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1.
As visions of ecological crisis mark the daily headlines, industrial spaces of intensive energy and material consumption become a more intense object of political and social concern. In this article, I attempt to situate geography's relative neglect of the ecological underpinnings of industrial capitalism within the context of the history of geographical thought. I argue that the ways in which geographers read the hyphen in the phrase “nature‐society” reveals epistemological limits to their object of study. I then offer three dramatically different readings of the hyphen and discuss how they have affected the lineages and trajectories of geographical research—Barrows's human ecology, Sauer's cultural landscape, and critical theories of social nature. I conclude by suggesting that geography needs to let go of its empirical and conceptual fixation on “nature”.  相似文献   

2.
The state of Kerala in India is known for its active civil society and the massive decentralization campaign launched in 1996. However marginalization of tribal communities hampers the state's decentralized environmental management strategies. The proposed construction of a dam along the Chalakkudy River will displace two colonies of the Kadar tribe in Chalakkudy and Athirapilly towns, destroy habitats of local wildlife and devastate unique riverine vegetation endemic to the region. This brings to light issues of social and environmental justice as well as a wider responsibility to protect and preserve unique flora and fauna. The state's decentralization strategies, as they relate to tribal communities, lack consideration of local power distribution and cultural conditioning. This raises questions about the state's role in social justice as well as biodiversity conservation. In 2010 and 2011, the author's interviews in Chalakkudy and Athirapilly towns reveal that tribal communities perceive that their place in society restricts their contribution regarding natural resource management and use. The paper suggests that unless the culture of planning and decision making in the state are changed, decentralized strategies will be ineffective, resulting in a predominately top‐down approach towards natural resource management, and will negate Kerala's goal of democratic decentralization.  相似文献   

3.
Novelists responded immediately to the earthquake that struck Haiti on January 12, 2010. Analysis of key works demonstrates the numerous images and interpretations that the catastrophe has generated among Haitians, and is valuable as a source for indigenous understandings of the altered nature of place in Haiti. Literature offers insight into the Haitian view of the earthquake's effect on gender relations, family structures, urban migration and development, and memory. Literature also participates in the country's reconstruction by articulating the challenges and opportunities faced by Haitian society, and by providing a space for therapeutic self‐expression. In this literature we witness the development of the language, attitudes, emotions, and meanings that are and will be the earthquake's cultural legacy.  相似文献   

4.
Over the past century the cultural and physical landscape of the Shire of Denmark on the south coast of Western Australia has been transformed by successive waves of in-migrants. The paper examines the period since the early 1970s when alternative lifestylers and early retirees, attracted by the district's natural beauty and low land prices, began moving in and acquiring former Group Settlement holdings. The activities of these and subsequent 'alternatives' and 'cashed out' early retirees settling in the district have raised the marketability of the Shire's cultural capital. These changes have occurred in association with broader processes of rural restructuring and changing notions of 'rurality'. Increasingly, Denmark's cultural and physical landscape has become a highly marketable product for consumption by Perth's affluent middle classes. In recent years land prices have risen rapidly as speculators and financiers seek to 'cash in' on the 'cashed out' society. The paper explores these issues and relates them to broader processes of economic and social change occurring at the national and international levels.  相似文献   

5.
ABSTRACT. The house‐lot garden in central Mexico is gendered space where changing cultural identities are negotiated, re‐created, and celebrated as “tradition” is continually redefined. No clear boundary separates the kitchen from the house‐lot garden or the private space of the household from the semipublic space of the community. During collective food preparation for religious fiestas, gendered reciprocity networks strengthen community relations and foster alliances between traditional neighborhoods and between communities in the region. At the intersection of everyday life and fiestas, food‐preparation spaces, or kitchenspaces, in the house‐lot garden are fertile areas in which to explore the cultural reproduction of nature‐society relations. They are vital to understanding gender, place, and culture in this region and represent people's symbolic connection with the land in increasingly urban contexts. This article analyzes the sense of place that Mexican women derive from their house‐lot gardens.  相似文献   

6.
MAKING SUSTAINABLE CREATIVE/CULTURAL SPACE IN SHANGHAI AND SINGAPORE*   总被引:1,自引:0,他引:1  
ABSTRACT. Shanghai and Singapore are two economically vibrant Asian cities that have recently adopted creative/cultural economy strategies. In this article I examine new spatial expressions of cultural and economic interests in the two cities: state‐vaunted cultural edifices and organically evolved cultural spaces. I discuss the simultaneous precariousness and sustainability of these spaces, focusing on Shanghai's Grand Theatre and Moganshan Lu and on Singapore's Esplanade—Theatres by the Bay and Wessex Estate. Their cultural sustainability is understood as their ability to support the development of indigenous content and local idioms in artistic work. Their social sustainability is examined in terms of the social inclusion and community bonds they engender; environmental sustainability refers to the articulation with the language of existing urban forms and the preservation of or improvements to the landscape. Although both Shanghai and Singapore demonstrate simultaneous precariousness and sustainability, Singapore's city‐state status places greater pressure on it to ensure sustainability than does Shanghai, within a much larger China in which Beijing serves as the cultural hearth while Shanghai remains essentially a commercial center.  相似文献   

7.
Initially, seven usages of the term cultural landscape in Norwegian academic literature are discussed: as an areal category, as a chronological stage of development, as the human components of any landscape, as countryside, as heritage, as scenery with esthetical qualities, and as elements in the landscape with meaning for human activity. The development of cultural landscape studies in different disciplines is then examined as a response to varying assessments of relevance for problems of society. Finally, the geographer's contribution to Norwegian cultural landscape studies is assessed.  相似文献   

8.
SCARING CROWS*     
A long‐form essay, arranged in a sequence of eight segments, in which I travel the countryside in search of a missing person: the scarecrow. Different aspects of the centuries‐old practice of scarecrow making and bird scaring are described. Traditionally constructed as a likeness of the human form and erected in newly sown fields as a visual method for warding off feeding birds, the existence of this striking farmland contraption is variously reported: as having all but vanished and yet of making unexpected reappearances; as materially functional and complexly meaningful; as a figure summoned up by cultural memory and personal recollection; and as a focus for mixed feelings of loss, nostalgia, estrangement, and community. A version of “geographical portraiture” accumulates, in which a single, scenic landmark stands as the essay's central fascination and simultaneously operates as a cipher for stories old and new, of agricultural society, country life, landscape politics, and rural values.  相似文献   

9.
ABSTRACT. The war in Iraq has spanned the full spectrum of military operations: intense combat, stability‐and‐support operations, and peacetime activities. Regardless of their nature and relative intensity, military operations are shaped by the characteristics of the military operating environment. Consequently, the scale, tempo, and complexity of any type of military endeavor are linked to the physical and cultural landscapes of the region in which it is conducted. Military geographers use geographical information, tools, and techniques to examine those links. Iraq's operating environment is studied to identify the relevant components of its physical and human geography. This military geographical examination of Iraq tells us a great deal about how the physical and cultural environment have influenced the war, as well as how the complexity of its human landscape continues to affect the postwar rebuilding of the country.  相似文献   

10.
This paper focuses on Hong Kong's Gravesweeping Festivals, Qingming and Chongyang. The practices carried out in urban cemeteries at these Festivals are over two thousand years old, and represent “time out” from modern “clock time”. They are examined in the context of Giddens' (1985) reworking of Hägerstrand's time‐space geography, and of Douglas' (1966) discussion of pollution. It is suggested that the cemeteries are regarded as dangerous places because they represent liminal spaces. Giddens' dimension of span enables a distinction to be made between, on the one hand, the long‐established cultural significance of the grave, and, on the other, the recentness of the urban cemetery. The dimension of form(redefined from Giddens' original concept), applied to some details of cemetery landscapes, reveals the “worlds apart” of the non‐material worlds of the spirits and of fengshui. By considering the Festivals in the light of Giddens' dimension, character, it emerges that the Gravesweeping Festivals are, as they have been for centuries, firmly embedded in Hong Kong's social system, where routines of ancestor veneration continue to renew and strengthen the family bonds that are at the heart of Confucian values. Furthermore, their continued observation may well represent practices that are of deep ontological significance to the predominantly immigrant community of Hong Kong.  相似文献   

11.
Agricultural development at Quitovac, a Sonoran Desert oasis that is an ancestral home of the Tohono O’odham people, was first interpreted in the literature as a typical example of an indigenous community succumbing to the economic pressures of industrial society. However, a humanistic analysis of the cultural and historical context and the results of ethnographic fieldwork leads to a radically different interpretation of recent community actions. Community‐initiated institutional and economic changes can be understood as creative and resilient adaptations, and perhaps a resolution, to a complex social and religious challenge to the community's identity. Notwithstanding the economic failure of part of the development efforts, the overall effects are interpreted as strengthening the residents’ sense of their home place and ensuring the continuation of religious rites associated with this sacred place.  相似文献   

12.
Since 1986, Burning Man has evolved from an obscure bohemian San Francisco solstice celebration into the world's largest intentional community, anchored by annual burns on a playa in Nevada's Black Rock country. Participants embrace an ethos that radically challenges mainstream culture through Black Rock City's yearly (re)formation, negotiation, immolation, and deconstruction. Voicing curiosity, as humanists, in who we are, what we do, and why we do it, we examine rituals associated with this transitory yet international‐scale event. Such happenings imply a human need to seek clarity, dwell in close confines, and engage with a utopian desire for concerted communal participation. Yet, there exist historical‐cultural paradoxes associated with Burning Man, including steep entry barriers that reinforce an elite homogeneous population no longer representative of Burning Man's distinctive California roots.  相似文献   

13.
ABSTRACT. In 1940, Berkeley graduate‐student geographers Robert West and James Parsons traveled to Mexico's Sierra Madre Occidental to retrace the Topia Road, colonial Mexico's main trans‐Sierran trail linking isolated mountain mining hamlets with the Pacific Coast and the world beyond, a journey chronicled in a 1941 Geographical Review article. Almost sixty years later, we document an attempt to retrace West and Parsons's route. Based on field observations, interviews with local informants, replication of Parsons's photographs, and his field notes, we evaluate landscape alteration in what West and Parsons referred to as some of the most isolated settlements in Mexico. We assess changes in the still‐remote communities along the route in terms of three influences: mining, migration, and drug trafficking.  相似文献   

14.
ABSTRACT. In the nineteenth century, local‐scale roads in central Kentucky were built subject to local knowledge and cultural tradition but within the context of legal authority and folk‐ or science‐based engineering precepts. This study demonstrates how legal and engineering standards‐though conceived as transcendent and objective‐were in fact contingent on the region's physical attributes as well as its cultural traditions and character. Thus local road alignment and construction have been influenced by and contingent on local knowledge, dialogue, and debate since frontier times.  相似文献   

15.
The Missouri Compromise of 1820 had a significant impact on northwest Missouri's settlement patterns. Missouri's slave state status attracted a higher number of southern pioneers than what would have normally been expected. These early settlers brought with them their entire cultural‐economic system—the production of hemp and tobacco with slave labor. Within the Platte region, the geographic distribution of these cultural variables is explained by pioneer origins. Those areas settled primarily by Upper Southerners possessed the greatest number of slaves and produced the most hemp and tobacco. The findings demonstrate that by 1850 the Upper South's slave culture had been transplanted to northwest Missouri's Platte region.  相似文献   

16.
ABSTRACT. Landscape interpretation, or “reading” the landscape, is one of cultural geography's standard practices. Relatively little attention, however, has been paid to reading landscapes transformed by insurgency movements or civil wars. Those landscapes can tell us a great deal about past and present political and social relationships as well as continuing power struggles. Guatemala presents a complicated postwar landscape “text” in which the struggle for power continues by many means and media, including how the war is portrayed on memorials, and in which the Catholic Church and the military/state are the two main competing powers. This essay explores some of the images and the text presented in Guatemala's postconflict landscape through contrasting landmarks and memorials associated with the country's thirty‐six‐year‐long civil war that formally ended in 1996.  相似文献   

17.
Although the partial outsourcing of state border control to non‐state actors is not a new phenomenon, Indonesia is an interesting case study. Border control in an archipelago consisting of more than 17 000 islands is particularly challenging for state authorities. In addition to contending with the exceptional geography, Indonesia's state authorities are also challenged by the political constellation with Australia in regard to irregular cross‐border movements of asylum seekers that has become a controversial issue in recent history. As an important transit country for asylum seekers and refugees en route to Australia, Indonesia's porous borders have rendered it possible to enter and exit the country relatively easily. Given Australia's political pressure and the financial incentives offered to Indonesia to act as a ‘final bulwark’ and control irregular migration flows more effectively, border control nowadays has gained more significance in Indonesia than in the past. Yet, financial constraints and, more importantly, a lack of political will to host asylum seekers in its own territories for the long term remain as obstacles. Fieldwork observations show that due to ongoing funding restrictions for state‐led border control, state‐society cooperation for border surveillance has increased. Civilians in many hotspots for irregular border crossings have been encouraged to report on ‘suspicious foreigners’. State‐society cooperation for border control, however, offers new opportunities for people smugglers to pay off civilian spies or corrupt border authorities.  相似文献   

18.
ABSTRACT. Wilbur Zelinsky's classic 1977 account of the Pennsylvania town as a cultural place type–the urban component of the nationally influential Pennsylvanian culture region–acknowledged that it was not exported intact across the successive western frontiers of the United States. But, aside from Edward Price's specialized study of courthouse squares, we know little that is systematic about how town‐planning ideas diffused across the continent. This investigation offers evidence from the Willamette Valley in Oregon of the eventual variety and geographical distribution of town‐platting conventions that developed in this Pacific Coast “destination’ setting and the possible provenance in the Ohio Valley of certain early Oregonian town‐plan features. The evidence raises questions about the resilience of town‐planning conventions in light of the distance carried, cultural time lags, and changing ideas about best practice and local suitability.  相似文献   

19.
ABSTRACT. Wilhelmine Germany had a powerful economy and, after 1898, began construction of a fleet to challenge Great Britain's global power. This article analyses Germany's cultural “will to power” in the period through the eyes of the avant‐garde, Munich‐published weekly magazine Simplicissimus as it examined the series of security crises between 1896 and the outbreak of war in 1914. The magazine was no fan of Wilhelmine militarism, its principal artist having been jailed for criticism of the kaiser, but it showed a deep support for Germany's rise to power on moral grounds. Many illustrations dealt with global power projection through the navy and the need for a suitable security partner within Europe. Its illustrators depicted Great Britain as an immoral world power only Germany might check and France as its preferred security partner to keep Europe at peace.  相似文献   

20.

An interest in culture developed in human geography from its beginning. It was rooted in a conception of 'geography as a science of places, not of men' (Vidal de la Blache), and focused on the study of man/milieu relationships through the analysis of landscapes or genres de vie , the origin and dispersal of agriculture, and the regional diversity of the earth. A neo-Weberian orientation appeared in the 1960s, but the main shift occurred in the 1970s, with the adoption of phenomenological or critical perspectives. The new cultural approach modernises the traditional orientations in the field, explores the meaning that people give to their spatial experience, and introduces new questions about the epistemological foundations of geography as a scientific discipline. In order to understand how society is produced and reproduced and how significance is given to the world, the new approach stresses the role of communication in cultural processes and spatial organisation.  相似文献   

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