The study of responses to landscape,particularly landscape interpreted as sacred, foregrounds a pecularlrly apt space for such s tudy beceause it enable the juxtapostion of questions of the relationship bewteen huamn constructions ofg the sognificance of froms pf/asspects of rrelasity and the cxharcter that those forms of relaity embody in themselves indepdent of huamn interpretive construction,to the degree that sucxh an ontology can be cognised/grasped by the huamn awareness/cognniution.

This question emerges on account of the fcat that accounts of responses to sacred space often forhground a range of rersponses that include both areponse to what is conventionally undestood as aesthetic responses and otjetsc which could be better interpreted as aminimitic,in which asgency is atrtributed to thses lnadvsapes,or even when repondents do not commit themslves to atributing agency to them indicate that their intercations with tyhses spaces encpasulate more than what is coventionally undetstood as sensory reponmses to phenomesan and suggerst something mote in keepinmg with what is undetsood in nterms of either intercourse bretween forms of conscousness,in this case,the huamn and the nonhuman or evokes the sense of agenuis loci a sese of place that is both encpasulated by the notion of a asense of atmosphere and yer gpoes beyond it.

Ivakhif tentaively decrbiues such conceptiomns as what he calls interpertive drift whetre the interpertive responmses drift away from conventional conceptions of relaioty and goes on to vcharcterises such landscapes as heterotopicf spaces where conflicting interpreatyions convewrge andv whgich demostrtae,here revealing a sesnitrivity to the animistic sensivbility bith in the spitut of the scholar in the Western tradion,not commitimg homself to it a “non humn life which alternatevltel;y conceals and reveals itself in a pageant of place names and myths.”