Landscape and Body, Part 1

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Из курса от партнера University of Zurich

Asian Environmental Humanities: Landscapes in Transition

11 оценки

University of Zurich

Asian Environmental Humanities: Landscapes in Transition

11 оценки

In this course, featuring many researchers from the University of Zurich and international institutions, we will introduce you to some of the most vibrant cultural trends addressing landscape appreciation, degradation, protection, and rehabilitation that currently circulate in the Asian hemisphere. You will learn about concepts of landscape in Asian religions, philosophy, social sciences, history and the arts and their reverberation in selected environmental projects in China, India and Japan. Furthermore, we will discuss how they are critically reflected upon in the context of the environmental humanities, and observe how an interdisciplinary approach towards regional ecosystems past and present reaches out beyond pragmatic technological solutions to mitigate environmental damage. Following us on our different paths and trajectories through the five modules of the course, you will encounter many of the reasons why environmental humanities study projects which strive to change people’s prevalent attitudes, values and behavioural patterns in order to redeem the rapidly globalizing crisis, and how they go about it. Having acquainted yourself with the stories Asia’s landscapes – and landscape representations – tell about actual and possible human-nature relationships, you can compare and evaluate their potential to bring about the desired change and define your own range of actions as an informed stakeholder for creating a sustainable future. What is arguably no less intriguing: you will learn how to appreciate a broad range of eco-aesthetic forms that re-enchant our lives by creatively interacting with the more-than-human world. You can follow the five modules of the course consecutively or just study the modules that interest you the most. If you want to earn a certificate, you need to complete all of the modules including the quizzes at the end of each module. THESE ARE THE TOPICS OF THE 5 MODULES OF THIS COURSE: Module 1: Concepts of landscape past and present and their cosmological underpinnings. Module 2: Entangled landscapes comprising cultural flows of concepts and forms, contemporary gardens on the move, nostalgic elegies of demolished sites and rural reconstruction projects. Module 3: Discussion of two religious communities in India (the Parsi-Zoroastrians and the Auroville community) and their relationship with the environment. Module 4: Environmental debates tackling religious concepts and social practices and the problem of waste disposal in India. Module 5: Environmental movements and the impact of Fukushima on attitudes towards nuclear energy in Japan, creative activism including arts projects and documentaries to protest against pollution and landscape degradation and raise environmental awareness in the Sinosphere, and emergent concepts for sustainable community life on the planet.

Из урока

The Roots and Routes of Asian Environmental Thought

We will begin this course by tracing historical ways of thinking about the environment in China. Through a range of examples, traditional notions of “nature” and “landscape“ will be introduced. These will be compared with modern transcultural and Western concepts. After studying a selection of key concepts pertaining to the construction of landscape (shanshui) as an aesthetic category, we will visit two sites in Switzerland where ancient and modern landscape art works from China are collected and made accessible to a wider public. Finally, we will look more closely into one historically and culturally formative theme in Chinese eco-aesthetic practice, namely the representation of human bodies as landscapes and vice versa. We will argue that the tradition of imagining, and mapping, bodies as structurally and materially embedded in the cosmic body has inspired ancient and modern artists to reflect critically upon the place and role of human beings in the world at large.

Landscape and Body, Part 19:16

Landscape and Body, Part 214:35

Landscape and Body, Part 3: Ecosickness narratives10:35

Познакомьтесь с преподавателями

Andrea Riemenschnitter
Prof.
Institute of Asian and Oriental Studies

In this and the next video,

we will introduce the conceptualization and representation of bodies

as integrated parts of, or intimately entangled with, landscapes.

Traditional notions of nature and the cosmos hold that bodies are

interconnected with their natural environment through the vital force qi.

The encounter with Western philosophy changed and hybridized these concepts.

Contemporary eco-art creatively draws from

the ancient cosmological scriptures without fully

subscribing to their religious dogma and authority.

Now let us look at the different body-landscape connections

that were drawn in ancient Chinese cosmological thought,

Taoist maps of the inner human body,

and an even more ancient representation of the human body in its cosmic embeddedness,

Lady Dai's funeral banner.

Historically, the idea of a body-landscape continuum grew from

shamanistic ritual practice and was further developed in

ancient China's three major philosophico-religious traditions, namely

Taoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism,

from where it spread into literature and the arts.

Ancient cosmology holds that all under heaven is animated by the same vital force, qi,

which is a kind of self-subsistent or ur-substance

that has both material and spiritual attributes.

Depending on their qi,

which can be more or less pure or sustain more or less spiritual energy,

container objects differ from each other.

Hence, we can perceive qi as the psychophysical structure of things and phenomena.

A rock, for instance,

normally is on the lower end of the spiritual endowments scale,

whereas heaven is considered to be on top.

The unfathomable source of qi is taiji,

the supreme ultimate state from which yin and yang originate.

Everybody knows its most popular symbol, called Taiji tu,

a circle divided by a winding line into black and white,

with one dot of the opposite color contained in each of the two halves.

This taiji map shows the interdependency and constant flow of qi between the human body,

the five elements, good and evil, light and darkness,

animality, cultivated virtues, and affective states.

This diagram is from a Korean source dating from the late 14th century.

Having placed a simplified version of the taiji symbol on its flag,

modern South Korea evidently continues to

define its modern identity within this tradition.

On the flag, the taiji circle is surrounded by the symbols for Earth,

Heaven, fire, and water from the classic “Book of Changes”, the “Yijing”.

We have just heard that everything in the universe

is interconnected based on the vital force qi.

This means that the cosmos is continuously and spontaneously self-generating.

The principle of endless re-creation is called ziran in Chinese.

Ziran, which we can put awkwardly as

“self-so-ing” in a kind of literal translation, or “as-it-is-ness”,

was borrowed to become an equivalent to the term “nature” when the influx

of Western terminologies required the establishment of a modernized vocabulary.

As Tu Wei-ming puts it in his article on “The Continuity of Being“,

„nature is vital force on display.” Being continuous, holistic,

and dynamic, “its enduring pattern is union rather than disunion,

integration rather than disintegration,

and synthesis rather than separation.

The eternal flow of nature is characterized by

the concord and convergence of numerous streams of vital force.”

The continuity of cosmic qi is best explained by Neo-Confucian thinker Zhang Zai,

who states in his famous Western Inscription:

“Heaven/yang is my father and earth/yin is my mother,

and even such a small being as I finds an intimate place in their midst.

Therefore, that which fills the universe I regard as

my body and that which directs the universe I regard as my nature.

All people are my brothers and sisters,

and all things are my companions."

To illustrate how the continuous flow of qi was imagined,

Tu mentions a self-portrait by Shi Tao.

On this painting, the mountains look like frozen ocean waves

and water resembles solid natural forms.

Even the robe Shi Tao wears looks like a river,

and in its whiteness almost seamlessly

merges the human figure with the surrounding landscape.

From the outer appearance of the body-landscape continuum,

we now move to a Taoist view of the internal body as

a landscape that ideally is self-regulating like the cosmos.

According to the Taoist doctrine,

a whole state apparatus of deities and officials

is responsible for steering the bodily functions,

and the superior person can,

by exerting perfect control over his body,

maintain the balance of the cosmic forces

and thus bestow order on the human world.

An illustration of how this was achieved is the inner landscape map “Neijing tu”,

which shows how to travel through one's body in pursuit of ordering, purifying,

and preserving the organic functions of

both the individual person and, by extension, the world.

From the waterwheel in the lower body part upwards

to the spirit sitting cross-legged in the head of the embryonic body,

you see several spirits busy cultivating the various treasures that

together constitute what Kristofer Schipper calls “the interior country of the body.”

In addition to individual cultivating practices and technologies,

priests, and sometimes the emperor, as the Son of Heaven,

would perform purifying rites on top of a sacred mountain.

For this purpose, a gown embroidered with landscape elements such as waves,

clouds, mountains, beasts, birds,

and flowers was worn.

Even more ancient than these maps,

the funeral banner of Lady Dai shows a shamanistic universe,

where the deceased human body dwells among

mythical beasts and spirits in the realm of transcendence.

Her grave at the archaeological site of Mawangdui

in today's city of Changsha in Hunan province

dates from roughly 2200 years ago.

Lady Dai's coffin was covered with this unique, mythical mappa mundi.

It shows a shamanistic cosmos, composed of figures and symbols that

circulated long before the rise to dominance of China's three main religious traditions.

On the banner's top

we see Heaven with the sun and moon and some mythical creatures.

The upper middle part shows Lady Dai and her attendants,

below is her body with a group of mourners,

and the image at the bottom represents the underworld

with two giant fish or whales,

some other mythical animals, and a giant

holding a plane symbolizing the boundary between the two spheres.

The affective states of happiness and sorrow structure the world of the living,

whereas fear and awe towards the beyond can be

deducted from the kind of mythical beasts that are shown to reside there.

Death rites assume a close connection of the living body with its natural environment.

As we have seen on Lady Dai's funeral banner,

Shamanism already inspired its arrangement as an imaginary landscape.

Taoism and Buddhism came forth with elaborate descriptions of paradises

where the sages and immortals dwell.

Besides its focus on ancestor worship,

Confucianism developed a kind of

subcultural tradition catering to a strong fascination with

the impact on society of excessive affects or the neglect of virtue in human conduct.

Populated by ghosts – the embodiments of emotional imbalance –

these eccentric landscapes were depicted as haunted houses,

gardens, lakes and rivers, or graveyards.

An extremely popular theme in literature,

ghosts were rarely ever painted.

Luo Ping’s scroll “Ghost Amusement” is a famous exception.

It highlights the era of transition from pre-modern to modern visual conventions.

The painter was not particularly interested in the surroundings of the frolicking ghosts,

but rather sought to confront or simply collect different ideas about

embodied life after death stemming from Western and Chinese traditions.

In modernity, a plethora of ghost movies elaborate on

the possibility of transgressing the boundary between this world and the beyond,

due to the accumulation of specific effective intensities,

especially love and anger,

and pay a great deal of attention to

the visualization of the places and landscapes that hatch such transgressions.

In sum, the Chinese perception of a body-landscape continuity was formed in religious,

philosophical, historical, aesthetic, proto-scientific

and other sources, before the advent of modernity.

As we will see in the next video,

it prevailed in aesthetic contexts,

thus showing its resilience and cultural power even under the pressure of,

and subordination under the Western scientific separation of mind and matter.

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