LANDSCAPE AS ART AND AS PERSONS
LANDSCAPE AS ART AND AS PERSONS

Summary/Abstract: During my fieldwork with the Fuyuge people who reside in the Papuan highlands of Papua New Guinea I was often captivated with the way they spoke about and related to what I would call their landscape (they did not have a word for landscape but did for the related idea of place). Every area of land, however small, had a name and men and women could recount which people in the past and present inhabited, cultivated or performed rituals in that place. Their detailed knowledge impressed me as someone coming from an urban environment with little knowledge of that kind for the surroundings I inhabited. On many occasions I would be walking with a Fuyuge person and we would stop and rest and he or she would look out across the valley and tell me stories about what had transpired in a place that was pointed out to me. Aside from the knowledge of the places that constituted the landscape there was what I would call an aesthetic appreciation of the surroundings. One could almost say that Fuyuge people valued the collective ‘art’ they had produced and were producing, a point I return to below

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