The Anthropology of Landscape by Eric Hirsch, Paperback | Indigo Chapters

Landscape has long had a submerged presence within anthropology, both as a framing device which informs the way the anthropologist brings his or her study into """"view"""", and as the meaning imputed by local people to their cultural and physical surroundings. A principal aim of this volumefollows from these interconnected ways of considering landscape: the conventional, Western notion of """"landscape"""" may be used as a productive point of departure from which to explore analogous ideas; local ideas can in turn reflexively be used to interrogate the Western construct. The Introduction argues that landscape should be conceptualized as a cultural process: a process located between place and space, foreground actuality and background potentiality, image and representation. In the chapters that follow, nine noted anthropologists and an art historian exemplify thisapproach, drawing on a diverse set of case studies. These range from an analysis of Indian calendar art to an account of Israeli nature tourism, and from the creation of a metropolitan """"gaze"""" in nineteenth-century Paris to the soundscapes particular to the Papua New Guinean rainforests. Theanthropological perspectives developed here are of cross-disciplinary relevance; geographers, art historians, and archaeologists will be no less interested than anthropologists in this re-envisaging of the notion of landscape. | The Anthropology of Landscape by Eric Hirsch, Paperback | Indigo Chapters