Landscape shapes (continued)

This year's lecture was the third and final instalment in a cycle of lectures on landscape anthropology begun in 2012. It began with a summary of what had been established in the lectures of the previous two years, as an introduction to the issues developed this year. It should be remembered that the ambition set for this cycle of lectures was to answer three main questions: what do we refer to when we speak of landscape? Can we generalize this notion beyond the civilizations that have elaborated landscape representations, whether pictorial or literary? And, if so, how can we precisely define the common core of a landscape scheme? These questions arose from dissatisfaction with the mainly historical definition of landscape - the habit of discerning a landscape in what surrounds us comes from the fact that we have learned to look at certain sites as landscapes, thanks in particular to the education of the eye through painting - and from the desire to use the notion in an anthropologically productive way by detaching it from its aesthetic support, i.e. by questioning the existence of forms of landscape perception in cultures where there is no tradition of figuration of places.