Ecumene (continues as Cultural Geographies)最新文献

{"title":"Book Review: Cultural geography","authors":"D. Ley","doi":"10.1177/096746080000700314","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/096746080000700314","url":null,"abstract":"of loss of (a mythical?) rural England. Mortonian rurality, and many others in the same genre, are about an old England that has gone but endures even today in imagined places in books, cinema or television (Brideshead Revisited and Heartbeat) and in actuality, as it were, in Ireland. The Irish west is a complex layering of texts, incorporating scenic sublimity, economic marginality and remoteness from the metropolis. Gaelic revivalists constructed it as a bastion of Gaelic nationalism, excoriated in Sean O Faoláin’s 1941 reference to ‘wildness, bawneens, poteen and traditional songs’. Others from England and the east of Ireland appropriated it as a substitute for a lost rurality. Both images were constructed by outsiders – the tourists observed by the poet Patrick Kavanagh who came to look at the peasant in his ‘lyrical fields’ from whose (premodern, traditional) tyranny Kavanagh, and others, such as the writer Edna O’Brien, escaped. Outsider perceptions of the west of Ireland as a timeless world of rural tranquillity continue in the popular imagination: recently an Irish Times report on urbanites moving to the west of Ireland quoted one Dubliner: ‘there’s something about the Shannon – when you cross that river you leave Europe. There’s a softness, a gentleness, a civilization here.’ Ryle’s invocation of former prime minister de Valera’s much-quoted 1943 address, which in many ways is emblematic of a rural Ireland that never was, serves to highlight some of the contradictions in English conceptions of rurality in Ireland, and the address may contain the seeds of the ultimate destruction of the rural landscape so prized by travellers and tourists. De Valera envisioned a ‘countryside bright with cosy homesteads’. The Land Acts of approximately a century ago, which gave legal ownership to the occupying tenant farmers, mean that the Irish rural landscape today is owned outright by in excess of 150 000 individuals. Trends in future planning seem determined to exceed the rural settlement densities aspired to by de Valera, with unpredictable consequences for the countryside and its writers and visitors in the future. Ryle’s book is a wide-ranging review of the literature of English and some Irish travellers and tourists in Ireland. It is at times complex in construction, but always interesting, and demonstrates a keen sense of the literature on representation of Irish place and identity. Ryle himself has many deeply felt personal asides on cycling trips throughout the ‘warm, wild and wonderful’ west of Ireland (to quote the tourist brochure), so that his readings are solidly grounded in experience of landscapes and people.","PeriodicalId":104830,"journal":{"name":"Ecumene (continues as Cultural Geographies)","volume":"8 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2000-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125562403","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Book Review: Place and experience: a philosophical topography","authors":"J. Porteous","doi":"10.1177/096746080000700310","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/096746080000700310","url":null,"abstract":"idea of discourse belies their invocation of Foucault, and produces the sort of Whiggish history that makes their introductory claims about historicism ring hollow. In this way, the nineteenth-century painter of Indian portraits George Catlin becomes an ‘early preservationist’ (p. 63), a prototype of the preservationism of the contemporary Wilderness Society. Differences between the aims and objects of their preservationism (sublime savagery against ecosystems and biodiversity) are erased, while the recent rise of global environmental problems, like climate change, and the globalization of American environmental concerns to encompass far-off places are barely touched on, though the debate around trade and environment does receive some notice in a chapter on the North American Free Trade Agreement. Arguably some simplification is necessary to provide narrative coherence in an undergraduate text such as this one, but the result here is to suggest that nothing ever really changes. In both political and intellectual terms, this is not the message we should be conveying.","PeriodicalId":104830,"journal":{"name":"Ecumene (continues as Cultural Geographies)","volume":"28 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2000-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134538953","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Landscape and identity in Russian and Soviet art: an introduction","authors":"M. Bassin","doi":"10.1177/096746080000700301","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/096746080000700301","url":null,"abstract":"tainly in the natural order of these things that a ‘newer’ cultural geography already hovers somewhere on the disciplinary horizon, waiting for a propitious moment to reveal its existence and lay its claim to the mantle of scholarly innovation and the charisma of the cutting edge. This observation is not intended cynically, but rather to suggest that what is important at the end of the day is not the novelty of the epithet but rather the quality of the intellectual insight that goes along with it. And in this regard, we should appreciate that the legacy of the ‘new’ cultural geography is going to endure far longer than the term itself. For if ‘classical’ cultural geography taught us to examine a material landscape shaped by the social, economic and cultural forces of the inhabiting groups, and if ‘humanistic’ cultural geography went on to explore how such material landscapes were perceived and interpreted at a subjective cognitive level, then the ‘new’ cultural geography has opened our eyes critically to landscape as an act of representation. The epistemological readujstment here is appreciable, for we can consider landscape as representation only by directing our attention onto the agency responsible for the representing, an agency which routinely seeks to arrange natural imagery and manipulate an iconography for its own particular purposes. Political ideologies can act as such agencies, and terms such as ‘Tory landscapes’, ‘fascist landscapes’ and so on have become a part of our vocabulary; but better studied and more evocative is the representation of nature as part of the elaboration and articulation of social identities, most commonly expressed as national identities. The implicitly instrumental quality of landscape representation vis-à-vis the larger identity project should not obscure its vital significance, for a vast range of examples points to the unique effectiveness of landscape imagery in presenting visions of the nation.","PeriodicalId":104830,"journal":{"name":"Ecumene (continues as Cultural Geographies)","volume":"14 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2000-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133223876","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Book Review: Gender and imperialism","authors":"J. Robinson","doi":"10.1177/096746080000700316","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/096746080000700316","url":null,"abstract":"ing particular versions of ecological imperialism that were specifically Afrikaner, Australian and Scottish, whilst ‘Economy and ecology’ highlights the varied reactions and resistances over time to imported systems of exchange and production. The final section, ‘Comparing settler societies’, offers both a commentary on the themes discussed in previous chapters and a critique of broader issues in environmental history. This text confirms for the environmental field the findings of a growing number of studies, from religion to medicine, that empire tended to be a more unified concept at home than overseas. By the opening years of this century settler societies were, in the British case, intended as the core, the heart, of a Greater Britain overseas. In practice, they represented not only the literal but also the metaphorical edge of empire, the ‘unsafe’ margin, to use the phrase of bell hooks, where knowledge, identity and power were unstable and negotiated in and through a variety of places. In seeking to reconceptualize the relations between metropoles and colonies, the themes running through this text share some common ground with the priorities of some postcolonial scholarship. They do not explicitly subscribe to this kind of position. Nor do they present a single coherent alternative. The detail within the various chapters nevertheless serves to guard against some weaknesses of the postcolonial. As John MacKenzie points out, the British empire, ‘vast and apparently despotic as it seemed’, was ‘in reality a ramshackle conglomerate’ (p. 222). Echoing this view, the concluding chapter by David Lowenthal provides an important reminder that ‘we cannot understand the ecology of empire without chronicling its particulars’ in space and time (p. 229). This is a welcome text. Its strength lies in its presentation of some of these ‘particulars’ within a single collection.","PeriodicalId":104830,"journal":{"name":"Ecumene (continues as Cultural Geographies)","volume":"57 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2000-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125658104","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"‘I object to rain that is cheerless’: landscape art and the Stalinist aesthetic imagination","authors":"M. Bassin","doi":"10.1177/096746080000700305","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/096746080000700305","url":null,"abstract":"This essay considers discourses around nature and landscape in the Soviet art criticism of the Stalin period. Rather than being a genre that was neglected or in some way subordinated to the themes of industrial construction and socialist transformation, the depiction of nature was a major preoccupation of Socialist Realism. Indeed, it became progressively stronger as the Stalinist period developed from the 1930s to the early 1950s. There was a common belief that the most important Soviet political and social values could be conveyed through the imagery of the natural landscape, and there was much discussion in the literature as to how the ideological messages could best be articulated. An examination of this discourse reveals, however, that the semantic potentials of landscape art ran in very different directions. Thus while Stalinist art was eminently successful in ‘politicizing’ the representation of the natural world, it was manifestly unable to remove the ambiguous and even contradictory nature of the messages that resulted.","PeriodicalId":104830,"journal":{"name":"Ecumene (continues as Cultural Geographies)","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2000-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127285450","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Book Review: Mappings","authors":"P. Burke","doi":"10.1177/096746080000700317","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/096746080000700317","url":null,"abstract":"tionship to empire – although in this respect Clare Midgley’s introduction did not do the collection justice. I was fascinated by the nuanced way in which women’s agency was conceptualized – most especially in the essay by Hilary McD. Beckles. Her insistence that slave women’s agency should not be interpreted only through the lens of resistance, or rebel politics, is excellent, and well worth reading even if you do not get through the whole collection. But I would suggest that historians and historical geographers of empire (and the postcolonial) learn from their own subjects, and enhance their commitment to drawing on the interpretations and understandings of the past which circulate through the different locations and contexts across which they work.","PeriodicalId":104830,"journal":{"name":"Ecumene (continues as Cultural Geographies)","volume":"15 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2000-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125143057","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Book Review: Journeys in Ireland: literary travellers, rural landscapes, cultural relations","authors":"P. Duffy","doi":"10.1177/096746080000700313","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/096746080000700313","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":104830,"journal":{"name":"Ecumene (continues as Cultural Geographies)","volume":"53 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2000-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123806058","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Book Review: Ecology and empire: environmental history in settler societies","authors":"Morag Bell","doi":"10.1177/096746080000700315","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/096746080000700315","url":null,"abstract":"One of the major social movements of the twentieth century, environmentalism has a remarkable capacity to redefine and reinvent itself. Current controversies over the relations between biotechnology and global environmental transformation provide a particularly apt context for this book. Central to new scientific and technological knowledge, grounded in the countries of the North, is the hitherto unprecedented power to intervene in the workings of nature through genetic manipulation. Closely associated with it are concerns that this rapidly growing collaboration between the laboratory and private capital could underpin new forms of ecological imperialism into the next century. Notwithstanding the hitherto ill-defined virtues of new biotechnology on a global scale, the strength of public reaction within and beyond the countries of the North highlights a deep-rooted and widespread unease and uncertainty over the application of scientific knowledge in environmental change. Nor do these powers go unchallenged. As the boundaries between nature and society, local and global, are increasingly blurred, new questions arise about the sites of power and the agents of control as local resistances to interventionist technologies question their supposedly progressive qualities and uniform applicability. In engaging with these debates, this edited text contributes to blurring the boundaries between past and present. It demonstrates that these ecological concerns are not of recent origin, and highlights the value of excavating environmental histories as a complement to contemporary studies. Ecology and empire forms part of a growing literature which traces some of the roots of current environmentalism. A field of research within studies of colonialism which, until recently, has been largely hidden from academic and public notice, it has a long and diverse genealogy across the globe, and is now widely valued not only for its intellectual insights but also for its current relevance. This text is important in the challenge it poses to Eurocentrism. Inspired by the work of the American historian Alfred W. Crosby, notably his 1986 publication, Ecological imperialism, Tom Griffiths and Libby Robin choose as their geographical focus the settler societies in Africa, Australasia and the Americas. Constituting the ‘edges’ of Europe’s empire, the colonized peripheries of primarily Britain’s imperial geopolitical regime, they are significant sites from which to reflect on European expansion. As the editors suggest, these are territories with a tradition of ‘indigenous’ environmental scholarship. They provide alternatives to the hegemony of Euro-American writing and offer scope to destabilize established narratives of global environmental history. The text is broad-ranging in both its spatial and temporal scope. The 15 chapters are arranged into five sections. In ‘The ecologies of invasion’ a long-term perspective on environmental transformations is provided, with particular","PeriodicalId":104830,"journal":{"name":"Ecumene (continues as Cultural Geographies)","volume":"99 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2000-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122496679","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Russkii inok: the spiritual landscape of Mikhail Nesterov","authors":"Abbott Gleason","doi":"10.1177/096746080000700304","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/096746080000700304","url":null,"abstract":"The career of the Russian painter Mikhail Nesterov suggests the particular way in which Russian modernism was affected both by the unusually literary nature of the dominant pre-modern tendencies in Russian art and also by religio-political preoccupations, which were stronger in Russia than elsewhere in Europe. His experience also gives a fascinating example of how even a painter deeply hostile to the Russian Revolution of 1917 could regroup and continue his career.","PeriodicalId":104830,"journal":{"name":"Ecumene (continues as Cultural Geographies)","volume":"14 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2000-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128077660","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Cultural geographies in practice","authors":"I. Cook","doi":"10.1177/096746080000700306","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/096746080000700306","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":104830,"journal":{"name":"Ecumene (continues as Cultural Geographies)","volume":"29 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2000-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115838117","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}