Riley, R.B., 1992, Attachment to the ordinary landscape, in: Altman, I. & S.M. Low, ‘Place attachment’, Plenum Press, New York
- Author : Riley, R.B.
- Year : 1992
- Published in Book : Place attachment
- Pages : 13-35
- Abstract in English : Place attachment is defined as an affective relationship between people and the landscape that goes beyond cognition. One way to begin to think of a human as interacting with the landscape in three ways: as a member of a species; as a member of a particular culture or subculture; and as a unique individual. Explanations of biological, evolutionary-based human experience enrich our conceptual vocabulary of the environmental experience but are unlikely to produce proven explanations. Culturally distinctive human societies are based on geomorphologically distinctive regions. The tie between the culture of the people and their landscapes is the key to understanding collective human activity. The way in which people develop a specific geographic region gives particular colour to human institutions and habits. A second way of looking at the landscape and cultural attitudes sees the landscape itself as a cultural artefact, a natural base transformed or molded by a particular group’s technology and culture. The concept of landscape as cultural artefact doe not depend upon the almost mystical concept of a pays, but upon the documental phenomena of a people making a landscape into a cultural form, with continuity and values. Attachment, a feeling for the congruence of culture and landscape can operate at scales from neighbourhood to entire regional, even national, landscapes. It is clear that the individual’s own life, body, and experiences play a major role in attachment to the landscape (See also Hart, 1979 in this paper). Attachment to the landscape is not simple. It is a set pf threads woven through one’s life. Childhood’s landscapes, and later attachments to landscapes are not only source of satisfaction in themselves but the stuff of an ever-changing interior drama within the human psyche. Specific landscape images and landscape attachment are indices to the total of an individual’s solitary and social experiences. Whether attachment to the landscape is based upon biology, culture, or individual experience it is memory that makes it more than a simple stimulus-response phenomenon.
- Outline in English : Place attachment is defined and some theoretical viewpoints are discussed
- Comments/Notes : place attachment, culture, landscape, nature, psychology.