Envisioning Landscapes, Making Worlds: Geography and the Humanities, edited by Stephen Daniels, Dydia DeLyser, J. Nicholas Entrikin, and Douglas Richardson
本书由美国地理学家协会组织，收录29篇论文，探讨地理学与人文学科交叉领域，涵盖制图、反思、表征和表演四个主题，适合研究生研讨。
Envisioning Landscapes, Making Worlds: Geography and the Humanities , edited by Stephen Daniels, Dydia DeLyser, J. Nicholas Entrikin, and Douglas Richardson . 2011 . New York : Routledge . 320 + xxxii. ISBN 978-0-415-58977-2, cloth, $140; ISBN 978-0-415-58978-9, paper, $47.95 . Envisioning Landscapes, Making Worlds: Geography and the Humanities is a remarkable and timely edited volume. Produced by the Association of American Geographers (AAG), which has over 10,000 members in 60 countries, it's the brainchild of Douglas Richardson, AAG's Executive Director, and Denis Cosgrove, a noted cultural geographer who died in 2008. The book grew out of AAG's 2007 “Geography and the Humanities Symposium” that featured over seventy participants, was three years in the making, and was supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities (Richardson, 2006, 2007a, b). (The symposium also resulted in a second “more experimental and experiential” (Richardson in this volume, p. xxi) book about the humanities’ engagements with space and place, GeoHumanities: Art, History, Text at the Edge of Place (Dear et al., 2011; a review in this journal is forthcoming)). From the outset, Richardson sets a high bar for the present book, hoping it will “form a foundational contribution,”“become influential and heavily cited,” and “generate heated debate” (p. xx). After Richardson's foreword, Cosgrove's precise prologue (“Geography within the Humanities”), and the editors’ introductory essay, there are 29 papers, divided into four sections: “Mapping,”“Reflecting,”“Representing,” and “Performing.” Several of geography's most well-known figures are among the authors, including Yi-Fu Tuan, David Lowenthal, David Livingstone, and Derek Gregory in addition to the editors and Cosgrove. Richardson's foreword provides a general introduction to the book and the broader genesis of the project and symposium, and each of the other editors contributes a chapter. With one exception, all chapters after the editors' introduction are sole-authored. Eleven are by women, all but one of them clustered in the “Representing” and “Performing” sections. As with so many things nowadays, many contributors are transnational, but a survey of current affiliations shows that fourteen are based in the United Kingdom, eight in the United States, two each in Canada and Sweden, and one each in Italy, Australia, and Japan. While all are academics, most consider themselves first and foremost as geographers (there are five exceptions, three of them clustered in the final “Performing” section), but many are working in cross- or interdisciplinary ways in a wide range of departments/fields, including communications, landscape architecture, planning, history, philosophy, sociology, political science, literature, film, media, drama, performance studies, architecture, and urban design. The first section—“Mapping”—is meant to go beyond cartography, and the word is to be used in a “metaphorical sense of interpreting and creating images and texts and of making sense of a fast modernizing or post-modernizing of the world” (editors’ introduction, p. xxx). Do the six chapters succeed along those lines? Five of the six go into either deep historical underpinnings of landscape ideas, maps and the ideas behind them, or how twentieth-century thematic mapping relates to history (Susan Schulten). There is much to reflect upon in these chapters, but making sense of our postmodernizing world is not what the authors achieved, except perhaps as a way of thinking about the past. The sixth chapter (Derek Gregory) explores the natural history of destruction, in this case the brutal Allied bombing of cities in Nazi Germany during World War II, and how best to depict that destruction (from above or below?) and how that in turn relates to memory and meaning of the acts. Most of the chapters in “Mapping” are well worth reading, but on the whole they are not as strong as those in the other three sections. “Reflecting” is for us the strongest overall section in the book. Here the idea is to “adopt a more reflective, but no less engaged, perspective on the past as well as the present to probe the moral and cultural complexity of places and landscapes, and to reveal the dense web of meanings and social relations, which lie behind that which seems in plain view” (editors’ introduction, p. xxx). The majority of the authors give us extremely solid works: Timothy Cresswell, who makes the case for “mobility … alongside such notions as landscape, space, place or territory … .” (p. 77); Entrikin, who tackles the relationship between geography and philosophy; Livingstone, who looks at Darwinian landscapes); and Anthony Pagden, who discusses how “the desire to move, to travel … together with the ability to transform nature to meet human needs, constituted not merely dominion over the world, but a form of knowledge of it” (p. 120). Tuan's “The Good Inherit the Earth” is not his strongest essay, although such a book without Yi-Fu Tuan's wisdom would not have been complete. The one weak piece in this section is Edward Casey's “Do Places Have Edges?” It is a valid question, but statements like, “If the edges of ready-to-hand things are prized for their pliable practicability, those of present-at-hand particulars are esteemed for their measurable constancy” (p. 67), are convoluted and not too revealing. The editors’ stated aim of the third section—“Representing”—is to address the “crisis of representation” (p. xxxi), and how depictions of the world are more than “mimetic correspondences with material reality, accurate or inaccurate, but projections of human values, hopes and fears, sometimes coercive ones” (ibid.). As such, this section participates in a longstanding concern in the humanities and one with significant past and present currency in geography. In a strong and varied section—featuring diverse and mixed media including poetry, photography, film, statuary, travel writing, drawing, and painting—several articles stand out. Indeed, after studying Joan Schwartz's approaches to reading photographs, it is hard to imagine anyone's photographic gaze not being forever changed and enriched. DeLyser's case study, on the politics of public commemoration, equally serves as a poignant reminder on the possibilities and responsibilities of academically grounded community-based advocacy. And Diana Davis’s “Reading Landscapes and Telling Stories” (on the power of art in shaping perceptions of/in the Maghreb) sheds important light on placemaking in an understudied world region and one that has been prominent in recent headlines in the still unfolding (so-called) Arab Spring. Section four—“Performing”—is an attempt to go beyond written and visual forms of representation, “or rather beyond the limits of too screen-like or desk-bound an interpretation of images and texts, to an appreciation of their relations with various embodied, multi-sensory practices, of sound, smell and touch, and the expressly physical engagement with the material worlds of their making and meaning” (ibid.). This idea previously has been incorporated into well-known geographical analytical concepts including sense of place, experiential geography, and spirit of place (genius loci). In foregrounding the performative, the sense that where and when something happens is crucial is well illustrated by Sheila Hones in “The Novel as a Spatial Event”—where she puts reading a novel into the readers’ context rather than being wholly abstraction—while Mike Pearson uses it to create (not only analyze) worlds. In perhaps the most evocative piece of the volume, “Deserted Places, Remote Voices: Performing Landscape,” Pearson traces his 20-year engagement with the “notion of a deep map” (p. 280) and his desire “to record and represent the substance, grain and patina of a particular place through juxtapositions and interpenetrations of the historical and the contemporary, the political and the cultural, the factual and the fictional, the academic and the discursive: depth not as profundity but as density of both topics and modes of address, in full cognizance of local and personal knowledge” about places (ibid.). He discusses his 10 years of creating site-specific performances that develop the idea, invite participation, and suggest horizons that others might explore. In a world filled with things we don't like, Pearson presents a method of living and creating our own worlds we’d like to inhabit. While the idea of “mapping” as a metaphor is in current vogue for charting routes through concepts and approaches—especially in linguistic studies—or as a group of graphic metacognitive tools, it is quite misleading in many ways, and it tends to muddy the intellectual waters when interpreting, creating, and making sense of places. Probably that is why a number of the chapters in the “Performing” section are so caught up with the ideas behind traditional maps and a more distant past, and not so much with trying to understand “a fast modernizing or post-modernizing” world. Another term needs to be developed for this idea, perhaps more along the lines of “envisioning” (as in the book's title), “cognitive visioning,” or just “place cognition.” Our issue with this section is not with the individual chapters, but with their disconnection with the description of what the editors set out to do. Clearly, the theme of visualizing complexity of thought and interpretation within the context of place is exciting, and it is wide open for future work. So while the stated charge to the authors of the section is a good one, and the chapters in it are well done, they don't seem to work individually or collectively in furthering the editors’ aims. Many of the book's strengths are in reflection—something the academy needs to spend far more time doing—and in these troubled times we need far more academics out interpreting and trying to make a world we actually want to live in. By relating to caring about our everyday places, and to the desire to maintain a balance between “love of place” and the sheer economic gain that can be drawn from it, these ideas will have a much greater resonance in academia. Making worlds—while reflecting on them, representing them, and performing them—is a compelling theme for this book, along with envisioning what makes places what they are. It is clear an important door has been opened to future scholarship along these lines. A final thought: these chapters are all solid pieces and the book would make a wonderful reader for a graduate seminar on the topic. The themes that are stressed are important to get into a broader discussion, especially in a rapidly evolving discipline like geography. Douglas Richardson has to be congratulated heartily for getting the grants to have a symposium, bringing together geographers and humanities scholars, and publishing two books from the efforts. Indeed, we’re delighted to see that the discussions will continue in earnest at the 2012 AAG Annual Meeting in New York: it will feature 40 paper and panel sessions on new interdisciplinary research and practice at the intersections of geography and the humanities. These interdisciplinary sessions will engage a variety of topics, including ones in literature, history, cinema, popular culture, performance art, comedy, curatorial practice, geographic imagination, painting, and photography and their relation to place, space, landscape, scale, cartography, and other aspects of geography (http://www.aag.org/cs/humanities). So from all these efforts, it's important to ask where the ideas will go next. We hope they will progress toward addressing a major crisis in the academy, which seems to be moving away from supporting humanistic understanding, and toward creating (and preserving) the kinds of places that help define our lives. Mike Pearson's chapter points a way to help people build knowledge through experiences in a place over a lifetime (or whatever length of time) that is a way of living one's life and making meaningful connections to places.