Phenomenology of Space and Place

Plantas y Fenomenología de la Muerte durante el Bronce Medio y Final en Menorca

by David Javaloyas Molina

Co-authored with: Llorenç Picornell, Gabriel Servera Vives

ABSTRACT

The present work studies the relationship between the vegetable kingdom and the Minorcan Late... more ABSTRACT

The present work studies the relationship between the vegetable kingdom and the Minorcan Late Bronze Age societies through the phenomenological archaeology approaches. For this purpose we analyze the archaebotanical record, with a special attention to charcoal analysis, carpology and palynology.
In this way, we focus on the study of the funerary record presenting and interpreting different minorcan sites (S’Alblegall rock-cut, Es Càrritx , Es Mussol and Es Pas caves), where different social practices associated to the use of plants have been documented: the use of aromatic plants in fires or the presence of floral offerings among others.

Keywords: Balearic Islands, Bronze Age, Archaeobotany, Phenomenological archaeology.

RESUMEN

El presente trabajo aborda las relaciones entre el mundo vegetal y las sociedades prehistóricas del Bronce Medio y Final en Menorca desde la perspectiva de la arqueología fenomenológica. Para ello utilizaremos, principalmente, el registro arqueobotánico, otorgando una especial atención al que se puede recuperar a partir del uso de la antracología, la carpología y la palinología.
En este sentido, nos centraremos en el estudio del registro funerario a través de la presentación e inter-pretación de diferentes yacimientos menorquines (Hipogeo de s’Alblegall, Cova d’es Càrritx, Cova d’es Mussol y Cova d’es Pas), donde se han documentado diversas prácticas sociales asociadas al uso de plantas como fuegos con altas presencias de plantas aromáticas o la documentación de ofrendas florales entre otros.

Palabras Clave: Islas Baleares, Edad del Bronce, Arqueobotánica, Arqueología fenomenológica.

Off-grid Mobilities: Incorporating a Way of Life

by Phillip Vannini

Published in Transfers: Interdisciplinary Journal of Mobility Studies

Drawing from sensory ethnography, the present multimodal writing—accompanied by photography and digital... more Drawing from sensory ethnography, the present multimodal writing—accompanied by photography and digital video—documents and interprets the mobilities of off-grid living on Lasqueti Island, British Columbia, Canada. The data presentation focuses in particular on the embodied experience of off-grid inhabitation, highlighting the sensory and kinetic experiences and practices of everyday life in a community disconnected from the North American electrical grid and highway network. The mobilities of fuel and energy are presented in unison with ethnographic attention to the taskscape of everyday activities and movements in which off-grid islanders routinely engage. The analysis, based on Tim Ingold's non-representational theory on place, movement, and inhabitation, focuses on how the material and corporeal mobilities of off-grid life body forth a unique sense of place.

Between the Real and Ideal. Ordering, controlling and utilising space in power negotiations: Hall buildings in Scandinavia, 250-1050 CE

by Marianne Hem Eriksen

Electronic version of my unpublished master's thesis from the University of Oslo, May 2010

The Scandinavian hall building was a constructional and social innovation which emerged sometime in the Early Iron... more The Scandinavian hall building was a constructional and social innovation which emerged sometime in the Early Iron Age; most scholars agree that it occurred in the second half of the Roman Period. The thesis examines the ordering, control and utilisation of space expressed through the Scandinavian hall buildings c. 250 – 1050 CE. The power relations of the Scandinavian Iron Age society are in the thesis interpreted as expressed through the hall buildings and their placement in a both genuine and cognitive landscape. The buildings’ construction, the finds related to the buildings, and the mythological ideas of the buildings are related to power struggle and power negotiations in the Iron Age societies. A recurrent theme throughout the thesis is the reciprocity between the built environment and the agents therein, as well as a focus on the biography of the hall buildings. Other important aspects discussed is the strong connection between the hall and the dead, the use of space as a differentiating factor between social groups, and the hall as an arena for rituals, transformation and liminality, differentiation and negotiation.

Keywords: Hall, cultic buildings, Iron Age, mythology, power, spatial ordering, communication, landscape, biography, practice theory.

Bαβουρανάκης, Γ. 2006. H τοπογραφία των Mινωικών ταφών: Aρχαιολογικές παρατηρήσεις, κοινωνιολογικές σκέψεις και ιστορικές ερμηνείες. Πεπραγμένα 9ου Κρητολογικού Συνεδρίου, 283-295. Ηράκλειο: Εταιρεία Κρητικών Ιστορικών Μελετών

by Giorgos Vavouranakis

Vavouranakis, G. 2011. Funerary customs and maritime activity in Early Bronze Age Crete. Vavouranakis, G. (ed.), The seascape in Aegean Prehistory (Monographs of the Danish Institute at Athens 14), Athens: DIA, 91-118

by Giorgos Vavouranakis

How Essential are Essential Laws? A Thought Experiment on Physical Things and their Givenness in Adumbrations

by Harald Wiltsche

will appear in: Mertens, K. & Guenzler, I. (eds.): Denken, Fühlen, Handeln. Phänomenologie im Widerstreit der Methoden. Paderborn: Mentis 2013.

Touristic Paradises: A Critical Rendering of Modern Vacationscapes

by Chaim Noy

Chapter in Rachel Elior (ed.), A Garden Eastward in Eden Traditions of Paradise. Jerusalem: The Hebrew University Magnes Press. Pp. 395-409. (2010). (Hebrew)

In this chapter I argue that in late-modernity, the industry of mass-tourism has re-produced, monopolized and mediated... more In this chapter I argue that in late-modernity, the industry of mass-tourism has re-produced, monopolized and mediated both symbolic paradisal images and concrete paradisal spaces. Tourism industry has accomplished the institutionalization and commercialization of contemporary paradises, via the uncanny and immensely profitable combination of mass-communication (mainly commercials), and mass-transportation, both of which are typical of the late-modern epoch. After I delineate several dichotomies due to which the tourism industry blossoms, regarding the differentiations between ‘home’ and ‘away,’ and between alienated and mundane living, and authentic paradisal existence, I adopt a feminist neo-Marxist perspective on one of the world’s greatest exploitative industries. I conclude by suggesting a few alternatives, and a brief neo-Marxist re-reading of the biblical story of the creation of Eden

The Said and the Unsaid: Performative Guiding In a Jerusalem Neighborhood

by Chaim Noy

Brin, E., and Noy, C. (2010). Tourist Studies, 10(1): 19-33.

This paper describes a guided walking tour of a formerly Palestinian neighborhood in Jerusalem and an important... more This paper describes a guided walking tour of a formerly Palestinian neighborhood in Jerusalem and an important battlefield in the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. The paper assumes a critical performance approach to guided tours in examining how through performative guiding, identities, histories and places are (re)constituted. We conceive of performative guiding as a situated event which both takes place in and simultaneously signifies and reconstructs the environment wherein it transpires. The tour we analyze was given by a Jewish-Israeli guide to a Jewish-Israeli audience, and was attended by the first author. The guide’s apparent inclination towards the Israeli and Zionist narrative regarding the story of the neighborhood is highlighted through an analysis of the commentary given. Through an examination of things said and unsaid, we highlight the dual role of performative guiding: relaying historical information and reaffirming partisan narratives.

Narratives and Counter-Narratives: Contesting a Tourist Site in Jerusalem

by Chaim Noy

In Jacqueline Tivers and Tijana Rakić (eds.), Narratives of Travel and Tourism. Aldershot, VT: Ashgate. Pp. 135-150. (2012)

This chapter examines the ideological role that narratives serve in tourism, arguing that tourism should be construed... more This chapter examines the ideological role that narratives serve in tourism, arguing that tourism should be construed as a highly ideological social sphere where political narratives are constantly at a struggle. The case study concerns a tourist site located in Jerusalem (Israel). The case shows how competing stories told of tourist sites and places are actually ideological narratives that serve effectively as part of larger ideological orders – in this case national ideology. I examine the hegemonic narrative (I borrow the term from Antonio Gramsci’s 1971 famous conceptualization) that is institutionally told of the site, and a counter-narrative that has been recently voiced by a group of artists/social activists. It is only through giving room to the latter narrative, that the hegemonic meanings imbued in the common story are revealed. In this sense we encounter counter-narratives in tourism, which are resistive and subversive stories that interrupt and undermine the industry’s powerful political commitments. Interestingly, from the perspective of tourism research, the counter-narrative voiced by local artists/activists is also produced within the semiotic realm of tourism, and also seeks to shape tourists’ consciousness and political convictions.
Thus narratives of tourism sites emerge as constitutive in terms of the meanings with which they charge the sites, and in terms of promoting hegemonic sets of meanings while reducing and silencing other meanings. Examining these narratives illuminates the awesome worldmaking power of tourism, which builds on the facts that, a. high ideological involvement can be achieved in and through tourism without it being explicitly marked as “ideology,” and b. that the nature of tourist behavior - which concerns embodied practices where travelers not only contemplate places but also consume them in an embodied and committed/mobilized sense.

Commodified Imagined Spaces: A few Critical Remarks on Tourism’s (in)visibilities

by Chaim Noy

Chapter in Arnon Soffer, Jacob, O. Maoz, and Ronit Cohen-Seffer (eds.), Cultural Landscape Patterns (honoring Yoram Bar-Gal). Haifa University Press, Haifa. Pp. 221-232. (Hebrew). (2011)

Migrating - Remitting -‘Building’- Dwelling: House-making as proxy presence in postsocialist Albania. in JRAI vol.16

by Dimitris Dalakoglou

This article examines the material culture of migration, focusing on migrants’ house-making projects in their... more This article examines the material culture of migration, focusing on migrants’ house-making projects in their countries of birth. In particular, it examines the houses built or refurbished by Albanians in their home-country, which is no longer their place of permanent residence. This is a widespread phenomenon in Albania, but it is also a frequently appearing practice amongst other international migrants. Why do migrants living outside their home-countries build houses there even though they do not plan to return? I seek to answer this question in the case of Albania by focusing empirically on the process of constructing these houses, rather than merely on the material entity of the house
as such. I propose that such ‘house-making’ by Albanian migrants is not only a simple house-building process; it also ensures a constant dwelling and dynamic ‘proxy’ presence for
migrants in their community of origin. These ethnographic observations have further significance for the anthropological study of both houses and international migration.

Il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel: The Irresolvability of the Gadamer-Habermas Debate

by William J. Urban

class paper written Good Friday, April 6, 2012

Environmental and Architectural Phenomenology, spring 2011 issue (vol. 22, no. 2)

by David Seamon

Feature essays: ENVIRONMENTAL AND ARCHITECTURAL PHENOMENOLOGY, spring 2011.

Feature essays in this issue... more Feature essays: ENVIRONMENTAL AND ARCHITECTURAL PHENOMENOLOGY, spring 2011.

Feature essays in this issue of EAP focus on landscape restoration and real vs. virtual animal dissections. 

In the issue’s first essay, Canadian educator Norm Friesen demonstrates how a phenomenological perspective contributes to understanding the lived differences between real and virtual realities. He focuses on laboratory vs. digitally-simulated animal dissections and draws on the ideas of Heideggerian philosopher Albert Borgmann to locate some of the pedagogical strengths and weaknesses of reality-based vs. hyperreal modes of learning.

In the issue’s second feature essay, retired Australian educator John Cameron writes a sixth “letter” from his rural home on Tasmania’s Bruny Island. His focus is the ecological restoration of some 50 acres of overgrazed paddocks, and the difficulties and satisfactions, both philosophical and practical, which arise from his decision to return the land to its “natural state.”

Back issues of EAP are now available at:

www.krex.k-state.edu/dspace/handle/2097/1522

David Seamon
Editor, EAP

Wo Befinden Sich Systeme? Ein Blinder Fleck Der Systemtheorie

by Alexander Filippov

The Place of Art in the Public Art Gallery: A Visual Sense of Place

by Chris Whitehead

co-authored with H. Graham and R. Mason, in Davis, P; Corsane, G; Convery, I. (eds), Making Sense of Place, Boydell and Brewer, forthcoming.

Locating art: The display and construction of place identity in art galleries

by Chris Whitehead

in Peralta E; Anico M (eds), Heritage and Identity: Engagement and Demission in the Contemporary World, Routledge, 2009

This essay will address the relationships between art on display in museums and galleries, identity and geographic... more This essay will address the relationships between art on display in museums and galleries, identity and geographic location with reference to theories of place identity developed by scholars such as Relph (1976), Proshansky et al (1983), Rowles (1983) and Dixon and Durrheim (2000). It will focus on the ways in which place identities are constructed in displays of art, building upon the notion of place identity as a political and social construction (and in this case specifically a curatorial one) that allows people to make sense of their connectivity to place and to guide their actions and projects accordingly. (Danziger, 1997 and Dixon and Durrheim, 2000) It will refer extensively (though not exclusively) to the representation and construction of place identity in art museums and galleries in the adjoining north-eastern cities of Newcastle, Gateshead and Sunderland. Focal points will include the Laing Art Gallery’s permanent display Art on Tyneside, which is intended to represent an artistic history of the region, and some of the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art’s exhibitions of specially commissioned works, such as American artist Chris Burden’s large-scale sculpture of the nearby Tyne Bridge.

Within this analysis, the essay will explore the following questions: why are place, community and identity actively connected in these gallery displays and what rhetorical means are used to do so? In addressing the first of these questions, the essay will examine the politics of representation and the agendas which drive curatorial (and in some cases artistic) choices and initiatives. The second question will focus on identifiable museological strategies of interpretation (including text, graphics and the configuring of interior décor) in the venues under study and will involve an exploration of the discourses of place identity which displays both represent and construct. In this context one may also ask: what are the ‘preferred performances’ (to conflate two bodies of theory) which these displays are intended to prompt in visitors, and what does this say about institutional views of citizenship, community and belonging?

This study will provide a platform for a wider discussion of the significance of place identity in the gallery for ontological understandings of art and engagement with art: what confers ‘north-eastern-ness’ on some art and how might this affect audience understandings of art as a concept, and as a category of material culture and experience? These last questions will be related to complex debates in art history and theory on the relationships between art production and geography, and to others in aesthetics, sociology, cultural studies and museum studies on the role of identity in visitors’ development of cultural capital and in their acts of meaning making and performance in art museums and galleries.

Vectors of Making: senses, spaces, and the formation of publics

by Marlene Eberhart

Forthcoming.

Spatiality and the Senses in the Theatre of Pietro Aretino

by Marlene Eberhart

RSA 2011: Theatre and the Reformation of Space 3: Property and Body; revision forthcoming in 'Early Theatre'.

Reduction or Revelation? Fichte and the Question of Phenomenology.

by f. scott scribner

Published in : Fichte and the Phenomenological Tradition, Eds., Violetta L. Waibel, Daniel Breazeale, Tom Rockmore. Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter, Gmbh & Co., 2010, 41-56.

This paper argues that Fichte's own transformation of transcendental philosophy by means of an experimental... more This paper argues that Fichte's own transformation of transcendental philosophy by means of an experimental phenomenological approach can be
understood as one that anticipates the central impasse between phenomenology's aspirations for objectivity and its more relevatory accounts.

The sense of feeling at home among functional homeless

by Carsten Schjott Philipsen

Presented Feb. 24th 2012 at AAG New York.