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E-book An Anthropology of Landscape : The Extraordinary in the Ordinary
Landscape is a subject of study that belongs to nobody. It has long been studied in various ways and under various guises by geologists, social and cultural geographers, planners, ecologists, historians and art historians, archaeologists and anthropologists. Landscapes form the basis for much poetry and innumerable novels and are thus of interest to literary critics. Discussions of landscape are a mainstay of much social and political journalism. To be interested in landscape is thus to enter a promiscuous field criss- crossed by different theoretical and methodologi-cal perspectives, values and interests. To some this undoubtedly makes the topic exasperating; nobody can adequately define or tie down the term, it is out of control and therefore of no analytical value. To others, such as ourselves, the inherent ambiguity of the term and the diversity of approaches and perspectives used to study it is precisely that which makes the study of landscape so interesting and valuable. Such a topic is inexhaustible and unbounded; rhizomic rather than rooted (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 5– 25), perspectives on landscape pop up anywhere and often in an unpredictable manner. In many of these studies the term never appears because others such as space and place and the environment – even more broadly, the world – subsume it.Landscape is thus an absent presence in a huge body of scholarship. In anthropology, books with landscape in the title were virtually absent twenty- five years ago (Tilley 1994). Since then there has been a growing interest in and development of landscape studies in books (Bender 1993; Hirsch and O’Hanlon 1995; Feld and Basso 1996; Ingold 2000; Bender and Winer 2001; Stewart and Strathern 2003; Tilley 2006; Arnason et al. 2012; Jarowski and Ingold 2012) and in many journal articles. While the traditional output of research in social and cultural anthropology has been the ethnographic monograph hardly a single one has appeared fore-grounding the study of landscape as a topic worthy of consideration in its own right during the last two decades. Ethnographic studies of land-scape are thus usually compressed into small vignettes within an overall disciplinary field that swallows them up. An exception can be found in the recent studies of Laviolette (2011a; 2011b). One of these volumes is about landscape only in a metaphorical sense, its focus actually being on extreme sports such as cliff jumping, extreme surfing and urban parkour. The other considers a huge region, Cornwall in south- west England, from a variety of different perspectives, with its chief focus being how cultural metaphors of identity are materialized. In its consideration of a variety of different social groups – amateur footballers, artists, farmers, fisherfolk, immigrants, landscape gardeners, scholars and tourists – it comes closest to the general perspective taken up in this volume. But Laviolette’s land-scape analysis is on a macro scale. It embraces a whole series of differ-ent landscapes within Cornwall, like a series of Chinese boxes, one inside the other. His informants, by and large, don’t bump into each other in their daily lives as they are dispersed over a huge peninsula. This study by contrast considers a small- scale landscape from different individual and social perspectives, enabling us to consider embodiment, materiality and contestation in a quite different manner because our informants are constantly co- present with others in the same landscape.
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