Visualism and Landscape: Looking and Seeing in Normandy

Abstract

Critiques of visualism, i.e. an epistemological 'bias toward vision', have focussed on surveillance and overview. Taking a different perspective, this paper differentiates looking from seeing, the latter being linked to all the senses. Discussions of landscape appreciation in Western literature have reflected a similar restriction to the distant or privileged gaze. Theorists have rendered invisible the labourers' and inhabitants' view of landscape and the consumption of its products. Based on fieldwork and filming in Normandy,this article reinserts the biographical and bodily meaning of landscape for unnamed cultivators and food producers, in contrast to nonlabouring spectators. It also discusses how fieldwork has to confront prior images of the landscape, especially Impressionist paintings as icons which intertwine with local perspectives. Through participant observation, the anthropologist may shift from looking as spectator to seeing as participant.