Internal and External Affective Landscapes
What are Internal and External Affective Landscapes? Why do they matter?
It is a revolutionary act to return affection and fascination to the living territory that has always sustained us.
- Sofia Batalha
Landscape Concept
The word landscape derives from the French word paysage, which can be defined, in a simplified way, as regions of human organization and occupation. In the modern West, landscape is “that which can be observed from a given place,” or a “geographical space of a given type.” It can be associated with everything we see. Including geographical territory opens up comprehensive perception by the senses. Geographical landscape can be defined as all the elements of space - everything our senses can perceive and interpret. In this context, landscape perception is limited to external perceptions and is not identical for everyone, as it varies according to the observer.
I want to mention the official concepts of landscape and territory given by the Glossary of the Information System of the Council of Europe Landscape Convention:
Territory is a term used to describe how people have appropriated a specific space through legal and social systems. Territories are generally extensive and precisely delineated, particularly within administrative or political boundaries. They are sometimes supported by natural elements (mountain ranges, rivers).
Landscape, as established in the Convention, designates a part of the territory, as perceived by populations, whose character results from the action and interaction of natural and human factors.
Let's note the notions of ‘legal appropriation’ and the ‘precise delimitation’ of administrative and political boundaries, which tend to ignore the ecosystemic characteristics of the living territory.
In this hierarchically anthropocentric conceptual framework, the territory is never sovereign or valid in its own right. It is only a resource and instrument to be organized within and for the cultural and legal structure. The official definition is both a symptom and perpetuates the causes of affective separation.
In this cultural context, the notion of landscape speaks of the relationship between human beings and nature, both spatial and temporal. In Western science, landscape results from interrelationships between the natural and the human, as nature is appropriated and managed by human beings. There are natural landscapes, with little or no human intervention, and cultural landscapes, resulting from the transformation of human activity. The natural landscape combines geology, geomorphology, vegetation, rivers, lakes, and other elements. The cultural landscape refers to all humans' physical modifications in urban and rural spaces.
It's worth noting how the Western non-autochthonous psyche - a generally detached way of thinking and feeling, which believes itself to be independent and separate, having difficulty articulating presence and belonging - interprets landscape as external and mainly visual. This excludes the inevitable living and ecosystemic intertwining. It erases the interrelationships of the multiple living systems that unfold in each landscape, including humans. In this limited context, there is no visceral identification or belonging, no sense of kinship, and even less responsible integration of non-humans into a shared ecology. It's a designation delineated by a mechanistic, hierarchical, and anthropocentric lens, where the landscape is just a setting waiting to be managed, maintained, and possessed by humans, excluding the subjective and poetic affections and all the biological porosity of body-in-place.
In contrast, indigenous ideas of landscape are alive and valued through multiple reciprocal and kinship relationships, which are cyclical and long-lasting. They are territories that have cultural, spiritual, mythical, and historical value, often shaped by thousands of years of traditional land use and ecological management, and are vital for preserving biodiversity and maintaining indigenous heritage.
Affection
Western concepts of landscape ignore affect because for science to be factual, it has to value itself as neutral. Before moving on to internal landscapes, we must open ourselves to affect. Affections affect, impact, stimulate, and penetrate, causing good or bad emotions. In turn, emotion is the response to affection, whether caused by something internal or external, corresponding to bodily reactions to each situation experienced - emotion is like a compass. All this happens simultaneously through the compass body, which involves the cartographic psyche in resonance with the living processes of each place.
Cross-culturally, we know that the characteristics of landscapes and places influence people's emotions, both individually and collectively. Whether positively or negatively, in affective clusters, charged with similar reactions - such as positive emotions towards green and lively landscapes or negative emotions towards ruined, ugly, contaminated, or destroyed landscapes.
Internal Landscape
We come to the internal landscape, reflected by emotion and interaction, nourished by both individual and collective memory and consciousness, as well as by the surrounding context. It is impermanent and varies according to each individual's sleep/wakefulness, emotion, and interest.
Internal landscapes are imaginary, metaphorical, deeply symbolic, subjective, and mythical. They relate the poetic intimacy of the psyche and body with the primordial natural unconscious. They are both personal and collective landscapes that use the innate language of biology, ecosystem, and memory to recreate landscapes internally. This internal construction reflects states of mind and is much less independent of seasonality and external topography than is usually considered in the West. These are familiar emotional landscapes where we reside, although they can always be surprising and subject to change.
Contrary to the hyper-individualistic perception of the modern psyche, these internal landscapes are not, and never have been, separate from the external landscapes.
Identity itself is related to the landscape's character and tangible and intangible features that mold a sense of belonging. It is the sum of the different living layers based on the territory, its cultural and natural elements, structure, and seasonality, from the particular to the general.
Internal and External Affective Landscapes
The Internal and External Affective Landscapes reflect these multiple, porous, and visceral relationships, never separable, never totally rational, and even less logical.
Here, the powerful symbolic resources of imagination, myths, and dreams are fundamental. Following the trail of affections, we follow the internal and external tracks of living, sovereign, and complex places. As mammals, innate relatives of body and place, our dreams are also those of the landscape we find ourselves in. Despite modern illusions of separation from the individual, we intrinsically belong, connect, and depend on the landscape surrounding us; it is a biological and ecosystemic reality.
We have always been, individually and collectively, inseparable from the non-human kinship that binds us.
To reconnect with the landscape is to take it on as a metamorph, as the primordial verb of the space-time in which life unfolds, and not just as a reference for orientation, localization, or human possession. We mend the relationships between spiritual, mental, emotional, intimate, and bodily landscapes through mythical, imaginary, dreamlike, symbolic, and metaphorical landscapes. These landscapes unite us with the living gods of places, those found in the ecosystem, the topography, the waters, and the winds. We remember the territory as impermanent as it is eternal, always multiple, ecosystemic, and sovereign, where life unfolds through the interconnection of multiple processes. Landscapes are living, harboring the world's stories - stories that are not about us individually but that viscerally involve and cross us. Here, we learn the value of paradox in the memory and cultural recording of the histories of places.
Recovering affection in this relationship is essential for naming and valuing emotional and instinctive intelligence, both with inspiration, enchantment, and systemic destruction. We are not immune to it, no matter how much we try to escape it through abstraction, dissociation, or addictions that numb us. Returning to the relationship implies walking with the mourning and enchantment of this primal wisdom.
In this porous and visceral relationship, we are not the masters but guardian witnesses, observers, and apprentices of the extraordinary story of life. We are not the managers or owners of the landscape but close relatives who can watch over biodiversity. Here, we know that our ideas and feelings are also the body of the landscape, and we are never to be separated. We have always been landscape, one of the nodes in the great web of the place, in connection and affinity with everything else.
We intentionally offer our talents to the inherent and complex bio-intelligent metabolism of living and sovreign landscapes, places, and territories.
References
landscape | Dicionário Infopédia Básico Ilustrado de Língua Portuguesa
Glossary of Landscape Terms (Glossary adapted from the Glossary of the Council of Europe Landscape Convention Information System)
What is the difference between affect, emotion and feeling? LIV
Navigating forests and other emotional landscapes | Green Teacher
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What a fascinating post - I wonder what your thoughts are on the chronotope, and if it helps or harms these maps.
I like to view everything as rational although it may currently be beyond our understanding, these landscapes could be viewed as the resonance of their genetic code developed through millions of years of constant interactions, a certain genetic gravity we are always trying to break from. To hone ones skills through a life lived in these landscapes both genetically and physically give us a grounding in which we fell affection and the evolved genetic history of these landscapes has worn away the hard edges through the development of natural interdependent relationships we can view as kinship. Music has a certain resonance and to live within the symphony of life in perfect harmony is what we strive, will this let us break free of our genetic gravity? Many thanks for thought provoking discussion