Other People’s Landscapes and Our Landscape

Anthropology is primarily concerned with humans and culturally created lifeworlds. However, landscapes are entities that are constructed in a different way than most other social and cultural phenomena. The presence of a non-human component in the landscape is undeniable. There are several ways of capturing this non-human component in anthropology, depending on how much the researcher wishes to distance from the basic principles of the European landscape perception. Thus, the anthropological interpretation of the landscape tells as much about human and non-human relations as how Europeans theorize otherness. The paper seeks to link polyphonic visions of landscape as presented in anthropological literature; arguing that the exploration of alterity is not necessarily the most expedient method in anthropological research in understanding environmental relations.