Abstract
With the publication of another book about a national park, one might expect familiar discussions of landscape, the gaze, iconic sites or tourism. These concepts are present in this book, but they are also challenged and refreshed in writing that is relentlessly wise and actively engaged with the world. Ness is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Riverside, where she specialises in performance studies, and this training and sensibility is apparent throughout the book. She begins with a critical review of anthropological and, in particular, cultural geographical work on performance, movement and landscape. This includes a discussion of works by Foucault, Bergson, Merleau-Ponty, Latour, Deleuze, Bateson and Ingold, although her primary focus is on the late-nineteenth century philosopher and logician Charles Sanders Peirce.
Ness deploys Peirce’s thinking to advance a theory of cultural performance. Pearce termed his approach to studying meaning and signs Semieotics, distinguishing it from prevailing work on semiotics. His semiotics operates in the broadest of possible terms, treating human performance as ‘a way of making things lively when they might otherwise not be so; making them matter when they otherwise may not’. A myriad of touchings, body poises and memories may flicker in ways that give rise to feelings and meanings. Drawing on Vincent Colapietro’s recent work on Peirce’s ‘active performativity of signs’ (p. 10) 1 and Erin Manning’s arguments in Relationscapes, 2 Ness describes and feels ‘a moment of pure dream’ which may be seen to move well beyond ‘what it seemed the body could do’ (p. 61). This she identifies as a way to access the almost virtual realm of pure experience.
These conceptual openings are followed by three chapters on ‘visiting’, combining participative and observational methods to look at climbing, bouldering and hiking. In her actions and writing, Ness accompanies the individuals with whom she shared these often awkward practice-performances. She describes a desperate moment of getting her foot caught between rocks. She pays attention to the combination of performance, non-verbal communication and mastery of method, revitalising them in a reflexive, critically attuned way and providing a profoundly fresh series of insights. She establishes a new vocabulary relating to non-verbal and complex aspects of symbolism and mediation and their role in human creativity, and the book provides an important discussion of the relations people establish with non-human forms.
In Choreographies of Landscape, Ness provides conceptual insights which connect a range of disciplines, drawing upon detailed research undertaken over many years – including in-depth ethnographic work. The book addresses new challenges and deepens our understanding of landscape from a number of disciplinary perspectives. The delight of this book is that it provides a serious engagement with a web of theories, yet it retains a light touch in style. Through careful attention to observation-performance, it offers an intimate approach to its subject that is both complex and beautifully poetic.