Symbolic Landscapes

by Backhaus, Gary; Murungi, John

• ISBN13: 9781402087028
• ISBN10: 1402087020
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-10-01
• Publisher: Springer Verlag

Summary

Symbolic Landscapes presents a definitive collection of landscape/place studies that explores symbolic, cultural levels of geographical meanings. Essays written by philosophers, geographers, architects, social scientists, art historians, and literati, bring specific modes of expertise and perspectives to this transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary study of the symbolic level human existential spatiality. Placing emphasis on the pre-cognitive genesis of symbolic meaning, as well as embodied, experiential (lived) geography, the volume offers a fresh, quasi-phenomenological approach. The editors articulate the epistemological doctrine that perception and imagination form a continuum in which both are always implicated as complements. This approach makes a case for the interrelation of the geography of perception and the geography of imagination, which means that human/cultural geography offers only an abstraction if indeed an aesthetic geography is constituted merely as a sub-field. Human/cultural geography can only approach spatial reality through recognizing the intimate interrelative dialectic between the imaginative and perceptual meanings of our landscapes/place-worlds. This volume reinvigorates the importance of the topic of symbolism in human/cultural geography, landscape studies, philosophy of place, architecture and planning, and will stand among the classics in the field. Book jacket.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. v
Contributors	p. xv
List of Figures	p. xvii
Places-Worlds
Introduction I: The Problematic of Grounding the Significance of Symbolic Landscapes	p. 3
Symbol - Landscapes - Symbolic Landscapes	p. 3
Semiotics: The Problematic of Defining 'Symbol'	p. 4
Geographical Literature and Symbolic Landscapes	p. 7
The Problematic of Defining 'Landscape'	p. 11
Toward the Geographicity of Symbolic Landscapes: A Phenomenological Grounding	p. 12
The Leading Clue: Merleau-Ponty's Gestural Theory of Language	p. 14
Human Behavior: The Field of Meanings that is the Ontological Source for Symbolism	p. 17
Spatiality	p. 20
The Spatiality of Sensation as a Gestural Expression	p. 22
Symbolic Landscapes	p. 23
New Trends in Cultural Geography	p. 25
Conclusion	p. 25
Overview of Part One	p. 26
The Road to Indian Wells: Symbolic Landscapes in the California Desert	p. 33
Introduction: Symbolic Landscapes	p. 33
Confronting Postmodern Symbolic Landscapes in California's Coachella Valley	p. 37
Confronting Pre-Modern Symbolic Landscapes in the Coachella Valley	p. 47
Two Ways of Being and Becoming in the California Desert	p. 53
Conclusion: Thinking About Landscape	p. 54
Wilderness as Axis Mundi: Spiritual Journeys on the Appalachian Trail	p. 65
Introduction	p. 65
Defining Wilderness	p. 66
The Rise of Wilderness as Symbol in the Intertwining of Lived-Body and Milieu of the Shepherd Nomad	p. 67
Wilderness as Axis Mundi in Judaic and Christian Scripture	p. 68
Wilderness and the American Milieu	p. 72
Wilderness and the Sojourner	p. 74
Appalachian Trail as a Place of Spiritual Journey	p. 76
Historical Background	p. 76
A Pathway through the Wilderness	p. 76
A Work of Art with Religious Implications	p. 77
The Experiential Spirituality of the Appalachian Trail	p. 80
Pilgrims on the Appalachian Trail	p. 80
Communitas and Liminality in the Intertwining of Lived Body and Milieu	p. 82
Time	p. 85
Conclusion	p. 86
Pu'u Kohola: Spatial Genealogy of a Hawaiian Symbolic Landscape	p. 91
Introduction	p. 91
Tides of Time	p. 93
Layers of Space, Time, and Meaning	p. 94
Physical Geography	p. 95
Conquest	p. 96
The Hawaiian Kingdom and Westernization	p. 98
American Colonization	p. 99
The Harbor	p. 100
Embodying Transformation	p. 101
Navigating the Present	p. 105
Mythological Landscape and Landscape of Myth: Circulating Visions of Pre-Christian Athos	p. 109
Introduction	p. 109
Xerxes' Canal	p. 113
Alexander's Mountain	p. 116
From Emblem to Field	p. 119
Conclusion	p. 125
Coda	p. 126
At Home on the Midway: Carnival Conventions and Yard Space in Gibsonton, Florida	p. 133
Introduction	p. 133
Mediated Yard Spaces	p. 134
Gibsonton's Boot: Ready-to-Wear Signs and Other Systems of Symbolism	p. 136
Siting Gibsonton	p. 138
Clearing Space: Town as Midway	p. 140
Remaking Yard Space as Carnival Midway	p. 142
Breaking Camp: Gibsonton as 'Lived Symbol' Between Arriving and Departing	p. 147
Speculative Spaces: At Home in the Front Yard	p. 151
Crossing the Verge: Roadside Memorial-Perth, Western Australia	p. 161
Introduction	p. 161
Location: The Geography of Roadside Memorial Sites	p. 162
Excavating the Sites	p. 163
Historical Perspective and the Meaning of Memorials	p. 164
Ritual and Rite of Passage	p. 166
Spontaneity of the Sites	p. 169
Life on "The Avenue": An Allegory of the Street in Early Twenty-First-Century Suburban America	p. 173
Introduction	p. 173
From Main Street to Lifestyle Retail Development	p. 174
An Allegory of the Street	p. 178
City Monumentality and Urban Amnesia	p. 180
Suburban Idealization: The Paradox of Private Public Space	p. 182
Metaphor, Environmental Receptivity, and Architectural Design	p. 185
Introduction	p. 185
Metaphor: Redesigning Design and Its Culture	p. 187
Organism As Bauplan for Architecture	p. 192
Furnishing Our Primary Inhabitation	p. 194
Design as Hinge: The Architectonic of the Intraworldly	p. 197
Extending and Compounding Green Metaphors: Watermark	p. 198
Entertaining New Vocabularies: Edge/Corridor Effects	p. 199
Conclusion	p. 199
Geographical Sensibilities in the Arts
Introduction II: An Apology Concerning the Importance of the Geography of Imagination	p. 205
Sensibility, Geography, and the Arts	p. 205
Geographies of the Imagination and Science	p. 207
The Cartesian Paradigm: Banishing the Imagination from Scientia	p. 210
The Relevance of the Geographies of the Imagination	p. 212
Merleau-Ponty's Doctrine of the Imagination	p. 214
The Artwork	p. 215
Literature	p. 216
Painting	p. 217
Spacings and Human Creativity	p. 218
Overview of Part Two	p. 222
Semblance of Sovereignty: Cartographic Possession in Map Cartouches and Atlas Frontispieces of Early Modern Europe	p. 227
Introduction	p. 227
The Meaning of Maps	p. 229
Colonial Possessions	p. 230
Martial Activities in Europe	p. 233
Jurisdictional Control	p. 238
Conclusion	p. 245
Symbolism and the Interaction of the Real and the Ideal: Scenery in Early-Modern Netherlandish Graphic Art	p. 251
The Prevailing View in the Art-Historical Research: The Exploration of Realism in Early-Modern Art	p. 251
Imitation and Invention of Nature in Early-Modern Art	p. 253
The Real and the Transitory in Early-Modern Landscape Views	p. 255
Local and Foreign Settings	p. 257
Cartographic Ambiguities	p. 259
Conclusion	p. 261
Traversing One's Space: Photography and the feminine	p. 265
Introduction	p. 265
Theoretics and Approaches to Photography	p. 267
Examples of My Photographic Project	p. 273
Conclusion	p. 276
The Philadelphia Flower Show and its Dangerous Sensibilities	p. 283
Experiential Therapeutics	p. 283
Symbolizing Experiences of Springtime	p. 285
Experiential Structure of the Symbolizing Experience	p. 287
The Dangerous Sensibility	p. 288
The Physical Layout	p. 289
The Major Exhibitors: Symbolizing Ideal Landscapes	p. 290
Characterizing the Artificiality of Place-Worlds	p. 294
Genius Loci	p. 295
The Commerciality of Place-Worlds	p. 297
The Instant Environment Machine	p. 299
Concluding Remarks	p. 301
Gardening at a Japanese Garden	p. 305
Introduction	p. 305
The Subjective Path	p. 306
The Objective Path	p. 307
The Right Path	p. 308
The Double Pre-Understanding	p. 309
Face to Face	p. 310
Handwork-Bodywork	p. 312
Spatial Activity as Identity	p. 314
Japaneseness	p. 315
Concluding Remarks	p. 320
Symbolic Space: Memory, Narrative, Writing	p. 323
Introduction	p. 323
Space in Ancient Mnemonics	p. 324
Narrative (Kleist: "Das Erdbeben von Chili")	p. 328
Writing Space	p. 331
Vienna's Musical Deathscape	p. 339
Introduction	p. 340
Joseph Haydn	p. 342
Overtones of the Deathscape in Documents	p. 343
The Church and Redemptive Death	p. 344
Nature's Role in the Deathscape Phenomenon	p. 346
Vienna and the Question of Suicide	p. 347
Redemptive Versus Nihilistic Death	p. 351
Death's Inspiration	p. 352
The Deaths of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven	p. 354
Conclusion	p. 356
Crusoe's Island and the Human Estate: Defoe's Existential Geography	p. 363
Introduction	p. 363
Robinson Crusoe: Map and Allegory	p. 363
Are We All Castaways?	p. 365
Remaking the Land	p. 369
Ready-to-Hand and One's Own	p. 371
Of Empire and Technology	p. 373
Deciphering Crusoe's Geo-Scripting	p. 375
Enter the Nameless Other	p. 378
Enter Friday	p. 381
Defoe's Symbolism: What It Says and How It Works	p. 382
Index	p. 389
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