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doi: 10.1068/d382tpmid: N/A
Efforts to work towards the rematerialisation of landscape have recently been augmented by concerns for corporeal, nonrepresentational dimensions of landscape experience as well as for nonhuman agency. Increasingly, landscape is conceptualised as a never-finished product of processes and practices that are both material and symbolic. Although such trends are reflected to some extent in work on landscape in colonial contexts, in this paper I contend that a closer engagement with these new directions may offer a useful means of breathing new life into colonial landscapes that, in some scholarly work, appear to have little existence beyond European representations that were made of them. Arguing for a conception of colonial landscape as process, I suggest that there is a need not only for recognising the material and corporeal dimensions of European experiences of colonial landscapes but also for attending to the ways in which those landscapes were brought into being and given meaning through the frequently mundane and locally focused activities of everyday life. Following a brief review of recent work on colonial landscapes, these suggestions are explored in the context of Spanish encounters with landscape in early colonial Peru. Initially focusing on accounts produced between the eve of conquest and the mid-16th century, the analysis then shifts to a legal battle that was fought in the early 17th century between two priests who occupied neighbouring parishes in the highland province of Huarochirí.
doi: 10.1068/d381tpmid: N/A
The study of a herd marks the point where ethnography and ethology meet. In the midst of this shared phenomenon, versions of ‘the social’ hinge on relations between herders and herd. In this paper I consider how our understanding of a herd might be extended by an awareness of its diverse geographies. This is achieved by reconstructing the entwined biographies of human and animal subjects dating from the reintroduction of reindeer to Scotland in 1952. The first transportation of reindeer from Scandinavia to the Cairngorm mountains was orchestrated by Mikel Utsi, a Lappish emigré from northernmost Sweden, and Ethel John Lindgren, a social anthropologist from Cambridge, of American–Swedish descent. What began as an ecological–economic experiment would occupy the couple until their deaths: Utsi's in 1979 and Lindgren's in 1988. I draw on a ‘make-do’ methodology undertaken in collaboration with past herders and the scattered company of the present herd: walking a sentient topography of traditional grazing grounds; renewing encounters with charismatic animals through photographic portraits; consulting an archive of herding diaries; and mapping a hidden ecology of landscape relics. These different registers of memory are used to explore how day-to-day engagements between herders and herd were rooted in unconventional systems of ecological and cultural knowledge. By reanimating a local landscape, the resulting narrative works at an intimate scale, while simultaneously gathering momentum from transnational movements of humans, animals, and traditions. Here, salvage and exchange are possible between geography's heritage of landscape and folk study and the sculpting of contemporary research.
doi: 10.1068/d380tpmid: N/A
The aim of this paper is to take some steps towards a renewed understanding of landscape and the gazing subject. A first main section, ‘Depth, outlines Merleau-Ponty's final visual philosophy and its attempts to replace a spectatorial conception of vision with an embodied ontology that accords transcendance to the depth of the visual world. A second section, ‘fold’, engages with Deleuze's rendition of Leibniz's philosophy as a means of both critiquing and supplementing Merleau-Ponty's account. Through these analyses I seek to rewrite the visual gaze upon landscape by exploring the ontological processes (processes of depth, processes of folding) which afford its actualisation. I thus seek to produce an account of gazing as an eventful actualisation and distribution of selves and landscape, through attending to the depths and folds of an immanent plane, from which distinctive and durable selves and landscapes arise and with which they are always in relation. Here, landscape is not a way of seeing the world. Nor is it ‘something seen’, an external, inert surface. Rather, the term ‘landscape’ names the materialities and sensibilities with which we see.
doi: 10.1068/d391tpmid: N/A
In accepting an ontology that takes imminence and becoming as given and subverts any gestures towards ossifying movement into coherencies such as culture, it is difficult to explain how certain kinds of subject–object relationships, such as the cultural landscape, present themselves to us as stable and a-contextually fixed. How might such apparent coherencies be accounted for? The question calls for a shift not only in what we mean by representation but, more importantly, in how we ‘take’ representation—that is, how we engage, interact, or acknowledge the presentation of a stable, demobilised, and closed world. I argue that this shift can take place only if landscape studies jettisons its reliance on concepts such as culture to explain the presence of the landscape and begins to think about such coherencies as a performance of coherence rather than coherence itself. I draw upon Derrida's idea of ‘dreams of presence’ to describe these performances of coherence as well as to theorise more broadly how an always-already deconstructing world can often be presented to us as closed.
doi: 10.1068/d0105pmid: N/A
In this paper I want to ask whether there is anything to be gained by taking seriously a posthumanist analysis of the relationship between humanity and the natural world, one that in fact extinguishes the dualism and produces only ‘naturecultures’. I will examine this question through a new analysis of the relationship between gum trees and Australia. Most humanist accounts, such as those developed in ‘traditional’ social anthropology and sociology, privilege the activity, agency, and representations of humans, and in so doing render the natural world and its individual species as passive and of interest only insofar as they provide a palette of meanings for essentially human symbolism, dreamings, and imaginaries. Such an approach has an impeccable track record from Emile Durkheim to Mary Douglas and it is not one I want to challenge here per se. What I do want to challenge is the implicit assumption that this is all there is to, or all we can say about, the relationship between nature and humanity. Rather than (only) ask what nature (or gum trees in this case) means, I want to ask (also) what nature does, and, importantly, what implications those actions have for the world, nature, humans, and ‘the social’. I argue that this approach takes us considerably further towards a more mature sociology of nature in Australia.
doi: 10.1068/d398tpmid: N/A
This paper tells a story of the community's purchase of the North Harris Estate, Isle of Harris, Scotland, bringing the land under collective ownership where previously it was held by an individual as a ‘private’ estate. At the broadest level the paper contributes conceptually to research whose objective is to challenge the inevitability of global imaginaries. Situated in the specific context of the Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2003, such action as that of the North Harris Trust has the potential to disturb global narratives of enclosure and privatisation. In recounting the story, the argument centres on the political possibilities of the land. In parallel with arguments concerning ‘place’, I examine how the re-creation of a collective, place-based identity in the new political spaces afforded by the North Harris Trust is linked to the process of negotiating the meanings of the land. The meanings of the land relate both to the mediation of historically resonant collective rights to the land and to how ‘nature’ is constituted in the search for socially just and sustainable futures. The focus is on the principles and everyday practices through which land and community are coproduced.
doi: 10.1068/d384tpmid: N/A
The number of closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras in British town centres has rapidly increased in recent years. These increases are mirrored in Europe and North America. In Britain many of these cameras videotape town centres, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. How do CCTV systems account for the space of the town centres in which they operate? What theoretical sensibilities can we use to engage with CCTV spatial accounting? To what extent do terms such as ‘professional,’ ‘legal’, ‘sociotechnical’, and ‘mundane’ enable adequate renditions of spatial-accounting activity? In this paper I will argue that engagement with the accomplishment of mundane public flows and specific incidents of accountable otherness can initiate a discussion of these questions and initiate an alternative to panoptic renditions of CCTV. The discussion will seek to draw together a potentially tense and disruptive theoretical combination of ethnomethodology and science and technology studies.
doi: 10.1068/d389tpmid: N/A
In this paper I explore the role of outdoor advertising in organising city space and framing people's experience of that space. I examine how UK outdoor advertising companies remap that space, segmenting and pricing certain areas of cities, and routes to and around cities. I argue that, in this cartographic, taxonomising role, advertising constitutes one of the forces that continually makes and remakes city space. Using Lefebvre's concept of city rhythms, I argue that outdoor advertising acts to align the urban rhythms of travel and work with the commercial rhythms of product innovation, promotion, and the life cycle of the commodity. This creates an urban time–space of ‘commodity rhythms’ which has important implications for people's experience of cities whilst engendering new connections between commodities and people moving around cities. I argue that this constitutes an adaptation of Foucault's biopolitics where it is precisely the rhythmic connections between populations of people and populations (and life cycles) of commodities that are at stake: it is a mutation of the metabolism of city spaces.
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