In recent years, the culturally distinctive Tunpu, a people group in southwestern China, have been reimagined by outsiders, including media, tourist companies, scholars, and especially Han Chinese from other regions in a search for perceived lost roots of Chineseness. Building upon a Tunpu narrative of migration to the region during the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) period, these outsiders imagine Tunpu sociocultural alienness to be representative of ancient unchanged Ming-period character. Thus romanticized, the Tunpu become an unspoiled reservoir where an authentic national Chinese essence can be rediscovered. Through a complex process of embodied engagement with the Tunpu landscape and its objects, however, it is a class of non-Tunpu settlement that becomes celebrated by these outside actors as ideal representation of Tunpu settlement and architecture. This total process fundamentally transforms Tunpu time and place. Yet, it also interacts intricately with local knowledge, and leads to complex local responses and reappropriations of new historical elements.
Local narrative and outsider imagination in a Chinese landscape
Materiality, sense, and agenda
Patrick Lucas
Sacred Landscape, Healing Landscape
“Taking the Waters” in Tunka Valley, Russia
Katherine Metzo
This article examines the sacred mineral springs in Arshan, Buriatiia. These springs have been inscribed as sacred due to their medicinal properties and are marked as sacred through rituals and material offerings. Residents lament the loss of healing, and implicitly sacred, strength of Arshan. The author argues that the sense of loss is due to the medicalization of healing in Tsarist and Soviet times and from the commodification of this type of sacred site through bottling and tourism.
Intertwined Landscape
The Integration of Arabo-Islamic Culture in Pre-state Palestine
Mostafa Hussein
were absorbed and directed toward the native population. This approach contrasts with later practices of cleansing the landscape of Arabo-Islamic signification in the post-statehood era, when the knowledge of these forms was employed to remove the Arab
The Return to the Monument
The Looming Absence of the Temple
Hava Schwartz
factors as well. In line with the logic that has guided the shaping of the urban landscape in Jerusalem for centuries, the physical planning of space in Israeli Jerusalem is expressive not only of power relations but also of the symbolic perception of the
Mark C. J. Stoddart and Paula Graham
landscapes as places to be experienced, rather than stocks of resources for extraction. The success of tourism marketing campaigns that promote Newfoundland nature and culture is reflected in the province’s designation as “one of the top ‘new’ and
Approaching Health in Landscapes
An Ethnographic Study with Chronic Cancer Patients from a Coastal Village in Northern Norway
Magdalena Skowronski, Mette Bech Risør, and Nina Foss
therapeutic and positive for their health when dealing with illness ( Gesler 1992 ; Williams 2007 ). Other studies have shown how CCPs experience significant healing dimensions of engaging with landscapes that are familiar to them and how it influences their
Mega-Plantations in Southeast Asia
Landscapes of Displacement
Miles Kenney-Lazar and Noboru Ishikawa
( Ito et al. 2014 ). On the other hand, smaller- and medium-scale farmers and operators have developed plantations that individually cover relatively limited amounts of land but in the aggregate have transformed and completely altered landscapes
Frida Hastrup and Marianne Elisabeth Lien
implicated in generating northern resource landscapes? The articles in this thematic section address these questions through five fine-grained ethnographic cases from Greenland, Iceland, and Norway. What is clear across these studies is that the
In Anthropological Journal of European Cultures
- Published (Print):
- 01 Mar 2020
- Article Type:
- Introduction
- Pages:
- v–xxi
Galina Kharyuchi
Translator : Tatiana Argounova-Low
published. Elena Glavatskaia in her monograph based on the 1926–1927 Circumpolar Census devoted her attention to the transforming religious landscape in the Obdorsk region. She noted that the process of Christianization in this area was slow, without mass
Lines in the Sacred Landscape
The Entanglement of Roads, Resources, and Informal Practices in Buriatiia
Anna Varfolomeeva
background, the article demonstrates how the line of the Mondy-Orlik road became intertwined with other lines of the landscape: the Oka River, patterns of human movement, and informal routes of jade transportation. The road changed human-landscape relations