Anthropology Of Place Research Articles

Szafa marzeń. Dziecięce kryjówki w E.T. Stevena Spielberga

The filmmakers made efforts to present reality from a child’s viewpoint. Among the strategies applied for this purpose, we find a detailed approach to grasping the atmosphere of children’s bedrooms. The wardrobe, intimate lighting, cozy nooks and child’s props allow the creation of a space of autonomy and the uncanny effect, which slips away from adults’ perception. The author uses works on the anthropology of place, the psychoanalysis of dreams, film studies analyses of E.T. and also the history of cinematic representation of children’s worlds in order to describe the specificity of domestic space in Spielberg’s movie. At the same time, the author proposes that E.T. can be interpreted as a movie about the relative independence of children’s worlds in relation to the overpowering and stiflingAmerican suburbs. If we follow the proposed interpretation, then the popular judgment of E.T. as a conservative and family narration from Reagan’s days would seem to be too one-sided.

To Know One's Place: Belonging and Differentiation in Alice Springs Town

Based on research in the town of Alice Springs in Central Australia the article explores how social and material aspects of the town generate meaningful understandings of oneself and differentiated others. Drawing on anthropology of place and space and analytical notions of belonging, I explore shared and divergent ways in which a range of people in town come to ‘know their place’ both in a socio-cultural sense and in the sense of relating to the built environment. Paying just as detailed attention to non-indigenous experience as scholars have long paid to indigenous lives, the article suggests that a focus on how people form material and social attachments to place can facilitate more open-ended understandings of changing forms of indigenous-settler relations than the more common focus on difference and division between categories of indigenous and non-indigenous people and domains of life.

Tahiti beyond the postcard: power, place, and everyday life

Winner of the 2013 ICAS Book Prize (Social Sciences) The that most people imagine - white-sand beaches, turquoise lagoons, and beautiful women - is a product of 18th century European romanticism and persists today as the bedrock of Tahiti's tourism industry. This postcard image, however, masks a different reality. The dreams and desires that the tourism industry promotes distract from the medical nightmares and environmental destruction caused by France's 30-year nuclear testing program in French Polynesia. Tahitians see the burying of a bomb in their land as deeply offensive. For Tahitians, the land abounds with ancestral fertility, and genealogical identity, and is a source of physical and spiritual nourishment. These imagined and lived perspectives seem incompatible, yet are intricately intertwined in the political economy. Tahiti Beyond the Postcard engages with questions about the subtle but ubiquitous ways in which power entangles itself in place-related ways. Miriam Kahn uses interpretive frameworks of both Tahitian and European scholars, drawing upon ethnographic details that include ancient chants, picture postcards, antinuclear protests, popular song lyrics, and the legacy of Paul Gauguin's art, to provide fresh perspectives on colonialism, tourism, imagery, and the anthropology of place.

Civic Ecology and the Anthropology of Place: Urban Community Gardens and the Creation of Inclusionary Landscapes

Abstract:[in focus, place. civic ecology, community garden, urban anthropology, urban space]

Toward an Anthropology of Place in Migrant Writing: Place, Non-Place, and “Other Spaces” in Fiction by Régine Robin

Toward an Anthropology of Place in Migrant Writing: Place, Non-Place, and “Other Spaces” in Fiction by Régine Robin

Moving and Dwelling: Building The Moroccan Ashelhi Homeland

The tamazirt (homeland, countryside, village) has become an organizing symbol for Anti‐Atlas mountain Ishelhin (Tashelhit‐speaking Moroccan Berbers) that helps perpetuate Tashelhit language as an index of ethnic identity. Residents render rural spaces meaningful through gendered material practices and discursive representations. They construct place and gender in the course of their movements between the countryside and the city. I suggest that dislocation may be integral to the cultural process of rendering locations as well as identities meaningful. The subjective connection of Ishelhin to place gives less primacy to place as space than as a location in a nexus of mobile relationships. [anthropology of place, rural‐urban relations, ethnicity, verbal expression, Morocco, Imazighen]

Between a Rock and a Non-Place: Towards a Contemporary Anthropology of Place

Feld, Steven and Basso, Keith, eds. Senses of Place. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 1996. 293 pp. $24.95 paper. Clifford, James. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. 408 pp. $17.12 paper.

White settler assertions of native status

The anthropology of postcolonialism has tended to neglect or homogenize the varied expressions of cultural and national identity of British settler descendants. Against the backdrop of research with white settler descendants who farm large Crown pastoral lease properties in the South Island high country of New Zealand, this article examines evidence they presented before the Waitangi Tribunal about their attachment to land as a politicized expression of belonging, of one set of Pakeha voices. It analyzes how high country runholders speak about and symbolically construct belonging and suggests that the high country landscape is a central metaphor in the conceptual systems of its inhabitants, providing them with a way of thinking about their cultural distinctiveness within the arena of contestations in the meanings of cultural identities defined by the Waitangi Tribunal. [postcolonial settler identity, New Zealand high country, land claims, sheep station life, anthropology of place]