Showing papers in "Ecumene in 2000"

Producing vertical territory: geology and governmentality in late Victorian Canada:

Abstract: This paper relates developments in the science of geology to forms of governmental rationality in Canada during the late nineteenth century. By so doing it opens for discussion a topic rarely broached by political theorists: the role that the earth sciences played in the historical evolution of forms of political rationality. The paper contests theoretical approaches that understand the relation between scientific knowledge and state rationality as only instrumental. Instead, the paper demonstrates how attending to the temporality of science (as evident in the emergence of specifically geological ways of seeing nature during the period) helps us understand the ways in which science is constitutive of political rationality, rather than merely its instrument. This argument is developed through a critique of Michel Foucault’s concept of ‘governmentality’, a concept that historicizes political rationality, yet remains silent on how the physical sciences contributed to its varied forms. The paper concludes wit...

Rescaling irrigation in latin america: the cultural images and political ecology of water resources

Abstract: A pair of scales ‐ local canal-based (or village-based) and basin-scale (or valley-wide) ‐ is featured in the irrigation of the mountain landscapes of Latin America. These scales arose historically through the interplay of cultural images with the political ecologies of agrarian transformation. In the Cochabamba region of Bolivia, long the irrigated breadbasket of the south-central Andes, the Inca state (c. 1495‐1539) imposed canal-based irrigation using a powerful concept of rotational sharing (suyu). Valley basins containing local irrigation were a part of the territorial web of Inca state geography known later as verticality. The Spanish empire in Andean South America (1539‐1825) was predicated upon a valley-centric colonial geography. Colonial rescaling involved despoliation and usurpation of waterworks, legal actions, and struggles over environmental change. Influence of the two irrigation scales has persisted. Today canal-based irrigation is not a timeless relict of indigenous customs, pace many postcolonial projects. Rather its usefulness, and its remarkable reinvention as a cultural concept and environmental creation, are the products of major modifications. Dismantling of multi-scale linkages in irrigation has reduced indigenous or peasant crossscale co-ordination. Local containment poses threats to the environmental and socioeconomic sustainability of canal-based irrigation.

Guns, Game and the Grandee: The Cultural Politics of Deerstalking in the Scottish Highlands

Abstract: This paper considers how the concentrated pattern of private landownership in the Scottish Highlands can be understood in relation to the field sport of deerstalking. Focusing on developments during the interwar years, it demonstrates how a series of connected representational practices, embodied rituals and political strategies were deployed by the sporting and landed community in defence of this elite leisure activity. These power-laden strategies coalesced into a distinctive culture of nature, which, although in part a continuation of tendencies set in train during the nineteenth century, also embraced new rhetorics of nationhood, ecological thought and landscape preservation. The paper demonstrates how humans, animals, technologies, science, localized history and popular memory were all drawn into deerstalking’s unequally weighted networks of association. Ultimately it asserts that the motif of custodianship and tradition commonly associated with modern sporting landownership in the Highlands was, and...

Science, observation and entertainment: Competing visions of postwar British natural history television, 1946-1967

Abstract: Popular culture is not the endpoint for the communication of fully developed scientific discourses; rather it constitutes a set of narratives, values and practices with which scientists have to engage in the heterogeneous processes of scientific work. In this paper I explore how one group of actors, involved in the development of both postwar natural history television and the professionalization of animal behaviour studies, manage this process. I draw inspiration from sociologists and historians of science, examining the boundary work involved in the definition and legitimation of scientific fields. Specifically, I chart the institution of animal ethology and natural history film-making in Britain through developing a relational account of the co-construction of this new science and its public form within the media. Substantively, the paper discusses the relationship between three genres of early natural history television, tracing their different associations with forms of public science, the spaces of ...

On the Colonial Genealogy of George Vancouver’s Chart of the North-West Coast of North America

Abstract: This paper contributes to the burgeoning critical literature on the history of cartography by tracking the links between maps, knowledge and power that stemmed from George Vancouver’s survey of the north-west coast of North America. Dispatched to the region by the British in 1791, Vancouver conducted an exhaustive cartographic survey and has been represented as the ‘true discoverer’ of the coast. It is argued here that he created a cartographic space (rather than simply discovered a pre-existing geography), and that his reconnaissance induced and supported a range of imperial and colonial practices. Vancouver’s work played a central role in the creation of a system of imperial inscription that primed the coast for colonial intervention. Attention is paid to the ways in which Vancouver’s project became (and remains) authoritative and influential in imperial and colonial terms: how it turned the coast into an arena of British imperial interest by occluding prior and alternative inscriptions on the land; how...

‘I object to rain that is cheerless’: landscape art and the Stalinist aesthetic imagination

Abstract: This essay considers discourses around nature and landscape in the Soviet art criticism of the Stalin period. Rather than being a genre that was neglected or in some way subordinated to the themes of industrial construction and socialist transformation, the depiction of nature was a major preoccupation of Socialist Realism. Indeed, it became progressively stronger as the Stalinist period developed from the 1930s to the early 1950s. There was a common belief that the most important Soviet political and social values could be conveyed through the imagery of the natural landscape, and there was much discussion in the literature as to how the ideological messages could best be articulated. An examination of this discourse reveals, however, that the semantic potentials of landscape art ran in very different directions. Thus while Stalinist art was eminently successful in ‘politicizing’ the representation of the natural world, it was manifestly unable to remove the ambiguous and even contradictory nature of the...

The African origins of Carolina rice culture

Abstract: This paper examines the cultural origins of rice cultivation in the United States, arguing that its appearance in South Carolina with settlement of the colony from 1670 is an African knowledge syst...

Putting maps in their place: the demise of the Falkland Islands Dependency Survey and the mapping of Antarctica, 1945-1962:

Abstract: This paper explores the political and scientific justification for the mapping of Antarctica by the Falkland Islands Dependency Survey (FIDS). As with the ‘Great Game’ of the nineteenth century, cartography was politics by another means. Thereafter, consideration is given to how the maps and surveys of Antarctica reflected British anxieties concerning Argentina in the immediate postwar world. As a rival claimant state in the South Atlantic, Argentine surveyors and administrators were a source of considerable concern to the FIDS. In the field, however, the FIDS surveyors were expected to concentrate on surveying while at the same time plotting these foreign incursions in Antarctica. The methods and processes involved in collating information into map form are considered. Ironically, the greatest geopolitical challenge to these aspirations came from the United States rather than Argentina or even Chile. Finally, the paper concludes with the changing political and cartographic remit of the FIDS in the era of...

Nomadic fantasies: producing landscapes of mobility in German southwest Africa

Abstract: In nineteenth-century Germany, ‘nomadism’ was an epithet frequently applied with little distinction to pastoralist, hunter-gatherer and semi-agriculturalist societies. It was used as a description not only of actual indigenous social organizations or economies, but also of a propensity to wander, an inconstancy and hence an obstacle to civilization. This was not confined to anthropological and ethnographic discourse. It also influenced policymaking in the colonies, particularly in discussions of land rights and land utilization. At the same time, discussions of nomadism, when applied to indigenous populations, awakened associations with a key theme in German national identity and national history - that the German nation had once shared this love of wandering. Debates on nomadism in the colonies expressed certain perceptions of German identity, but also anxieties about the mobility of labour and capital. The example chosen in this paper is German southwest Africa at the turn of the century.

Sound Escape: sonic geography remembered and imagined:

Abstract: Ecumene 2000 7 (1) rom its inception in the late 1960s in Canada, the interdiscipline of acoustic ecology has always been conceived of in spatial terms. Its founder, the composer and writer R. Murray Schafer, was concerned with uniting the various branches of sonic research from acoustics to communications, from sound recording to sound design, from music to audio art and from otology to noise pollution activism under the rubric of soundscape studies. His seminal book The tuning of the world (1977) mapped the (western) sonic environment both historically (through literary evidence) and ethnographically (through sound technologies), and imagined its future design. Acoustic ecology is an emerging field concerned with a broad approach to the sonic environment – not merely the prohibition of harmful noises, but the preservation and design of unique, beautiful or culturally significant sounds. The Finnish ethnomusicologist Helmi Järviluoma has described acoustic ecology as the ‘study of the relationship between living organisms and their sonic environment, soundscape’. One of acoustic ecology’s main concerns are imbalances in this relationship, viewed as a dialogue between organisms and the spaces they inhabit. As Schafer asked in The tuning of the world, ‘is the soundscape of the world an indeterminate composition over which we have no control, or are we its composers and performers, responsible for giving it form and beauty?’ Schafer’s World Soundscape Project, which was formed at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia in the early 1970s, undertook ethnographic projects to map the soundscape of various communities, from a historical and contemporary survey of the Vancouver Soundscape (1974) to Five Village Soundscapes (field data collected 1975, published 1977). The latter project consisted of recording the soundscapes of five European villages in Germany, France, Italy, Sweden and Scotland. Järviluoma’s current project is to revisit the same villages, plus one Finnish village, 25 years later. Her international team of researchers and consultants includes architects, geographers, acousticians, composers and a public health official. The six-year study aims to study the changes in the five village soundscapes while creating ‘concrete means that help each locality in designing and constructing its soundscapes’, and intensively developing ‘the methods and theory of the analysis of the acoustic environment’. Key compo nents seem to be cooperation with local architects and community planners. The project reflects the growth of soundscape studies from its initial concern with developing morphology, techniques and theory to its current concern with a world perceived as being in sonic crisis. New communications and industrial technologies are constantly threatening sound environments in a shrinking Sound Escape: sonic geography remembered and imagined

‘Only connect’: global and local networks, contexts and fieldwork:

Abstract: We examine the ways in which the variety of voices and multiple networks that constitute field work are reduced in its representation, particularly within the discipline of archaeology. The interrelatedness of structures, constraints and opportunities which constitute the conditions and outcomes of fieldwork raises issues beyond notions of intertextuality and the ethics of representation. The specificity and contingency of ‘the field’ is demonstrated through a case study set partly in southern Albania. Contrasts are drawn between ethnographic and archaeological experiences and understandings, and the ways in which the metaphor of ‘tourism’ can be understood as relating to both. These issues of the reduction and representation of richness and diversity are also pursued through amalgamation and experimentation in the relationship between form and content, including montage, both visual and textual. In part, a traditional written style of intellectual argument, albeit employing genres ranging from diary and ...

In search of primeval Russia: stylistic evolution in the landscapes of Nicholas Roerich, 1897-1914

Abstract: During the first decade and a half of his career, the Russian painter and stage designer Nicholas Roerich (Nikolai Rerikh) (1874-1947) gained renown for depicting his native land’s ancient past in a manner that was supremely creative yet also historically accurate. However, during this period, which lasted roughly from his graduation from the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts in 1897 to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, Roerich’s painterly style and overall world-view underwent major changes. Several factors - including a great love for archaeology, strong feelings about the relationship between humankind and the environment, and a deep interest in mysticism and Asian philosophy - caused him to abandon his early programme of faithfully rendering scenes from Russia’s early history. Increasingly, Roerich painted ancient Russia’s landscape metaphorically, interpreting it first as a crossroads of Eurasian cultures, then as a pristine, primeval wilderness in which humanity lived not only in harmony with...

Landscape and identity in Russian and Soviet art: an introduction:

Abstract: tainly in the natural order of these things that a ‘newer’ cultural geography already hovers somewhere on the disciplinary horizon, waiting for a propitious moment to reveal its existence and lay its claim to the mantle of scholarly innovation and the charisma of the cutting edge. This observation is not intended cynically, but rather to suggest that what is important at the end of the day is not the novelty of the epithet but rather the quality of the intellectual insight that goes along with it. And in this regard, we should appreciate that the legacy of the ‘new’ cultural geography is going to endure far longer than the term itself. For if ‘classical’ cultural geography taught us to examine a material landscape shaped by the social, economic and cultural forces of the inhabiting groups, and if ‘humanistic’ cultural geography went on to explore how such material landscapes were perceived and interpreted at a subjective cognitive level, then the ‘new’ cultural geography has opened our eyes critically to landscape as an act of representation. The epistemological readujstment here is appreciable, for we can consider landscape as representation only by directing our attention onto the agency responsible for the representing, an agency which routinely seeks to arrange natural imagery and manipulate an iconography for its own particular purposes. Political ideologies can act as such agencies, and terms such as ‘Tory landscapes’, ‘fascist landscapes’ and so on have become a part of our vocabulary; but better studied and more evocative is the representation of nature as part of the elaboration and articulation of social identities, most commonly expressed as national identities. The implicitly instrumental quality of landscape representation vis-à-vis the larger identity project should not obscure its vital significance, for a vast range of examples points to the unique effectiveness of landscape imagery in presenting visions of the nation.

Something straight in our landscapes: looking at the ‘Lemieux effect’ in Quebec nationalism

Abstract: The production of the painter Jean Paul Lemieux is examined in the context of Quebec nationalism and its quest to define a Quebecois territoriality. Prior to the independence referendum of 1995, the separatist Parti Quebecois produced a ‘Declaration of sovereignty’ which was circulated throughout the province both in a text and video format. Focusing on territory rather than ethnicity, the language of the declaration sought to move away from francophone cultural politics to build a more inclusive platform for the nation. This movement toward a territorial nationalism was disrupted by the landscape imagery of the video, which was released simultaneously with the text. Composed almost exclusively of long, static, horizontal shots, the video of the declaration conveys the territory of Quebec as an empty space devoid of people and history. Looking at Jean Paul Lemieux’s use of a similar - yet differently coded - visual language in his own landscapes, I explore the complex process of collective authorship and ...

Russkii inok: the spiritual landscape of Mikhail Nesterov

Abstract: The career of the Russian painter Mikhail Nesterov suggests the particular way in which Russian modernism was affected both by the unusually literary nature of the dominant pre-modern tendencies in Russian art and also by religio-political preoccupations, which were stronger in Russia than elsewhere in Europe. His experience also gives a fascinating example of how even a painter deeply hostile to the Russian Revolution of 1917 could regroup and continue his career.

Cultural Geographies in Practice

Abstract: • reveal the legacy of industrialism, not eradicate it or cloak it in nostalgia; create images and stories, which reveal both the effect and the cause of the legacy; • unveil social conflicts in the city, not repress them; create works that illuminate and explicate conflict and points of dynamic change; • reveal ecological processes at work in the city, not eradicate them; build infrastructure which embraces ecosystem processes and a philosophy of sustainability; • enable an equitable community dialogue, which envisions a future; produce new forms of critical discourse, which provide access, voice and a context in which to speak.

Critics in the native soil: landscape and conflicting ideals of nationality in imperial Russia

Abstract: Although the native landscape would eventually become an important locus for Russian national sentiment, Russians only came to celebrate the distinct characteristics of their natural environment at a comparatively late date. It was not until the second half of the nineteenth century that a pointedly native school of landscape painting would gain acceptance with the public and the arts establishment. But within a short span of time after its appearance Russian landscape painting came to generate widespread interest and enjoy great success. One of the best ways to help illuminate both the hesitance to embrace landscape painting and the rapidity of its emergence as a significant genre is to explore the critical response to it. In this paper I argue that Russian art critics were torn by landscape painting because it did not comfortably conform to any of the established formal or political frameworks then available for the evaluation of art in Russia. Its popularity nevertheless increased because it offered a ...

Book Review: The social life of trees: anthropological perspectives on tree symbolism

Abstract: As with most edited collections, The social life of trees grew out of an earlier conference. ‘Trees and wood as social symbols’ was organized with the objectives of surveying tree symbolism in different societies and cultures, and exploring the extent to which trees serve as symbols of transgenerational continuity. The organizers were well aware that broad cross-cultural analyses of symbolic and/or social structures run against the grain of both present postmodernist and cognitive approaches in anthropology. Also, their focus on longitudinal continuities is somewhat at odds with ongoing celebrations of discontinuity and disjunction in current social theory. This sounded at the outset, the editor presents the theme in overview weaving in commentary on each of the contributors’ essays. Rival does not excavate the roots of the topic. Durkheim is noted for anticipating work in material culture studies, and Frazer, of course, is cited for his monumental studies of tree worship and the symbolism of vegetational cycles of death and rebirth in ancient and primitive religions. Rival infers that despite the vast array of material on tree symbolism in disparate sources, there has been little prior collation and even less theorization of the subject. This volume, then, offers fresh insights and perspectives on a topic that has evaded either global analysis or synthesis. Beyond Rival’s Preface and introductory chapter the book branches into three parts. Part I, ‘Why trees are good to think’ features essays by three well-established anthropologists. Maurice Bloch, drawing on his field work in Madagascar, presents a tentative explanation of why trees are universally used as major symbols. From the standpoint of cognitive anthropology, Bloch sketches the outlines of a general theory of tree symbolism. In a somewhat different key, Roy Ellen examines the question: just how universal and prototypical the image and category of tree might be in human psychology and culture? He finds in palms a particularly useful and variable ethnosemantic and taxonomic category. James Fernandez takes the discussion from knowledge of taxa to trees of knowledge. He looks at trees as ‘models for the moral imagination’ in various contexts, from the equatorial rainforest, to Iberian oak landscapes, but mainly as depicted in Enlightment metaphors of natural hierarchy and its alternatives. Part II, ‘Trees, human life and the continuity of communities’ puts the reader into the local, empirical, and ethnographic present in several distinct settings. Pascale Bonnemère illustrates the vital links between particular taxa – Pandanus, the cordylines, areca-nut palm (used especially for betel-nut preparation), Ficus – and the life cycle of the Ankave-Anga of Papua New Guinea. Rodolfo A. Giambelli considers the cultural importance, especially metaphoric roles, of Book reviews 247

Book Review: Art for the nation: exhibitions and the London public, 1747-2001:

Abstract: Why do people visit exhibitions? The curious practice of entering public galleries to look at works of art has a history that, for lack of evidence, cannot easily be told from the perspective of the people who chose to be spectators. It is even more difficult to tell it from the point of view of those who were dragged or dragooned along, those who just arranged to meet friends there, or those who popped in for a few minutes to find some shelter from the wind and rain. Brandon Taylor has not quite taken on this task in a work which deals with the issue of ‘how visiting art galleries became one of the privileges and duties of the citizen’ (p. xiii), but it is a question which runs as a constant counterpoint within his detailed examination of what those who exhibited art in public galleries liked to think about the people who came in and saw it. The book runs chronologically from the beginnings of the public art gallery in eighteenth-century London to (in a brief coda) Tate Modern at Bankside. Each chapter is oriented around a significant gallery space in London and the debates surrounding it in the period it was opened to the public: the Royal Academy of Arts (late eighteenth century), the National Gallery (early nineteenth century), the V&A (mid-nineteenth century), the Tate (late nineteenth century), the Duveen wing at the Tate (1920s and 1930s), the ICA (1940s and 1950s) and the Hayward Gallery (1960s). Put simply, Taylor’s argument is that the publics imagined for these spaces within the ideas and arguments of those exhibiting art have changed over time, and that these changes are a matter of the relationship between class and nation. One of the central themes of the book is that from the middle of the eighteenth century onwards a key concern of art professionals, and of those who have given them the financial and political resources to put on exhibitions, has been with the moral ‘improvement’ of the public and the incorporation of individuals into a national culture through the contemplation of art. Since a major, if changing, concern throughout this period has been with class divisions, then the agenda of this moral crusade has been one – particularly in the nineteenth century – of a crusade to civilize the working classes. Drawing on gallery archives and on newspaper and parliamentary debates, Taylor extends familiar discussions of rational recreation into detailed examinations of gallery spaces in terms of financing, siting, collection building, lighting and policing. However, a second concern of the book is to detail the failure of art to heal class divisions. First, because the gallery space was constructed as an implicitly middle-class space. Second, because of the fracturing of any idea of a ‘national public’ at the end of the nineteenth century in terms of attitudes to change: in this instance through the debates over modernism and, in particular, Picasso and Matisse. Here again Taylor offers an explanation based on class. This pits the Royal Academy, the landed gentry, new industrial patrons, the provincial intelligentsia, the armed services, the Church and Whitehall on one side against metropolitan intellectuals, the BBC and the Arts Council on the other. While this analysis is pursued with some subtlety through detailed examinations of the Book reviews 479

Book Review: Place and experience: a philosophical topography

Abstract: idea of discourse belies their invocation of Foucault, and produces the sort of Whiggish history that makes their introductory claims about historicism ring hollow. In this way, the nineteenth-century painter of Indian portraits George Catlin becomes an ‘early preservationist’ (p. 63), a prototype of the preservationism of the contemporary Wilderness Society. Differences between the aims and objects of their preservationism (sublime savagery against ecosystems and biodiversity) are erased, while the recent rise of global environmental problems, like climate change, and the globalization of American environmental concerns to encompass far-off places are barely touched on, though the debate around trade and environment does receive some notice in a chapter on the North American Free Trade Agreement. Arguably some simplification is necessary to provide narrative coherence in an undergraduate text such as this one, but the result here is to suggest that nothing ever really changes. In both political and intellectual terms, this is not the message we should be conveying.