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Contested Landscapes: Movement, Exile and Place. Barbara Bender and Margot Winer, eds. Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2001. 320 pp.
This collection of articles considers the contested space of landscapes-both physical and imagined settings-in which struggles over representations of power occur. The book includes papers presented at sessions organized on the same theme at the 1999 World Archaeology Congress. Twenty articles by archaeologists, anthropologists, and others are grouped into two sections, each of which is accompanied by reviewer commentary and responses from selected authors. Barbara Bender's introduction sketches the basic themes of the book and clarifies key concepts. She rejects the notion that landscape necessarily has elitist connotations, and defines it to include "the ways in which people understand and engage with the material world around them" (p. 3). She emphasizes a need for an ethnographically grounded phenomenological approach, noting that people's engagement is always historically contingent and inprocess. Thus, Bender's notion of landscape subsumes an understanding of continual change, of movement rather than of stasis, and considers the notion of fixity in landscape an illusion. Bender also situates landscape within the broader context of global movements of people that compress time and space, and create inequalities. Movement in landscape occurs as physical settings are continuously reworked by the interactions of multiple and often contradictory forces; and conceptually as a result of people's movements in, across, and through settings because of migration, travel, or exile.
Contested landscapes appear where hegemonic state institutions come into contact with local communities in the promotion of tourism and management of cultural resources. Roxane Caftanzoglu argues that the exclusionary vision of a modern Greece privileging its classic antiquities has produced a counter discourse of place attachment by a small community living under the Acropolis to legitimize itself. Andrew Garner focuses on the "management discourse" employed by public agency professionals to market a forest site to recreational...