The Anthropology Of Landscape: Perspectives on Place and Space (Oxford Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology)

Landscape has long had a submerged presence within anthropology, both as a framing device which informs the way the anthropologist brings his or her study into 'view', and as the meaning imputed by local people to their cultural and physical surroundings. A principal aim of this volume follows from these interconnected ways of considering landscape: the conventional, Western notion of 'landscape' may be used as productive point of departure from which to explore analgous ideas; local ideas can in turn reflexively by used to interrogate the Western construct. The Introduction argues that landscape should be conceptualized as a cultural process: a process located between place and space, inside and outside, image and representation. In the chapters that follow, nine noted anthropologists and an art historian exemplify this approach, drawing on a diverse set of case studies. These range from an analysis of Indian calendar art to an account of Israeli nature tourism, and from the creation of a metropolitan gaze in nineteenth-century Paris to the soundscapes particular to the Papua New Guinea rainforests. The anthropological perspectives developed here are of cross-disciplinary relevance; geographers, art historians, and archaeologists will be no less interested than anthropologists in this re-envisaging of the notion of landscape. Landscape has long had a submerged presence within anthropology, both as a framing device which informs the way the anthropologist brings his or her study into'view', and as the meaning imputed by local people to their cultural and physical surroundings. A principal aim of this volume follows from these interconnected ways of considering landscape: the conventional, Western notion of'landscape'may be used as a productive point of departure from which to explore analogous ideas; local ideas can in turn reflexively be used to interrogate the Western construct. The Introduction argues that landscape should be conceptualized as a cultural process: a process located between place and space, foreground actuality and background potentiality, image and representation. In the chapters that follow, nine noted anthropologists and an art historian exemplify this approach, drawing on a diverse set of case studies. These range from an analysis of Indian calendar art to an account of Israeli nature tourism, and from the creation of a metropolitan'gaze'in nineteenth-century Paris to the soundscapes particular to the Papua New Guinean rainforests. The anthropological perspectives developed here are of cross-disciplinary relevance; geographers, art historians, and archaeologists will be no less interested than anthropologists in this re-envisaging of the notion of landscape. Landscape has long had a submerged presence within anthropology, both as a framing device which informs the way the anthropologist brings his or her study into 'view', and as the meaning imputed by local people to their cultural and physical surroundings. A principal aim of this volume follows from these interconnected ways of considering the conventional, Western notion of 'landscape' may be used as productive point of departure from which to explore analgous ideas; local ideas can in turn reflexively by used to interrogate the Western construct. The Introduction argues that landscape should be conceptualized as a cultural a process located between place and space, inside and outside, image and representation. In the chapters that follow, nine noted anthropologists and an art historian exemplify this approach, drawing on a diverse set of case studies. These range from an analysis of Indian calendar art to an account of Israeli nature tourism, and from the creation of a metropolitan "gaze" in nineteenth-century Paris to the soundscapes particular to the Papua New Guinea rainforests. The anthropological perspectives developed here are of cross-disciplinary relevance; geographers, art historians, and archaeologists will be no less interested than anthropologists in this re-envisaging of the notion of landscape. PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS......Page 5 CONTENTS......Page 7 LIST OF FIGURES......Page 8 Introduction: Landscape: Between Place and Space ERIC HIRSCH......Page 11 1 Looking at the Landscape: Class Formation and the Visual NICHOLAS GREEN......Page 41 2 Land, People, and Paper in Western Amazonia PETER GOW......Page 53 3 People into Places: Zafimaniry Concepts of Clarity MAURICE BLOCH......Page 73 4 Moral Topophilia: The Significations of Landscape in Indian Oleographs CHRISTOPHER PINNEY......Page 88 5 Landscapes of Liberation and Imprisonment: Towards an Anthropology of the Israeli Landscape TOM SELWYN......Page 124 6 Chiefly and Shamanist Landscapes CAROLINE HUMPHREY......Page 145 7 Seeing the Ancestral Sites: Transformations in Fijian Notions of the Land CHRISTINA TOREN......Page 173 8 Landscape and the Reproduction of the Ancestral Past HOWARD MORPHY......Page 194 9 Relating to the Country in the Western Desert ROBERT LAYTON......Page 220 10 The Language of the Forest: Landscape and Phonological Iconism in Umeda ALFRED GELL......Page 242 INDEX......Page 265 This volume offers anthropological perspectives on landscape, a topic of emerging interest for anthropologists, geographers, art historians and archaeologists. It proposes that landscape be conceptualized as a cultural process situated between "place" and "space"." - publisher What has the art historian to say to the anthropologist about landscape and the ways in which it is perceived?