Performing on the Landscape versus Doing Landscape: Perambulatory Practice, Sight and the Sense of Belonging

Thus writes Tim Ingold in the first paragraph of an article entitled ‘Against Space: Place, Movement, Knowledge’ (Ingold forthcoming). Two different senses of landscape, I will argue, can be linked to this passage. The first is concerned with the landscape of earth, fields, pastures, country and ground, and the second is the landscape of space. These two different senses of landscape are linked to two different ways of seeing. The first involves binocular vision, movement and knowledge gained from a coordinated use of the senses in carrying out various tasks (Ingold 1993). The second derives primarily from a monocular perspective that is fixed and distant from the body. The first modality engenders a sense of belonging that generates landscape as the place of dwelling and doing in the body politic of a community, whereas the second constructs a feeling of possession and staged performance in a hierarchical social space.