Cultural Landscapes

Life and death in Australian ‘heartlands’: pastoralism, ecology and rethinking the outback

by Nicholas Gill

2005, Journal of Rural Studies, 21(1), 39-53

Australian outback mythology is frequently invoked in attempts to unify Australians and smooth over differences. This... more Australian outback mythology is frequently invoked in attempts to unify Australians and smooth over differences. This is accomplished by appeals to shared heritage and shared cultural and economic interests. To a significant extent outback mythology is associated with the extensive grazing industries of the inland and north of Australia. Through association with a mythology of national origins, pastoral land use has been important in both national building in Australia and in generating a sense of settler belonging. The positive cultural association of pastoralism, however, have come under intensifying criticism since the 1980s from environmentalists and others. Drawing on ecologically based nationalism, critics of pastoralism draw on outback mythology to emphasise a geography of death in the inland caused by grazing and to articulate alternative inland geographies grounded in ecological thinking. These politics of nation building highlight new forms of long standing tensions between the outback as both rural heartland and wilderness in national origin stories, the role of land use practices in struggles over who and what ‘belongs’, and the roles of mythology in struggles over resources. These visions of the inland are however limited by frontier thinking and the boundaries and disjunctures this creates. The variety of connections between land and peoples are not part of these visions. In Sack’s terms (Homo Geographicus: A Framework for Action, Awareness and Moral Concern, John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1997) the morality of these geographies of the inland is questionable as they render the inland opaque and prevent ‘seeing through to the real’. Protagonists in these debates and researchers must grapple with the reality and diversity of connections and disconnections between land and people to create moral geographies of the inland and grounded conversations beyond mythology.

Sweepin’ Spirits: Power and Transformation on the Plantation Landscape

by Whitney Battle-Baptiste

Introduction: Recovering Landscape as a Cultural Practice

by Mick Atha

Water in the Historic Landscape: Proceedings of the 8th Annual Historic Landscape Symposium Presented by the American Society of Landscape …

by Elizabeth Brabec

Middleburg Plantation: A cultural and historical investigation into the formal gardens

by Elizabeth Brabec

Community planning and design with Amerindian people: a culturally sensitive approach

by Elizabeth Brabec

Identifying cultural attitudes and values in community landscapes

by Elizabeth Brabec

Remnants of medieval field patterns-driving forces behind their disappearance, the role of hedgerows, principles of conservation

by Elizabeth Brabec

Pluzina: the issues of documenting a vernacular landscape

by Elizabeth Brabec

Meridian Hill Park: The making of an American Neoclassical Landscape

by Elizabeth Brabec

Memorie dell’antico nel paesaggio pre-industriale della via Ostiense: rinvenimenti archeologici e demolizioni fra otto e novecento

by Marina Marcelli

in Bollettino dell’Unione Storia ed Arte, 6, 2011

The Military-Pastoral Complex: Contemporary Representations of Militarism in the Landscape

by Matthew Flintham

The Earth Still Trembles: On Landscape Views in Contemporary Italian Cinema

by Giorgio Bertellini

italian culture, Vol. xxx No. 1, March, 2012, 38–50

The essay discusses contemporary Italian fi lmmakers’ sustained interest in
the representation of national... more The essay discusses contemporary Italian fi lmmakers’ sustained interest in
the representation of national landscapes and physical environments as
revelatory settings of defacement of the nation’s geo-cultural patrimony.
Whether historical costume dramas, documentaries, or high-class melodramas,
Martone’s Noi credevamo, Guzzanti’s Draquila, and even Guadagnino’s
Io sono l’amore, among others, have exposed comparable forms of spatial
and anthropological degrado. In so doing they resonate with articulations
of environmental literacy and ethics emerged in the writings of Roberto
Saviano and Salvatore Settis.

Estructuras del Poder. Organización Sociopolítica y Arquitectura Residencial de Élite en el Callejón de Huaylas, Perú

by Miguel Alejandro Aguilar Diaz

Tesis para optar el grado de Magíster en Antropología en la Universidad de los Andes, Colombia. Director de tesis: Dr. Alexander Herrera Wassilowski.

En este estudio se realiza el análisis de la arquitectura residencial de las élites en el sitio de Keushu, durante el... more En este estudio se realiza el análisis de la arquitectura residencial de las élites en el sitio de Keushu, durante el Horizonte Medio hacia inicios del Intermedio Tardío, a partir de una edificación de tipo "kancha" en el sitio, sus relaciones con el entorno paisajístico y las estrategias de apropiación del pasado y la memoria colectiva para la legitimización del estatus y las relaciones de poder en esta sociedad.

Yalburt Yaylası (Ilgın, Konya) arkeolojik yüzey araştırması projesi 2010 sezonu sonuçları

by Ömür Harmansah

Harmansah, Omur and Peri Johnson (In press). “Yalburt Yaylası (Ilgın, Konya) arkeolojik yüzey araştırması projesi 2010 sezonu sonuçları.” 29. Araştırma Sonuçları Toplantısı. Ankara: T.C. Kültür ve Turizm Bakanlığı 2012.

Wandering / Wondering - a series

by Luke Bennett

An ongoing family of walk-inspired blogs meditating on traces and functions encountered within the built environment.... more An ongoing family of walk-inspired blogs meditating on traces and functions encountered within the built environment. Blog-essays to date have pondered the role of hilltops, the ability of cities to erase traces of air raids and the enduring role of the sublime in the aculturation of perilous mountain pathways. Michel de Certeau gets a look-in quite a bit. At times the essays are tending towards the psychogeographical, at others they ponder the lived physical expression of law and engineering infrastructure.

Mapping Moral Landscapes: Cartographies of Ascent and Descent in the Narratives of Pro-Life Activists

by Field Notes: A Journal of Collegiate Anthropology

By Tegan J. Gaetano

Published in Field Notes: A Journal of Collegiate Anthropology 4(1): 74-86. (May 2012)
Copyright ©2012 by Field Notes: A Journal of Collegiate Anthropology

The Supreme Court ruling of Roe v. Wade in 1973 brought to the fore of public consciousness in the United States two... more The Supreme Court ruling of Roe v. Wade in 1973 brought to the fore of public consciousness in the United States two dominant stances on the issue of abortion (i.e. pro-life and pro-choice), each organized around a rhetoric of moral vilification. As the sites of abortion practice, abortion clinics have since become theatres of contention, where conflicting imaginings of agency, reproduction, and personhood take shape and are experienced. This paper seeks to explore the relationship between morality, place, and imaginative practice in the narratives of pro-life activists working at the doors of Affiliated Medical Services, a women’s health clinic providing abortions in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Discourse about abortion experiences and activisms is treated reflexively as landscape talk – talk of how places are culturally recruited to stake out the values, histories, and identities of the individuals who occupy them. This paper argues that to better understand this process, there is a need to investigate how talk temporally and spatially located in the lived landscape is rooted in the imaginative landscape. How is abortion imaginatively rendered in talk? An answer to this question is approached by adopting Randall Lake’s (1984) heuristic model of an ascent-descent structure of moral discourse.

Combating Urban Disengagement? Stickers as a Form of Street Art

by Alice Clough

MA Thesis, published in UCL Anthropology Working Papers Series No. 09/2011

Stickers form a category of street art that is becoming increasingly popular in modern, industrial urban environments.... more Stickers form a category of street art that is becoming increasingly popular in modern, industrial urban environments. By exploiting the material properties of stickers, street artists are able to spread their work over large areas with little effort. Sticker designs are shared using the Internet, forming global networks of trade and exchange; they are also collected – an activity also enabled by their material properties – which allows individuals to re-establish meaningful relationships with material forms. A four-week fieldwork period in Berlin provided the opportunity to investigate the inner workings of the street art genre, from the perspective of their role in relation to other forms of visual media like corporate advertising. Sticker art is proven to occupy an unexpected position, incorporating aspects of both anti-capitalist and capitalist methods and ideologies. It also has important implications for the future development of the street art subculture, as it raises issues of popularisation, dislocation, and the subsequent stagnation of street art in Berlin.

Aguas, rocas y metales: arqueología y explotación de recursos minerales en la Edad Media

by Marta Sancho Planas

2008, Acta Historica et Archaeologica Mediaevalia, 29, 519-545

Reflexiones acerca de la forma de abordar los estudios sobre la explotación de recursos minerales y su transformación... more Reflexiones acerca de la forma de abordar los estudios sobre la explotación de recursos minerales y su transformación en la Edad Media. Se propone una investigación a
partir de las aportaciones de los textos escritos, la arqueología y la analítica aplicada a
los materiales arqueológicos, así como los datos procedentes de fuetes orales, iconografía y
estudios etnográfi cos. Se abordan las formas de explotación de minerales metálicos y no
metálicos, la sal y el agua como recurso mineral y como dichas explotaciones producen
transformaciones en el paisaje que pueden identifi carse y analizarse desde una perspectiva histórica.

Quando il paesaggio non era stato ancora inventato. Descriptiones locorum e teorie del paesaggio da Roma a oggi, in G. TESIO, G. PENNAROLI (a cura di), Lo sguardo offeso. Il paesaggio in Italia: storia geografia arte letteratura, Atti del convegno internazionale di studi, Vercelli, Demonte e Montà, 24-27 settembre 2008, Torino 2011, pp. 45-85

by Ermanno Malaspina

Si ringrazia l'editore per la gentile concessione della pubblicazione on line di una copia post-print dell'articolo

«Continua a mancare una | linea di indagine che tenti di sintetizzare tutti i fattori della letteratura, della... more «Continua a mancare una | linea di indagine che tenti di sintetizzare tutti i fattori della letteratura, della pittura, della descrizione di viaggio, della geografia, dell’agricoltura, della politica, della storia sociale e così via, e che, muovendo da confronti pertinenti, tenti di rispondere alla domanda fondamentale: nel mondo classico esisteva il paesaggio?» . Le pagine precedenti non hanno certo fornito la sintesi a tutto campo richiesta da Jakob, sintesi che per la sua complessità temo resterà per sempre un desideratum. Tuttavia, esse hanno almeno inteso fornire una risposta articolata e per quanto possibile sistematica alla domanda, ancorandola ad una nuova sistemazione del quadro teoretico di riferimento: il mondo ellenistico e romano percorre una sua particolare via come società inconsapevolmente paesaggistica, più matura e “moderna” in alcuni ambiti, meno in quello letterario, ove con l’ekphrasis si ritraggono quadri naturali, spesso con profonda sensibilità e straordinario nitore artistico, ma senza cogliere l’essenza del paesaggio quale noi lo percepiamo oggi.