Landscape Studies

Drawing on previous work on environmental justice, social construction of environment, and sense-of-place theory, this paper will examine the relationship between inequity, landscape meaning, and place identity using the case of the Gullah/Geechee. This study will examine the effects of changes to the environment and landscape on members of the Gullah/Geechee community, focusing on possible effects on place identity due to acts of environmental injustice, specifically among residents of Hog Hammock on Sapelo Island, Georgia.

Partendo da una riflessione sull’esperienza diretta di coordinamento del progetto di riqualificazione del Museo del Paesaggio di Castelnuovo Berardenga (Siena), il saggio, all'interno del volume curato da Katia Ballacchino, Letizia Bindi e Alessandra Broccolini, evidenzia le ricadute delle competenze antropologiche indirizzate alla ricerca, alla tutela e alla comunicazione del patrimonio locale nell’area del Chianti senese, presentando il quadro delle prospettive sociali e politiche e dei bisogni di autorappresentazione delle istituzioni e degli attori coinvolti.

Bangladesh is located in the world’s largest delta where the relationship with water is totally different from rest of the world. The satellite image of Dhaka city shows the presence of water bodies that girdle the city in east and west periphery. At present Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh is growing with mind-numbing speed, filling up these lowlands for the extra population, as all the highlands are increasingly being built or covered. These wetlands which generally acted as flood basin for Dhaka is now unable to ful- fill its purpose and thus increasing flood magnitude and its elongation period. This approach to land devel- opment is affecting the resilience of the city. This disturbance on environment can be termed as ‘ecological disaster’ making the situation worse for the people of Dhaka city. The analysis on pre-urban and post-urban context will express how the situation gets worse for unwise and unplanned decision-making and for not respecting the hydrology and its functions. The important observation is, the strategy of ‘flood-free land’ should be transformed to ‘flood-free building’ in the new innovative housing model in this context, which can relate to our society and culture and for reviving the relation with water which was very much promi- nent in the past. This way there will be more space for water during monsoon and flood. The study first asks the question of how can the diverse ecology and unique natural dynamics of Delta environment be restored and integrated with new and existing urban residential development in and around Dhaka city and aims to come up with a model of the new housing typology where human and other species and the natural functions of wetland can coexist.

Landscape research has seen a burgeoning of interest in notions of 'affect', 'doing', 'performance' and 'practice' in the past decade or so. Although these notions can be parcelled together in a variety of ways, in this chapter I want to situate them within the range of work dealing with what has come to be termed more-than-representational theories (Lorimer 2005). As a style of thinking, more-than-representational theories emerged in the mid-1990s in response to the 'mesmerized attention' given to texts and images, which, as Nigel Thrift (2000: 380) argued, had occluded 'a lot of the little things'. Originally termed 'non-representational theory' (and still referred to as such by a number of scholars) or 'the theory of practices', more-than-representational thinking is today associated primarily with the fields of cultural and political geography, and the work of, all of whom, like Thrift, are geographers based in UK universities. Many have connections to the University of Bristol's School of Geographical Sciences (Cresswell 2012), where non-representational theory first emerged. Although it is an approach with a particularly strong UK adherence, it has been applied in geographical contexts that range from Britain to Denmark, Canada, Hong Kong, Argentina, Hungary, the United States and Australia, to name a few.

A cselekvőhálózat-elmélet (Actor-Network-Theory, ANT) értelmében egyetlen társadalmi ágens sem tekinthető a társadalom középpontjának, a materiális ágencia nem vezethető vissza egyetlen alapvető rétegre vagy kauzális mozzanatra. Az ANT-nézet szerint minden entitás valamilyen módon hozzájárul legalább egy hálózat fenntartásához és fennállásához. Szimmetrikus módon kell elemeznünk a hálózatokat, amelyek a társadalmi valóság szövetét alkotják. 49 Egyetlen ágens sem rendelkezik monopóliummal az ontológiai fontosságot illetően. Mint John Law és Annemarie Mol írja a cumbria-i bárányok és a 2001-es száj-és körömfájás járványról szóló tanulmányukban, "a materiális szemiotikában egy entitás akkor számít ágensnek, amennyiben egy észlelhető különbséget hoz létre". 50 Egy ágens annyiban mondható cselekvőképesnek, amennyiben ágenciát fejt ki, tehát egy hálózat csomópontjainak valamelyikében. "Az entitások", folytatja Law és Mol, "egymás számára adnak létet [...], egymást valósítják meg". 51 Nincsen az ANT társadalmi ontológiában semmilyen tiszta "önmegvalósítás": létezni annyi, mint mások megvalósulásához folyamatosan hozzájárulni. Kölcsönös megvalósítás, adományozás híján aligha beszélhetnénk bárminek a létezéséről. Mindig a másik az, aki létet nyújt számunkra; másság nélkül elképzelhetetlen bármilyen önazonosság. Amit hajlamosak vagyunk fizikaiként aposztrofálni, rendkívül sokféle konstrukció végeredménye. Graham Harman rámutat arra, hogy a Bruno Latour neve által fémjelezhető 49 LATOUR 1999: 733-740 50 LAW -MOL 2008: 58 51 U.o.

Since the Ancient Greeks the artisans of Mass Culture have continually attempted to define their domain in contradistinction to High Culture while trying to break away from the Plebeian-Patrician dichotomy. After centuries, it is only around the early 1800s that Mass Culture witnessed an exponential growth and a greater autonomy, which resulted in establishing new media of its own, such as: radio, television, comic books, detective stories, science-fiction, and most notably photography.1 For Walter Benjamin, photography was inherently linked to the masses due to its inborn potential of reproducibility, which replaced the domain of tradition with plurality of copies.2 What links photography to the masses, literary critic Eduardo Cadava argues, is that both have their origins in techniques of reproduction: “they both belong to the production and reproduction of images”. 3 There is, however, a contemporary photographic genre that both embraces and resists the speedy consumption of Mass Culture imagery: aftermath photography. By discussing photographs taken by the contemporary Dutch artist Gert Jan Kocken (1971), this article argues how this photographic genre simultaneously invites and excludes the masses through a particular way it juxtaposes landscape images next to quasi-news captions.

In several publications, the geographer Hans-Jürgen Nitz has described the medieval settlement history of the Odenwald, a lower mountain range situated in contemporary Germany. Nitz’s work has been and remains very influential among historians and geographers. In his view, until the 8th century, the Odenwald was largely abandoned and therefore in royal possession. At the end of the century, the abbey of Lorsch and other landlords were granted large tracts of woodland by the king in order to organize the colonization of the Odenwald. According to Nitz, the planned settlements of the region find their origin in this early and high medieval process of land-clearance, that was directed by lords. However, recent research contradicts this model. Geographers demonstrated that Nitz’s typology of settlement-structures has to be revised and archaeological excavations suggest that his model of settlement planification is overly simplistic. Paleoenvironmental studies show that the Odenwald was certainly not an abandoned ‘wilderness’ in the early 8th century: it had been continuously submitted to extensive forms of land-use from the Neolithic period onwards. These observations lead to refute Nitz’s systematic narrative and to develop an alternative approach to the medieval history of the Odenwald, even if this reframing leaves many questions unanswered and does not provide a model as slick as the one it is meant to replace. In this perspective, this paper explores the importance of extensive forms of land-use and questions the role of lordship and local communities in the management of resources and settlement processes.

The main purpose of this research is to complete the toolkit for landscape study taking into
account the way a society, characterized by movement, evolves to a continues increase of
living environment rate of transformation. The research highlights the importance of dynamic
analysis of the landscape and the need for appropriate tools that can capture and sustain its
movement. The interaction between film and landscape is covered in two directions that relate
to techniques and significance. It follows a method that is based on several steps: how the
landscape is filmed, shown in various film productions (via the database of landscape videos)
and how a montage is able to conveys a specific message.

Book review of VIVIANA FERRARIO, Geographical readings of a historical landscape. The promiscuous cultivation of vines in the Veneto, Verona, CIERRE editions, 2019.
The changes of the last seventy years have transformed European landscapes, reduced in size and made more homogeneous by the rationalization of techniques and crops, but fragments of historical landscapes have been preserved in some marginal, resistant, inert or ductile territories. Survival is also due to the value attributed to them today, which goes beyond the economic-productive evaluation to enhance that of testimony of the past to be preserved, of cultural heritage to be transmitted and, finally, of a sustainable model for the future. All this places them at the center of current landscape studies.

Alice Munro’s short stories rarely start from a preconceived idea or plan, but more frequently from a striking image leading to a “queer bright moment,” in the oxymoronic phrase she coined to capture the visual warp out of which her stories proceed (Munro Moons xv). “Images” is one of the childhood stories Alice Munro wrote especially in view of the publication of her first collection, Dance of the Happy Shades (1968), which gathered a dozen of the pieces she had published in various magazines, notably The New Yorker, over the previous two decades. “Images” contains several “moments of loud clarity” – Jean-Jacques Lecercle’s own phrase for such unsettling insights (35) – which the child-focalizer registers and the grown-up narrator re-envisions as moments of writerly inception. It is the generative propensity of the image, the image as primer, that I propose to analyze in this article, starting from the distinction art historian Georges Didi-Huberman introduces between the visible and the visual in his ground-breaking essay Devant l’image: question posée aux fins d’une histoire de l’art. Pleading for a reopening of the case of the image after the pronouncements of art history had seemingly sealed it, Didi-Huberman wields concepts such as the splitting of the image, that are clearly indebted to the Lacanian analysis of the scission between the eye and the gaze, a caesura to which Didi-Huberman will return in a subsequent essay, Ce que nous voyons, ce qui nous regarde. My contention in this article is that “Images” is informed by the aporetic tension between visibility and visuality, savoir sans voir ou voir sans savoir. Between the signs the image represents and the symptoms it presents lies a narrow unscripted space which writing may invest and start from.

The paper gives a survey of settlement patterns and field systems in Norway c. 800-1500 A.D. based on archaeological evidence and contemporary written sources. As topography and climate varies considerably in a country that stretches across 13 degrees of latitude, the agricultural conditions vary accordingly, resulting in regional diversity in both settlement patterns and field systems. Separate, dispersed farms have for long been regarded as the predominant form of settlement for most of the country, but also clustered settlements seem to have been common along the western and north-western coast, at least from the Middle Ages up to the nineteenth century. The diversity of settlement and tenurial patterns as well as physical variations in the agricultural potential resulted in a variety of farm types and field systems. Scattered fields under more or less permanent cultivation without fallow periods were usual in larger parts of medieval Norway, especially to the west, while rotation of arable land was used in areas where the proportion between land and husbandry was less balanced and more extensive cultivable soils. Altogether, the Norwegian settlement patterns and field systems reflect both regional heterogeneity and variations within regions, but they also reveal similarities with the neighbouring countries.

Detroit nazywa się w ostatnich latach „nowym miastem amerykańskiego horroru”. Pejzaż opuszczonych przemysłowych budynków i bezludnych ulic wykorzystano w tak znaczących dla gatunku filmach jak: Lost River (2014, reż. R. Gosling), Nie oddychaj (2016, reż. F. Alvarez) czy Tylko kochankowie przeżyją (2013, reż. J. Jarmusch). W Coś za mną chodzi (2014) Davida Roberta Mitchella miejskie przestrzenie Detroit przeciwstawione są jego przedmieściom. Suburbia to obszar, który – jak twierdzili rodzice nastoletnich bohaterów – jest przyjazny, w odróżnieniu od pełnego niebezpieczeństw centrum. Granice tych światów zostają jednak zamazane przez rzuconą na bohaterów klątwę. Z pustych, schludnych alejek wyłaniają się upiorne postaci. Przydomowe trawniki i zgrabne domki niepokoją nawet wtedy, gdy nikogo nie widać na horyzoncie. Reżyser, aranżując taką przestrzeń grozy, korzysta z tradycji amerykańskiego horroru lat siedemdziesiątych i osiemdziesiątych (w szczególności z przedstawienia suburbiów w Halloween (1978) Johna Carpentera). O ile jednak w większości filmów grozy krajobraz pełni rolę mniej lub bardziej wyrazistego tła, to w Coś za mną chodzi wyrasta on na bohatera pierwszego planu. Użyty przez Mitchella kod wizualny odsyła do post-kryzysowego pejzażu Ameryki, w którym podlegająca dezindustrializacji sceneria Pasa Rdzy okazuje się przestrzenią, w której rodzą się potwory.

As a resident of Bengal, it is quite hard to imagine that many years ago, a kind of cotton fabric made by the local people of this place attracted the whole world. Its extreme delicacy and transparency was incomparable. The belief among Europeans was that, the fabric was made by mermaids, fairies and ghosts of Bengal (Descriptive and Historical, 1851)! According to early legends, muslin was 'woven under water' (Islam, 2016; Ashmore, 2012). Indeed there is a mystery here. This fabric once called ‘Bangla Kapor’ (Cloth of Bengal), ‘Dhakai’ or ‘Gangetiki’ is more commonly known as ‘Muslin’ (Karim, 1963; Eaton, 1993). The story of this mysterious fabric taken a dramatic twist as this practice has become extinct along with the particular plant species (behind the finest quality of muslin) about 150/160 years ago during the colonial period (Islam, 2016). This paper investigates the colonial reading of muslin making through different historical accounts and other sources in the first part of this research. The second part explores the non-linear reading of the practice that begins with the question - why was the practice unique to Bengal and followed by a series of drawing investigations. These engender several other questions and directions: what was the role of the landscape of this region and was there a connection between the practice of muslin making and human habitation?

This paper addresses the problem of the so-called “emblem glyphs” or royal titles that incorporate certain place names. The common trend in scholarship is to view these place names as corresponding to a distinct kind of spatial entities, even as polity names. I argue that there is no evidence to sustain the “polity name” hypothesis. Instead, place names incorporated into the royal title should rather be interpreted as the most salient, highlighted features in the representations of the political landscape created by each Classic Maya regime. Such features do not necessarily correspond to the largest spatial entities within the political landscape. There may be little or no correspondence to the immediate physical landscape of Classic Maya sites as some of the place names in the “emblem glyphs” are locations in deep time. The article begins with a brief overview of the research on the subject and then proceeds with a specific case study exploring the relations between the ideational landscape in the inscriptions of the site of Naranjo and the identities of its rulers according to the same corpus of texts. It considers other cases of place names in “emblem glyphs” supporting the observations made in the case study.

This article from the ‘Classics Review’ section of the journal ‘ethnoarchaeology’ provides the back story and update for “Ceramic Theory and Cultural Process” published in 1985 and reprinted many times since then. That book built on the seminal article that I wrote for ‘Current Anthropology’ ten years earlier, and my responses to my critics there that stimulated me to write the book (those articles are on this site). Besides several anecdotes about the book, one section of the article provides a brief ethnography of its publication at the Cambridge University Press.
    One of my greatest frustrations that stimulated writing of  the book was that my former focus on the cognitive anthropology (e. g. Arnold 1971) of ceramic production and my focus on what has come to be known as ‘technological choice’ among potters failed to provide much insight into understanding ceramic production outside of the ceramics in the communities that I studied. Those theoretical and conceptual perspectives, although helpful and useful, did not help me provide insight into another pottery making community except that ‘potters make choices’ about resources, vessel shapes, and design. I already knew that from my field work; it was very obvious to me. I had written several articles that incorporated potters’ choices that I called ‘decision trees’. (These articles will be added to this site in due time), and the frustration of the incomparability of my perspective from one pottery making community to another that led me to rethink my experiences with potters in Mexico, Peru and Guatemala, in order to discover new insights that were truly cross-cultural in scope. The results were generalizations, but not necessarily universals, in ’Ceramic Theory and Cultural Process’. Some of these generalizations challenged assumptions and generalizations that archaeologists used to interpret the past.  Finally, the article makes several updates to the ceramic resource model, and other feedback mechanisms in the book.

Publikacja „Archeologia Frontu Wschodniego Wielkiej Wojny i dziedzictwo konfliktów zbrojnych jako wyzwanie poznawcze, społeczne i konserwatorskie” (akronim: AFW) to wyraz potraktowania archeologii nie tylko jako praktyki poznawczej, ale także jako formy praktyki społecznej.

Badania naukowe i prospołeczne działania kulturotwórcze, których wyniki przedstawiamy w tej publikacji, zostały zrealizowane w latach 2020-2021. Stanowią one efekt dążenia do następujących celów:
– dążenie do kompleksowego zaprezentowania materialnych elementów przeszłości zinterpretowanych jako ślady działań wojennych z lat 1914-1915, które zostały zadokumentowane w wyniku badań wykopaliskowych
zrealizowanych do 2018 na Równinie Łowicko-Błońskiej;
– przedstawienie treści potencjalnie pomocnych w waloryzowaniu, kategoryzowaniu i konserwacji materialnych pozostałości I wojny światowej frontu wschodniego;
– upowszechnianie wiedzy na temat procesu archeologicznego, w wyniku którego materialne ślady Wielkiej Wojny frontu wschodniego, jako zabytki
archeologiczne, są i stają się obecne pośród nas
oraz
– upublicznianie (na forum lokalnym, krajowym i międzynarodowym) zarówno wiedzy na temat specyfiki materialnych pozostałości działań wojennych, które miały miejsce w latach 1914-1915 na obszarze znajdującym się w granicach dzisiejszej Polski, jak i argumentów
przemawiających za wysoką wartością historyczną, naukową i społeczną tych pozostałości.

Questa versione del programma è aggiornata al 20/05/2020 ed è sprovvista dei link per l'accesso alle sessioni plenarie e parallele, che saranno comunicati a seguire. Si consiglia di monitorare il sito web del convegno per eventuali aggiornamenti: https://ssg2020paesaggio.wordpress.com/ In collaborazione con:

While place-based pilgrimage is an embodied practice, can it be experienced in its fullness through built environments,
assemblages of souvenirs, and music? Imaging Pilgrimage explores contemporary art that is created after a pilgrimage and intended to act as a catalyst for the embodied experience of others. Each chapter focuses on a contemporary artwork that links one landscape to another-from the Spanish Camino to a backyard in the Pacific Northwest, from Lourdes to South Africa, from Jerusalem to England, and from Ecuador to California. The close attention to context and experience allows for popular practices like the making of third-class or "contact" relics to augment conversations about the authenticity or perceived power of a replica or copy; it also challenges the tendency to think of the “original” in hierarchic terms.

Imaging Pilgrimage brings various fields into conversation by offering a number of lenses and theoretical approaches (materialist, kinesthetic, haptic, synesthetic) that engage objects as radical sites of encounter, activated through religious and ritual praxis, and negotiated with not just the eyes, but a multiplicity of senses.

Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
List of Plates
List of Figures

Introduction: Art as Pilgrimage, Pilgrimage as Art

I. Vashon Island – Spain: A Backyard Camino
II. S. Africa – Lourdes: Souvenirs as Sites
III. England – Jerusalem: Rewilding through Pilgrimage Song and Chant
IV. Oakland – Ecuador: Haciendo marcas otra vez-Making marks, again
V. Los Altos (Labyrinth) – Beyond: "The end is where we start from"

Towards a Conclusion: "As Far as the Eye Can Travel"
Bibliography

(MA Thesis) This paper provides an landscape analysis of nineteenth century Genesee County, New York. The following discussion employs the concepts of Central Place Theory and Power of Place to examine the Euro-American construction of places within the landscape, and how the Iroquois Seneca nation was affected in their displacement as the primary occupants of Genesee County. This discussion provides an  example of the validity of Central Place Theory in an agricultural capitalist context. Population rank size analysis for the nineteenth century and analysis of collected archaeological material in a Cultural Resource Management (CRM) setting are utilized to demonstrate the distribution of a central place network in Genesee County.

The notion of standardization in pottery production has been used as an indicator of ceramic specialization. Yet, this notion and the assumptions behind it are still largely untested ethnographically. This paper attempts to identify some factors that affect the standardization of ceramic vessel shapes in Ticul, Yucatan, Mexico. A sample of 448 ethnographic vessels of three shapes were measured and analyzed statistically. Interpretation of these analyses within the ethnographic context of the workshop industry in Ticul provides insight into the factors associated with variability in dimensional uniformity as a function of market, technique, and the potter's own views of variability. In caution, we suggest that the coefficient of variation should not supplant the use of the standard deviation as an expression of standardization.

w w w . a s h g a t e . c o m w w w . a s h g a t e . c o m w w w . a s h g a t e . c o m w w w . a s h g a t e . c o m w w w . a s h g a t e . c o m the notion of landscape as it is articulated across current w w w . a s h g a t e . c o m w w w . a s h g a t e . c o m w w w . a s h g a t e . c o m w w w . a s h g a t e . c o m w w w . a s h g a t e . c o m

The number of cultural parks has been steadily increasing in recent years throughout the world. But what is a cultural park? This book provides a detailed answer to this question and sets out the basis for an academic debate that moves beyond the technical narratives that have prevailed to date. It is important to open up the topic to academic scrutiny given that cultural parks are becoming widespread devices being employed by different institutions and social groups to manage and enhance cultural and natural heritage assets and landscapes. The main problem in dealing with this topic is the predominant lack of theory-grounded, critical reflection in the literature about cultural parks. These remain largely conceived as technical instruments deployed by institutions in order to solve an array of problems they must deal with. As cultural parks are generally regarded as positive and constructive tools whose performance is associated with the preservation of heritage, the overcoming of the nature/culture divide, the reinforcing of identity and memory and the strengthening of social cohesion and economic development, this book critically explores these issues through the analysis of the literature on cultural parks. In addition, it provides a novel theoretical conceptualization of cultural parks that is connected with, and underpins, a tentative methodology developed for their empirical analysis.

O texto ensaia as noções de natureza e paisagem assimiladas na primeira semana de viagem de Goethe à Itália (de 3 a 10 de setembro de 1786). Nesses primeiros dias do itinerário percorrido ainda em terras germânicas, ambas as categorias orbitam no universo reflexivo do poeta: enquanto que a natureza dá voz a polaridades afins – empiria e sensibilidade, unidade e multiplicidade, objetivo e subjetivo – a paisagem seria um recorte da natureza apreendido sensivelmente, um quadro da natureza formulado pelo olhar (sentidos) treinado de um observador atento e localizado sobretudo no âmbito da estética. Busca-se, portanto, compreender a paisagem contemplada por Goethe para além das descrições geográficas dos lugares visitados e visualizados, mas privilegiando a conversão da natureza em arte.

Understanding the ways in which human communities define themselves in relation to landscapes has been one of the crucial research questions in anthropology. Place and Identity in Classic Maya Narratives addresses this question in the context of the Classic Maya culture that thrived in the lowlands of the Yucatan peninsula and adjacent parts of Guatemala, Belize, and Western Honduras from 350 to 900 CE. The Classic Maya world of numerous polities, each with its own kings and gods, left a rich artistic and written legacy permeated by shared aesthetics and meaning. Alexandre Tokovinine explores the striking juxtaposition of similar cultural values and distinct political identities by looking at how identities were formed and maintained in relation to place, thus uncovering what Classic Maya landscapes were like in the words of the people who created and experienced them. By subsequently examining the ways in which members of Classic Maya political communities placed themselves on these landscapes, Tokovinine attempts to discern Classic Maya notions of place and community as well as the relationship between place and identity.

Autorka artykułu podejmuje problematykę społecznego, a następnie materialnego zaniku wsi w powiecie piskim. Na obszarze tym, w następstwie przemian społeczno-politycznych po zakończeniu II wojny światowej, doszło do całkowitej depopulacji kilkudziesięciu różnych jednostek osadniczych. Powiat piski do 1945 roku znajdujący się w południowej części Prus Wschodnich, pograniczny od setek lat, przeszedł do interioru kraju, który odzyskał niepodległość w nowych granicach. W początkowych latach funkcjonowania w nowym organizmie państwowym traktowany był jednak niemal jak ziemia niczyja – a na pewno „obca” – z postrzeganymi jako obcy mieszkańcami i obcym dziedzictwem. Następstwem nastąpiły gwałtowne przekształcenia krajobrazu kulturowego, którego struktury jednak w dalszym ciągu przechowują liczne informacje. Przykładowo obecne rozmieszczenie opuszczonych jednostek osadniczych wskazuje przebieg dawnych granic politycznych. Takie przestrzenie natomiast, przypominając historię mazurskiej ziemi i jej mieszkańców, stanowią nadal swego rodzaju pogranicze – miejsca interakcji współczesnych z dziedzictwem, przeszłości z teraźniejszością. W powiecie piskim tylko w samym ścisłym pasie 10 km od południowej granicy dawnych Prus Wschodnich częścią krajobrazu kulturowego jest kilkadziesiąt jednostek osadniczych, w których nikt dziś nie zamieszkuje – 26 wsi i 7 leśniczówek. Ich struktury materialne są nośnikiem opowieści o dawnym i obecnym pograniczu.

The article describes a problem of social and material disappearance of villages in Pisz County. In this area, following the socio-political changes after the end of the Second World War, a total depopulation of several different settlement units took place. Pisz County – until 1945 located in the southern part of East Prussia, and already considered a borderland for hundreds of years – joined the interior of the country that regained its independence in the new borders. However, in the early years of its functioning in the new State organism, it was treated almost like a no-man’s land – and certainly an “alien” land – with its residents treated as strangers and its foreign heritage. The result has been a rapid transformation of the cultural landscape, but its structures still contain various information. For example, the current distribution of abandoned settlement units indicates the course of former political borders. In turn, their spaces, resembling the history of Masurian land and its residents, are still a kind of borderland; these are places of interaction: modern with heritage, the past with the present. In Pisz County – in the very zone of 10 km from the southern border of former East Prussia – a part of the cultural landscape is constituted by several settlement units, which nobody occupies today; these include 27 villages and 7 forester’s lodges. Their material structures tell the story of the former and present borderland.

This article provides an environmental justice reading of the film Manufactured Landscapes and Edward Burtynsky's photographs. It focuses on representations of materiality, such as how the bodies of workers interact with the environmental toxins with
and in which they work, and the limits of an aesthetics of beauty to account for global consumer complicity and risk. Burtynsky’s deployment of a “toxic sublime” (Peeples 2011) and the film’s
depiction of vital materiality ask audiences to reckon with the “dirty ecologies” (Morton 2009) of risk society’s “storied matter” (Bennett 2010), such as oil, e-waste, and invisible toxic fumes.
Burtynsky’s photographs foreground toxicity in ways that suggest that “beauty” is not a grounds for environmentalism in the Anthropocene, colluding with a paradigm of “health” that evades the “trans-corporeality” (Alaimo 2010) of human bodies. Moreover, attachment to beauty and health might, in fact, ironically engender toxicity. Through the film, Burtynsky’s works make visible the externalized costs of global consumerism to very specific bodies and very specific environments, and
draw audiences materially into relation with those costs, emphasizing what is termed in this article a material relationality. The author concludes that, despite eliciting sharp scholarly criticism, the film and Burtynsky’s photographs call for an aesthetic sensibility and form capable of revealing how
materialism facilitates global environmental justice.

When the Manchu established the Qing Empire on both sides of the Great Wall, they modified the landscape of the region of Jehol, north of Peking, which the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) had emptied of its local population. Before 1703, Chengde resembled the other imperial xinggong travel camps that the Qing dynasty (1644-1911) had established in Jehol. Between 1703 and 1792, the Kangxi and Qianlong emperors transformed this camp into the summer capital of the dynasty in order to concretize claims to political legitimacy. The newly created landscape of Chengde (“Virtue Bearer”) integrated visual symbols that made reference to significant places in the Qing empire that were located in China, Mongolia and Tibet. As a consequence of the creation of this imperial landscape, several relationships were defined or revised: the relationship between Chengde and the cultural universe of East and Central Asia; that between Chengde, Jehol and the northern Qing frontier; and that between Peking, Chengde and the hunting grounds of Mulan on the Emperor’s Road. The focus of this paper is on the relationship that links site and cosmogony. This article will discuss the Kangxi and Qianlong emperors’ interpretations of the site of the summer capital, their thorough mastery of Chinese and Buddhist concepts about nature, their familiarity with the distinct landscape architecture traditions of the Qing Empire, and finally images of the resulting landscape held by the two emperors. The creation of the Chengde landscape was clearly a political project, but the resulting landscape is also replete with non-political symbolic elements. One of my claims is that the man-made Jinshan Mountain is intended to represent the mythic Sumeru Mountain; as such it forms the symbolic pivot of the Bishu shanzhuang imperial residence and hence of the whole Manchu landscape enterprise. Scholars have not recognized the possibility of a cosmological reading of the landscape of the Manchu summer capital based on a comparison of the configurations of the imperial gardens with the Buddhist model of the universe. I would argue that this new way of reading the landscape of the Bishu shanzhuang gardens offers a more complete understanding of the imperial landscape of Chengde, beyond the more immediate political and geomantic interpretations of the site.

This essay explores Jia Zhangke’s 2006 film Still Life (Sanxia haoren) from two related perspectives: first, the still powerful discourse of realism that continues to shadow discussions of Chinese cultural production; and second, Jia’s formal and aesthetic experimentation. Beginning with a survey of some of the many types of “realisms” that have been ascribed to Jia, it goes on to situate his work within the context of a recent reappraisal of Bazinian realism that emphasizes the filmmaker’s ethical commitment to his or her subject. In Still Life, which centers on a handful of Three Gorges cities in the midst of being demolished to make way for the Three Gorges dam and reservoir, this ethical commitment is bodied forth by formal structures appropriated and adapted from earlier artistic forms. This virtuoso experiment in remediation and hypermediation draws from a broad array of sources–European portraiture, Socialist Realism and Chinese landscape painting, as well as Tang poetry and contemporary pop music–to reveal precisely how cultural practices have shaped and continue to shape the Chinese landscape. At the core of Jia’s aesthetic, historical and spatial investigations are the beleaguered people who have been forced to make way for the wholesale reconstitution of this particular landscape. These are, in the Chinese title of the film, the “good people of the Three Gorges."

This paper reports some refinements in the Threshold Model for Ceramic Resources based on distances to ceramic resources from ethnographic pottery making communities (Arnold 1985). The refinements make the thresholds more objective than they were in the previous model and enable it more precise application for identifying local vs. non-local ceramic production in the past.

Il contributo si pone l’obiettivo di analizzare criticamente la realtà dei
paesaggi italiani riconosciuti come Patrimonio dell’Umanità UNESCO, indagando i processi di territorializzazione ad essi collegati. Nello specifico si mettono in evidenza gli effetti del riconoscimento UNESCO in termini di costituzione di nuove reti di attori, trasformazione delle regole di tutela e gestione del paesaggio, affermazione di  rappresentazioni del territorio legate alla patrimonializzazione del paesaggio. L’ipotesi di partenza è che l’istituzione di un sito debba essere considerata come un progetto di territorio, guidato da reti di attori
che, mobilitando il patrimonio come risorsa e sfruttando la portata globale della WHL, intendono affermare le proprie strategie e i propri obiettivi. La ricerca utilizza un approccio teorico-metodologico innovativo nel campo degli studi sul patrimonio culturale, integrando
i concetti di territorio, territorialità e territorializzazione, con una prospettiva topologica e relazionale riguardo ai rapporti tra luoghi e tra scale.

Allegory prompts us to say of any cultural description not "this represents, or symbolizes, that" but rather, "this is a (morally charged) story about that." 1 This narrative redistribution interrupts the present as a closed continuum because it inserts and works with objects and experiences that are qualified by their spatial and temporal strangeness. 2

In Checco Zalone’s cinema, the landscape plays a leading role. In  Quo vado?, in particular, the relationship between the protagonist and the landscape opens up to a global dimension that renegotiates the localglobal dynamic in an identity key: first, Zalone crosses a series of marginal landscapes, making experiences of various topological disorientations, then, thanks to the match with a transformative landscape, it gradually abandons its provincial and local character, in favour of a new way that pushing him around the world, forces him to re-establish – to survive in the current context – a new balance between local identity, national identity and global identity.

Articula-se o conceito de Stimmung (estado de ânimo; atmosfera; caráter) à solidão, condição por vezes necessária à sintonia do ser com o mundo envolvente. As bases de interpretação teórico-metodológicas se circunscrevem em discursos literários e na pintura de paisagem alemães dos séculos XVIII e XIX. São convidados à narrativa textos e imagens de solitários na paisagem, como o Werther de Goethe, quadros de Caspar David Friedrich e as cartas do médico-pintor Carl Gustav Carus, criador do personagem Albertus que dá título ao artigo. O elo que une os seres poéticos e seus criadores é, a título de conjectura, a Stimmung, o trato recíproco entre a solidão (subjetividade) e a paisagem (arte, objetividade). Privilegia-se a análise epistemológica de Stimmung e de paisagem segundo leitura multidisciplinar, lançando luz na literatura, na filosofia (especialmente do Idealismo alemão), na história (social e da arte) e na estética. O título define o recorte cronológico proposto: o início se dá em 1774, quando Goethe publicou o seu "Os sofrimentos do jovem Werther"; o término refere-se ao ano de 1841, data em que Carus reeditou o seu Briefe über Landschaftsmalerei [Cartas sobre pintura de paisagem].

Saint Jerome in a Landscape is one of Lorenzo Lotto’s most remarkable works, created when Lotto painted in Rome alongside Raphael. Discussions of the panel focus on Lotto’s affinity for Raphael, yet overlook the most unusual features of the painting: the vigorous ‒ and un-Raphaelesque ‒ trees scattered in the middle ground and in the foreground, and the stump of a felled tree that mirrors the muscular torso of Jerome. This essay explores sources ‒ ranging from Dürer’s woodcuts and the Hypnerotoma- chia Poliphili to Michelangelo’s frescos in the Sistine Chapel ‒ that informed Lotto’s anthropomorphic lens. More generally, it looks at how Lotto’s arboreal protagonists comment on inspiration, transformation, and the relationship between painting and sculpture, nature and art, and humans and nature.