Symbolic landscapes

Repository | Book

Springer, Dordrecht

2009

399 Pages

ISBN 978-1-4020-8702-8

Symbolic landscapes

Edited by

Gary Backhaus, John Murungi

Symbolic Landscapes presents a definitive collection of landscape/place studies that explores symbolic, cultural levels of geographical meanings. Essays written by philosophers, geographers, architects, social scientists, art historians, and literati, bring specific modes of expertise and perspectives to this transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary study of the symbolic level human existential spatiality. Placing emphasis on the pre-cognitive genesis of symbolic meaning, as well as embodied, experiential (lived) geography, the volume offers a fresh, quasi-phenomenological approach.

The editors articulate the epistemological doctrine that perception andimagination form a continuum in which both are always implicated as complements. This approach makes a case for the interrelation of the geography of perception and the geography of imagination, which means that human/cultural geography offers only an abstraction if indeed an aesthetic geography is constituted merely as a sub-field. Human/cultural geography can only approach spatial reality through recognizing the intimate interrelative dialectic between the imaginative and perceptual meanings of our landscapes/place-worlds. This volume reinvigorates the importance of the topic of symbolism in human/cultural geography, landscape studies, philosophy of place, architecture and planning, and will stand among the classics in the field.

Publication details

Full citation:

Backhaus, G. , Murungi, J. (eds) (2009). Symbolic landscapes, Springer, Dordrecht.

Table of Contents

Introduction I the problematic of grounding the significance of symbolic landscapes

Backhaus Gary

3-31