Cultural Turn in Landscape Studies and the Anthropology of Landscape

“Landscape” originated from the study of the surface morphology. As the basic vision in the research of geography, it has experienced the transformation of research themes such as “regional characteristics”, “man-land relationship” and “cultural history”. Since the 1970s, there has emerged a “cultural turn”. The cultural cognition of landscape from the perspective of existentialism needs to analyze its local emotions and meaning dimensions with the Verstehen Method, and obtain “perceptual knowledge” from the “other’s perspective” as a new research paradigm. Almost at the same time, the “spatial turn” in the field of cultural anthropology echoed the new vision and new methodological requirements of landscape research, thus giving birth to the research field of the anthropology of landscape in the 1990s. Based on the above theoretical research context, this research further clarifies the nature of the cultural phenomenon of “landscape” from the perspective of phenomenology. From the research purport and paradigm needs of landscape “perception cognition”, it explains the research category of the anthropology of landscape as an interdisciplinary research field, and its potential application in the landscape research practice in the future.