Landscapes on-the-move

Abstract

Both archaeologists and anthropologists have been slow to address the question of how people on the move engage with landscape. Anthropologists have tended to discuss the larger political and social terrain of diaspora without too much consideration of what this might involve in terms of intimate and personal engagement. Archaeologists espousing a more phenomenological approach have focused on intimate and personal engagement with place and well-worn territory, without acknowledging that these often work within larger, less familiar landscapes of movement. The article attempts to move between the two approaches, between different and interlocking scales of human activity and understanding. It attempts to show that however ‘out of place’ people may be, they are also always ‘in place’.

Topography and scale in a community-driven maternal and child health program in Eastern Indonesia

“…In theory, and in the words of policy experts in Jakarta, these two programs are complementary, but on the ground where supply and demand meet, they compete and confound, producing unexpected friction (Tsing 2005). The view of this therapeutic landscape changes based on where one stands, leading to 'polysemic' (Bender 2001) interpretations of which sites matter most in determining the causes of and solutions for poor maternal and child health outcomes. Competing policy priorities force the question: are government clinics or communities more accountable for delivering improved health outcomes?…”

An Experiment in Using Visual Attention Metrics to Think About Experience and Design Choices in Past Places

“…Indeed, the next major phase in archaeological analyses based on the visual properties of place was tied up with the emergence of postprocessualism, and in particular with postprocessual landscape archaeology. Scholars such as Bender (Bender 1993; Bender 1999; Bender 2001 linked the experience of place, including the visual experience, to people's roles as cocreators of landscapes and the built environment, and argued that a holistic multisensory (including visual) approach to past experience of places is necessary to understand humanplace interactions. With the emergence of a postprocessual set of approaches to the visual properties of past places, and an attendant desire to achieve veridic models of human experience of places, came an interest in realistic and hyperrealistic visualizations, through which a modern person might attempt to approximate past experiences of that place.…”

The Temporality of the Landscape Revisited

“…'The Temporality of the Landscape' has been criticized as failing to consider power, inequality and the historical specificity of social relations (Bender 2001); as evoking an 'overall tone of harmonious coherence, in part because of his human-centred focus on a quotidian taskscape', which risks the 'human and often individualistic selfabsorption' of mere performativity (Massey 2006, p. 41). But its most puzzling incoherence lies in its presentation of archaeology as somehow the opposite of a modern Western discipline, without its intimate and ambivalent connections with the Western colonial project, the European landscape tradition, the development of state control of the past, modernist regimes of urban and rural planning and the industrialized construction industry.…”