James Andrew Whitaker The Imaginative Foundations of the Landscape 1 Imagination Philosophical discourse has a long history of interest in the imagination. The latter has been considered in various ways as a faculty or as a process for creatively associating diverse elements and as a space containing symbolic or semiotic content. The philosophy of Immanuel Kant (2003: 60) posits the imagination as an essential cognitive faculty and describes it as “...a blind but indispensable function of the soul, without which we should have no cognition whatever, but of the working of which we are seldom even conscious” (quoted in Sneath et al. 2009: 12). Sneath et al. (2009: 11-12) describe the Kantian notion of imagination as “...the ability to bring to mind that which is not entirely present to the senses”. This implies an ability that I would define as that of being able to “manifest the inchoate” (Whitaker 2011) and to bring elements together within an order that is instantiated by the imagination. The philosopher R. G. Collingwood (1946: 231-249) shared the Kantian view of imagination and argued in The Idea of History that scholars must interpolate and draw connections between otherwise disparate and protean facts in order to construct fluid historical narratives. Collingwood (1946) used the term in a technical sense to nominate a process of filling contextual blanks and lacunae whose contents are suggested vis-á-vis other elements in an historical narrative. The approaches of Kant, Collingwood, and Sneath et al. share an emphasis on the imagination as a faculty. However, there are both facultive and holistic approaches to the imagination in the current literature (Sneath et al. 2009). I shall emphasize the facultive approach. The contemporary anthropological literature tends to treat the imagination as a holistic space (Appadurai 1996; Crapanzano 2004; noted in Sneath et al. 2009: 5-7). Sneath et al. (2009: 5) have 1 The title to this paper is in reference to The Imaginary Institution of Society by Cornelius Castoriadis (1987).