Abstract

Land is embedded in a multitude of material and cultural contexts, through which the human experience of landscape emerges. Ethnographers, with their participative methodologies, long-term co-residence, and concern with the quotidian aspects of the places where they work, are well positioned to describe landscapes in this fullest of senses. The contributors explore how landscapes become known primarily through movement and journeying rather than stasis. Working across four continents, they explain how landscapes are constituted and recollected in the stories people tell of their journeys through them, and how, in turn, these stories are embedded in landscaped forms.

Nicolas Ellison is Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Toulouse).

Arnar Árnason is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen.

Andrew Whitehouse is a Teaching Fellow in Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen.

“This thoughtful collection of essays on landscapes is largely inspired by the recent writings of Chris Tilley and Tim Ingold, whose own contributions bookend the other papers in the volume…What this volume does is open up some space for further imaginative wanderings and questions about the precise manner in which both residents and scholars are socially disciplined or culturally conditioned to read different landscapes.”  ·  The Australian Journal of Anthropology

“The main theoretical aim of the book, to move beyond a dichotomy between experience and structure in the anthropological study of landscape, is important and makes a lot of sense in relation to the existing literature on the topic… [T]his new collection is timely,…exceptionally rich and interesting and clearly demonstrate that anthropological thinking on landscape is alive and well.”  ·  Paola Fillipucci, Cambridge University

Jo Vergunst is Lecturer in Social Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen.