Landscapes Of Mobility

Our world is unquestionably one in which ubiquitous movements of people, goods, technologies, media, money, and ideas produce systems of flows. Comparing case studies from across the world, including those from Benin, the United States, India, Mali, Senegal, Japan, Haiti, and Romania, this book focuses on quotidian landscapes of mobility. Despite their seemingly familiar and innocuous appearances, these spaces exert tremendous control over our behavior and activities. By examining and mapping the politics of place and motion, this book analyzes human beings’ embodied engagements with their built world and provides diverse perspectives on the ideological and political underpinnings of landscapes of mobility. In order to describe landscapes of mobility as a historically, socially, and politically constructed condition, the book is divided into three sections-objects, contacts, and flows. The first section looks at elements that constitute such landscapes, including mobile bodies, buildings, and practices across multiple geographical scales. As these variable landscapes are reconstituted under particular social, economic, ecological, and political conditions, the second section turns to the particular practices that catalyze embodied relations within and across such spaces. Finally, the last section explores how the flows of objects, bodies, interactions, and ecologies are represented, presenting a critical comparison of the means by which relations, processes, and exchanges are captured, depicted, reproduced and re-embodied.

Our world is unquestionably one in which ubiquitous movements of people, goods, technologies, media, money, and ideas produce systems of flows. Comparing case studies from across the world, including those from Benin, the United States, India, Mali, Senegal, Japan, Haiti, and Romania, this book focuses on quotidian landscapes of mobility. Despite their seemingly familiar and innocuous appearances, these spaces exert tremendous control over our behavior and activities. By examining and mapping the politics of place and motion, this book analyzes human beings’ embodied engagements with their built world and provides diverse perspectives on the ideological and political underpinnings of landscapes of mobility. In order to describe landscapes of mobility as a historically, socially, and politically constructed condition, the book is divided into three sections-objects, contacts, and flows. The first section looks at elements that constitute such landscapes, including mobile bodies, buildings, and practices across multiple geographical scales. As these variable landscapes are reconstituted under particular social, economic, ecological, and political conditions, the second section turns to the particular practices that catalyze embodied relations within and across such spaces. Finally, the last section explores how the flows of objects, bodies, interactions, and ecologies are represented, presenting a critical comparison of the means by which relations, processes, and exchanges are captured, depicted, reproduced and re-embodied.

The Manggarai people of eastern Indonesia believe their land can talk, that its appetite demands sacrificial ritual, and that its energy can kill as well as nurture. They tell their children to avoid certain streams and fields and view unusual environmental events as omens of misfortune. Yet, far from being preoccupied with the dangers of this animate landscape, Manggarai people strive to make places and pathways “lively,” re-traveling routes between houses and villages and highlighting the advantages of mobility. Through everyday and ritual activities that emphasize “liveliness,” the land gains a further potency: the power to evoke memories of birth, death, and marriage, to influence human health and fertility. Potent Landscapes is an ethnographic investigation of the power of the landscape and the implications of that power for human needs, behavior, and emotions. Based on two years of fieldwork in rural Flores, the book situates Manggarai place-making and mobility within the larger contexts of diverse human-environment interactions as well as adat revival in postcolonial Indonesia. Although it focuses on social life in one region of eastern Indonesia, the work engages with broader theoretical discussions of landscape, travel, materiality, cultural politics, kinship, and animism. Written in a clear and accessible style, Potent Landscapes will appeal to students and specialists of Southeast Asia as well as to those interested in the comparative anthropological study of place and environment. The analysis moves out from rooms and houses in a series of concentric circles, outlining at each successive point the broader implications of Manggarai place- and path-making. This gradual expansion of scale allows the work to build a subtle, cumulative picture of the potent landscapes within which Manggarai people raise families, forge alliances, plant crops, build houses, and engage with local state actors. Landscapes are significant, the author argues, not only as sacred or mythic realms, or as contexts for the imposition of colonial space; they are also significant as vernacular contexts shaped by daily practices. The book analyzes the power of a collective landscape shaped both by the Indonesian state’s development policies and by responses to religious change.

A History of Mobility in New Mexico uses the often-enigmatic chipped stone assemblages of the Taos Plateau to chart patterns of historical mobility in northern New Mexico. Drawing on evidence of spatial patterning and geochemical analyses of stone tools across archaeological landscapes, the book examines the distinctive mobile modalities of different human communities, documenting evolving logics of mobility—residential, logistical, pastoral, and settler colonial. In particular, it focuses on the diversity of ways that Indigenous peoples have used and moved across the Plateau landscape from deep time into the present. The analysis of Indigenous movement patterns is grounded in critical Indigenous philosophy, which applies core principles within Indigenous thought to the archaeological record in order to challenge conventional understandings of occupation, use, and abandonment. Providing an Indigenizing approach to archaeological research and new evidence for the long-term use of specific landscape features, A History of Mobility in New Mexico presents an innovative approach to human-environment interaction for readers and scholars of North American history.

Annotation Second homes are an integral component of tourism in rural and peripheral areas. This volume represents the first major international review of second homes for over 25 years. The volume represents essential reading for those interested in rural regional development processes.

For more than a century, the study of hunting and gathering societies has been central to the development of both archaeology and anthropology as academic disciplines, and has also generated widespread public interest and debate. The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology and Anthropology of Hunter-Gatherers provides a comprehensive review of hunter-gatherer studies to date, including critical engagements with older debates, new theoretical perspectives, and renewed obligations for greater engagement between researchers and indigenous communities. Chapters provide in-depth archaeological, historical, and anthropological case-studies, and examine far-reaching questions about human social relations, attitudes to technology, ecology, and management of resources and the environment, as well as issues of diet, health, and gender relations - all central topics in hunter-gatherer research, but also themes that have great relevance for modern global society and its future challenges. The Handbook also provides a strategic vision for how the integration of new methods, approaches, and study regions can ensure that future research into the archaeology and anthropology of hunter-gatherers will continue to deliver penetrating insights into the factors that underlie all human diversity.

"The book has two aims. First, it demonstrates the common ground between the fast-growing fields of environmental history and mobility studies in terms of subject matter, theoretical approaches, and methodology. Second, it shows how mobility--the movements of people, things, and ideas, as well as their associated cultural meanings--has been a key factor in shaping Canadians' perceptions of and interactions with their country. Approaching the burgeoning field of environmental history in Canada through the lens of mobility reveals some of the distinctive ways in which Canadians have come to terms with the country's climate and landscape. The collection seeks to accomplish these aims with a broad scope: a series of case studies that span Canada's diverse regions, from the closing of the age of sail in the late nineteenth century to post-World War II automobile culture. Chapters examine a wide range of topics, from the impact of seasonal climactic conditions on different transportation modes, to the environmental consequences of building mobility corridors and pathways, and the relationship between changing forms of mobility with tourism and other recreational activities. The contributors employ a number of methodologies, including the use of traditional archival sources (correspondence, government reports, business ledgers, publicity materials) as well as historical geographic information systems (HGIS), qualitative and quantitative analysis, and critical theory."--