Recent death jeopardises the boundary between the worlds of the leaving and the dead, which needs to be restored for the safety of the community. Among the Philippine highlanders residing in the Ifugao province this function is performed by the means of epics or epic-shaped ritual chants sung during funeral wakes. This genre bears a name of "the story of the dead" (hudhud di nate in Ifugao, hudhud ni nosi in Yattuka).

The soul of the deceased has to be conducted successfully from the village where the funeral rite takes place to the abode of the dead. That implies summoning the Conductor of souls, who helps the singers to let the soul refresh its memories first by visiting the places that played the crucial role in the life of the deceased person. After that the soul is 'pushed' downstream, first through real, than through mythological geography . Before the soul reaches the underworld, there is a possession. The soul talks to the relatives and is being persuaded to forget the way back.

The paper is based on the author's field materials collected in Ifugao province, including the funeral hudhud texts recorded in Asipulo, Kiangan and Lagawe municipalities in 1995-2012 and interviews with epic singers and shamans. Field data are compared to early records on rituals and beliefs of the population of the area that date back to the beginning of the XXth c. Of those R.F. Barton's writings are of crucial importance.

This paper explores the changing integration of a spiritualised landscape into the celebration and reproduction of a non-Russian Siberian community - the Sakha people, of the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia). The Sakha people's animist shamanic tradition did not die out during the Soviet period, and its post-Soviet revival is continuing despite the pressures of rapid social and technological change. Contemporary Sakha shamanic practice centres around two genres of shamanic prayer, the Algys and Ohuokhai, which consist largely of extensive poetic eulogies of the surrounding landscape and its spirits, sung by the specialists leading the prayer.

In the classical practice of Sakha shamanism, the aesthetic experience of the poetry and music of these prayers is a central aspect of the interaction between humans and spirits they instantiate. The poetic words are in fact bestowed by the upper gods and spirits, in an act of divine self-giving. The beauty of the prayer's poetry and music enable the ritual participants to contemplate the glory of the created order, including the spiritual entities who have set it in place, and the landscape they inhabit. In doing so, they perpetuate the Sakha people's experience and re-creation of their natural environment as a national homeland: the landscape, via its spirits, has its own agency and presence in the Sakha people's experience of national belonging. I suggest that the landscape maintains its potency within Sakha perceptions of community even for those who lack interest in classical Sakha shamanism, via the celebration of natural beauty in Sakha pop songs.

The Boorana have preserved "oral chronicles" based on their own time concept and a system of ordering the course of local history ("gadaa calendar"). In their oral chronicle, the Boorana systematically mention places whose names are referring to a specific characteristic of the landscape. Those names of places tend to be linked to histories of conflicts between the Boorana and neighboring ethnic groups, and also with migration history and with their customs of religious ceremonies and of political meetings.

In this paper, I will focus especially on the relation between landscapes and historical memories of conflict, the landscapes not being only bearers of the historical memory but - according to oral accounts - influencing both the historical event itself and influencing the way it is memorized. I would like to show several oral histories as example and suggest that landscapes convey 1) memories related to battles, specifically to battle fields, their location, situation and landscape context, 2) memories on routes, especially those related to battle fields, 3) memories on the boundaries, separating the Boorana from "other" groups, defined as "other" also through a definition of a landscape which is "ours", and "theirs", 4) memories on territories "owned" by the Boorana.

In the Don Cossack dialect the word "Don" means not only the river but the territory around it, the area of Cossacks settlement that is officially called "Podonje". So in the result of such a metonymical transformation the word "Don" combines two types of space: geographical (the river and its basin) and cultural (their (Cossacks') own cultivated territory as opposed to the strange and dangerous).

On the one hand, this transformation leads to changes in traditional Russian beliefs that settlers brought to the Don region (for example, water ghosts such as "vodjanoy" (water sprite) and "rusalka" (mermaid) that can harm people have disappeared). On the other hand, a certain number of new characteristic features have developed:

- specific local geographic terminology appears,

- specific names of dialect groups of Cossacks come to use ("Upper-don" Cossacks and "Lower-don" Cossacks),

- a peculiar folklore image of the river originates, and so on…

As a result, we come to conclusion that the river space has an excessive influence while a distinctive culture of South Russia settlers is being formed/

'Human places become vividly real through dramatization', Tuan notes (2005: 178). Everyday lives of people in the Bosnian valley-town of Gacko are drawn into a repetition of sacral and political rituals. Their performance is not completely separate and they customarily rely on points in mythical time and space. However, the critical difference lies in the direction of their communication with the land. The nationalist modus operandi is territorial. By taking the human individual as its starting point and projecting fears of uncertainty, it subdues land into bastions of exclusivity. The cosmological approach functions in reverse. As neither certainty nor uncertainty originate from people, the agency of land-God appears as the life-moulding force inclusive of the totality of human experience. The associated ritual practices and oral history celebrate and revere this vernacular lex terrae, as the cohesive element of both synchronic and diachronic plurality. The sacral calendar of Gacko's Christians, Muslims and Roma is a shared knowledge of immersed placedness which stands in stark contrast to the violence of modern divisions. The rituals extend through a range of relationships, from weddings and funerals to traditional forms of medicine, economic exchange and athletic competitions. The paper builds upon my ethnographic explorations in the town of Gacko and raises questions on the vitality of non-humans in the reconstruction of a post-war society.

Considering landscape not just as mere representation detached from the environmental context that it is supposed to stand for, but as a socio-historical process deeply embedded in an engagement between humans and their surroundings, I mean to discuss some of the vectors that turn landscape into: a) a socio-historical process; b) an instrumental dimension used by individuals in the course of environmental conflicts. In view of that, can social movements make use landscape - as a socially and historically rooted category - incorporating it amidst the trends of social conflicts? The present paper discusses this question, focusing on the analysis of a conflict that opposed a group of smallholder peasants to a mining company in the Portuguese central inland following the 25th April 1974 Revolution. While fighting against the company's projected dredging of farming land, the opposing landowners recalled the environmental damages infringed by the multinational mining companies from 1912 until 1962. Challenging the mining company's pragmatism and rational argumentation, the local defiant peasants used environmental depredation and the pernicious effects of mining on landscape as symbolically charged argumentation against mining. In this sense, landscape surfaced in popular contentious rhetoric as an idealized pastoral meant to overstate the advantages of organic pre-industrial agriculture in opposition to the decadence and mayhem generated by mining. The conflict under scrutiny might add additional clues on how local collective resistance takes shape and how environmental issues, drawn from idealized landscape representations, take part in social protest, interleaving political, ideological and economic factors.

In Serbia, a country with ca. eight million inhabitants, are living approximately 200,000 Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) from Kosovo, most of whom are ethnically Serbs, with an additional 15,000 to 20,000 being unregistered Roma, Ashkali, Gorani and Bosniaks (U.S. DOS 2008; IDMC; UNHCR November 2009). Many IDPs are living in collective centers (similar to refugee camps) with unresolved political, citizen and economical status and are often used from the Serbian nationalist as an example of the "Serbian eternal suffer(ing)". Most of these collective camps used to be holiday resorts during the time of the former Yugoslavia. In the nineties, their landscape changed as they became shelters for the refugees coming to Serbia from Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia. At a later stage, IDPs from Kosovo settled at these collective camps and continue to living there today.

This paper draws on ethnographical work and biographical interviews with Internally Displaced Persons from Kosovo living in Serbia and explores the symbolic landscapes of the above mentioned refugee camps as their new homes. Furthermore, it sketches the imagined and lived symbolic religious landscapes of the Serbian Orthodox Church through the celebrations of the Serbian family saint day tradition (in Serbian : slava) in the collective centers, as an important element for the preservation of religiosity and religious practices, through family and home life,among Orthodox Serbs.

If one is on the lookout for "active" landscapes, then seismic landscapes are probably good places to start with. In 2011 the city of Van (Turkey) was hit by two major earthquakes: events that have transformed the way in which Van's residents relate to the urban landscape surrounding them. Amidst hundreds of collapsed houses and cracks that mark the walls of almost every single building, the way people approach buildings has taken on a downright suspicious quality - an attitude, which in fact mirrors theoretical approaches that highlight the active nature of non-human objects.

I will approach the activity of seismic landscapes through the world of rumours and conspiracy theories that have been thriving ever since the earthquakes happened. This ethnographic material indicates that the seismic activity of the earth has alienated inhabitants from the urban landscape they previously experienced as largely passive. In a context where urbanization is perceived as development in a modernist sense, the urban space was seen as a passive foil open to human transformation. Yet with the earthquake, this modernist certainty has started to crack. What the ethnographic material shows, however, is that the new suspicion is only directed at certain objects, while others continue to preserve their image as stable and unmoving. It is precisely this selective process of seeing activity in some and passivity in other objects, which indicates the need to theoretically differentiate between degrees of activity and to investigate the mechanisms by which objects are being attributed different natures by our informants.

This paper discusses the interface between natural hazards and environmental history in the Himalayan region of Ladakh, in the contested State of Jammu and Kashmir in North India. Drawing on ethnographic research, I argue that Ladakh inhabitants' experiences and interpretations of ecological upheavals associated with climate change are inextricably linked to local environmental history and memory, as well as a range of perceptions. Following a discussion of the involvement of various social actors in the region and the resulting tripartite conception of its landscape, I establish that the historical interrelation between sacred, geostrategic and scientific perceptions of the mountains of Ladakh is fundamental to the production of knowledge about the region. Defining how Ladakh as a place is lived and known through time is contingent upon factors that include the Buddhist conception of the summits, the military activity ongoing in the region due to its crucial strategic importance to South Asian regional disputes, and the increasing scientific focus on the Himalayas as critical barometers of climate change. The history of Ladakh is inscribed not only in the collective memory of its people, but also in the landscape. Today, the most telling physical marks of change are those carved by receding glaciers and environmental hazards - in particular, sudden torrential rains and the ensuing flash floods that exacerbate the erosion of increasingly crumbling mountainsides. A consideration of the different knowledge systems informing the local population's experiences is essential to a comprehensive view of the full impact of current ecological upheavals.

In Gloucestershire, England, the flood of 2007 is remembered as an exceptional emergency. However, some floodplain residents, as well as flood markers, documents and photographs speak of a rather similar flood in 1947. People living particularly close to the river also remember high floods in the 1960s and 1990s. What is the relationship between recurrent floods, social memory and landscape?

Because floods are rhythmic phenomena, social memory and local knowledge play a crucial role in living on the floodplain. Stories, photographs and flood markers remind floodplain residents of the possibility of a generally dry landscape becoming wet at intervals. No two floods are the same, however, due to transformations in land use, hydrology, climate and flood management regimes. Therefore, improvisation emerges as a central aspect of coping with floods alongside the exact memory of previous floods.

As floodplain residents are aware of both the relative autonomy of flooding and the role human activities have in directing and exacerbating flood waters, living on the floodplain can be approached as a set of conversations with a responsive watery landscape. The element of water in the river, on the floodplain, and occasionally on the roads and in people's homes seems particularly apt for tracing these conversations, as it is as malleable as it is powerful and destructive. This presentation explores the metaphor of a listening, remembering and speaking landscape in the analysis of living and coping with floods three places in present Gloucestershire.

Tigray in northern Ethiopia is marked by a vivid historical memory. While the Orthodox Church has a long history of defining itself through the (re-)production of manuscripts, and the state leadership at least partially reposes its power on official recordings and propagation of their history, most local historical memory in the Ethiopian highlands is, however, kept almost exclusively orally. This encompasses genealogies and stories of heroism of leaders and peasants; trickser stories; traditional law; myths of origin; legends of spirits and wonders. Researchers recorded some of these accounts in the last century, but decades have passed without any serious studies on it, except in some territories in southern Ethiopia. One of the most interesting features of local historical memory has, however, been virtually overlooked: The fact that it is highly linked with landscapes, inseparable from specific spots and territories. Local traditional historians study the history of their land by moving through it, visiting spots linked with memories and recording them from elders - they "read" the landscape. This has evolved into a local method of verification of historical sources, e.g. of historical chronicles: If one wants to know the background of a historical event, one visits the area linked with it and verifies the details, which often contradict the simplified version in the chronicle. The landscape is in this sense a mnemotic phenomenon, which strongly interacts with society and without which historical memory - and in consequence: the preservation of the traditional rules of the society - is not thinkable.

This paper investigates the relationships between noise pollution, environment, and legislation in São Paulo, Brazil. I explore the ways in which the urban soundscape can serve as a point of entry to discuss the relations between spatial segregation, citizenship, violence, and taste. Based on ethnographic work and interviews with residents, architects, lawyers, and urban planners, I briefly examine three issues related to urban sounds in São Paulo: first, I consider how the city administration has been dealing with noise complaints, especially car audio parties in 'periferia' districts (inhabited mostly by low-income residents), whose sonic practice has become criminalized. Second, I describe my ethnography at São Paulo's anti-noise agency and unpack some of the politico-economic issues surrounding noise and urban growing. Finally, I focus on an ethnographic project where residents from different regions were asked to create an 'everyday soundtrack' by recording and editing everyday sounds that resonate with each of them affectively, politically, musically, economically, etc. As I show, this last approach can be a useful methodological tool in that it allows the anthropologist to study auditory cultures and attachments/detachments with specific urban spaces. I conclude by suggesting the ways in which discussions about noise pollution may help us understand the (often subtle) interactions between actors with divergent interests and investments in the urban environment. Finally, investigating sound behavior and control should also help us access localized modes of dwelling and sociability, as the heterogeneity of urban sounds<->noises found in urban centers highlights multiple zones of cultural contact.

Through this archive they will have the experience of the street at home. Their pictures will be souvenirs for keeps on the Internet, a tool of communication that barely existed in Serbia at the time. Now that we have digital technology omnipresent, do we show up in places where the cameras can easily reach us, so we have an evidence of a kind that we were there? Do we purposefully attend the public gatherings, so we are taking part in the urban mosaic as people used to? Is this the reason why we record our experiences - to prove out being there as well as owning that moment? If so, how does this constant mediation through digital technology modifies us and our awareness of present?

"There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism" quoted a protester on his poster. Would Benjamin approve?

Furthermore, can Belgraders think of the Republika Square - a circular space of gathering just like Tahrir Square in Cairo as not having that heritage now? Can they just wait for the night bus there or walk into the national theatre as nothing has happened there? They can and they do. Only us, exiled from Serbia come back to that environment with a surge of memories popping out in this locality through images superimposed to the architecture and the noise increasing from car horns to whistles in our mind. Did everyday overrun the extraordinary so easily when Benjamin's progress pushes through?

My work addresses the question of how an attention to the sound and the exploration of an area through sound helps access individual experiences of city life that are, otherwise, often lost in the kind of cultural and ethnic block thinking that community studies is very much prone to.

I have found that our ears are far more accurate than what we are consciously aware of. I have experienced that by having an accident that has left me partially blind. Ironically, this has become an interesting tool for my research. This paper will exemplify this aural mode of attention and how the cultural landscape emerges through sound.

This paper will listen to the sound of the landscape, wanting to reach an understanding of the layers of memory and time that constitute it and explore the affect and effect it has on the inhabitants of the space. Mine is an argument for a multi sensory imagination, potentially more adapted to the depiction of contemporary society.

I will focus on a comparative analysis of two case studies. Firstly, I will examine how the fragmented, cultural and ephemeral of the area emerges in their discourse. Then, I will analyse their intake on everyday cultural practices.

This mode of attention provides a platform for the surfacing of the rhythms of the area. I will argue that listening to those rhythms helps access a more diverse range of mainstream cultures and subcultures that coexist in a geographical space.

The lyrical repertoire that accompanies the Afro-Brazilian fighting dance, capoeira, is largely composed of songs about geographical places (Rêgo, 1968 ). Among these, some are imaginary, such as "Aruanda," an overseas site ‒ somewhere in Africa ‒ where, to many capoeira practitioners, the souls of Afro-descendants return. Many other places are real. Thus, foreign countries and continents (particularly Africa) and other Brazilian cities are evoked by the singer. Many songs explore the urban landscape of the city of Salvador (streets, places, paths, churches), as well as the surrounding rural villages and natural sites.

The sung narrative wanders from the imaginary ‒ even though it is highly meaningful and intimate ‒ and from faraway and unknown locations, to entirely concrete and familiar places.

This articulated landscape, built by sudden movements between imaginary and real places, seems particularly apt to confer plausibility and immanence to sung narratives about the past, especially about legendary old capoeiristas and slavery.

The shifting to places that are less and less alien to the singer's actual placement confers credibility to the narrative. The everyday landscape begin to echo echoing memories that are inaccessible to individual experience, but become more and more plausible and vivid, like a direct memory, born of individual experience.

After recent ethnographic research among an indigenous Andean group with no previous anthropological studies, I found a particular "anomaly": women are not only allowed to play aerophones (in this case, a Amazonian-shape traverse flute), but they are in fact the only ones who can played it. This practice -which goes against what has been documented until now in the Andean and Amerindian groups of South America- is explained by the natives referring how the mountains taught a woman to play. As part of my effort to explain this cultural particularity in the Andean context, I compare the use of this flute with the use of a maraca only played by men, who use it mostly as a way to talk to mountains (an act that is not possible for women today).

This presentation is an attempt to grasp the relationship people of Byans have had with landscapes. Byans lies in the uppermost valley of the Mahakali River that constitutes the western border of Nepal with India. As trans-Himalayan traders, the many inhabitants of Nepali Byans, who call themselves Rang, have moved between Tibet and southern hills of the Himalayas along mountain trails. I first present the system of Rang spatial nominals, in which a "relative" or "deictic" coordinate system merged with an "absolute" one, and argue that the system reflects, or is afforded by, the actual geographical features of Byans and adjacent regions. Then I show that Rangs often discuss a landscape as is composed of many named places, mutually connected by trails. Many of these named places are inextricably connected with, and materially transformed by their "traditional" subsistence activities (agriculture, animal husbandry, and trade). On the other hand a named place often reminds them of mythical and historical incidents that once occurred there, and/or some "supernatural" being(s) living there who should be ritually treated. The latter aspect is most clearly appeared in "se yamo", the long oral tradition recited in their traditional funeral rituals, in which the soul of the deceased is sent by words, within the actual landscapes and beyond along trails, to the ancestors' land. Lastly I argue that this apparently static but ever-changing relationship between Rangs and the landscapes can hardly be sustained without the experience of living and walking in the landscapes.

In the rural Mananara region of Northeastern Madagascar, people at first appear to be largely silent regarding the difficult political eras of their past, such as colonialism, slavery, and war. Yet, walking with farmers through their agrarian landscapes, narratives of these periods slowly emerge. Pointing to a tobacco plant, for example, a farmer relates the story of how colonial overseers only allowed Malagasy workers a break if they wished to smoke a cigarette. Clove trees recall the hardships of the Second World War, when students had to use crushed clove seeds for ink as they had limited access to trade goods such as pens. Drawing from eighteen months of ethnographic research, this paper investigates how such narratives illustrate the powerful role agricultural landscapes play in offering individuals a vehicle with which to connect their lives with larger historical and political trajectories. Turning towards their fields, people find ways to articulate stories about the political past in terms that resonate on a personal level and that allow such records to be passed between generations. In the process, agricultural landscapes emerge as places where both material and ideological resources are actively cultivated, as people find in their fields living traces of historical meaning and memory.

We exchange many stories about what happened to us in our day-to-day interactions, which forms the basis of our perceptions of appropriate social relations, micro politics, and sometimes history. This paper focuses on the spatial setting of those personal, but at the same time political or historical stories, and the work of visual imaginaries in the process of narrative transmission among people sharing spatial basis of their life. It argues that, when the story is set in a place to which one is familiar, it can evoke in the person images of the background landscape and the scene, to leave a vivid impression about the narrated event.

The cases examined are stories about political conflicts in the north part of Ireland. Due to its history of frequent and long-lasting conflicts, people in urban areas in Northern Ireland have had great part of their life within a specific range of ethno-politically divided network and residential zone. This has been a factor of the development of conflicted views about history and what constitutes violence. As the mundane landscapes such as street corners and local parks passed by on daily basis were narrated to have turned into a stage of violence, they came to represent both of the seemingly contradictory two marks, the homely and uncanny. With this subtle balance of verisimilitude and unlikeliness, those stories spread and were rumored, in the process of which what was witnessed by other community members fused into one's own memory.

Lacan observed in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, that 'As subjects, we are literally called into the picture, and represented here as caught' and themes of ontological incompleteness and being 'trapped in art' are also explored in Oscar Wilde's famous novel The Picture of Dorian Grey. This paper examines how this novel has become understood to members of a Nahuatl community in rural central Mexico where the events of the Spanish conquest are found frozen in time and place in features of the surrounding landscape. It discusses the moral portraiture made by decadent intellectuals who recursively 'splice' core themes of The Picture of Dorian Grey with the mythology concerning the 'face' of the conquistador Hernan Cortez that is seen on a large rock outcropping. The analysis engages a local critical theory embracing the prespectivist topography of this hybrid landscape.