Kaaristo, Maarja

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Reviews169in Austria; and Tschoepe’s description of how Romani families are moved into and out of Turkish ‘dirtscapes’ of purity and pollution.I had hoped that the epilogue would provide some hints about the orientation of the book series as a whole, but this section is more fragmented; oddly describing the field as ‘perhaps overheating’ (2019: 320). Laviolette does begin to connect the material stakes of break-down and repair with our collective climate emergency, drawing on texts from media archaeology and the environmental humanities. For me, Berglund captures the planet-fixing potentialities of repair best in her insightful chapter on ‘small mutinies’, where an imperfect yet engaged praxis of repairing reflexively from where we are, raises lively critical questions about how to go on, even from ‘broken’ places.Lara HoustonUniversity of SussexAnu Lounela, Eeva Berglund and Timo Kallinen (eds) (2019) Dwelling in Political Landscapes: Contemporary Anthropological Perspectives. Studia Fennica Anthropologica 4 (Helsinki: The Finnish Literature Society), 293 pp., ISBN 978-951-858-087-7When it comes to understanding landscape from the phenomenologi-cal perspective, certainly Tim Ingold’s conceptualisation of perceiving landscape from within has greatly influenced not just anthropologists, but also geographers and other social scientists. Taking this as its starting point, this book seeks to pay more attention to the material and meaningful political landscapes, to the ‘messy entanglement between policy, people and things’ (Immonen: 193). It is precisely in highlighting the political aspects of the phenomenological landscapes with anthropological sensibilities that this book is a welcome addition to landscape studies.The book starts with a theoretical introduction by the three editors, Anu Lounela, Eeva Berglund and Timo Kallinen ‘exploring how the material and conceptual are entangled in and as landscapes’ (8), fol-lowed by a geographically wide-ranging array of ethnographies from Denmark, Indonesia, Estonia, Madagascar, Mexico, Canada, Israel, Peru, Finland, Zimbabwe (former Rhodesia), Ecuador (Amazonian rainforest) and Papua New Guinea. The volume ends with Jason M. Brown’s chapter, reiterating many of the theoretical strands that weave the book together and reminding us not to misread landscape as ‘a cultural layer atop an objective nature populated with material Reviews170or biological objects’ (280). Following Ingold, the chapters approach landscape as an object of inquiry as well as a research tool, a simultane-ously representational and embodied taskscape, (re)produced by the interactions between human, non-human and material. Theoretical framing is further established by the two reprinted chapters. Philippe Descola discusses landscape as ‘transfiguration’ both in situ and in visu (237) and Anna Tsing presents the notion of ‘weedy landscapes’ (33) as exemplified in her study of a Danish former coal-mining site, a ‘disturbed anthropogenic landscape’ (41).One might ask what precisely anthropology can contribute to land-scape studies. Perhaps anthropology’s focus on the human, as both individuals and members of groups, as well as the way it pays atten-tion to history. Both physical and human geography and physical and socio-cultural anthropology come in handy here: our present landscapes are results of the millions of years of geological developments as well as the history of humans engaging in horticulture and agriculture and domesticating plants and animals. The past and future are always and already part of the present landscapes be it materially or imaginatively. This is evident in the nostalgic landscapes of former colonial Rhodesia (Katja Uusihakala) and in the memory and identity politics of Israel where ‘the landscapes have been altered, or even manufactured, with the aim to legitimate the settlers’ arrival and sense of belonging’ (Järvi, 136). Landscape is a form of remembrance for the indigenous Dene and Métis peoples’, whose complex relationships with the oil and gas exploration history in Canada is discussed by Morgan Moffitt, as well as in Papua New Guinea, where, as Tuomas Tammisto shows, it is a continual process of physical and semiotic placemaking and ‘an impor-tant materialisation of personal and group histories’ (247).Landscapes are often contested and ‘related to different interests, meaning-making processes and ways of seeing’ (90) as Jenni Mölkänen shows in her chapter on environmental conservation landscapes of rural Madagascar. Multiple stakeholders from local inhabitants to various NGOs, to representatives of state power can have conflicting interests and understandings of what goes on in any given landscape. Some environmentalist discourses almost disregard the local inhabit-ants in their entirety, as landscapes become dwelling places for ‘NGO activists, scholars, donor organisation staff, state forestry officials and others engaged in mapping species, measuring distances and studying the landscape from a detached point of view’ (70) as is evident in Anu Lounela’s analysis of the ‘disturbed landscape’ of Central Kaliman-tan in Indonesia. Joonas Plaan further demonstrates in his discussion Reviews171of the Estonian (is)land-seascape how locals can in turn re-establish their authority by evoking the notions of tradition or cultural heritage, sometimes adding other powerful global stakeholders into the mix in the form of organisations such as UNESCO. We also need to pay attention to what constitutes a landscape: it is not just ‘land’, other elements such as water, air or weather are included (Joonas Plaan; Francesco Zanotelli and Cristiano Tallè). Tensions can and will arise between the discourses on protecting the ‘natural’ environment and/or ‘cultural’ traditions, regardless of how much we would like to avoid such dichotomies in our theorizing or practice. This makes the urgent need to find working strategies and tactics to mitigate the effects of the ongoing climate crisis ever more evident.Landscape can be understood as a meaningful ‘gathering of people and things that is at once social, experiential and, of course, material and not as a representation separate from the thing it refers to’ (Ber-glund, 209). This book is definitely worth reading from cover to cover, as all the chapters work well together in their socio-natural approach. The only thing I missed was a concluding chapter by the editors, as it would have been interesting to see their take on the relationship between landscape, place, space, location, locale and territory in terms of both anthropological and geographical theorising. Perhaps this is a call for the readers to take themselves – after all, the book gives us many conceptual and theoretical tools to engage with both the sensed and imagined political landscapes and landscapes of politics.Maarja KaaristoManchester Metropolitan UniversityMichał Buchowski (ed) (2019) Twilight Zone Anthropology. Voices from Poland. RAI/Sean Kingston Publishing. Vol. 2 of the RAI Country Series (series editor David Shankland)In the early 2000s, at a European gathering of anthropology students, the participants were asked to say something about the position of anthropology in their home countries. Taking the floor, a student from Cracow said that his institution was proudly continuing the work initiated by Bronisław Malinowski, whom he described as a Polish anthropologist. A peer from the UK interrupted him, reminding that Malinowski spent most of his life in the UK and his research and scholarship were connected with British educational institutions (and funds). An Austrian student intervened, too, adding that Malinowski 

Book review: Dwelling in Political Landscapes: Contemporary Anthropological Perspectives

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Book review: Dwelling in Political Landscapes: Contemporary Anthropological Perspectives

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