Generalplan Ost. His goal was to create both a modern, rational, and hierarchical space for Germany's planned eastern empire, and a homeland for German colonists, who would bring imagined ancient, national, Teutonic values to the enclosed, nucleated, community spaces where they would dwell (Chapter 8). Christaller, of course, later became one of the gurus of the geographers who successfully proselytized for geography as spatial science. It should be remembered, furthermore, that this was not just a Nazi project; le Corbusier, for example, also had a plan to erase the place of Paris's Jewish community and replace it with a rational geometric infrastructure and built environment inspired by ancient Greco-Roman scenes (Chapter 2).

Tom Mels refers in the title of his review to my “rage against space,” perhaps recalling the Luddites' “rage against the machine” (or maybe just the rock band?). I am not, however, a spatial Luddite, and I do not rage against theoretically well-informed uses of the concept of space, as for example by Yi-Fu Tuan or Robert Sack. What I am leery of is the obfuscating use of the concept of space characteristic of spatialism. My critique of the space of modernist planners and their ideologists thus resonates with the critique made by Lefebvre, as I think Mels suggests. If I do not reference Lefebvre more than I do, this is because as a Nordic philologist I feel constrained by a lack of equivalent competence in the Romance languages, and thereby the complex nuances of the French concept of espace that Lefebvre uses in his Marx-inspired work (I do cite other Marxists, notably the historian and materialist E. P. Thompson). This is likewise, to answer Minca, the reason why the first chapter in the book did not go into depth concerning the confusions tied to the words in the Romance languages that are translated as landscape. Minca makes an important point, though, and this is one reason I wrote the book Landscape, Nature, and the Body Politic (Olwig 2002), in which I go into much more depth with regard to the Romance languages in general, and Renaissance Italy in particular (with help from philologists knowledgeable of those languages).

The Archipelagic and Community

Tim Waterman suggests in his review of Chapter 4, “Are Islanders Insular? A Personal View,” that my discussion of islands is only ostensibly drawn from personal experience, and is rather rooted, like the other chapters, in a philological concern with language, literature, and history. Actually, rather than begin geographical enquiry with supposedly scientific abstractions, such as the concept of space, I prefer to begin by exploring the experience, practice, language, and thought of historically constituted material places through field work involving participant observation. Thus, to study Nordic philology, I not only traveled to Norden from my home island (Staten Island). I have also spent a lifetime living and working in as well as exploring Norden, residing in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. I have also spent what amounts to years living and working on different West Indian islands together with my Danish anthropologist spouse. Likewise, to better understand the Greek archipelago, we have made a home, part of the year, in the city of Ermoupolis in the Cyclades. As a participant, I draw on my own personal experience of places. Growing up on an island is something you do and participate in, and, at least in my case, my attraction to Homer's Odyssey and to Herman Melville's Moby Dick is an affinity for islands and water-born travel shared not only with the authors, but also with my grandfather and father. David Lowenthal, an aficionado of islands (to whom the book is dedicated—along with Yi-Fu Tuan and Karen Fog Olwig), engaged in his final book with the notion of the archipelagic as a way of thinking about the world that seeks meaning in a diversity of modes of understanding served by disparate kinds of evidence. It contrasts with the epistemology of those who seek a unity of knowledge that is more continental and homogenous in character (Lowenthal 2018)—even if continental plains can also have, for example, contrasting, nonhomogenous, mountainous areas that are characteristically archipelagic (think Switzerland). The experience of islands, and the practice of living on them, thus perhaps can, as Lowenthal suggested, stimulate an archipelagic geographic epistemology. One can note, in any case, that even if Ptolemy was Greek, he was very much a Greco-Roman who lived and worked within a Roman Empire that was land oriented and continental in orientation, unlike the Greece of Homer and Herodotus, with its archipelagic practice and mindset.

Waterman points out that although islands are normally thought to be insular, enclosed, and bounded by their borders, I rather emphasize the dialectic between the island as a material place and the liminality of their interconnectivity with other islands in an archipelago, and with other coasts accessible by water. One area that I have been researching and visiting the past half-century is that of the Frisian polities that historically were termed “landscapes” in various cognate languages (Chapter 1). Found on the islands and coasts of the Wadden Sea, which borders on the modern states of Germany, The Netherlands, and Denmark, they were loosely federated and semiautonomous in relation to neighboring states and empires. The people of these polities were both socially and physically mobile, and economically and socially liminal, because, for example, if one child inherited the land of the family farm, other children might go to sea to make their fortune, transporting, among other things, the products of the farm. The Frisians thereby became pioneers of shipping along the Atlantic coast of Europe, as well as export-oriented farmers. They were also expert engineers in boat building and the techniques of collective water drainage, and dam and dike construction, to reclaim and farm fertile land from the sea, and they were able to merge small islands into larger islands through diking. The Wadden Sea, furthermore, was a vast, shallow, watery commons in which shifting tides created ideal conditions for fishing, especially shell fishing, and the hunting of water fowl—the customary sustenance of the landless poor. This complexity, defying the isolation identified with insularity, allowed for multiple and flexible routes to shifting forms of status, related to differing communities of interest and power, rather than rigidly divided, fixed classes within a monolithic system. This, in turn, facilitated the maintenance of representative forms of government that are difficult to sustain in more hierarchical, rigidly class-based societies.

To respond to Mike Jones, I would argue that although these polities did, for some periods of history, have social divisions and even classes in the modern sense, these social divisions had relatively limited development and importance, and this is what made these areas interesting. Likewise, their representative form of government provided an important prerequisite for democracy, which was also practiced on occasion in direct form. I prefer, however, to use the term representative government over democratic government because the meaning of democracy is open to discussion. Some, such as the geographers Reclus and Kropotkin, whose ideas build on the notion of community, would question the justice of “liberal democracy,” which is founded largely on the premise of an imagined autonomous individual and spatially enclosed private property. These issues are important, as Jones makes clear, and they should be considered by the book's readers.

Conclusion

My book, seen in this island light, is very much an archipelagic expression with a panoply of chapters of different sizes, on a diverse array of topics tied to landscape, place, space, environment, and justice, and it clearly sparked the critical imagination of the reviewers in a stimulating variety of ways. Perhaps the best example of this is the brilliant essay by Theano S. Terkenli, which is an inspired riff on “Landscape and Tourism: Metaphors and Insights” from the perspective of someone working in the island landscapes of Greece. This archipelagic diversity, furthermore, is exemplified by the backgrounds of the reviewers, ranging from the Dutch-Gotlander Tom Mels to the UK-Nordic Mike Jones, the American-Londoner, Tim Waterman, the Italian-Sydneysider Claudio Minca, and the archipelagic Greek Theano S. Terkenli. I am indebted to them all for their reviews and their critique.

ORCiD

Tim Waterman https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4126-0004

Claudio Minca https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6619-6614