ABSTRACT

This chapter highlights the relationships between people and land, and discusses the interplay between ethnography and geography as methods of landscape description. Landscape is a complex interplay between what is seen vertically by a beholder and the horizontal terrain as viewed from above. Through a series of ethnographic vignettes based on planned but ultimately serendipitous walks through the landscapes of Bahrain, the author presents walking as a way of increasing exposure to chance and to the vertical aspects of landscape. The ethnographic and the geographic are complementary, combining the human with the spatial, the vertical with the horizontal dimensions, which together have the potential to offer a thicker reading of landscape than either can describe by itself. Grasping both vertical and horizontal dimensions enables the landscape architect to design more successfully.