CASCA 2015 Session Proposal - Knowledges of Landscapes: Differential Chronotopes and the Experience, Representation, and Meanings of Land

CASCA 2015 Session Proposal

Knowledges of Landscapes: Differential Chronotopes and the Experience,
Representation, and Meanings of Land

Western frameworks, reflecting their development within
urban-industrial regimes in which landscapes are not and perhaps
cannot be lived, suggest that knowledge of and appreciation for
landscape are phenomena of other spaces and/or times. In relation, and
regardless of how they are peopled, 'natural' and 'pristine'
landscapes are diminished in cosmopolitan modernity. Objectified,
suffused with romanticism and nostalgia, mediated, packaged and
ritually consumed as tourism and heritage, and yet effectively
forgotten on an everyday basis amid rapid social and technological
change, landscapes nevertheless remain intrinsic and central
contributors to personal, ethnic, and national subjectivities and thus
can also become important tropes for reification and resistance. Given
these contexts, how is the landscape to be appreciated, known,
experienced, represented, mediated, recorded? How are anthropologists
to know the landscapes of others? Do landscapes and other related
figurations of persons in material space and time become resurgent in
response to modernity and indeed hyper/supermodernity?

Interested contributors are invited to submit an abstract of at most
150 words, accompanied by contact and affiliation information and a
short list of keywords, by February 1, 2015, to session organizer
Nicola Mooney (University of the Fraser Valley) at: nicola.mooney@ufv.ca