At Home in the World: An ontology of landscape in Japan | Em Casa no Mundo: Um ontologia da paisagem no Japão

The relationship between human beings and landscape/place is an issue that cuts across human communities. However, even before it is formulated as a question, the landscape and what constitutes it reveal themselves as the very possibility of orientating ourselves in the world, of recognising meaning in it - before taking the landscape as an object of reflection, the landscape is always already an existential condition of the human being. Starting from this premise, the anthropologist must try to understand how different cultures articulate their 'answers' to the same question - the nature of the human-landscape relationship - and harmonise them with his/her own 'answers'. However, both inside and outside anthropology, many of the answers that have been given belong to a different type of question: questions that presuppose, from the outset, a human subject who is in opposition to the world, making judgements about it, attributing functions and properties to it. As a result, the landscape often becomes an object that we try to define or determine the conditions of perception/access to. For this talk, I will start by illustrating this objectifying tendency as I go through some of the literature on landscape. Then, in a second moment, I will try to elaborate a possible 'answer' that Japanese culture seems to articulate to the initial question (the nature of the human-landscape relationship). This 'answer', in turn, will include a reflection on (i) 'nature' in Japanese culture and (ii) the Japanese notion of 'furusato' ('native village' / 'native place') in its cultural, philosophical and ethnographic dimensions. The overall purpose of this talk lies in the possibility of taking this 'answer' as our own, reflecting on its human dimension and not just the cultural one.