The anthropology of landscape : perspectives on place and space /

Nine British anthropologists and a cultural historian build here on a 1989 London School of Economics conference exploring the cultural processes through which humans actively envision the world around them. Drawing on geography and art history for their landscape vocabulary, the authors critically refine and transcend these models through their insistence on mutually creative and destructive impacts engaging both human societies and their environments over time: landscapes live. They also move far beyond the artistic canon in global comparisons, while nonetheless encompassing Nicholas Green's brief, insightful essay on how urban economics recreated the 19th-century suburban Parisian landscape. Articles range from readings of hierarchy and clarity in Madagascar, to mass-produced calendars in India, to auditory soundscapes in Papua New Guinea. Other articles examine the profoundly different political and ecological worlds of upper Amazon forests, of diverse claimants to Israeli and Australian deserts, of Fijian gardeners, and of chiefly shamanic visions of Mongolia. Although essays vary in completeness and style, the volume represents a provocative and engaging dialogue for interdisciplinary studies in space and place, from beginning students through professionals in anthropology, geography, art history, and cultural studies.