Objective  During the period from the 1980s to the 1990s, the cultural turn in the social sciences influenced and contributed to the transformation of the main theme of heritage conservation from history to culture, and the academic paradigm of heritage research also developed from history and architecture to anthropology and cultural geography, with the “relationship between nature and culture” becoming an important aspect of reflection on the representativeness of world heritage. Accordingly, the relationship between “nature, culture and man” under the framework of world heritage has been increasingly emphasized by the theoretical circles of heritage conservation in recent years. In the 1990s, cultural landscape exploring the “interaction between culture and nature” became a specific type of world heritage, and influenced the vision of heritage conservation research in countries all over the world, including China. In traditional Chinese culture, the natural environment with cultural imagery is originally an integrator of “nature, culture and man”, and its cultural significance of symbol, metonymy and metaphor needs to be put into a more macroscopic cultural tradition of landscape in order to get a clearer understanding thereof. Therefore, it is necessary to place traditional landscape of China under an integrated worldview that transcends the nature − culture dichotomy of Western modernity, and to re-recognize the nature − culture integration value of traditional landscape.

Methods/process  Based on the reflection of the World Heritage Committee and relevant advisory bodies on the representativeness of the World Heritage List in view of the World Heritage Convention and the Operational Guidelines for the Implementation of the World Heritage Convention, which has been carried out since the 1980s, this research extends to the broader philosophical and social context in which the above discussion has emerged. The “ontology turn” abandons the basic ontological paradigm of “nature − culture” dualism in the modernity discourse in explaining the world, and acknowledges the significance of proposing “multi-naturalism” and “indigenous ontological perspectivism” in the ontological research. In particular, in 1995, British anthropologist Tim Ingold reinterpreted Martin Heidegger’s concept of “dwelling” and formally put forward the methodological framework of the perspective of anthropological dwelling, which transcends the dichotomy between subject and object and turns to the “dwelling perspective” that integrates nature and culture. With the Dwelling Perspective, a methodological framework is formally proposed, which transcends the dichotomy between subject and object, and turns to the integration of nature and culture. The Dwelling Perspective puts the existing value cognition of landscape into the ontological vision that transcends the nature − culture dichotomy of Western modernity, and re-recognizes the fact that ancient Chinese people actually lived in landscape places of interest and achieved an aesthetic and emotional coexistence with such landscape places by integrating them into their own social network based on their physical perception.

Results/conclusion  By analyzing the discourse of modernity, it is found that the modern “nature − culture” dualism does not represent the world perception mode of all human groups. Without a paradigm that separates nature and culture, the traditional cultures of many human groups including China believe that nature, spirit, multi-species organisms and human beings are integrated as a whole, which represents a pre-modern overlapping of nature and culture that is different from the narrative discourse of modernity. Based on the cognitive horizon of the Anthropological Dwelling Perspective, we can continue to explore the contemporary significance of the nature − culture integration value of traditional landscape places of interest in China. In terms of ideological and theoretical origins, the landscape places of interest in China represent the integral cognition of the surrounding environment under the worldview of “harmony between man and nature”, which are of social significance and emotional sustenance under the concept of scenery − emotion integration. Ontologically, the historical analysis of traditional landscape culture should return to the “practical experience of people in the real world”, and the historical heritage should be “re-understood in the due context, and reflected upon in people’s life logic”.