Boundless Worlds: An Anthropological Approach to Movement

By Peter Wynn Kirby

Where lived experience of surroundings is shifting, visceral, and immersive, interpretation of social spaces tends to be static and remote. "Space" and "place" are also often analyzed without grappling much (if at all) with the social, political, and historical roots of spatial practice. This volume embarks upon the novel strategy of focusing on movement as a way of understanding social spaces, which offers a means to get beyond biases inherent in the social science of space. Ethnographic studies of social life in settings as varied as nomadic Mongolia and island Melanesia, as distinct as contemporary Tokyo and war-torn Palestine, challenge Western assumptions about the universality of "space" and allow concrete understanding of how life plays out over different socio-cultural topographies. In a world that is becoming increasingly "bounded" in many ways - despite enormous changes wrought by technological, ideological, and other social developments - Boundless Worlds urges a scholarly turn, away from the purely global, toward the human dimension of social lives lived in conditions of conflict, upheaval, remapping, and improvisation through movement.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Release date: Dec 1, 2008
• ISBN: 9781782382157

Book preview

Chapter 1

Lost in ‘Space’: An Anthropological Approach to Movement

Peter Wynn Kirby

More than thirty years after our first encounter, both Belleville and I have

changed. But Belleville is still a place, while I am afraid I look more like a flow.

Manuel Castells (2000: 454)

The tension between place, memory, and change lies at the heart of human existence and, as Manuel Castells’s quotation cited above indicates, sometimes place allows us to understand just how mutable and protean our lives become. But that is not to say that places are fixed or even durable, save in relative terms. We live in a world shaped by flux. Islands of apparent stability are engulfed by a sea of human and animal peregrinations, linguistic and cultural change, emergent social institutions, traffic in goods as well as flows of ‘bads’ (such as disease and pollutants), circuits of material culture, exchange of images and ideologies, slow motion tectonic shifts, and climate change. Not least, our bodies are in constant motion with organs pumping fluids, lungs expanding and contracting with air, hair regenerating (or receding), bodies building and losing tissue, and cells undergoing continual birth and decay. Subject to buffeting motion and change in a broad sweep of socio-cultural contexts, it is not surprising that anthropologists find enduring attempts to create armatures of stability out of the vagaries of existence. Even the edifices we construct, which in comparison to flesh seem the essence of permanence and solidity, are effectively architectural illusions obscuring ongoing negotiation between dwellers, materials, design, and use. Movement and change – aggressively regulated, channelled, and even denied in the creation and maintenance of social institutions and the structuration of social relations – are the reviving undercurrent circulating throughout social life.

Yet while anthropology and other social sciences have long acknowledged the importance of addressing flux in socio-cultural inquiry, albeit with a diversity of approaches,¹ attention to the ramifications of movement remains relatively lopsided. Extensive work on migration and diaspora cultures and on social ‘movements’ provides important insights into the fluidity of people, culture, and ideas, as I detail below; and, indeed, the current emphasis in scholarship on transnational flows of everything from labour and images to pollution and contagion in our mediated, globalizing world reveals keen interest in certain specific forms of movement as objects of analysis (e.g., A. Ong 1999; cf. Tsing 2000, 2005). Nevertheless, a focus on certain emblematically transnational or ‘global’ movements exposes lacunae in, or neglect of, other elements of mobility and flux worthy of anthropological purview (e.g., Piot 1999). As ‘users’ are drawn into the compressed space of mediated communication and accelerated travel corridors, or folded into the altered temporalities to which hypertext and split-second electronic transactions give rise – creating discontinuities between the immediacy and rootedness of lived surroundings and distant or virtual planes – so social scientists often seem seduced by the immense speed and ‘flow’ (and novelty) of new circuits into paying less attention to more quotidian themes or settings (e.g., Castells 2000; cf. Harvey 1990). And as some accounts begin to discern metonymic traces of global processes in many forms of social movement (cf. Strathern 1995 and Tsing 2000, 2005 for salient critiques), human-scale experience of movement is neglected.

Globalization and globalism (the latter indexing discourse on the global) signal important and historic transformations in our world, transformations that beg careful anthropological analysis. Yet, as I explore below, ways of thinking about and addressing globalization expose problems in how anthropologists confront questions of movement that pose great difficulties for the discipline. Some of these interpretive obstacles have been created by the historical legacy of ‘space’ in Euro-American discourse.

Social scientists’ keen interest in ‘space’ in recent years stems, to a considerable extent, from the belief that spatial knowledge, architectures, symbolism, and action comprise an analytical cross-section of social phenomena that can help lead to a deeper, more insightful understanding of varied social contexts. Unfortunately, this chimera of ‘space’ often leads to vastly divergent results. Recent work in anthropology and other social science (detailed in the sections below, as well as in subsequent chapters in this volume) has made it increasingly clear that what is generally termed ‘space’ is guilty by association with a wide array of concepts from the European intellectual tradition that in fact lead us away from a clearer understanding of the multiplicities of social life. Indeed, far from being an unlucky bystander, ‘space’ has lain, in many ways, at the very heart of brutal European (and other) encroachments on less powerful societies, not to mention domination of domestic populations. Cartesian-influenced conceptions of space and linked technologies of power, such as cartography and development schemes, have etched political notions of segregation, domination, and control onto the surface of the world, reshaping the globe itself to ‘Western’ specifications – so much so, in fact, that it has become difficult to countenance use of this term without severely undermining research objectives. Against the backcloth of contemporary social developments, with stewardship of planetary ecology and responses to infectious disease pandemics complicated by uneven geopolitical terrain; with transnational flows of migrants, capital, and ‘culture’ making state frontiers seem increasingly arbitrary, obstructive, and anachronistic; with creation of far-flung social networks via communications technologies, expanded travel corridors, and other means of social and intellectual exchange continuing apace; and with heavy-handed counter-jihadist measures, however understandable at times, provoking public outcry at lost freedoms and unfortunate excesses, a sustained interrogation of ‘space’ and a renewed appreciation of movement seem particularly timely.

The collection’s attention to the politics of demarcation penetrates straight to the heart of these issues, particularly the tension between social boundaries and social movement reflected to some extent in the volume’s title. The political ramifications of ‘marking one’s territory’, common both to the competitive spraying of territory in the animal world and to the (often equally bestial) erection of boundaries between human groupings, are undeniable. But beyond these rites of possession and division, human engagement with the world consists of a ceaseless marking, and remarking, of our environs, a circulating interplay between the trammelled routes and existing toponyms that accrete to ‘places’ through history-laden social contact with terrain and the daily embodied iterations and symbolic interchange that transpire in the simplest journey or sensory immersion in a social milieu.² As several of the book’s contributors vividly illustrate, autochthonous notions of place, interval, and (topo)genealogy are, to be sure, laden with power.³ Yet Cartesian ideas of space seem particularly culpable in denying relations between ‘objects’ contained within its abstracted field. Therefore, while attuned to the important socio-political dimensions of topologies of hierarchy and exclusion and control in a range of societies, this volume remains sensitive to how the axes of space have been extended and overlaid on top of existing notions of relation, proximity, and affect, replotting in x,y,z co-ordinates alternative social mappings, and facilitating proliferation of a certain culturally-anchored set of political relations that have long been assumed as givens in all too many scholarly analyses.

This volume of essays brings together nine scholars whose thoughtful, rigorous, and penetrating socio-historical investigations give the lie to conventional understandings of space and its interpretation. These scholars have, each in their own way, distinguished themselves as shrewd investigators of alternative understandings of spatial phenomena specifically and as bold critics of ‘conventional wisdom’ in socio-cultural inquiry more generally. Taken together, the collected essays comprise a subtle and concerted assault on the constellation of familiar notions that combine to make ‘space/place’ not only a considerable hurdle impeding understanding of varied social groupings but, to some, an epithet reviling simplistic, ethnocentric or hackneyed thinking.

Significantly, this collection does not propose abandoning the term ‘space’ entirely (though one contributor, Tim Ingold, has argued that this is an essential first step (Ingold 2001)). Rather than coin new jargon or produce convoluted intellectual formulations, we prefer to construct a coherent and many-pronged attack on flawed invocations of this concept while pointing the way towards a more sensible and socio-historically sound account of the rich complexities of practical and symbolic interventions into human environs. A strong thread weaving through the contributions is the importance of movement: movement as an essential component of the effervescence and improvisation of social life, movement in defiance of political strictures, indeed, the inevitability of movement across or along spatio-political structures or boundaries intended to restrict movement, control dissent or difference, and pacify populations. The collected essays, in relating their research findings, reveal important dimensions of ‘topo-logics’ of richly varied provenance and, in turn, identify the ways in which human lives belie the cold, empty, passionless rationality of space as imposed in social settings and as implicated in some structuring of human thought itself.

One criterion for selecting essays – aside from a demonstrated sensitivity to the spatial politics of occupation, demarcation and movement – was a willingness to look beyond disciplinary boundaries. (To be sure, many of the volume’s critiques of policed geopolitical frontiers and enforced spatial/cultural protocols could be directed at overly zealous boundary maintenance between scholarly disciplines.) Another was the ability to combine broad theoretical sophistication with original and specialist research. The result is nine essays that consider appropriations and engagement in social milieux as diverse as contemporary Palestine, hinterland Mongolia, community Tokyo, and Island Melanesia; spatial dynamics of cross-cultural contact in colonial South Asia, on the one hand, and in multinational corporate France, on the other; and frictions between spatio-temporally localized traditions and global ambitions in both networked knowledge industries in rural Finland and in politically mobilized ‘post-diaspora’ Tibet. The essays taken as a whole comprise a concerted and coherent attempt to interrogate (largely ‘Western’) occupations and manipulations of space against the backdrop of how people actually move through, exist in, conceive of, and represent these spaces in their everyday lives in varied social contexts. Many anthropological collections analysing ‘space’ and/or ‘place’ (e.g., Low and Lawrence-Zúñiga 2003; Gupta and Ferguson 1997; as well as Feld and Basso 1996, to a lesser extent – Hirsch and O’Hanlon 1995 stands as a notable exception) dive into theoretical analysis of ethnographic subjectivities and experiences of place in our contemporary age without grappling much (if at all) with the social/political/historical roots of these important socio-cultural phenomena. In order to lay sturdy foundations for this discussion, I review and interpret below the rise of ‘space-thinking’ in European and diaspora societies (and its imposition on other parts of the world) before moving on to engage with alternative means of approaching the study of bodies and surroundings in a range of socio-cultural settings.

Making ‘Space’

Space has been in the making for millennia, and yet it is clear that the origins of ‘Cartesian’ space, as presently leveraged and experienced, extend back at least to Greek civilization’s intellectual achievement of creating rationality and abstraction out of the heterogeneity and unevenness of the world. While the intellectual roots of this process took sustenance from linguistic developments⁴ and a logic imposed on philosophical questions of all stripes, the trope of space grew most clearly out of mathematical advances (cf. Jonas 1982),⁵ perhaps most vividly illustrated by Euclidian geometry. Chief among these was the Greeks’ success in severing relations between objects, denying characteristics of place and creating infinite division and transferability within two-dimensional surface-planes and three-dimensional cones, spheres, polyhedra, and so on, in conceptual ‘space’ (Euclid 1990 [c.300 BCE]). Implicated in Greek metaphysics’ objectification and logic of conversion was a system of mnemonics, pioneered and refined into an ‘art’ (Yates 1966) by the Greeks, in which visualized spaces (often in fact places, rooms and corridors from actual buildings visited by devotees and etched in their mind’s eye through long hours of practice) became festooned with interchangeable images of objects and personae used to symbolize, store, and conjure up complex information (Yates 1966; Fabian 1983). Though these cavernous precincts of the mnemonically trained mind generally remained fixed, the contents of the architectonic spaces could be altered at will.⁶ This cold, rational conception of space – refined through subsequent centuries to the present day and resulting in a ‘spatialization of consciousness’ (Fabian 1983, emphasis removed) that shapes rhetoric, conceptions of the world, and their presentation (Fabian 1983; cf. Havelock 1982: 9, 311–12) – has had a pervasive influence on academic and other engagement with the world. Not only do memory and rhetoric and pedagogy bear the stamp of this spatialized approach to knowledge (W. Ong 1958), with spatio-cultural forms such as taxonomies, grids, kinship diagrams, and so forth shaping encounters with social data (Fabian 1983), but a complex of space-focused biases and stances and predispositions has created pervasive distortions in how social scientists, and others, interpret surroundings and the societies they study. Amid these conditions of persistent intellectual disengagement from lived experience, people continue to ‘see’ the world through the filter of space.

Developments of spatial representation in art and architecture both reflected and reinforced this process. To take painting, for example: from classical times through the Middle Ages there was extensive, though crude, use of two-dimensional media to represent three-dimensional scenes. But the refinement of linear-perspectival composition in Renaissance painting signalled an expansion of ‘space-thinking’ (and ocularcentrism)⁷ that would have important ramifications for European and other engagements with and representations of their surroundings. Leon Battista Alberti characterized perspective as a ‘velo’ (veil) of threads stretched across a frame and allowing the pyramid-shaped perspective of the scene to be perceived as a grid extending from the vanishing-point to the surface of the painting (from Alberti’s fifteenth-century De Pictura, cited in Edgerton 1975: 118) and then in a reverse pyramid from the surface of the painting to the viewer that implied (and imposed) a ‘monocular, unblinking, fixed eye’ (Jay 1993: 54; cf. Hirsch 1995). This Quattrocento perspectival reckoning framed the world in terms of a strict, sophisticated set of geometrical and optical principles – couched in the production of verisimilitude – and implicated the viewer in the structuring of the scene. In the hands of Florentine architect Brunelleschi and other artists and designers after him, the Albertian ‘veil’ of space-thinking began to transform the (re)production of space into an end in itself, prioritized over representing the objects contained within it.⁸ This subtle shift from an embodied experience of the world (a multi-sensory complex of knowledge and orientation, of which vision is an important component) to the practice of interpreting the world as a ‘field’ (cf. Gibson 1950; Jay 1993)⁹ is significant and wide-reaching. Naturally, lived sensory experience of body and surroundings is part and parcel of existence in any society, a point on which I elaborate in later sections. But the extensive diffusion of this form of space-thinking, a social logic otherwise known as the Cartesian perspective – from whose viewpoint the world is surveyed as an eerily disembodied zone, cross-cut with x,y,z axes designating human or material positions as co-ordinates on a conceptual grid – has had massive political ramifications that contributions to this volume address directly. Not only did spatialized thought shape Enlightenment philosophy and the development of modern science (Ong 1958; Yates 1966; Fabian 1983; Jay 1993; Casey 1997), but it has fuelled colonial, imperialist, and capitalist appropriation of territory framed in the peculiar social rhetoric of spatiality, a dimension I discuss below.

Marking the Territory

If historical study of past millennia on this planet can tell us anything, it is that human societies have long engaged in movement, exploration, intercultural contact, and often violent conflict and aggression (e.g., Gibbon 1983 [1781]; Frank 1998; Diamond 2005). Yet, partly by virtue of technological achievements (for example, in ship-building and navigation) that allowed states to project power far beyond their borders, recent centuries witnessed an explosion of political expansion, and predatory European states in particular appropriated distant territory with scant regard to populations suffering incursion. The political ramifications of space as a conceptual regime, described above, were tightly bound up in this process. Just as the spatial organization of knowledge from Ancient Greece onward led to discipline and control of facts to be manipulated by European and diaspora intellects, spatial ordering of societies was intended to wield and exert control over populations and resources for domestic stability and for geopolitical advantage. Most importantly, ‘savage’ regions came to be seen from colonial/imperial vantages as both ‘empty’, waiting to be filled (i.e., civilized), and as a woefully neglected and underdeveloped resource (Fabian 1983). In short, space existed to be occupied (Fabian 1983). Subjugation of far-flung lands, and occupation of territory, came to be justified under projects of colonial and imperial expansion in which this Cartesian spatial logic shaped how rapacious states viewed, approached, and justified encounters with other peoples and their domination. One key technology of this multilateral spatial regime was that of cartography. Several scholars (following Edgerton 1975) believe that the recovery of Ptolemy’s Geographia and its grid-based approach to mapping land likely aided fifteenth-century Europeans in honing perspectival representation.¹⁰ In turn, this dispassionate European conception of space as a homogeneous, ordered field also influenced the practice of map-making and map-thinking. On this latter point, Svetlana Alpers, for instance, notes the preponderance of the ‘mapping impulse’ in Dutch art and describes a dramatic increase in cartography in sixteenth-century Holland (Alpers 1983: 119, 134). But while early map-making betrayed a great deal of inaccuracy and artifice as inventive cartographers made up for gaps in knowledge and skill (Alpers 1983), in time mapping became a sophisticated instrument of power. As a conceptual field, ‘the mapping impulse’ was essentially a two-dimensional, vision-focused counterpart to the three-dimensional abstraction of space-thinking. And as societies and, in particular, elites began to conceive of the world as a flat, uniform surface in which the heterogeneity of societies and ecology were denied, so they also began to think in terms of bounded territories with clear borders – perhaps not so unlike a chessboard.

Once territorial space came to be viewed as a two-dimensional field whose contours could be calculated with precision, it could be filled and made productive.¹¹ Indeed, the marriage of space-thinking with the ‘mapping impulse’ led to a prevalent conception of the world as a uniform surface, marked by settlements and other features that became little more than dots on a map in the minds of elites. Not only was the diversity of topography reduced (or even eliminated) to the specifications of the type of map selected – layers of schematized data could be peeled away depending on whether the map was to be ‘topographical’, ‘political’, or otherwise, and could shift with respect to the legend and projection chosen – but maps began in turn to shape perception of landscape – for example, features (and peoples) not found on the map did not, in a sense, exist to the same degree for those for whom cartography had become ontology. (For an illustrative account of the cartographic biases of British officials in colonial South Asia, see Michael, this volume.)

The ‘Western’ colonialist/imperialist/capitalist legacy of occupation and appropriation of territory made adroit use of state technologies of knowledge, division and control. Naturally, this approach to power was not limited to foreign holdings, and the military and social motives for imposition of order that have shaped urban planning for centuries (e.g., Sennett 1994; Rabinow 2003) are just one example of how space and domination have had wider social application. (Eventual resistance against these disciplinary regimes, and related capitalist projects, came to a head in the postwar period, notably in neo-revolutionary, even ‘situationist’, post-1968 France (Debord 1983; Sadler 1998; De Certeau 1988), but such resistance has likely been pervasive in all manner of contexts, as banal as it may seem at times in less populated rural areas, for example (Scott 1985, 1976)). The numerous parallels we can discern in Foucault’s work on power/knowledge through spatial and other discipline of bodies make it tempting to conclude that the impact of space-thinking on the wielding of state power was ‘panoptical’. And, to be sure, the spatiality of knowledge that began as the memory palace and extended through the history of European art, architecture, and intellectual life reached a telling stage of development (and took a rather paranoid turn) when Jeremy Bentham in 1791 conceived of the ‘Panopticon’.¹² Particularly in the ocularcentrist ‘surveillance society’ of the contemporary industrialized world, where state objectives of counter-terrorist security through control of space are invoked with new urgency to justify all manner of surveillance, examination, interrogation, and exclusion, it is unsurprising that the metaphor of the Panopticon remains so persuasive in conveying the cold, eerie precision of a theoretical space/power/knowledge complex. Yet we should also recognize that this Victorian project of omniscience and linked projects of power/knowledge, as convincing and seductive as they are, fit into a larger discourse of space, mapping, occupation, and control described throughout this introduction rather than the other way around. In order to do justice to the complexity of this theme, it is essential not only to scrutinize the ways in which this dominant yet acephalous spatial regime has influenced objectification, subjugation, and appropriation of diverse areas of the world (continuing today disguised in development and free trade initiatives pushed by industrialized powers onto less prosperous areas of the planet (cf. Escobar 1995)), but to look furthermore at how other societies conceive of their surroundings, articulate social engagement, and enact relations through movement, as a number of contributors to this volume succeed in doing with cogent ethnographic analyses. Before addressing these specific themes in greater detail, however, I discuss how related anthropological theory can help us foreground some disciplinary biases in anthropology that both aid and obstruct clearer understandings of social dynamics in myriad areas of the world.

The Place of Anthropology

Anthropologists have not always successfully peeled away the ‘veil’ of space-thinking from interpretations of social action in field encounters. Yet the discipline has been far more dedicated than its disciplinary cousins in seeking to understand topo-logics from ‘native’ points of view. This commitment stems, undoubtedly, at least in part from the common experience of long-term ethnographic fieldwork in small-scale settings or among relatively circumscribed groups of informants, often in social settings with divergent means of constructing social knowledge and markedly different socio-cultural ‘reckoning’ of relation, proximity, and surroundings. Importantly, growing attention in recent decades to communities in complex ‘First World’ settings, in the world’s largest cities, and among dispersed, migrant, or itinerant groups has only served to underline the extremely resilient abilities of social groups to orient themselves even amid considerable dislocating forces (e.g., Hannerz 1969, 1980, 1992, 1996, 2004; Bestor 2001, 2004; A. Ong 1999; Yang 1997; Appadurai 1996; and Malkki 1995, to choose among many examples). Important work (e.g., Feld and Basso 1996; Gupta and Ferguson 1997; cf. Casey 1997) on ‘senses of place’ and the cultural underpinnings of place-orientation as key elements of ethnographic and ethnological analysis has brought field interpretations into the round, so to speak, allowing further understanding of the ‘lived’ and localized notions and actions through which peoples situate themselves in a range of societies. One glaring Cartesian hangover, however, is a lingering bias that imagines places as simply fitting into a container-like volume of space, including two-dimensional frames such as national or regional borders as inscribed on maps. (Meanwhile, a host of metaphorical invocations such as ‘analytical space’ or ‘interpretive space’, betraying at least the prevalence of the trope of space-thinking, if not always full awareness of its ramifications, appears all too commonly in anthropological work.) Amid the frequent interchangeable selection of ‘space’ and ‘place’, or ‘space/place’, and the array of different uses of these terms and approaches to these topics, it is hard to agree fully with the idea that there should be a sub-discipline called ‘the anthropology of space and place’ (see Low and Lawrence-Zúñiga 2003a, and especially Low and Lawrence-Zúñiga 2003b). Surely attunement to construction of, and engagement in, surroundings ought to be a component of any good ethnography. Indeed, as Ingold (2001) avers, the fact that these two terms, in English, rhyme and share 80 per cent of their letters must go a long way towards explaining why they crop up in stubborn proximity in sentences and titles far and wide. Perhaps worse (and no doubt due, in part, to the subtle, convincing arguments of ‘place’ scholarship described above), some eschew the term ‘space’ completely in favour of ‘place’ when describing social milieux. While on the surface this might seem like a refreshing step forward, ‘place’ when invoked on its own can become almost an un-reflexive, ‘disciplinarily-correct’, and flawed substitute for denigrated ‘space’ in less enlightened accounts, and links between the finite immediacy of locale and the broader experience of informants in wider social milieux can erroneously be assumed to be included within its narrower lexicographic scope. When this overemphasis on place is combined with a fascination for the global, a bizarrely schizophrenic theoretical ‘bipolar disorder’ materializes, with perhaps fewer social scientists even recognizing the need to stand astride the two extremes with theoretical consistency.

One way of projecting outward from place and taking account of broader horizons of experience is to reconcile place with landscape. (Of course, when immersed in the phenomenological flow of experience, moving through interpenetrating domains, there is no need for a theoretical ‘bridge’ between place and landscape – they transpose and modulate effortlessly and without reflection.) Landscape references a cultural ‘perspective’ on surroundings, particularly within the Euro-American intellectual and artistic tradition, which tends to see nature¹³ as a view imbued with the social and cultural/linguistic spatiocentrism described above. Obviously, ‘Western’ views of landscape have been influenced by history and political economy, such as the growth of a landed gentry in England, freed from working the land and able to keep it at a remove, who could eulogize the ‘natural’ in poetry and speech and participate in its representation in gardens or paintings (Williams 1988). (Indeed, Martin Jay calls these ‘aesthetic’ landscapes: ‘the real estate version of perspectival art’ (Jay 1993: 59).) When this politico-historical background is taken into account, however, the term landscape offers a neat functionality in moving beyond the confines of place into the full ambit of human iterations and encounters. Crucially, place retains a perceiving subject, even if the subject in question exists outside of milieux firmly grounded in traceries of social relations, enduring paths of iteration, and mnemonic cues (e.g., Mondragón, this volume). While space is ‘divorced as much as possible from a subject-position’, place remains embedded in phenomenological experience, sensed ‘from a specific (subjective) vantage point’ (Hirsch 1995: 8). Landscape, alternatively, resonates with both subjective and cultural significance. The interplay between these crucial social and phenomenological dimensions of everyday enactments of, and navigations through, landscape gives the term, properly defined, a certain cogency when trying to convey the fluid character of localized practice and social movement, particularly in ethnographic terms – as demonstrated throughout this collection.

Hirsh’s introduction to The Anthropology of Landscape (Hirsch and O’Hanlon 1995) provides an excellent distillation of the ‘foreground’ and ‘background’ qualities of social landscapes (Hirsch 1995: 3), demonstrating the subtle, emergent, processual nature of experiencing phenomena and interpreting the terminological constructs anthropologists and others use to convey the phenomenology of movement and action. In particular, the chapter succeeds in evoking the fluidity of human experience between the heterogeneous surfaces and horizons of day-to-day life – or ‘landscape as … process’ (Hirsch 1995: 5) in which a foreground of being and action points to ‘actuality’ while background augurs ‘potentiality’ – in other words, stages of action towards multiple futures (Hirsch 1995: 3). In discussing many of the terms common to spatial accounts in anthropology and elsewhere, Hirsch stresses the connections and semantic overlaps with which they resonate:

They are … moments or transitions possible within a single relationship, analogous to the experience of a person momentarily losing his/her way on a familiar journey before relocating him/herself by reference to an external perspective; or to the ‘empty place’ which periodically fills the ‘foreground’ experience before receding to its customary ‘background’ location. … Landscape thus emerges as a cultural process (Hirsch 1995: 5–6, emphasis in original).

Hirsch, moreover, makes a convincing case for a positioning of landscape ‘between place and space’ (Hirsch 1995: 1) – importantly, in my opinion, he elects to preserve and refine the term space rather than abandon that conceptual register of analysis or fabricate a neologism. Space as ‘background’, ‘horizon’, ‘potentiality’ (Hirsch 1995: 4), remaining only relatively undefined in a processual landscape until becoming engaged with by subjective actors, seems truer to social experience and still allows for cognitive and mnemonic engagements with ‘spaces’ not presently inhabited, but conceived or remembered. The book’s collective decision to take the ‘conventional (Western) notion of ‘landscape’ … [as a] productive point of departure from which to explore analogous local