Landscape unmasked: Kenneth Olwig and the ghostly relations between concepts

摘要

Books on landscape and nature often induce a deja vu effect upon their audience. Kenneth Olwig's monumental Landscape, nature and the body politic produces no such effect. It is not only a highly original and stimulating book full of suspense, but also one that has important implications for the way geographers and other social scientists think about the relationships between landscape, land, country, polity, place, custom, law, gender, the body, 'race', nature and nation. Indeed, a core theoretical notion in the account is that these concepts in their complex conjunction offer insights that are irreducible to any of these concepts in isolation. Olwig employs the masque - and especially the 1605 Masque of blackness, with a text by Ben Jonson and staging by Inigo Jones - as a fascinating prism through which these complex relationships can be teased out. The Renaissance masque was a form of courtly spectacle, in which masked performers danced and acted, developing into a form of drama with scenery and music. Olwig shows how the masque was a powerful art form imbued with an ideological texture of social relationships, particularly that between court and country. The book is also about masking, or what might be called an ideological process of visual and mental deception for certain political purposes, notably the abstract power of the state, gendered practices and cartographic reason.