Landscape, land and identity: a performative consideration

book chapter

This chapter considers ideas of land and identity processes through an original consideration of landscape. Following Taussig's argument that cultural meaning and identification are less constituted in institutionalised and ritualised signification than emergent in the performance of life, attention focuses upon the performative character of landscape and its relationality with land and identity.... Making land significant in life is considered through landscape in the notion of spacing. The notion of an everyday, gentle politics is introduced to the constitution of identities and feeling of land. Identities and values concerning land are produced relationally in the energy cracks between performativity and institutions, as the several investigations upon which this chapter draws testify.