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- Convenors:
-
Petr Gibas
(Institute of Sociology of the Czech Academy of Sciences)
Karolína Pauknerová (Charles University)
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- Format:
- Workshop
- Stream:
- ENVIRONMENT
- Location:
- Room H-207
- Sessions:
- Thursday 16 June, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This workshop explores the many ways in which we as ethnologists, anthropologists and scholars from related disciplines study landscapes in the making, how we become part of their transformations and how we acknowledge, conceptualize and make methodological use of their more-than-human properties.
Long Abstract:
Landscape is a concept that proves salient for multiple disciplines in the humanities and social sciences including anthropology, ethnology and folklore studies. The plasticity of landscape as a concept allows for empirically rich, theoretically innovative and methodologically creative studies while keeping us as researchers in a close relation to the material world and the more-than-human aspects of people's engagement with it and the scientific exploration thereof. This corresponds well with the need to re-think our disciplines´ position within contemporary post-anthropocentric times.
Landscape is always multi-layered with an important material dimension and thus forces researchers to consider diverse features from rocks and water to various living entities as well as traces of the past and cultural artefacts and the ways these feature in continuous re-creating and re-framing of landscape(s). This makes landscape an excellent concept for pondering and putting to practice the calls for post/non/more-than-human aspects of our lived reality; it also complicates our research practice and poses a methodological as well as conceptual challenge.
The proposed workshop explores such issues in the form of facilitated discussion (in English). After a short introductory presentation by the convenors, each presenter will be asked to introduce their research and how it relates to the theme of the workshop as a starting point for ensuing discussion among workshop participants. We welcome contributions related to empirical, methodological and theoretical topics, both traditional and non-conventional, exploring landscapes re-framed, re-created, re-modelled, re-imagined and/or concentrating on re-conceptualising landscape and re-thinking research practices and methodologies based on such explorations.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 16 June, 2022, -Paper short abstract:
Climbing landscapes are infinite memory books written by those who came before. How this heritage left in rocks manifests itself in the aesthetics of movement and the experiences embedded in the lines which have become climbing routes? How are we to understand the multisensory craft of climbing?
Paper long abstract:
These days, climbing attracts people in droves, all eager to join the contest between body and rock. Ian Heywood and Jackie Kiewa have eloquently trumpeted what this sport might bring to human existence – a sense of raw spontaneity sharply lacking in our comfortable, pre-packaged modernity. Climbing teaches life and risk management lessons, although it must constantly joust with modern rationalizing and commercial influences to remain authentic.
As an ethnographer, and one by intuition sceptical of modernity-revelling perspectives, I am drawn to the refined social background of climbing – to the experience born of the interplay between aesthetics and heritage. I believe climbers – skilful dwellers – inhabit climbing landscapes which are open spaces of possibility and affordance. In the act of climbing, the climber re-establish passive ‘nature’ into a highly interactive ‘environment’. In achieving this, they must master and employ skills and knowledge inherited from generations of rock climbing enthusiasts. Climbing landscapes, along with guides, stories, names, moves and objects left behind, are infinite memory books written by those who came before.
Consequently, I find myself asking how this intangible heritage left behind in rocks by generations of climbers manifests itself in the aesthetics of movement and the experiences embedded in the lines which have become climbing routes. How is an anthropologist to study the mind-body experiences and traces left by generations of rock users? How are we to understand the multisensory craft of climbing?
Paper short abstract:
Landscape-oriented heritage studies on mire art deepens our understanding of the agency of artists, especially their willingness to stand for nature and encourage people to safeguard mires. The mires are changing culturally and used to highlight more-than human aspects in the eco-crisis.
Paper long abstract:
The mires form a cultural resource for people as well as an environment of flora and fauna. They represent not only extended periods of past culture, but also future and present-day values. There is a growing number of artists in Finland inspired by the mires. Especially the threat of mining has had a strong impact on many artists. The mires are changing culturally and used by individuals and communities to highlight new aspects in the eco-crisis.
Landscape-oriented heritage studies on mire art deepens our understanding of the agency of artists, especially their willingness to stand for nature and encourage people to safeguard mires. Landscape is seen as both mental and physical, subjective as well as objective, including temporally parallel (tangible and intangible) heritages. As part of cultural values, the personal (re-)attachment to mires is rooted in the recognizable intangible cultural heritage of communities and individuals, for example, through representations, expressions, cultural spaces as well as knowledge and practices concerning nature.
My research material consists of open theme interviews conducted in 2020-2021 as part of the Mire Trend research project. For example an opera singer, lament performer and photographers shared their experiences and understanding of mires. I focus on the expressions of mire landscapes by answering the following questions: In what way was the landscape considered controversial? How was mire landscape used as site-specific stage for artwork? What is the role of non-human agencies in artworks? Affective expressions are found by close reading/listening to the narrators.
Paper short abstract:
Walking, if practised intentionally, can help researchers to focus attention to complex relationships forming the landscape including the more-than-human facets. The paper discusses the challenges posed by walking as a research tool by means of detailing our approach to walking.
Paper long abstract:
In the paper, we present our fieldwork pursued in the post-mining and post-military landscape in the north of the Czech Republic. The landscape in question, in the Podralsko micro-region, has undergone multiple transformations. The area served as a military training area (pre-1918, 1942-45, 1947/1968-1991), was heavily affected by the expulsion of Germans after WWII (1947) and by uranium mining (1965-1995) and the subsequent land rehabilitation. The area has been also frequented by tourists, at least from the 1920s onwards.
In our fieldwork, we employed walking in the area as a research tool and as a way to engage with the landscape. The challenge was to deal with the problem of crossing the genre of the tourist walking and also crossing the banality of walking as a human locomotion. By intentionally distracting us via pre-set forms of recording, planned stops and ways of talking about what surrounded us, we strived to focus our attention differently in order to see more complex relationships within the field including its more-than-human facets, e.g. in the form of traces of mining or military activities in the forest or sounds of the plants and animals, or types of the surfaces we walked on.