While anthropologists have always studied spatial aspects of cultural practices, space, place and landscape were rarely the central topics of their research and writing. Space was considered as passive, secondary background to cultural processes rather than their integral component, shaping force and product. It may be argued that for a long time space was not taken sufficiently seriously as to inform thoroughly ethnographic research and theoretical debates about culture. This has changed and a new anthropology of space, place and landscape is forming, drawing inspiration from cultural geography’s advanced conceptualizations of space while retaining anthropology’s special interest in cultural processes and the evolution and dynamics of human behavior. Of the three widely used spatial concepts – space, place, and landscape – it is the last one that has turned out to be the most difficult to define and apply in systematic research. In this article we offer some suggestions about the possible ways of conceptualizing landscape in anthropology in order to make this concept of a real research value and theoretical utility.
The conceptual debate on recently quite a fashionable topic of landscape is, at least within Czech academia, deeply influenced by the concepts and imagery of natural sciences. In this article, we advocate an alternative concept of landscape, that developed by anthropology of landscape. We understand landscape to be a widely conceived "way of seeing", way of grasping, experiencing and understanding the world, rather than simply a piece of reality out there. In the first part of the paper we present, how anthropology of landscape theorize its subject. In the second we offer two applied examples – analyses of prehistoric and (post)industrial landscape. The main aim of the article is to balance otherwise natural science driven debate about landscape and to return to the concept of landscape what it lacks – human experience.