Introduction: Enquiries into Contemporary Ritual Landscapes
: Pirjo Kristiina Virtanen, Eleonora A. Lundell, Marja-Liisa Honkasalo
Publisher: Estonian National Museum
: 2017
: Journal of Ethnology and Folkloristics
: 11
: 1
: 5
: 17
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/jef-2017-0002
: https://research.utu.fi/converis/portal/detail/Publication/26881006
‘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.
KEYWORDS: ritual landscape • non-human agency • materiality • immateriality • belonging • relationality