What is a "landscape"? To address this question, as this seminar does, is to think about the way the category emerged as part of European ideas about something called "nature" and its relationship to human subjectivity. Here landscape became a way of seeing as a way of knowing: in particular as a way of understanding land as property and as a resource, as well as a reflection of human emotions and a way of engaging questions of existence. In order to "provincialize" these ways of seeing/understanding – that is, to identify how they emerged within a very particular set of historical, geographical, cultural, political, and economic contexts that nonetheless came to claim universality – we will compare Western landscape painting traditions with visual forms from other traditions that might be seen as akin to landscapes. These include Indigenous art from Canada and elsewhere as well as Chinese and Islamic traditions; seminar participants are also encouraged to bring their own specific interests to the table through readings on other topics. Understanding the genealogies of "landscape" through scholarship in art history, anthropology, history, and geography will equip us for a more globally oriented and critical approach to those strands of modern and contemporary art concerned with the "environment" and our existence in the geological age recently dubbed the Anthropocene.