Recognizing the Dialogical Nature of the Landscape: For a Marxist Semiotics (original) (raw)
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We provide an overview of different approaches to the semiotic study of landscapes both in the field of semiotics proper and in landscape studies in general. We describe different approaches to the semiotic processes in landscapes from the semiological tradition in which landscape has been seen as analogous to a text with its language, to more naturalised and phenomenological approaches, including landscape as chronotope, as well as the ecosemiotic view of landscapes that goes beyond anthropocentric definitions. Special attention is paid to the potential of the Tartu–Moscow school’s cultural semiotics to analyse landscapes and the possibilities held by a dynamic, dialogic and holistic landscape definition for the development of ecosemiotics.
Semiotic study of landscapes: An overview from semiology to ecosemiotics
Sign Systems Studies, 2011
The article provides an overview of different approaches to the semiotic study of landscapes both in the field of semiotics proper and in landscape studies in general. The article describes different approaches to the semiotic processes in landscapes from the semiological tradition where landscape has been seen as analogous to a text with its language, to more naturalized and phenomenological approaches, as well as ecosemiotic view of landscapes that goes beyond anthropocentric definitions. Special attention is paid to the potential of cultural semiotics of Tartu–Moscow school for the analysis of landscapes and the possibilities held by a dynamic, dialogic and holistic landscape definition for the development of ecosemiotics.
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A Study of the Semiotic Understanding of Land Art
Semiotics is the science of signs. It is known as an approach to expose the fundamental structural elements of the meaning of an object or a term. It comprises of the study of signs, designation, indication, analogy, likeness, symbolism, signification, metaphor, and communication. Semiotic and land art are closely associated with each other. Land art consists of sculptures, carvings, and performances located at specific natural surroundings to deliver messages of love and concern for the environment, even though they are ephemeral or located in inaccessible places they are transmitted by the semioticians. Like all works of art, each piece could be classified as abstract or realistic and would be created using signs and symbols of the artist’s semiotic system to code the messages and feelings. The aim of this article is to examine the semiotics of land art based on signs and symbols of landscape through documentary analysis. The findings of the study revealed that semiotics is a powerful tool to reflect feelings and sentiments regarding different landscape. Some implications were also furnished.
Landscape And Ethnos Revisited
My 1987dissertation " On Landscape and Ethnos: An assessment of Lev N. Gumilev's theories " was marginal to mainstream 'Western Geography' and its academic discourse. Whereas, amidst an emerging Glasnost late Soviet discourse ushered in a re-emergence of several intellectual strains that encompassed aspects of Gumilev's work. Perhaps most contradictory was the Russian national ethnic identity—a proto Slavophil movement—also incorporating resurgent Orthodox religious thought and practice (about which more will be discussed later in this intervention) versus a revised Eurasianism that viewed Russia as a mix of European and Asian ethnicities. While current criticism of Gumilev incorporates a contradictions in his ethnic and geopolitical theories that synthesizes both Slavic Russian and Eurasian identities within biophysical & biosphere phenomena he labels as " passionarity ". In this intervention I will also address this issue and resolution of its seeming contradictions. Today, discussion, analysis and interpretations of Gumilev's wide ranging theories are legion, both within post-Soviet Russian and international discourses. What I adhere to is the Vernadsky based biosphere physical geography with acknowledgement of Anuchin's revised approach to a unified geography that merges evolutionary human agency into physical geography. Prior to my discovery and interest in Gumilev's theories, as a geographer, I was influenced by a sense of the factuality of humans as a species part of the planet's ecological evolution. But following an evolutionary trend in western (American) ecosystem and sociobiology, I began to see more of the broad diversified field of geography as unitarian rather than bifurcated into human and physical. American academic geography is rooted in 19 th century German theory and its universalization including its close philosophical and scientific connection with Russian academia. As a Berkeley student under the influence of Carl Sauer, I became familiar with the history and theory of geographical discourses, and a century of controversy over environmental determinism and its seemingly reasonable resolution in Possibilism. That approach does not rule out environmental influences on human agency or the reverse, but rather seeks to identify and understand mutual influences. Yet increasingly the two draw apart with the greater expansion of scientific research into convergent neurobiological processes and a unitary evolution of lifeforms within a biosphere that is more or less a product of cosmic and heliosphere influences on evolutionary earth processes. As the reader will discover, this preamble to a larger work points to the overwhelming and rationally incontrovertible evidence produced in scientific exploration and data analysis. 24 December 2017 PREFACE: So many reviews and critiques of L. N. Gumiev's theories and diverse works have originated from a social determinist perspective, both from Russian, English, and other language interventions, theses and publications. But that is the intellectual norm, especially from outside of a materialist ethos, be it dialectical materialist or generic scientific discourse. From having run across Gumilev's work on Eurasian historical geography and included a brief comment in my doctoral work, my mentor, P. L. Wagner suggested that I read deeper into Gumilev. Circulation of my initial work drew responses from senior academics urging me to shift from my theoretical and empirical work on the diffusion across Eurasia to focus on Gumilev who was known only to a small circle of scholars in areas of Soviet Geography and intellectual history. My earliest reading of Gumilev evolved with great assistance and encouragement from Wagner, Ted Shabad, and David Hooson into a successfully defended doctoral thesis, which was picked up by Soviet academicians with parts translated into Russian and published online from an Omsk
2012
In their article "Narratives of Loss and Order and Imaging the Belgian Landscape 1900- 1945" Bruno Notteboom and David Peleman analyze a number of publications on landscape, focusing on narratives constructed by means of landscape images published in Belgium. With the work of Jean Massart and Emile Vanderwelde as a point of departure, Notteboom and Peleman discuss popularizing publications in the fields of botany, agricultural education, and tourism, as well as an urban planning. They address the three realms of landscape narratives defined by Matthew Potteiger and Jamie Purinton as story, context/intertext, and discourse. Notteboom and Peleman distinguish three recurrent operations or narrative techniques: framing, sequencing, and juxtaposing whereby their main argument is that in spite of their ideological differences the publications they discuss seek a way of dealing with processes of modernization and with the loss of a traditional way of living defined by a direct re...
Philosophy of Landscape : Think, Walk, Act
2019
This landmark collection of essays on landscape offers a much-needed comprehensive exploration of an important dimension of our human environment. Landscape is different from such environmental topics as the forest, the city, and the sea. Unlike other subjects of environmental inquiry, landscape is strangely situated, giving it a compelling significance. For landscape is not a place that can be clearly demarcated. It is not a natural object like a mountain or a river, nor is it a location such as a valley or an island. In fact, landscape is no thing at all. Etymologically speaking, landscape is an expanse of the perceived environment: a scene, a region, surroundings as viewed by an observer. This gives landscape unique standing in environmental experience because landscape cannot be considered alone: it is, in effect, defined by and in relation to human perception. Landscape is a relationship. We can think here of the Claude glass, so called because it was an optical device, invented by the seventeenth century French landscape painter Claude Lorrain, through which an artist or a traveler in the countryside could look and adjust in order to frame a pleasing aspect of the scenery, arranging the view through the glass to resemble what a painter would depict with brush and paint. This exemplifies how what is designated as a landscape depends on the viewer, a point of exceeding importance. For there is no landscape "out there", so to speak, no independent object or place. Recognizing this has dramatic implications, for it demonstrates how landscape is actually a complex synthesis of viewer and environment. Recognizing this led me to entitle my first extended discussion of environment, "The Viewer in the Landscape", and that same understanding underlies many of the essays in this volume. Moreover, landscape has been used metaphorically in ways that do not always suit a visual meaning, such as 'earthscape' and 'spacescape' and even in referring to memories of one's previous home as an internal landscape.-Filosofia da Paisagem. Estudos, 2013. A compilation of essays by Adriana Veríssimo Serrão, the principal investigator of the project. Organized in four chapters: "Anthropology and Philosophy of Nature"; "Nature and Art: The Composite Categories"; "Landscape and Environment. A theoretical debate" and "Problems of Philosophy of the Landscape", the book reflects on the essence of Landscape as idea and reality, being and manifestation. 'A piece of nature' is, as such, an internal contradiction; nature has no pieces, it is the unity of a whole. The instant anything is removed from this wholeness, it is no longer nature, precisely because it can only be 'nature' within that unlimited unity, as a wave of that global flow. 2 19 Spazio limitato il paesaggio, ma aperto, perché, a differenza degli spazi chiusi, ha sopra di sé il cielo, cioè lo spazio illimitato; e non rappresenta l'infinito (simbolicamente o ilusionisticamente), ma si apre all'infinito, pur nella finitezza del suo essere limitato: costituendosi come presenza,