Kenneth Olwig - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by Kenneth Olwig
Mapping Across Academia, 2017
Is the nature of landscape something that can be mapped, or is the landscape itself a thing or cr... more Is the nature of landscape something that can be mapped, or is the landscape itself a thing or creature of the map? Or perhaps even a “monster” of the map? These are questions around which landscape studies have revolved in recent years. In this chapter I trace the two sides of the question and provide a capsule history of contemporary geographical scholarship, focusing on the contributions of Carl Sauer and European geographers. This landscape approach still dominates much of continental and especially German geography, but in Anglo-America it has declined and landscape has come to be seen not so much as some thing you can map, but rather as a thing of the map, that is, a creature born of cartography. I suggest a third alternative, which opens up new ways of thinking about things, nature, landscape and mapping. Maps are foundational pieces in the study of traditional and also postmodern and “non-modernist” landscape which in contemporary geography is concerned with the social bases for things governing and historically developing inter-relationships between society and nature—this is the thing about lansdscape.
Nature's Ideological Landscape, 2021
Nature's Ideological Landscape, 2021
Nature's Ideological Landscape, 2021
Nature's Ideological Landscape, 2021
Landscape Research, 2020
Taking its point of departure in the prominent, and controversial, legal, political and social en... more Taking its point of departure in the prominent, and controversial, legal, political and social engagement of David Lowenthal's lawyer father, Max Lowenthal, this article first explores the evident influence of Max Lowenthal on his son's distinctive, socially engaged approach to scholarship and writing as an academic, and as a public intellectual. It will then consider how Max Lowenthal's example facilitated David Lowenthal's subsequent lifelong involvement with the work of another publicly engaged and multifaceted lawyer, George Perkins Marsh. This background can help understand why David Lowenthal was himself a multifaceted advocate, whose work appealed to a broad readership of academics, professionals and laymen. Focusing on David Lowenthal's writings from the beginning of his career until his death in 2018, the essay will illuminate the political landscape of his thinking and doing concerning cultural and environmental heritage.
Norsk Geografisk Tidsskrift - Norwegian Journal of Geography, 2015
Olwig, K.R. 2015. Nationalist heritage, sublime affect and the anomalous Icelandic landscape conc... more Olwig, K.R. 2015. Nationalist heritage, sublime affect and the anomalous Icelandic landscape concept. Norsk Geografisk Tidsskrift–Norwegian Journal of Geography Vol. 69, 277–287. ISSN 0029-1951. The idea of landscape has undergone change, as has the physical landscape, under differing historical, technological, ideological and representational contexts. The article is concerned with the way modern imaginaries of landscape have been read back into the past in order to naturalize, essentialize and legitimize a particular imagined political, economic and physical national heritage. The image of Icelandic landnám, understood as the settlement of the naturally bounded, wild, sublime, virginal nature of Iceland encountered by rugged and free Nordic Vikings, speaking a pure Nordic language, played a foundational mythic role in particularly 19th century Nordic and Germanic national romanticism. This was because Iceland provided an apparent means of ground-truthing the nationalism, coupled with economic liberalism, that the national romantics promoted. The article examines the ways that such romantic nativist ideas of national character, as something embedded in a people through the esthetic experience of raw sublime nature, continue to operate on Iceland, and far beyond the boundaries of Norden, in a modern world of freebooting financiers, offshore neoliberal economics and renewed nationalistic fervor. The modern international role of the physical landscape in this ideology is exemplified by a case from Mexico, whereas Iceland exemplifies the continued vitality of this ideational landscape.
Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography, 2013
Abstract “Thing” has undergone reification, and it has done so together with its linguistic “conj... more Abstract “Thing” has undergone reification, and it has done so together with its linguistic “conjoined twin” – “landscape”. Whereas thing once was the name for meetings where people assembled to treat common things that matter, things, in the modern sense, have become physical objects (things as matter). Likewise, landscape's meaning has been reified from being a polity constituted by common thing meetings treating substantive things that matter, to becoming a spatial assemblage of physical things as matter. To fully grasp the contemporary meaning of both things and landscape it is necessary to understand the way in which those meanings are the intertwined outcome of a process of revolutionary inversion, or turning inside–out, by which the meaning of things has been spatialized, enclosed, individualized, privatized, scaled and reified as a constituent of the mental and social landscape of modernity. The potentiality of the concept of thing lies, it will be argued, in its continued containment of older, subaltern meanings that can work to empower an alternative “non‐modern” understanding of things along the lines of, but distinct from, Bruno Latour's notion of Dingpolitik, which will be termed “thing politics” here. This argument is analysed in relation to Martin Heidegger's concept of the “thing”, and exemplified by the mandate of the European Landscape Convention, and the modern planning usage of Landscape Character Assessment and Ecosystem Services, as applied to England's Lake District.
Ethnos, 2015
This conversation was held in October 2014 in Aarhus to discuss the still inchoate concept of Ant... more This conversation was held in October 2014 in Aarhus to discuss the still inchoate concept of Anthropocene. Does the Anthropocene entail an important call for a new kind of politics and understanding or is it a political buzzword? Does Anthropocene scholarship signal the prospect of genuine cross-disciplinary collaboration or does it sustain conventional hierarchies of knowledge and power? What, in short, are the pitfalls and possibilities of the Anthropocene? Editor Nils Bubandt invited four scholars from different disciplines and backgrounds to discuss these questions.
Environmental History, 2013
In the course of the preparation for the restoration of the Váli-stream, an environmental impact ... more In the course of the preparation for the restoration of the Váli-stream, an environmental impact assessment (EIA) and, as a part of it, foundational wildlife and landscape protection studies were carried out. The goal of the study is to reveal the significant impacts of a planned stream restoration on wildlife protection, and later on, to propose mitigation measures on the adverse effects. The other main goal of the study is to evaluate the intervention's effects on the landscape, regarding the landscape character, land use, landscape structure and scenery as well.
"This essay will argue for the necessity of combining the historical/empirical and the theor... more "This essay will argue for the necessity of combining the historical/empirical and the theoretical/institutional oriented approaches to the commons, with an approach that takes cognizance of the commons enormous symbolic importance to society as an epitome of shared abstract values and democracy. The link between these approaches to the commons lies in the conception of the commons as landscape."
Social & Cultural Geography, 2011
... In Renaissance cosmology there were basically four elements, or essences, earth, air, water,f... more ... In Renaissance cosmology there were basically four elements, or essences, earth, air, water,fire, and a fifth elemental essence, æther. ... all notes. Hobbes thus comprehends the state as a kind of theater writ large, and, as can be seen from the book's famous title page, this state is ...
Norsk Geografisk Tidsskrift - Norwegian Journal of Geography, 2000
... in the landscape. Kenneth R. Olwig, Department of Geography, NTNU, The University in Trondhei... more ... in the landscape. Kenneth R. Olwig, Department of Geography, NTNU, The University in Trondheim, N-7491 Trondheim, Norway. E-mail: Kenneth.Olwig@svt.ntnu. no ÐÐÐÐÐÐÐÐÐÐÐÐ Vågenes, Vibeke. 1998. Women of ...
Norsk Geografisk Tidsskrift - Norwegian Journal of Geography, 2007
The multiple interfaces of the European Landscape Convention were the topic of a roundtable panel... more The multiple interfaces of the European Landscape Convention were the topic of a roundtable panel discussion held at the meeting of the Permanent European Conference for the Study of the Rural Landscape in September 2006. The roundtable was convened by Kenneth R. Olwig, who together with four other speakers presented the main topics for discussion. Their presentations are given here as a series of short articles. Initially a brief historical background and the main provisions of the European Landscape Convention (Florence Convention) of 2000, in force 2004, are presented. The interfaces with law, landscape ecology, heritage, and globalisation are then successively discussed. Finally, the European Landscape Convention itself is examined as a discursive interface, with contradictory as well as synergetic aspects.
Norsk Geografisk Tidsskrift - Norwegian Journal of Geography, 2001
... Keywords: dialectical opposition, disciplinary epistemology, myth, totalizing thought Kenneth... more ... Keywords: dialectical opposition, disciplinary epistemology, myth, totalizing thought Kenneth R. Olwig, Department of Geography, NTNU, The University in Trondheim, NO-7491 Trondheim, Norway. E-mail: kenneth.olwig@svt.ntnu.no ...
Landscape Research, 2011
... In Co-operative Environmental Governance: PublicPrivate Agreements as a Policy Strategy , Ed... more ... In Co-operative Environmental Governance: PublicPrivate Agreements as a Policy Strategy , Edited by: Glasbergen, P. 6587. ... of Global Warming and What We Can Do About It by the American politician, environmentalist, businessman, Nobel Prize and Oscar Academy Award ...
International Journal of Heritage Studies, 2001
Page 1. ISSN 1352-7258 print; ISSN 1470-3610 online/01/040339-16 2001 Taylor & Francis Ltd DO... more Page 1. ISSN 1352-7258 print; ISSN 1470-3610 online/01/040339-16 2001 Taylor & Francis Ltd DOI: 10.1080/13581650120105543 International Journal of Heritage Studies, Vol. 7, No. 4, 2001, pp. 339±354 `Time Out of Mind'±`Mind Out of Time': custom versus tradition in ...
Environment and History, 1996
It is my thesis that the discipline we now know as environmental history owes a great deal of its... more It is my thesis that the discipline we now know as environmental history owes a great deal of its impetus to the emergence at the beginning of the 19th century of a socially engaged and environmentally committed interdisciplinary 'proto-discipline'. A material conception of nature was of key importance to this environmental history, and thereby to the historically conscious conservation movement which it set in motion. This concept of nature as thing could, however, be (mis)construed to represent a reification which separates humanity from nature. This reification, as will be seen, was problematic because it bore concealed within it older normative concepts of nature, which came to imply environmental determinism as a natural ideal and the alienation from nature of any form of humanity which violated this ideal. This meant that humanity tended to be counterpoised to nature. There is a consequent need today to 'deconstruct' this concept of nature in order to 're-i...
The nature of Europe is in the Nordic nations." This statement might have been made somewhere in ... more The nature of Europe is in the Nordic nations." This statement might have been made somewhere in the heartland of Europe at any time from ancient antiquity to the present century. The meaning of the terms "nature", "nation" and "Nordic", however, has changed in subtle ways through time. The history of these changes, in turn, provides a background for an understanding of the meaning of Nordic landscape and culture for Europe, and for the Nordic nations, today.
The American Historical Review, 2005
Mapping Across Academia, 2017
Is the nature of landscape something that can be mapped, or is the landscape itself a thing or cr... more Is the nature of landscape something that can be mapped, or is the landscape itself a thing or creature of the map? Or perhaps even a “monster” of the map? These are questions around which landscape studies have revolved in recent years. In this chapter I trace the two sides of the question and provide a capsule history of contemporary geographical scholarship, focusing on the contributions of Carl Sauer and European geographers. This landscape approach still dominates much of continental and especially German geography, but in Anglo-America it has declined and landscape has come to be seen not so much as some thing you can map, but rather as a thing of the map, that is, a creature born of cartography. I suggest a third alternative, which opens up new ways of thinking about things, nature, landscape and mapping. Maps are foundational pieces in the study of traditional and also postmodern and “non-modernist” landscape which in contemporary geography is concerned with the social bases for things governing and historically developing inter-relationships between society and nature—this is the thing about lansdscape.
Nature's Ideological Landscape, 2021
Nature's Ideological Landscape, 2021
Nature's Ideological Landscape, 2021
Nature's Ideological Landscape, 2021
Landscape Research, 2020
Taking its point of departure in the prominent, and controversial, legal, political and social en... more Taking its point of departure in the prominent, and controversial, legal, political and social engagement of David Lowenthal's lawyer father, Max Lowenthal, this article first explores the evident influence of Max Lowenthal on his son's distinctive, socially engaged approach to scholarship and writing as an academic, and as a public intellectual. It will then consider how Max Lowenthal's example facilitated David Lowenthal's subsequent lifelong involvement with the work of another publicly engaged and multifaceted lawyer, George Perkins Marsh. This background can help understand why David Lowenthal was himself a multifaceted advocate, whose work appealed to a broad readership of academics, professionals and laymen. Focusing on David Lowenthal's writings from the beginning of his career until his death in 2018, the essay will illuminate the political landscape of his thinking and doing concerning cultural and environmental heritage.
Norsk Geografisk Tidsskrift - Norwegian Journal of Geography, 2015
Olwig, K.R. 2015. Nationalist heritage, sublime affect and the anomalous Icelandic landscape conc... more Olwig, K.R. 2015. Nationalist heritage, sublime affect and the anomalous Icelandic landscape concept. Norsk Geografisk Tidsskrift–Norwegian Journal of Geography Vol. 69, 277–287. ISSN 0029-1951. The idea of landscape has undergone change, as has the physical landscape, under differing historical, technological, ideological and representational contexts. The article is concerned with the way modern imaginaries of landscape have been read back into the past in order to naturalize, essentialize and legitimize a particular imagined political, economic and physical national heritage. The image of Icelandic landnám, understood as the settlement of the naturally bounded, wild, sublime, virginal nature of Iceland encountered by rugged and free Nordic Vikings, speaking a pure Nordic language, played a foundational mythic role in particularly 19th century Nordic and Germanic national romanticism. This was because Iceland provided an apparent means of ground-truthing the nationalism, coupled with economic liberalism, that the national romantics promoted. The article examines the ways that such romantic nativist ideas of national character, as something embedded in a people through the esthetic experience of raw sublime nature, continue to operate on Iceland, and far beyond the boundaries of Norden, in a modern world of freebooting financiers, offshore neoliberal economics and renewed nationalistic fervor. The modern international role of the physical landscape in this ideology is exemplified by a case from Mexico, whereas Iceland exemplifies the continued vitality of this ideational landscape.
Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography, 2013
Abstract “Thing” has undergone reification, and it has done so together with its linguistic “conj... more Abstract “Thing” has undergone reification, and it has done so together with its linguistic “conjoined twin” – “landscape”. Whereas thing once was the name for meetings where people assembled to treat common things that matter, things, in the modern sense, have become physical objects (things as matter). Likewise, landscape's meaning has been reified from being a polity constituted by common thing meetings treating substantive things that matter, to becoming a spatial assemblage of physical things as matter. To fully grasp the contemporary meaning of both things and landscape it is necessary to understand the way in which those meanings are the intertwined outcome of a process of revolutionary inversion, or turning inside–out, by which the meaning of things has been spatialized, enclosed, individualized, privatized, scaled and reified as a constituent of the mental and social landscape of modernity. The potentiality of the concept of thing lies, it will be argued, in its continued containment of older, subaltern meanings that can work to empower an alternative “non‐modern” understanding of things along the lines of, but distinct from, Bruno Latour's notion of Dingpolitik, which will be termed “thing politics” here. This argument is analysed in relation to Martin Heidegger's concept of the “thing”, and exemplified by the mandate of the European Landscape Convention, and the modern planning usage of Landscape Character Assessment and Ecosystem Services, as applied to England's Lake District.
Ethnos, 2015
This conversation was held in October 2014 in Aarhus to discuss the still inchoate concept of Ant... more This conversation was held in October 2014 in Aarhus to discuss the still inchoate concept of Anthropocene. Does the Anthropocene entail an important call for a new kind of politics and understanding or is it a political buzzword? Does Anthropocene scholarship signal the prospect of genuine cross-disciplinary collaboration or does it sustain conventional hierarchies of knowledge and power? What, in short, are the pitfalls and possibilities of the Anthropocene? Editor Nils Bubandt invited four scholars from different disciplines and backgrounds to discuss these questions.
Environmental History, 2013
In the course of the preparation for the restoration of the Váli-stream, an environmental impact ... more In the course of the preparation for the restoration of the Váli-stream, an environmental impact assessment (EIA) and, as a part of it, foundational wildlife and landscape protection studies were carried out. The goal of the study is to reveal the significant impacts of a planned stream restoration on wildlife protection, and later on, to propose mitigation measures on the adverse effects. The other main goal of the study is to evaluate the intervention's effects on the landscape, regarding the landscape character, land use, landscape structure and scenery as well.
"This essay will argue for the necessity of combining the historical/empirical and the theor... more "This essay will argue for the necessity of combining the historical/empirical and the theoretical/institutional oriented approaches to the commons, with an approach that takes cognizance of the commons enormous symbolic importance to society as an epitome of shared abstract values and democracy. The link between these approaches to the commons lies in the conception of the commons as landscape."
Social & Cultural Geography, 2011
... In Renaissance cosmology there were basically four elements, or essences, earth, air, water,f... more ... In Renaissance cosmology there were basically four elements, or essences, earth, air, water,fire, and a fifth elemental essence, æther. ... all notes. Hobbes thus comprehends the state as a kind of theater writ large, and, as can be seen from the book's famous title page, this state is ...
Norsk Geografisk Tidsskrift - Norwegian Journal of Geography, 2000
... in the landscape. Kenneth R. Olwig, Department of Geography, NTNU, The University in Trondhei... more ... in the landscape. Kenneth R. Olwig, Department of Geography, NTNU, The University in Trondheim, N-7491 Trondheim, Norway. E-mail: Kenneth.Olwig@svt.ntnu. no ÐÐÐÐÐÐÐÐÐÐÐÐ Vågenes, Vibeke. 1998. Women of ...
Norsk Geografisk Tidsskrift - Norwegian Journal of Geography, 2007
The multiple interfaces of the European Landscape Convention were the topic of a roundtable panel... more The multiple interfaces of the European Landscape Convention were the topic of a roundtable panel discussion held at the meeting of the Permanent European Conference for the Study of the Rural Landscape in September 2006. The roundtable was convened by Kenneth R. Olwig, who together with four other speakers presented the main topics for discussion. Their presentations are given here as a series of short articles. Initially a brief historical background and the main provisions of the European Landscape Convention (Florence Convention) of 2000, in force 2004, are presented. The interfaces with law, landscape ecology, heritage, and globalisation are then successively discussed. Finally, the European Landscape Convention itself is examined as a discursive interface, with contradictory as well as synergetic aspects.
Norsk Geografisk Tidsskrift - Norwegian Journal of Geography, 2001
... Keywords: dialectical opposition, disciplinary epistemology, myth, totalizing thought Kenneth... more ... Keywords: dialectical opposition, disciplinary epistemology, myth, totalizing thought Kenneth R. Olwig, Department of Geography, NTNU, The University in Trondheim, NO-7491 Trondheim, Norway. E-mail: kenneth.olwig@svt.ntnu.no ...
Landscape Research, 2011
... In Co-operative Environmental Governance: PublicPrivate Agreements as a Policy Strategy , Ed... more ... In Co-operative Environmental Governance: PublicPrivate Agreements as a Policy Strategy , Edited by: Glasbergen, P. 6587. ... of Global Warming and What We Can Do About It by the American politician, environmentalist, businessman, Nobel Prize and Oscar Academy Award ...
International Journal of Heritage Studies, 2001
Page 1. ISSN 1352-7258 print; ISSN 1470-3610 online/01/040339-16 2001 Taylor & Francis Ltd DO... more Page 1. ISSN 1352-7258 print; ISSN 1470-3610 online/01/040339-16 2001 Taylor & Francis Ltd DOI: 10.1080/13581650120105543 International Journal of Heritage Studies, Vol. 7, No. 4, 2001, pp. 339±354 `Time Out of Mind'±`Mind Out of Time': custom versus tradition in ...
Environment and History, 1996
It is my thesis that the discipline we now know as environmental history owes a great deal of its... more It is my thesis that the discipline we now know as environmental history owes a great deal of its impetus to the emergence at the beginning of the 19th century of a socially engaged and environmentally committed interdisciplinary 'proto-discipline'. A material conception of nature was of key importance to this environmental history, and thereby to the historically conscious conservation movement which it set in motion. This concept of nature as thing could, however, be (mis)construed to represent a reification which separates humanity from nature. This reification, as will be seen, was problematic because it bore concealed within it older normative concepts of nature, which came to imply environmental determinism as a natural ideal and the alienation from nature of any form of humanity which violated this ideal. This meant that humanity tended to be counterpoised to nature. There is a consequent need today to 'deconstruct' this concept of nature in order to 're-i...
The nature of Europe is in the Nordic nations." This statement might have been made somewhere in ... more The nature of Europe is in the Nordic nations." This statement might have been made somewhere in the heartland of Europe at any time from ancient antiquity to the present century. The meaning of the terms "nature", "nation" and "Nordic", however, has changed in subtle ways through time. The history of these changes, in turn, provides a background for an understanding of the meaning of Nordic landscape and culture for Europe, and for the Nordic nations, today.
The American Historical Review, 2005