We are not arguing that pictorial or textual representations of landscape are uninteresting or unimportant to analyse (see e.g. Laviolette’s anthropological mapping of Cornish identities in terms of images (2011b: 80ff.), nor contesting that they may constitute very powerful ways through which people know and experience physical landscapes, so much so that texts or imagery begin to constitute and structure encounters and experience of material landscapes. Quite the contrary, it is just that they have tended to dominate much discussion. Indeed, they have been taken by some as defining what landscapes actually are and what the object of a landscape study actually is. We offer a thoroughly materialist approach here as an antidote and counterpoint.

We make the simple and somewhat blindingly obvious comment that walking is not a text, cut-ting down a gorse bush is not a text, training to be a soldier is not a text, a body is not a text, hills and rivers and trees are not texts. A materialist approach to landscape is thus a return to the real, and we regard it as a way to reinvigorate and redirect the study of landscape. The move is from representation to the materially grounded messiness of everyday life and the minutiae of material practices that constitute it.

Such an emphasis on being there and observing and interacting with others stresses performativity: the manner in which our identities and those of others are constituted in and through action, and the manner in which these identities come into being through performances of identity (Butler1990).

Landscape is thus an intertwining of the flesh of the body and the flesh of the world, to use Merleau-Ponty’s metaphor (Merleau-Ponty 1968: 142). Landscape is undoubtedly a very complex material thing to attempt to understand or make sense of since it is, to use Latour’s (1993) term, a quasi-object, something constructed and made; a cultural product, but having an independent existence with its own rhythms and purposes. We are touched by this fleshly material world of landscape and in turn touch it. In the process we transform ourselves.

Bodies and landscapes thus produce each other in mutual relation, in the process of motility and inhabitation. In the most basic sense the agency of landscape is embod-ied because it acts on us through the mediation of our bodies. The think-ing, subjective mind emerges in relation to the landscape and ends in its perception. Thus the body may be both subject and object, sensing and sensed within a landscape setting. It may be experienced from the ‘inside’, through kinaesthetic sensations conveying information about posture, position and movement, or from the ‘outside’ as a body among others intersubjectively constituted through a mutual relation with other persons in culture.

Lakoff and Johnson (1990,1999) explore the manner in which our everyday cognitive capacities are rooted in relation to our bodily being and emotional capacities in contemporary western culture: the manner in which we perceive things to be near or far, to the left or right of us, behind or in front of us, below or above us, forms the basis for our every-day, ordinary taken-for-granted and pre-reflective metaphors by means of which we represent the real in language: the foot or brow of the hill, the face of the clock, the legs of the table and so on. Happy is up, sad is down, etc. etc. (1999: 49ff.). Metaphors are an ever-present part of our language and the way in which we represent the world. They form par-ticular understandings of the landscapes we inhabit and the manner in which they are empowered or naturalized (Tilley 1999, 2004).

Things extend our sensorimotor capacities out from the body and into the setting of the world. In the process perception and under-standing may be materially extended. In this case the agency of things consists in their ability to shape and mediate human actions.

So duration and the ‘depth’ of the landscape and what constitutes the horizon become part of the pre-objective constitution of bodily perception. Past experiences feed into the present, anticipating the future. Our temporal experience ‘colours’ the manner in which we understand the present from the lived perspective of the body. This is always limited, ambiguous, shifting and changing; some aspects of landscape become foregrounded at one temporal moment and fall into the background at another. Embodied perception shifts and changes, is always in flux and is related to our interactions with sentient others, human or non-human. Our perceptual senses engage with our embodied being all at once in synaesthetic relation. We do not see the world and then hear it or smell it or touch it. All our perceptual senses intermingle in our embodied experience and all at once, a position currently being valuably explored in the emerging sub-discipline of sensory anthropology.

Meinig (1979) invites us to imagine a landscape thus:a group of different people go to the top of a hill and look down and across the panorama of landscape below. Each is invited to describe the landscape before them:what do they see? Meinig lists ten versions of the same scene:the landscape may be regarded in various ways as nature, habitat, artefact, system, a problem, as a source of wealth, as ideology, history and so on. Ten versions of the same thing is obviously an arbitrary number:there could be many more or less. The general point though is that political, economic, moral and aesthetic interests and values colour what people see and may inevitably lead to radically different attitudes.

Landscapes are thus inevitably contested. They are valued precisely because they are valuable, part of people’s lives. They reflect the com-plexity of their lives. They are historically contingent and their mutabil-ity stems from the various ways in which people understand them and engage with the material world. So landscapes are untidy and messy, tensioned, always in the making (Bender 1993, 1998, 2006; Bender and Winer 2001).