This volume explores the conceptualization and construction of sacred space in a wide variety of faith traditions: Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, and the religions of Japan. It deploys the notion of "layered landscapes" in order to trace the accretions of praxis and belief, the tensions between old and new devotional patterns, and the imposition of new religious ideas and behaviors on pre-existing religious landscapes in a series of carefully chosen locales: Cuzco, Edo, Geneva, Granada, Herat, Istanbul, Jerusalem, Kanchipuram, Paris, Philadelphia, Prague, and Rome. Some chapters hone in on the process of imposing novel religious beliefs, while others focus on how vestiges of displaced faiths endured. The intersection of sacred landscapes with political power, the world of ritual, and the expression of broader cultural and social identity are also examined. Crucially, the volume reveals that the creation of sacred space frequently involved more than religious buildings and was a work of historical imagination and textual expression. While a book of contrasts as much as comparisons, the volume demonstrates that vital questions about the location of the sacred and its reification in the landscape were posed by religious believers across the early-modern world.

Restoring Layered Landscapes brings together historians, geographers, philosophers, and interdisciplinary scholars to explore ecological restoration in landscapes with complex histories shaped by ongoing interactions between humans and nature. For many decades, ecological restoration - particularly in the United States - focused on returning degraded sites to conditions that prevailed prior to human influence. This model has been broadened in recent decades, and restoration now increasingly focuses on the recovery of ecological functions and processes rather than on returning a site to a specific historical state. Nevertheless, neither the theory nor the practice of restoration has fully come to terms with the challenges of restoring layered landscapes, where nature and culture shape one another in deep and ongoing relationships. Former military and industrial sites provide paradigmatic examples of layered landscapes. Many of these sites are not only characterized by natural ecosystems worth preserving and restoring, but also embody significant political, social, and cultural histories. This volume grapples with the challenges of restoring and interpreting such complex sites: What should we aim to restore in such places? How can restoration adequately take the legacies of human use into account? Should traces of the past be left on the landscape, and how can interpretive strategies be creatively employed to make visible the complex legacies of an open pit mine or chemical weapons manufacturing plant? Restoration aims to create new value, but not always without loss. Restoration often disrupts existing ecosystems, infrastructure, and artifacts. The chapters in this volume consider what restoration can tell us more generally about the relationship between continuity and change, and how the past can and should inform our thinking about the future. These insights, in turn, will help foster a more thoughtful approach to human-environment relations in an era of unprecedented anthropogenic global environmental change.

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This book discusses approaches towards landscapes under pressure and transformation, and the importance of unprejudiced and experimental investigations to reveal its natural and cultural complexity. Layered Landscapes Lofoten, Understanding of Complexity, Otherness and Change aims to challenge internalized concepts about how landscapes are considered and investigated, to open for alternative research, and legitimize subjective, singular and experimental approaches as valid and appreciated as a foundation for an informed process. These approaches take into consideration both the landscape and the practices taking place in the landscape, that are consistently full of individual and collective stories and experiences—the complexity created in both time and space, which influences our societies not only as traces of historical events, but as present realities and even expectations and what is to become. Under the concepts of complexity, imbrication, vulnerability, fieldwork, flexibility and reorientation ideas are developed, all based in the contemporary and historic layers of the dramatic and contested landscapes of the Lofoten Islands in Northern Norway—where pressure from political decisions and structural changes, increasing tourism, a potential new oil industry and uncontrollable global forces’ impact on nature and societies and cause continuous transformation and alteration of landscapes and topography, surrounding the traditional and modern fishing communities.

Explores the long and complex histories of landscapes from personal, social and cultural perspectives.

Arthur Erickson Layered Landscapes - Drawings from the Canadian Architectural Archives is the inaugural publication of our Canadian Modern series. It presents and expands upon the content of the traveling exhibition, curated by Canadian Architectural Archives chief curator and archivist Linda Fraser with architectural historian Geoffrey Simmins. The act of layering has both practical and metaphoric connotations: it refers to Erickson's design process, in which he added layers of experience and inhabitation, enclosure and vistas onto a landscape, privileging the horizontal over the vertical. For Erickson, "line tells everything," and these drawings of some of his most inventive buildings remind us of the value of hand sketches in the architectural design process. Canadian Modern is a peer-reviewed series focused on the cultural and architectural history of twentieth-century Canada, published by Dalhousie Architectural Press. The series promotes scholarship on the architecture, built environment, and landscape of Canada. Focused on publications grounded in archival materials, this collection aims to enhance existing research and stimulate future investigations while positioning Canadian debates and practices within a broad international framework. Book jacket.

Capture stunning macro floral images with this gorgeous guide by acclaimed photographer Harold Davis. You'll learn about different types of flowers, macro equipment basics, and the intricacies of shooting different floral varieties in the field and in the studio. Harold also shows you techniques in the Photoshop darkroom that can be applied to flower photography to help you get the most out of your images. Beautiful and authoritative, this guide to photographing flowers is a must-read for every photographer interested in flower photography. Photographing Flowers will also win a place in the hearts of those who simply love striking floral imagery.

In this comparative, interdisciplinary study based on extensive fieldwork as well as historical sources, Janet Sturgeon examines the different trajectories of landscape change and land use among communities who call themselves Akha (known as Hani in China) in contrasting political contexts. She shows how, over the last century, processes of state formation, construction of ethnic identity, and regional security concerns have contributed to very different outcomes for Akha and their forests in China and Thailand, with Chinese Akha functioning as citizens and grain producers, and Akha in Thailand being viewed as "non-Thai" forest destroyers. The modern nation-state grapples with local power hierarchies on the periphery of the nation, with varied outcomes. Citizenship in China helps Akha better protect a fluid set of livelihood practices that confer benefits on them and their landscape. Denied such citizenship in Thailand, Akha are helpless when forests and other resources are ruthlessly claimed by the state. Drawing on current anthropological debates on the state in Southeast Asia and more generally on debates on property theory, states and minorities, and political ecology, Sturgeon shows how people live in a continuous state of negotiated boundaries - political, social, and ecological. This pioneering comparison of resource access and land use among historically related peoples in two nation-states will be welcomed by scholars of political ecology, environmental anthropology, ethnicity, and politics of state formation in East and Southeast Asia.

The exchange of landscape practice between China and Europe from 1500–1800 is an important chapter in art history. While the material forms of the outcome of this exchange, like jardin anglo-chinoisand Européenerie are well documented, this book moves further to examine the role of the exchange in identity formation in early modern China and Europe. Proposing the new paradigm of “entangled landscapes”, drawing from the concept of “entangled histories”, this book looks at landscape design, cartography, literature, philosophy and material culture of the period. Challenging simplistic, binary treatments of the movements of “influences” between China and Europe, Entangled Landscapes reveals how landscape exchanges entailed complex processes of appropriation, crossover and transformation, through which Chinese and European identities were formed. Exploring these complex processes via three themes—empire building, mediators’ constraints, and aesthetic negotiations, this work breaks new ground in landscape and East-West studies. Interdisciplinary and revisionist in its thrust, it will also benefit scholars of history, human geography and postcolonial studies.