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Introduction: Enquiries Into Contemporary Ritual Landscapes Cover

Introduction: Enquiries Into Contemporary Ritual Landscapes

Open Access
|Jul 2017

Abstract

‘Landscape’ and ‘ritual’ have been largely discussed in the social and human sciences, although their inter-relatedness has gained little scholarly attention. Drawing on earlier studies of ritual and landscape, as well as the authors′ own ethnographic works, ‘ritual landscape’ is suggested here as a useful analytical tool with which to understand how landscapes are produced, and how they, in their turn, produce certain types of being. ‘Ritual landscape’ recognises different modalities of agency, power-relation, knowledge, emotion, and movement. The article shows how the subjectivity of other-than-human beings such as ancestors, earth formations, land, animals, plants and, in general, materiality of ritual contexts, shape landscapes. We argue that ways of perceiving landscape includes a number of material and immaterial aspects indicated by ways of moving through landscapes and interacting with different human and non-human subjects that come to inhabit the world, creating relations and producing agentive ensembles and complexes.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/jef-2017-0002 | Journal eISSN: 2228-0987 | Journal ISSN: 1736-6518
Language: English
Page range: 5 - 17
Published on: Jul 13, 2017
Published by: University of Tartu, Estonian National Museum, Estonian Literary Museum
In partnership with: Paradigm Publishing Services
Publication frequency: 2 issues per year

© 2017 Pirjo Kristiina Virtanen, Eleonora A. Lundell, Marja-Liisa Honkasalo, published by University of Tartu, Estonian National Museum, Estonian Literary Museum
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License.