From Jenny Blain ...
Dear all,
This panel cfp is at
http://www.nomadit.co.uk/asa/asa2011/panels.php5?PanelID=936 and
proposals are submitted via that link. We're already getting
proposals. You can also get there via http://www.theasa.org/ and go
to 'ASA11' call for papers.
The cfp closes 29 April 2011.
Jenny
ASA11: Vital powers and politics: human interactions with living things
University of Wales Trinity Saint David, 13/09/2011 - 16/09/2011
Panel 24
British landscape, heterotopia and 'new animism'
Convenors
Jenny Blain (Sheffield Hallam University)
Robert Wallis (Richmond University)
Short Abstract
Commonly, presentations of place deal in humanly-inscribed meaning,
in viewing, shaping, protecting landscape. This panel invites
discussion and theorising of places and component beings as creators
of meaning and change, asking what anthropology brings to
understanding of other-than-human agency.
Long Abstract
Conventional portrayals of landscape, seascape, townscape within
Britain, present either a 'wild' unpopulated, mysterious and
'unspoilt' tourist destination, or a human-created, moulded place be
it of farmland, town centre, suburban garden. Viewers are invited to
look, to explore, to protect, to preserve, to restore, to further
shape: agency here lies with the architect, planner, tourist or tour
guide, farmer, promoter, heritage manager, in short with human
people. Heterotopic spaces are ones in which humans, in such
human-centric focus, inscribe multiple or changing meanings.
Sacred landscapes, however, in other discourses may have their own
agency, as may other-than-human people within these - trees, ancestor
spirits, reindeer, rivers. They call to some people, exclude others,
and have their own being and historical trajectory to which human
activity may be peripheral. We ask here, what anthropologists can
bring to an exploration of agency of these landscapes of Britain, or
of how the slow pace of life of a yew tree, the swift pace of a
goldfinch creates its own context and meaning.
The panel invites presentations of how landscape or its components
engage with humans; including exploration of (human) discourse on
what Harvey (2005) terms 'new animism', and theorised discussion of
tensions between discourses of protection and discourses of 'being
changed' by place.
--
Dr J. Blain [log in to unmask] [log in to unmask]
Programme Leader, MRes Social Sciences
Faculty of Development and Society, Sheffield Hallam University
Collegiate Crescent Campus
Southbourne, 37 Clarkhouse Road Sheffield, UK S10 2LD
0114 225 4413 07919 556371
home address: 18 Lemont Road, Sheffield S17 4HA
0114 262 1342 07919 556371
Sacred Sites, Contested Rites/Rights, Sussex Academic Press 2007
Researching Paganisms, Altamira 2004
Nine Worlds of Seid-Magic: Ecstasy and neo-Shamanism in North
European Paganism, Routledge 2002
http://www.sacredsites.org.uk/
http://wyrdswell.co.uk/
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