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Landscape, Memory and History: Anthropological Perspectives. Pamela J. Stewart and Andrew Strathern, eds. London: Pluto Press, 2003. 246 pp.
Identity through the medium of memory and place, as it relates to shifting and contested perceptions of landscape, are organizing themes around which the case studies in this volume coalesce. Examining these themes against historic, ethnohistoric, geographical, and literary sources, the authors provide time depth to the study of the processes that inscribe meaning to elements of the physical and imagined environment. The authors complicate monolithic historic accounts of landscape by demonstrating the use of history(ies) by various parties in attempting to fix, or blur, ideas of place. In the introduction, the editors situate the volume within a broader body of anthropological scholarship and sketch the project that develops throughout the remainder of the text as the interpretation of the "verbal pictures," which endow various locales with historic depth as well as subjectivity. The editors and nine of the ten authors are anthropologists. The tenth is a human geographer.
To lead off the case studies, John Gray mines the recent poetry of Tim Douglas and others to explore the ambiguities and ironies associated with poetic descriptions of the Scottish borderland. These descriptions both exalt cultural distinction and lament the region's inexorable relationship with...