The anthropology of landscape (P02855)

? Credit Points : 20 ? SCQF Level : 11 ? Acronym : SPS-P-sps

This course examines the politics of place, space and landscape. The first half of the course explores how anthropology has developed different theoretical approaches to the study of landscape, including landscape as representation, the phenomenology of landscape and landscape as process. Throughout the course ethnographic works will be examined which illustrate the infusion of power in space, the contested nature of landscape, and the way in which landscapes both feed into and are produced by the complex plays of power and resistance at overlapping levels. The second half of the course focuses on particular themes that have emerged from the anthropology of landscape, including the relationship between landscape, memory and the past; landscapes of movement, migration and landscape learning; nature/culture, environmentalism and conservation; and urban landscapes. The last lecture will explore more recent debates about materiality, the agency of objects and how these can be usefully explored and deployed in a landscape context.

Entry Requirements

none

Subject Areas

Home subject area

Social Anthropology, (School of Social and Political Science, Schedule J)

Delivery Information

? Normal year taken : Postgraduate

? Delivery Period : Semester 2 (Blocks 3-4)

? Contact Teaching Time : 1 hour(s) 50 minutes per week for 10 weeks

Summary of Intended Learning Outcomes

Advanced knowledge and understanding of the complex and multifaceted ways in which landscape and environment are imagined, constructed, experienced and contested, and the role that ideas and knowledge of the place and space, nature & culture, landscape and environment play in the complex politics of identity and state-making, in colonial, postcolonial and nationalist contexts. Advanced recognition and understanding of the complex roles that place, space and landscape, in both ideational/discursive and material ways, can enable and limit the imagination/invention/constructions of the past, present and future and in turn how notions of the past, present and future inform, enable and limit the means by and through which landscape and place are understood, engaged with and managed, and the way in which these complex struggles over place and the past are both inscribed in and produce space and landscape.