Imagining Landscapes
Imagining Landscapes

Author: Monica Janowski

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-05-13

Total Pages: 271

ISBN-13: 1317118650

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The landscapes of human habitation are not just perceived; they are also imagined. What part, then, does imagining landscapes play in their perception? The contributors to this volume, drawn from a range of disciplines, argue that landscapes are 'imagined' in a sense more fundamental than their symbolic representation in words, images and other media. Less a means of conjuring up images of what is 'out there' than a way of living creatively in the world, imagination is immanent in perception itself, revealing the generative potential of a world that is not so much ready-made as continually on the brink of formation. Describing the ways landscapes are perpetually shaped by the engagements and practices of their inhabitants, this innovative volume develops a processual approach to both perception and imagination. But it also brings out the ways in which these processes, animated by the hopes and dreams of inhabitants, increasingly come into conflict with the strategies of external actors empowered to impose their own, ready-made designs upon the world. With a focus on the temporal and kinaesthetic dynamics of imagining, Imagining Landscapes foregrounds both time and movement in understanding how past, present and future are brought together in the creative, world-shaping endeavours of both inhabitants and scholars. The book will appeal to anthropologists, sociologists and archaeologists, as well as to geographers, historians and philosophers with interests in landscape and environment, heritage and culture, creativity, perception and imagination.

Landscapes
Landscapes

Author: Hilary P.M. Winchester

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-10-29

Total Pages: 217

ISBN-13: 1317888537

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Landscapes is a timely and well-written analysis of the meaning of cultural landscapes. The book delves into the layers of meaning that are invested in ordinary landscapes as well as landscapes of spectacle and power. Landscapes is a powerful and vivid application of the new cultural geography to case studies not previously visited within cultural geography texts.

Cultural Landscapes of India
Cultural Landscapes of India

Author: Amita Sinha

Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press

Published: 2020-11-10

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 0822987864

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Most people view cultural heritage sites as static places, frozen in time. In Cultural Landscapes in India, Amita Sinha subverts the idea of heritage as static and examines the ways that landscapes influence culture and that culture influences landscapes. The book centers around imagining, enacting, and reclaiming landscapes as subjects and settings of living cultural heritage. Drawing on case studies from different regions of India, Sinha offers new interpretations of links between land and culture using different ways of seeing—transcendental, romantic, and utilitarian. The idea of cultural landscape can be seen in ancient practices such as circumambulation and immersion in bodies of water that sustain engagement with natural elements. Pilgrim towns, medieval forts, religious sites, and contemporary memorial parks are sites of memory where myth and history converge. Engaging with these spaces allows us to reconstruct collective memory and reclaim not only historic landscapes, but ways of seeing, making, and remembering. Cultural Landscapes in India makes the case for reclaiming iconic landscapes and rethinking conventional approaches to conservation that take into consideration performative landscape as heritage.

Re-Imagining Resilient Productive Landscapes
Re-Imagining Resilient Productive Landscapes

Author: Carla Brisotto

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2022-03-09

Total Pages: 326

ISBN-13: 3030904458

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This book explores how lessons from past urban planning experiences can inform current debates on urban agriculture. Productive landscapes today have been posited as instruments for the positive transformation related to territorial fragility and abandonment, promoting social cohesion, food security and wider environmental and economic benefits. The book will re-map the way in which seeming landscape limitations and challenges can be turned into potential, innovation and a new lease of urban-rural life. It does so by drawing on significant past urban agricultural experiences in planning as vectors for new critical reflections relevant to re-igniting ideas for future envisioning of urban scenarios in which productive landscapes play fundamental transformative roles. The focus is on planning ideas and the roles of key individual planners, all of which have designed agricultural strategies for the city at some point in their careers. It intends to help us today reimagine urban-rural relationships, and the transformation of under or mis-used urban open spaces, peri-urban areas, fringe conditions and in-between spaces.

Imagining Serengeti
Imagining Serengeti

Author: Jan Bender Shetler

Publisher: Ohio University Press

Published: 2007-06-15

Total Pages: 393

ISBN-13: 0821442430

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Many students come to African history with a host of stereotypes that are not always easy to dislodge. One of the most common is that of Africa as safari grounds—as the land of expansive, unpopulated game reserves untouched by civilization and preserved in their original pristine state by the tireless efforts of contemporary conservationists. With prose that is elegant in its simplicity and analysis that is forceful and compelling, Jan Bender Shetler brings the landscape memory of the Serengeti to life. She demonstrates how the social identities of western Serengeti peoples are embedded in specific spaces and in their collective memories of those spaces. Using a new methodology to analyze precolonial oral traditions, Shetler identifies core spatial images and reevaluates them in their historical context through the use of archaeological, linguistic, ethnographic, ecological, and archival evidence. Imagining Serengeti is a lively environmental history that will ensure that we never look at images of the African landscape in quite the same way.

Landscapes of Accumulation
Landscapes of Accumulation

Author: Llerena Guiu Searle

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2016-09-21

Total Pages: 326

ISBN-13: 022638523X

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Over the past few decades, India has experienced a sudden and spectacular urban transformation. Gleaming business complexes encroach on fields and villages. Giant condominium communities offer gated security, indoor gyms, and pristine pools. Spacious, air-conditioned malls have sprung up alongside open-air markets. In Landscapes of Accumulation, Llerena Guiu Searle examines India’s booming developments and offers a nuanced ethnographic treatment of late capitalism. India’s land, she shows, is rapidly transforming from a site of agricultural and industrial production to an international financial resource. Drawing on intensive fieldwork with investors, developers, real estate agents, and others, Searle documents the new private sector partnerships and practices that are transforming India’s built environment, as well as widely shared stories of growth and development that themselves create self-fulfilling prophecies of success. As a result, India’s cities are becoming ever more inaccessible to the country’s poor. Landscapes of Accumulation will be a welcome contribution to the international study of neoliberalism, finance, and urban development and will be of particular interest to those studying rapid—and perhaps unsustainable—development across the Global South.

Anglo-Saxon Literary Landscapes
Anglo-Saxon Literary Landscapes

Author: Heide Estes

Publisher: Environmental Humanities in Pre-modern Cultures

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 9789089649447

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Literary scholars have traditionally understood landscapes, whether natural or manmade, as metaphors for humanity instead of concrete settings for people's actions. This book accepts the natural world as such by investigating how Anglo-Saxons interacted with and conceived of their lived environments. Examining Old English poems, such as Beowulf and Judith, as well as descriptions of natural events from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and other documentary texts, Heide Estes shows that Anglo-Saxon ideologies that view nature as diametrically opposed to humans, and the natural world as designed for human use, have become deeply embedded in our cultural heritage, language, and more.

Imagining Nature
Imagining Nature

Author: Kevin Hutchings

Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 9780773523432

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In Imagining Nature Kevin Hutchings combines insights garnered from literary history, poststructuralist theory, and the emerging field of ecological literary studies. He considers William Blake's illuminated poetry in the context of the eighteenth-century model of "nature's economy,' a conceptual paradigm that prefigured modern-day ecological insights, describing all earthly entities as integrated parts of a dynamic, interactive system. Hutchings details Blake's sympathy for – and important suspicions concerning – the burgeoning contemporary fascination with such things as environmental ethics, animal rights, and the various fields of scientific naturalism. By focusing on Blake's concern for the relationship between nature and ideology (including the politics of class, gender, and religion) Hutchings avoids the sentimentalism and misanthropic pitfalls all too often associated with environmental commentary. He articulates a distinctively Blakean perspective on current debates in literary theory and eco-criticism and argues that while Blake's peculiar humanism and profound emphasis upon spiritual concerns have led the majority of his readers to regard his work as patently anti-natural, such a view distorts the central political and aesthetic concerns of Blake's corpus. By showing that Blake's apparent hostility toward the natural world is actually a key aspect of his famous critique of institutionalized authority, Hutchings presents Blake's work as an example of "green Romanticism" in its most sophisticated and socially responsive form.