Landscape, Memory and History: Anthropological Perspectives (review)

This edited volume provides a useful comparative discussion of landscapes, combining ethnographic and historical narratives with aesthetic and biographical accounts. Theoretically, contributors favor process over textual analysis, viewing landscapes as sites of contested meanings and negotiations. The volume's strength is in its combinations of pertinent historical analysis with nuanced ethnography. Afairly broad array of regions is represented, including Australia (Lane, Strang); Ireland (McLean, Smith); Jamaica (Carrier); Madagascar (Harper); Papua New Guinea (O'Hanlon and Frankland, Stewart andStrathern);Scotland (Gray,Strathern and Stewart); and the Solomon Islands (Guo). Geography also provides two unexamined themes. First, with the possible exception of Australia, the volume is an excellent foray into what one might call Island studies.Second,and more importantly, they are all (with the exception of Madagascar) former British colonies. While this history figures prominently in only a few of the articles (Gray, McLean, O'Hanlon and Frankland, and Smith), it is a theme that could productively be read into the volume as a whole, making it quite suitable for postcolonial studies and coursework that focuses on the British empire.

The articles are presented in an order that favors this geography over theoretical relatedness. Reading across this regional presentation provides insight into the real value of the volume. Personal histories and interpretations of those histories form one nexus. The aesthetic imagination of individuals is examined through Tim Douglas's poetry of the Scottish Borderlands and Wahgi funerary songs. Both celebrate the past exploits of individuals and the creative ability of the living as they engage in a dialogue about the meaning of routes and borders stretched across the landscape. Personal stories are also prominent in James Carrier's account of two environmentalists as they engage a neoliberal political economy in Jamaican conservation efforts. Similarly, Veronica Strang's comparison of a settler and an Aboriginal hero highlights the role of historical individuals in the creation of meaning and identity. For these historical figures, memorial spaces are also organized, in museums and gravesites, giving physical presence to their respective community's imagination. Through these contributions, one gains a sense of the work individuals do in making space.

Community and nation form another point of comparison. The chapters on Scottish borderlands, Madagascar's forests, Papua New Guinean routes, Irish bogs, and Jamaican seascapes each highlight therole of such spaces in forming national or community identities. For example, Stuart McLean's study of the bog traces the intersection of such places with community activities as they move from a source of fuel to sites of touristic imagination. These spaces are not without conflict. In Madagascar, conservationist assumptions about a unified ethnicity conflicts with the community's emphasis on ancestry that challenges ethnic assumptions. Likewise, competing ideas about land use by farmers and Australian Aborigines, coupled with their different positions in a changing political economy, are insightfully linked to shaping national policy toward these resources. A similar tension is found in the excellent chapter on British mapping of Ireland, where colonial efforts to redefine the Irish landscape failed to completely erase local character. In all of these cases, the authors do an excellent job of highlighting the dialogic quality of landscapes. These case studies can be usefully read against the built islands of the Langalanga (Solomon Islands). The Langalanga seem to read their own past through a combination of memory and the gaze of colonial officers and ecotourists.

A final theoretical point that can be productively read through these contributions deals with development and resource management. As landscapes are connected to identity and place-making practices, these case studies highlight how transformations of resource management are never straightforward, and always engender some form of conflict or negotiation or both. This theme is apparent in most of the cases, and highlights some of the problems with the assumptions of neoliberalism...