park’s visitors with what the pioneering anthropologist of performance Edward Schieffelin once identified as “cultural scenarios” (2005 [1976]: 3). They constitute culturally salient patterns of activity in which visitors may come to terms not only with who they have been meant to be, symbolically speaking, but also with who they, in point of undeniable fact, actually are—with the “stuff” of which they are made, as living organisms and as forms of human life.3 Perhaps most significantly, however, these performances enable visitors to encounter who (and with whom), they may be becoming as well, as far as their futures, both more and less vivid, are concerned. In this latter regard, Yosemite also serves as a stage—in both the spatial and the temporal sense of the term—for performance processes that, in their emergent, transformative character, bear a vague family resemblance to those that anthropologist James Peacock, in his landmark study of the ludruk “rites of modernization” of mid-twentieth-century Surabaya, Java, observed and documented as well (1968). They also relate even more closely, however, to the incipient “events-in-the-making” created initially in 2006 for the Technologies of Lived Abstraction Series at the University of Montreal, Canada, and collaboratively “folded into” theoretical writing by Erin Manning (2009: 1–3).
Figure 0.1. Visitor Anna Reck choreographing a “small fact” of visitor experience inside a living oak tree in Yosemite Valley, 4 July 2005. Photo by Erich Reck.
I have termed the particular type of performance I studied in Yosemite National Park “landscape performance.” It is admittedly an awkward phrase. However, it is so in part because it is designed to forge a new kind of connection between ideas that are normally kept apart. So, it vexes. On the one hand, the phrase can be understood as similar in meaning to “landscape painting” or “landscape architecture.” Landscape performance, in this sense, references kinds of performance that may take landscape as their primary subject matter. This sense of the phrase is relatively straightforward. On the other hand, however, the phrase is also meant to be understood in the way that phrases such as “musical performance” or “theatrical performance” or “dance performance” are. In this sense, landscape performance identifies landscape itself as something that is a kind of performance, something that is itself capable of performing. This is the definition that jars the most—unless it is taken as a relatively poetic expression (“performance” being read figuratively), or unless it is interpreted as identifying landscape as a discursive formation that determines the experiences of the human subjects who may be located and defined in relation to it—perhaps along the lines articulated by critical theorists such as Judith Butler or Michel Foucault. Neither of these interpretations, however, is my own. I seek to take the phrase as non-metaphorically as possible, and I do not define landscapes in general merely as human-made discursive formations. It is one main effort of this study, in fact, to demonstrate that such critical theoretical definitions are inadequate to the task of understanding exactly the kinds of performances that are here most at issue. Discursive definitions are not wrong, as far as they go, but they do not tell the whole story of landscape performance, either what it is or how it can come to mean all that it generally does, especially to visitors in Yosemite National Park.
When both senses of the phrase are taken together, “landscape performance” begins to function in a way that is something like the duck-rabbit image made famous by Ludwig Wittgenstein (1953). That is, it can be understood to exhibit the character of a “multi-stable object” in the terms of phenomenological discourse (Downey 2004). It becomes a symbol that sustains simultaneously at least two equally valid understandings, the recognition of which depends on the particular perceptions and purposes of its various interpreters.4
I would characterize landscapes in general—and Yosemite National Park in particular—as colossal multi-stable objects in their own right. From some points of view, in relation to some kinds of experience, and for some purposes, they may be recognized as discursive formations—as essentially representational, societally constructed, “textual” objects or hermeneutic palimpsests.5 From other perspectives and for other purposes, they may be understood and experienced as geological formations, as nonhuman material realities. From still others, they may be perceived and lived as divinely inspired creations of pure light and energy, perhaps enlightening, perhaps maddening.6 The list could be extended indefinitely. A landscape will invariably come across as many things to many people, sustaining innumerable perspectives, experiences, and lines of thought simultaneously and through time.
This multi-stable definition of the symbol “landscape performance” is not altogether unlike those more typically employed in ethnographic studies of landscape, although it is substantially different from them as well. Ethnographic conceptualizations of landscape tend to identify it either as the (at least partly) natural environmental context of a human cultural group or as a symbolic construct created through culturally specific practices (Bender and Winer 2001; Feld and Basso 1996; Low and Lawrence-Zuniga 2003). In its recognition of the symbol’s inherent multiplicity of interrelated meanings, the definition of landscape performance here employed is similar to the “processual” definitions of landscape developed by Eric Hirsch (1995) and David Crouch and Charlotta Malm (2003). However, in its recognition of the virtually innumerable variations of meaning the symbol can represent, it also resonates strongly with David Crouch’s later definition of landscape as a creative and emergent spatial “pregnancy of possibility” (2010: 1) as well as with Mark Dorrian and Gillian Rose’s definition of landscape as a “zone of transaction between multiple interests” that “needs to be understood in terms of what it does” (2003: 16). In this latter, doing-oriented respect, the symbol also bears a limited resemblance to Tim Ingold’s definition of landscape as the qualitative, heterogeneous, temporal and embodied, moving form of a “taskscape” (2000: 190–200). It recognizes, as does Ingold’s conceptualization, the basic relation between purposive habits of interaction (“dwelling” in Ingold’s terms) and the variability of a given landscape’s definition. However, the closest definitional parallel is evident, perhaps, with respect to Erin Manning’s “metastable” conceptualization of the plastic, virtual-real, “relationscape,” a topological milieu rhythmically unfolding through its “living coordinates”—durations that embody the convergence of movements of thought still in the process of taking form (2009: 5–11, 159, 181, 183, 197, 228).
Despite the limited correspondences to all of these definitions, the variability and inclusiveness of the multi-stable definition adopted here is greater than any of these alternatives allow. It argues that no single definition individually, and no human definitions collectively, can represent all that “landscape” or “landscape performance,” understood pragmatically, can come to mean, despite the probability that any definition is likely to be valid in some limited respect and optimal for certain purposes.7 This said, landscapes and their performances are not all things to all people. They are not everything and therefore nothing in terms of their definitional character and meaningfulness. Yosemite National Park, as this book documents, is a spectacularly elaborate case in point of a landscape that exhibits and performs the character of a highly distinctive multi-stable object. While its variability of perception is rivaled only by the intensity with which beliefs about its true character tend to become fixed, regardless, all of its various visitors, if they were inclined to agree about anything, would probably agree that there is no landscape in the world remotely like it. Its distinctive features—its three-thousand-foot granite cliffs, domes, and spires; its enormous waterfalls, towering pines, and massive black oak trees; its officially “wild and scenic” Merced River—all of these elements of the landscape are instantly recognizable and unmistakable to those who have spent any significant time among them. As Rebecca Solnit,
