Cultural Landscapes In India

Most people view cultural heritage sites as static places, frozen in time. In Cultural Landscapes of India, Amita Sinha subverts the idea of heritage as static and examines the ways that landscapes influence culture and that culture influences landscapes. The book centers around imagining, enacting, and reclaiming landscapes as subjects and settings of living cultural heritage. Drawing on case studies from different regions of India, Sinha offers new interpretations of links between land and culture using different ways of seeing--transcendental, romantic, and utilitarian. The idea of cultural landscape can be seen in ancient practices such as circumambulation and immersion in bodies of water that sustain engagement with natural elements. Pilgrim towns, medieval forts, religious sites, and contemporary memorial parks are sites of memory where myth and history converge. Engaging with these spaces allows us to reconstruct collective memory and reclaim not only historic landscapes, but ways of seeing, making, and remembering. Cultural Landscapes of India makes the case for reclaiming iconic landscapes and rethinking conventional approaches to conservation that take into consideration performative landscape as heritage.

In Landscapes in India, Amita Sinha shows that landscapes can be read like languages, as arrangements of symbols that reveal cultural values. South Asian landscapes'rich with formalized symbols, from the Cosmic Tree in Buddhist landscapes to cities patterned on mandalas'offer a training ground for reading landscapes everywhere. In a readable narrative heavily illustrated with spectacular color photographs, Sinha introduces readers to sacred and secular landscapes, identifying archetypal forms that have evolved over millennia. According to Sinha, landscape symbols express all that a culture holds dear and externalize deeply felt emotions'of security, kinship, and relationship with the divine. Architects, landscape architects, and planners will rely on this beautiful book's idation of archetypal forms and how they co-evolve with nature and culture. Landscapes in India also offers fresh perspectives for travelers and readers interested in geography, anthropology, and religion.

One of our deepest needs is for a sense of identity and belonging. A common feature in this is human attachment to landscape and how we find identity in landscape and place. The late 1980s and early 1990s saw a remarkable flowering of interest in, and understanding of, cultural landscapes. With these came a challenge to the 1960s and 1970s concept of heritage concentrating on great monuments and archaeological locations, famous architectural ensembles, or historic sites with connections to the rich and famous. Managing Cultural Landscapes explores the latest thought in landscape and place by: airing critical discussion of key issues in cultural landscapes through accessible accounts of how the concept of cultural landscape applies in diverse contexts across the globe and is inextricably tied to notions of living history where landscape itself is a rich social history record widening the notion that landscape only involves rural settings to embrace historic urban landscapes/townscapes examining critical issues of identity, maintenance of traditional skills and knowledge bases in the face of globalization, and new technologies fostering international debate with interdisciplinary appeal to provide a critical text for academics, students, practitioners, and informed community organizations discussing how the cultural landscape concept can be a useful management tool relative to current issues and challenges. With contributions from an international group of authors, Managing Cultural Landscapes provides an examination of the management of heritage values of cultural landscapes from Australia, Japan, China, USA, Canada, Thailand, Indonesia, Pacific Islands, India and the Philippines; it reviews critically the factors behind the removal of Dresden and its cultural landscape from World Heritage listing and gives an overview of Historic Urban Landscape thinking.

The pluralism of South Asia belies any singular reading of its heritage. In spite of this diversity, its cultural traditions retain certain attributes that are at their core South Asian—in their capacity to self‐organize, enact and reinvent cultural memories, and in their ability to retain an intimate connection with nature and landscape. This volume focuses on the notion of cultural landscape as a medium integrating multiple forms of heritage and points to a new paradigm for conservation practices in the South Asian context. Even though the construct of cultural landscape has been accepted as a category of heritage, its potent use in heritage management in general and within the South Asian context in particular has not been widely studied. The volume challenges the prevalent views of heritage management in South Asia that are entrenched in colonial legacies and contemporary global policy frameworks.

While historical and protected landscapes have been well studied for years, the cultural significance of ordinary landscapes is now increasingly recognised. This groundbreaking book discusses how contemporary cultural landscapes can be, and are, created and recognised. The book challenges common concepts of cultural landscapes as protected or ‘special’ landscapes that include significant buildings or features. Using case studies from around the world it questions the usual measures of judgement related to cultural landscapes and instead focuses on landscapes that are created, planned or simply evolve as a result of changing human cultures, management policy and practice. Each contribution analyses the geographical and human background of the landscape, and policies and management strategies that impact upon it, and defines the meanings of 'cultural landscape' in its particular context. Taken together they establish a new paradigm in the study of landscapes in all forms.

This volume breaks new ground by conceptualizing landscape as a dynamic cultural complex in which the natural world and human practice are inextricably linked and are constantly interacting. It examines the social and cultural construction of space in the early medieval period in South Asia, as manifest in society, religious architecture and as shaped through trade and economic transactions.

Placemaking and cultural landscapes are worldwide multidisciplinary global concerns that cover many points of view of the common impacts of socio-economic cultural and rights jurisprudence planning, wellbeing and related advancements. Concerned with the complex interactions between the development and environment of those factors, it is important to seek ways, paths and implications for framing sustainability in all social activities. This book is mostly based on the 10th ACLA – Asian Cultural Landscape Association International Webinar Symposium that took place during September 26–27, 2020, in the Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, India. It examines contemporary social–cultural issues in the context of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN-SDGs) and associated cultural and sacred landscapes. There, the emphasis is on awakening deeper cultural sensitivity in harmonizing the world and the role of society and spiritual systems, drawing upon multi-disciplinary and cross-cultural interfaces—all within the scope of the future of the earth. The book’s chapters add a new dimension of cultural understanding in the broad domain of emerging human geoscience, considered as key policy science for contributing towards sustainability and survivability science together with future earth initiatives.

This compelling book offers a fresh perspective on how the natural world has been imagined, built on, and transformed by human beings throughout history and around the globe. Coverage ranges from the earliest societies to preindustrial China and India, from the emergence in Europe of the modern world to the contemporary global economy. The focus is on what the places we have created say about us: our belief systems and the ways we make a living. Also explored are the social and environmental consequences of human activities, and how conflicts over the meaning of progress are reflected in today's urban, rural, and suburban landscapes. Written in a highly engaging style, this ideal undergraduate-level human geography text is illustrated with over 25 maps and 70 photographs. Note: Many additional photographs related to the themes addressed in the book are available at the author's website (www.greatmirror.com.)