Contested Landscapes: Movement, Exile and Place

Description

Landscapes are not just backdrops to human action; people make them and are made by them. How people understand and engage with their material world depends upon particularities of time and place. These understandings are dynamic, variable, contradictory and open-ended. Landscapes are thus always evolving and are often volatile and contested. They are also always on the move - people may or may not be rooted, but they have 'legs'. From prehistoric times onwards people have travelled, but the process of people-on-the-move - as tourists, or on global business, as migrant workers or political or economic refugees - has vastly accelerated. How and why do people who share the same landscape have different and often violently opposed ways of understanding its significance? How do people-on-the-move make sense of the unfamiliar? How do they create a sense of place? How do they rework the memories of places left behind? There is nothing easeful about the landscapes discussed in this book, which are often harsh-edged and troubled both socially and politically. The contributors tackle contested notions of landscape to explain the key role it plays in creating identity and shaping human behaviour. This landmark study offers an important contribution towards an understanding of the complexity of landscape.

Barbara Bender Professor in Heritage Anthropology,University College London Margot Winer Associate Professor, Saint Mary's College of California and Co-ordinator, SMC Study Abroad Program, University of Cape Town

'[The editors] show that human activities shaped people's landscapes with the material worlds they have created.' New Scientist 'Traditional landscape history ignores [the book's] central message at its mortal peril.' Landscape History '...The book succeeds in its presentation of landscape as the instantiation of people's engagement with the material world around them - the social tapestry of everyday life. For it is of everyday life accounts that this book is full. It is this plurality of voices, beliefs, memories, and practices that makes up a noteworthy collection of essays.' Alberto Corsin Jimenez, University of Oxford '[The authors] present a myriad of historical, cultural, political, and geographical viewpoints under a diversity of topics...the essays present powerful accounts of conflict in the human spirit.' Landscape Australia Magazine