| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative World

Kenneth Robert Olwig. Landscape, Nature, and the Body Politic: From Britain's Renaissance to America's New World. Foreword by Yi-Fu Tuan. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. 2002. Pp. xxxii, 299. Cloth $65.00, paper $24.95.

This ambitious book examines the interlocking and shifting meanings of several key terms—including "landscape," "nature," "country," and "nation"—from the early seventeenth century to the present. Simplified somewhat, the story it tells is of the near eradication of one idea of landscape (as a site of custom and memory) and the emergence of another (as the "scenic view" through which particular models of political authority and identity can be created). Whereas landscape has come to connote the pictorial representation of a delimited physical area, Kenneth Robert Olwig describes the term's origins in European notions of polity and customary practice: "A Landschaft was more than a place; it expressed the very idea of political representation as manifested in the representative body that stood for a political community. The Landschaft as place was thus defined not physically, but socially, as the place of a polity" (p. 10). In other words, "landscape" (or "landschaft") is a term to which the social and political (rather than the "scenic") were initially primary. This book describes both the rise to prominence of the "scenic" model of landscape and the ways in which that model has helped to shore up everything from monarchical authority to national identity.

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