Cultural sustainability and notions of cultural heritage: a review with some reference to an Asian perspective

A move towards emphasising human activity - culture - in shaping landscape patterns arose in the German human geography tradition of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Recognition of the significance of Kulturlandschaft, as for example in the work of Otto Schlüter (1872-1959), is seminal to our present understanding of human values and meanings in our surrounds. The perceptive and innovative thinking and practice of Franz Boas (1858-1942), anthropologist and geographer, extended the new human geography to embrace the idea that different cultures adjusted to similar environments and taught the historicist mode of conceptualising environment. It was a philosophy that emphasises culture as context (‘surroundings’), and the importance of history: a Boasian anthropological approach referred to as historical particularism. Boas argued that it was important to understand the cultural traits of societies - their behaviours, beliefs, and symbols - and the necessity for examining them in their local context.