Introduction

The primary aim of this chapter is to establish a firm theoretical foundation for subsequent chapters in which I will present and analyze the various ways that residents experience Boquete during the present era of residential tourist growth and development. These experiences are fundamentally channeled through two spatial mediums: landscape and place. As such, in this chapter I engage a collection of interdisciplinary literature, albeit primarily geographical in focus, in order to establish precise and thoroughly differentiated theoretical interpretations for the concepts of landscape and place.

First, I explore landscape as a complex idea with layers of material, cultural, perceptual and representational meaning. Owing to this multilayered significance, landscape manifests itself in a variety of forms, both tangible and intangible. While the idea of landscape over time has become explicitly dissociated from much of its original meaning, the concept, nevertheless, continues to carry implicit ideological significance. As such, I explore landscape as a historical creation ideologically associated with certain ideas regarding power, perspective, property and nature. Ultimately, this section builds toward an interpretation of landscape as an alienated and ideologically informed ‘way of seeing’ the surrounding world.

In oppositional terms to landscape as an alienated, visual experience, place is constituted as an intimate, multisensory experience. In particular, the experience of place is explored as shared meaning at the collective level of community and in the context of a multidimensional and all-enveloping experience of complete fusion between subject and object. From this interpretation of place, the analysis then widens in scope to explore the conditions of placeness and placelessness, so as to situate a particular notion of place, as set forth above, among a wider range of place experiences.

Landscape

…as an idea

‘Landscape is at once patently obvious and terrifically mystified’ writes Don Mitchell. ‘The more the word landscape is used, the greater its ambiguity’ (1996: 2).