Landscape origins in Augustin Berque: landscaping thought and landscape thinking

Abstract

The geographer Augustin Berque dedicated most of his work in the study of landscape, having phenomenology as one of his bases of thought. For him, the landscape is one of the many ways of expression of the relationship between man and environment, and that's why he dedicated himself in the search of deep sense of landscape, searching its origin in the humankind. In that path, Berque found some registers of the term landscape much earlier than the European Renaissance, usually pointed as the birth of the concept. Although this is the origin of the term in the West, in the IV century China, about a thousand years before the western civilization, there are records of both the term landscape, and a reflection on it. In this context of emergence, or birth, Berque considers that the deep sense of the landscape is revealed from its origins in China. He also proposes the notions of landscaping thought and landscape thinking.