Cultural Landscapes, Places, Identities, and Representations

This cluster will facilitate an interdisciplinary discussion using theories and practices from several disciplines (Anthropological Linguistics, Art History, Geography, and Geology) to explore the relationships between physical and cultural landscapes, and how these are encoded in language, material culture, and social units. In doing so, participants will create a new transdisciplinary understanding of the connections among landscapes and territories, the language and discourses used to talk about them, social units such as clans or moieties, and their representations in material culture. The initial focus will be on the Northern (Dena'ina) and Southern Athapaskans (Navajo and Apache).

In addition to monthly meetings to discuss readings, the group plans to invite an anthropologist from Kenai, AK who is dealing with these ideas among the Dena'ina Athapaskans and to host a symposium. Questions to be explored include:

• Cultural landscape, place attachment, and place identity
• The role of the imaging of place in personal and cultural identity
• The interconnected roles of kinship and place in cultural and physical sustainability
• Implications of the reliance of hunter-gatherers on specificities of place
• The information embedded when place is imaged in material culture (ie. references to kinship, identity, territory, etc.)
• The relationship of language to place and discourses of place
• Cognitive theory and representations in language and culture
• How the human body is analogically or metaphorically mapped upon the landscape
• How significant physical features of the landscape are rendered in image, especially on clothing

This cluster will address the interpretation and translation of cultures across divides and testing the limits of interpretation (particularly of geometric imagery among indigenous peoples).

The cluster will meet at 4:30 PM in SS 109 on the following dates: September 25, October 9, October 23, November 6, November 20, December 4.