The nature-culture divide, widely recognized as a legacy of the European Enlightenment, is re-emerging with a new sense of urgency today. The divide is now deeply intertwined with the social versus biological and design versus ecological sustainability debates, and has been linked to the ‘Anthropocene’, a new concept marking the beginning of significant human impact on the earth’s geology and ecosystems. Underlying all this lies the question concerning human desire to control the world, to achieve mastery over nature, which has resulted in an uncertain future outlook for humanity in the unstable world it has created. ► Enlightened, early modern thinkers viewed human civilizational progress as a struggle against nature; they saw the development of modern science and education as effective methods for taming the forces of nature and refining coarse human behaviours. Seen with the eye of scientific objectivity, nature was gradually reduced to numbers, weights, and measures, while humans were likened to nature: they are naturally born with wild characters and savage manners that are in need of education to cultivate civilised social and intellectual skills. This capacity of cultural refinements was seen as a key characteristic distinguishing humans from animals. Since then, nature has been sharply distinguished from culture, while human interventions have tended to be sought against nature. ► Scholars in various fields of anthropology, sociology, philosophy, environmental studies, and intellectual/ landscape history have been reassessing the nature-culture dichotomy as an issue of great concern for humanity’s future. They drew attention to the effect of the new universal concepts, such as ‘environment’, ‘atmosphere’, and ‘context’, and shed light on the impact of the scientific re-conceptualisation of natural elements, such as air, light, tree, wind, water. In doing so they have traced the significant changes to our understanding of how nature works. Through this reassessment, the idea of mute and impersonal nature, seen as a stage for objects and phenomena governed by autonomous law, against the setup of which human activities are presented is shown to be the outcome of modern scientific imagination. ► This workshop focuses on rethinking the human-nature relationship through, first, critical examination of the Enlightenment legacy, and, second, new explorations of non-Western civilizational positions, in order to chart new trajectories for landscape history. Critical reflections on the European tradition projected against contrasting civilizational positions on human-nature bond have the potential of introducing comparative perspectives that enable a better understanding of the intellectual shifts that are often easily forgotten in today’s rapidly transforming world.◄

Nature and Culture in Early Modernity New Approaches to Landscape History

Guest Speaker

Professor Mohammad Gharipour School of Architecture and Planning, Morgan State University, Baltimore, USA Director & Founding Editor, International Journal of Islamic Architecture (IJIA)

Fri 4 October 2019

C A M E A

Centre for Asian and Middle Easter Architecture International Workshop

8:30-9:00 Arriving and Morning Coffee/Tea - Santos Lecture Theatre, Adelaide University 9:00-9:10 Opening and welcome – Samer Akkach

9:10-10-10 Guest Lecture – Mohammad Gharipour

Public Health and Early Modern Urban Landscapes of the Islamic World

SESSION 1 South-East Asia 10:10-10:30 From Gardens of Delight to Cultivating the Mind: Landscaping knowledge in pre- and early

modern Malay Literatures – Virginia Hooker 10:30-10:50 The Sacred Tree: Arboreal Imagery as Landscape in Javanese Art – James Bennett 10:50-11:10 Environmental Disaster or Religious Orthodoxy? The Question of Changing Style in Lombok’s

Textile Traditions – Muchammadun 11:10-11:40 Morning Coffee/Tea SESSION 2 Europe & Beyond 11:40-12:00 Cultivating Nature(s) – John Powell 12:00-12:20 Cruel Natures: 18th-century Representations of Violence and Punishment in Ovid’s

Metamorphoses – Melanie Cooper 12:20-12:40 Nature, Life, and Order: Architecture and the Sacred Art of Healing the World – Samir Mahmoud 12:40-2:00 Lunch SESSION 3 India, Persia, and China 2:00-2:20 The Space of Landscape in the Humanistic Imagination – Daydreaming, Territoriality and

Empires in the Syncretic Timurid-Mughal Cultural World – Manu P. Sobti 2:20-2:40 Legal Implications of Nature-Culture Positions in Mughal Hunting Contexts – Shaha Parpia 2:40-3:00 The Lost Gardens of Eden: A Reading of Two Persian Texts on Early Safavid Gardens – Zahra

Ranjbari 3:00-3:20 ‘Shang Shan Ruo Shui’: Water in Qing Dynasty Imperial Garden Design – Yumeng Zhao 3:20-3:50 Afternoon Coffee/Tea 3:50-4:50 Group discussion and conclusion 6:00-8:00 Dinner

C A M E A

Centre for Asian and Middle Easter Architecture

International Workshop PROGRAM

Abstracts and Contributors

Guest Speaker

Mohammad Gharipour Public Health and Early Modern Urban Landscapes of the Islamic World Following major reforms in political, economic, and even cultural institutions across the Islamic world, urbanism went through significant changes in the 16th century. Contemporaneous with these shifts, city planning and design were leveraged to improve public health in cities through a host of new public resources and construction projects, including urban infrastructure, medical facilities, urban landscapes, and places for gathering and entertainment. The landscape design was conceived of and employed as an instrument in complex and profound ways to promote health in the development of urban infrastructure, institutions, and spaces in the Islamic empires of Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals in the 16th – 18th centuries. This lecture will employ public health lens to view the function, use, and social significance of urban landscapes and to explain how they contributed to the creation of the notion of healthy and productive cities in early modern Islamic world.

Mohammad Gharipour is Professor of Architecture at the School of Architecture and Planning and Director of the Graduate Program at Morgan State University in Baltimore, USA. He has received major awards from the Society of Architectural Historians, National Endowment in Humanities, Foundation for Landscape Studies, Council of Educators of Educators of Landscape Architecture, American Institute of Architects, and Fulbright. Gharipour has published ten books including Persian Gardens and Pavilions (I.B. Tauris, 2013) and Gardens Renaissance and the Islamic Empires (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017). He is also the director and founding editor of the International Journal of Islamic Architecture.

Contributors

James Bennett The Sacred Tree: Arboreal Imagery as landscape in Javanese Art The ‘tree of life’ is a term used to describe an arboreal motif that is a widespread in the visual arts of Java, and its cultural diaspora in the archipelago, during the Islamic classic period dated 16th – early 19th century. The ascendancy of Islam in the 16th century redefined many aspects of Javanese society and coincided with increased cultural contacts between Java and the neighbouring islands. These factors invigorated the birth of a new aesthetic, signified by the arboreal motif, which may be termed the Javanese style and one that subsequently influenced the art of neighbouring islands. The origin of the arboreal motif is often linked to ancient indigenous traditions associating spiritual power with trees and the depiction of the magical wish-fulfilling tree in the Hindu-Buddhist period (8th-15th century). This interpretation reflects a common view that Javanese art of the Islamic period developed from the aesthetic heritage of the preceding era. It was Dutch scholars who first introduced the expression ‘tree of life’, later adopted by Indonesian scholars, when describing the motif although there appears no local precedent for the phrase. An examination of the sacred tree motif reveals more nuanced meanings than implied in the term ‘tree of life’ with its archetypal associations. The flamboyant, often florid, representations of arboreal imagery in the Islamic era suggest tree motifs subsequently came to encapsulate various aspects of landscape, both real and imagined. Notably, trees signified those sacred sites in the terrain where ancestral or chthonic forces manifested. Rather than representing the ‘tree of life’, the Javanese sacred tree motif is a multivalent symbol of nature encompassing both indigenous perceptions of the environment and the new cosmology of Islam.

James Bennett is Curator of Asian Art at the Art Gallery of South Australia. His major exhibitions and catalogue publications include Crescent Moon: Islamic Art and Civilisation of Southeast Asia (2005), Golden Journey: Japanese Art from Australian Collections (2009), Beneath the Winds: Masterpieces of Southeast Asian Art (2011), Realms of Wonder: Jain, Hindu and Islamic Art of India (2013), and Treasure Ships: Art in the Age of Spices (2014). He is currently undertaking doctoral research at the University of Adelaide examining the definitive elements appearing in the development of an Islamic aesthetic in Java, with specific reference to the art of the pesisir period dating from the 16th to the 18th century.

Melanie Cooper Cruel Natures: Eighteenth-Century Representations of Violence and Punishment in Ovid’s Metamorphoses The remote landscapes of Ovid’s Metamorphoses provide the setting for a range of violent transformations as acts of cruel retribution often interpreted as warranted and just. This paper will explore how some of these mythical themes

and their representations in the visual culture of the eighteenth century are also reflective of early modern European ideals of progress, cultural achievement and expansion.

Melanie Cooper is a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Adelaide where she graduated with her PhD in Art History in 2016. As an interdisciplinary art historian, her research interests include representations of gender, sexuality, classical mythology and early modern evolution in eighteenth-century visual art and culture. Melanie currently serves as the State Representative for South Australia on the Executive Committee of the AAANZ and is an active member of the Adelaide art community as a studio member based at Floating Goose Studios. She also lectures in Art History at the University of Adelaide and has published writings on contemporary art practice in addition to her academic research.

Virginia Matheson Hooker From Gardens of Delight to Cultivating the Mind: Landscaping Knowledge in Pre- and Early Modern Malay Literatures By the early 16th century, Islam and the literatures of the Islamicate world had been carried by the trade winds to the port-cities on either side of the Melaka Straits. Quranic descriptions of the garden paradise of eternal bliss and Persian descriptions of earthly pleasure-gardens inspired local writers to create their own metaphorical gardens whose beauty overwhelmed the senses. These Malay gardens of words became set features in romantic tales of gentle didacticism and lived on until the 20th century. In the early 17th century, the Malay royal courts developed another aspect of Persian gardens when they created Malay versions of Persian mirror-books (for the education of rulers), that carried the word ‘Bustan’ (garden) in their titles. Thus ‘gardens’ became associated not only with pleasure but also with education and guidance. In the mid-19th century, Raja Ali Haji (c.1809 -1873), a highly regarded Malay religious scholar and historian, who had travelled to the Middle East and Batavia, observed the negative effects of European colonialism on the traditional Malay-Islamic system of government. But he also observed the bureaucratic efficiency of the Dutch and their structured system of schooling for children and training procedures for colonial officials. In the 1840s he composed his own work, The Garden of Writers: For Youths Who Wish to be Educated. This and other works he wrote to entice Malays to learn, science and geography as well as religion and ethics, went into multiple printings in his region. The paper shows how Raja Ali surveyed the terrain of Islamic scholarship, Persio-Malay didactic classical texts, as well as the European systematic and structured style of presenting information, and selected from it the elements he needed to landscape new gardens of knowledge that would encourage young Malays to study and learn.

Virginia Matheson Hooker FAHA is Emeritus Professor at the Australian National University and a fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. She was formerly professor of Indonesian and Malay and is now a fellow in the Department of Political and Social Change, College of Asia and the Pacific. Her current research concerns Islam-themed art in Southeast Asia. Among her publications are ‘Reflections of the Soul’ (Inside Indonesia 112: Apr-Jun 2013); ‘Mindful of Allah: Islam and the Visual Arts in Indonesia and Malaysia’ (Artlink, 33(1) March 2013); ‘When Laws Are Not Enough: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Intra-Religious Pluralism in Contemporary Indonesia’ in Gary Bell (ed.) Pluralism, Transnationalism and Culture in Asian Law, ISEAS: Singapore, 2017: 151-17; and ‘“By the Pen!”: Spreading ʿilm in Indonesia through Quranic Calligraphy’, in Samer Akkach (ed.) ʿIlm: Science, Religion and Art in Islam, University of Adelaide Press: Adelaide, 2019: 81-97.

Samir Mahmoud Nature, Life, and Order: Architecture and the Sacred Art of Healing the World When we speak of nature we speak of ‘life’ and ‘vitalism’ yet rarely do we hear architects and designers speak of life, though they have been invoking nature for centuries. As I will demonstrate in this paper, ‘life’ is absolutely necessary for rendering a building or space beautiful and for restoring a more holistic approach to the appreciation of our embeddedness in a wider cosmic matrix. The presentation will draw on non-western intellectual traditions to present alternative ways of considering the relation between the nature-culture divide with architecture as an example. The presentation will also revisit the notion of ‘life’ as articulated in certain traditions of Islamic cosmology. The presentation will draw heavily on the works of Ibn ‘Arabi, John Ruskin, and Christopher Alexander and will critically engage with contemporary landscape theory.

Samir Mahmoud, PhD, is a graduate of the University of Cambridge (2012) in philosophical aesthetics. He is currently Assistant Professor of Architectural History & Theory at the Lebanese American University (LAU). Between 2013-2016 he was Visiting Assistant Professor of Architecture at the American University of Beirut (AUB). He was Postdoctoral Fellow at the Khalili Centre for Research in Art & Material Culture, University of Oxford (2012-2013) and Agha Khan Postdoctoral Fellow at MIT (2012). Samir's interests vary widely and include, art & architecture (Islamic and Western), philosophy (Islamic, Neoplatonism, and Continental), Islamic studies, urban & landscape design, and psychology (particularly the dialogue between Islamic and Western ‘therapeutics of the soul’).

Muchammadun Environmental disaster or religious orthodoxy? The question of changing style in Lombok’s textile traditions Indonesia, located on the Pacific ‘rim of fire’, is the most tectonically active region on the planet and volcanic eruptions have dramatically affected the course of cultural history in the archipelago over the centuries. The eruption of Mount Tambora on the island of Sumbawa in 1815 was the largest eruption in the world in the modern era - ten times stronger than the famous Krakatau explosion that occurred almost seventy years later. Tambora altered global climates so dramatically that 1815 became known in Europe as the ‘year without summer’. The ash fallout is estimated to have killed 44,000 people on the neighbouring island of Lombok and forced up 100,000 people to flee to Java. This disaster certainly devastated the local Sasak community traditions, including the culturally significant arts of textile making. Today Lombok’s textiles, such as ritual usap, are notable for the absence of figurative imagery. Contemporary Sasak observers attribute this absence to the influence of Islamic religious orthodoxy prompting the substitution of simple geometric patterns for motifs depicting humans and animals. The paper presents historical and archaeological evidence that suggests instead it was the Tambora eruption that caused the disappearance of figurative motifs in textiles. The eruption’s causalities, likely included a generation of Sasak weavers who customarily transmitted the technically complex textile patterns as a tacit knowledge from mother to daughter. The impact of Islamic orthodoxy likely played only a subsequent secondary role in the stylistic movement away from figurative art at a time when many of those older patterns had already been lost as a result of the Tambora cataclysm.

Muchammadun is Assistant Professor in Community Development Studies at State Islamic University of Mataram in Indonesia. He received his postgraduate degrees from VHL of Wageningen University and Research Centre, Netherland, The Australian National University, and, most recently, the State Islamic University of Yogyakarta. He held scholarships from Nuffic NESO, ANU, and Beasiswa Studi, the Republic of Indonesia. He specializes in Islamic community education, and his research interests are in community resilience and culture, documentation of tacit knowledge, and education and social transformation. He has been managing university- and NGO-based community work in West Nusa Tenggara, Indonesia, and his work will appear in a forthcoming publication on Integration and Interconnection Paradigm in the Field of Social Work Education and Practice.

Shaha Parpia Legal Implications of Nature-Culture Positions in Mughal Hunting Contexts The sophisticated nature of the Mughal hunt, its multifarious functions, the elaborate hunting etiquette, and the specially created hunting landscape were legitimising factors of good governance, sovereignty and linked them to their successful Timurid forebears. However, the imperial hunters were also aware that the rationale for their discerning hunting culture had to be grounded in Islamic scriptural foundations in order for it to be justified and legal. The Qur’ān and Hadith emphasise the spiritual nature of animals as an essential component of God’s creation and therefore proscribe acts of violence against them except under exceptional circumstances such as in the context of food. Hence by its very nature, the imperial hunt can hardly be considered legitimate. However, the Mughals, by drawing on the writings of medieval scholars like the 11th century Hanafi jurist Shams al-Dīn al-Sarakhsī, were able to manipulate anthropocentric thought such as the justification of killing for the greater good of humankind with the more important theocentric qualities that stress that societies were obliged to have respect and engagement with non-human animals. These views are at the core of hunting manuals called shikarnamas written by Mughal and later provincial courtiers such as Husain Husaini Sadr-i Jahan al-Taishi. They also drew on the belief that certain animals which were an intrinsic component of their hunting repertoire, such as the cheetah and elephant, possessed many qualities that were worthy of emulation by humankind. Such beliefs highlight the complexities of the human-animal-environment nexus in Mughal hunting contexts which had far reaching legal implications.

Shaha Parpia completed her PhD at the Centre for Asian and Middle Eastern Studies (CAMEA), the University of Adelaide. Her recent publications include ‘Mughal hunting grounds: landscape manipulation and “garden” association’ (2016), ‘Reordering nature: power politics in the Mughal shikargah’ (2018), ‘Hunting ground, agricultural land and the forest: sustainable interdependency in Mughal India 1526-1707’ (2018), and ‘The imperial Mughal hunt: a pursuit of knowledge (2019).

John Powell Cultivating Nature(s) Cultures use words to describe concepts. When concepts change, either new words appear or the meanings of existing ones are modified. In the West, the meaning of the word “nature” underwent significant transformations during the 18th and 19th centuries, particularly as that word was applied to the practice of garden making. The different meanings

of “nature” resulted in three radically different styles of gardens. At the start of this period, pleasure gardens continued the centuries’ old practice of mirroring the nature of the universe, and humans’ and deities’ roles in it. The plants, trees, and water comprising (biological) nature were these gardens’ materials: exhibiting them was neither the gardens’ raison d’être nor primary purpose. This style was swept away, impetuously in England, and replaced by the so-called English landscape style, which purported to mirror (biological) nature, but which did successfully mirror the nature of contemporary social realities. Then, not long thereafter, the garden became solely an expression of (biological) nature. Its focus was no longer the nature of the world but (merely) the world of nature.

John Powell is a Visiting Research Fellow in the School of Architecture and the Built Environment at the University of Adelaide, where he completed his PhD in 2017. His interests include gardens and landscape, music, and the philosophy of art. As a pianist, John is an active participant in the musical life of his community in fields as diverse as musical theatre, chamber music, lieder, and solo performance. He is currently researching the musical representation of gardens in 19th- and 20th-century French and Spanish piano and orchestral music and looks forward to performing some of the key works identified in this research. He lives in New Plymouth, New Zealand.

Zahra Ranjbari Botanic and Poetic Landscapes: A Reading of Two Persian Texts on Early Safavid Gardens Existing scholarship on Persian gardens reveals a pattern of common interest in spatial layout, formal quality, and symbolic meaning. Gardens are often depicted as symmetrically laid out enclosures, as introverted places for hedonistic purposes, as passive spaces for contemplation, and symbolically charged, earthly embodiments of Qur’anic paradise. Such symbolism presents Persian gardens as salubrious oases intended purely for repose and delight. This discourse has oversimplified the history, meaning and function of Persian gardens, which were dynamic venues serving multiple and complex purposes. Against this background, the study attempts to shed new light on Persian gardens and landscapes through a fresh reading of two key Persian texts that provide historically grounded perspectives on the gardens’ botanical functions and poetical meanings. The first text, a late 15th century botanical manual, is offering extensive material on the science of gardening as well as rare agricultural instructions regarding the laying out and planting of formal gardens, taking into account both garden aesthetics and the science of horticulture. The second text is a compilation of five poems composed in 1557 by Shah Tahmāsp’s court poet and historian, Navīdī Shīrāzī, to celebrate the completion of the new imperial garden city of Qazvin. The new reading of these texts shows how Persian gardens served multiple functions ranging from the most practical to the most poetic, how formal aesthetics and paradise symbolism played only marginal roles in their design and creation, and how different considerations contributed to the creation of desirable garden environments.

Zahra Ranjbari completed her PhD at the Centre for Asian and Middle Eastern Architecture (CAMEA), the University of Adelaide. She is a member of the Centre for Asian and Middle Eastern Architecture (CAMEA), undertaking research on early sixteenth-century Persian gardens and landscapes. Her PhD project was titled Botanic and Poetic Landscapes: A Reading of two Persian Sources on Early Safavid Gardens.

Manu P. Sobti The Space of Landscape in the Humanistic Imagination – Daydreaming, Territoriality and Empires in the Syncretic Timurid-Mughal Cultural World Within the purview of landscape narratives prevalent in the turbulent medieval Islamic world, this presentation offers a deep reading of Zahiruddin Muhammad Babur’s epic autobiography – the Baburnama – composed between 1526-29. In an epoch of emerging cartographies, Babur’s text self-consciously storyboarded quotidian and memorable choreographies within a tapestry of real and imaginary landscapes, while it remained historically reflective and poignant. The unprecedented account ‘constructed’ a cartographic vision far beyond what Babur could have legitimately controlled as he fled the unruly Shaybanids in 1501 CE - first towards Kabul, and subsequently Northern India. In effect, the conditions of Babur’s penury and exile served as temporal catalysts for how the future emperor of India ‘humanistically’ imagined the landscape of a syncretic Timurid-Mughal cultural world. Within contrasting attributions of the text as a ‘legitimizing document’, as a ‘mirrors-for-princes genre’, or alternatively a ‘meditation on the nature of destiny’, this discussion reconstructs if the recurrent ‘humanistic’ genre was indeed Babur’s desperate reach beyond the ‘geographically mapped’, and towards a ‘cultural elixir’ of kingly dreams.

Manu P. Sobti is Director International Engagement/Senior Lecturer at the School of Architecture-University of Queensland. His work on landscape mobilities and mappings of early-medieval urbanities and architecture along the Eurasian Silk Road and the Indian Subcontinent is well-recognised, especially his filmic project on Central Asia’s Amu Darya River titled Medieval Riverlogues. He has authored Chandigarh Re-think (ORO Publishers, published 2017) and has two books under contract: Space and Collective Identity in South Asia: Migration, Architecture and Urban Development (Bloomsbury Press,

forthcoming 2020); and Riverine Landscapes, Urbanity and Conflict: Narratives from East and West (Routledge-Taylor & Francis, forthcoming 2019).

Yumeng Zhao ‘Shang Shan Ruo Shui’: Water in Ming and Qing Landscape Design The essay will discuss the difference in the understanding of water between the Western Enlightenment and Ancient China, through the study of water-related landscape designs and aesthetic values in their respective philosophies. Water has always been perceived by the Chinese as a key philosophical element of nature for its fluidity and unusual change of states. Chinese traditional art and literature portrayed water with the virtues of benevolence, honesty, humility, and mystery. The presentation will discuss Ming and Qing Dynasty in 18th-19th-c. China, focusing on the development of water-system and features in Imperial gardens of Beijing, as well as the water aesthetic in the emerging private gardens of the aristocrats. These will be compared with the water elements in the European garden designs of the era. Through the comparisons of the design characteristics and techniques, it is expected to draw the difference in the two cultures’ approaches to landscape-making as reflected in the different perceptions of the human existence and cultural relationship with the natural environment.

Yumeng Zhao is currently completing her Masters of Architecture at the University of Adelaide, Australia. With a cross-cultural background, she has developed an interest in the East Asian philosophies and how they shaped the difference in cultural behavior and environment.