Rashid's Blog: A Place for Inquisitive Souls

New topological geo-imaginaries have to some extent supplanted landscape as a medium for theorising space and nature-culture realtions. Such accounts of space aim to challenge the static conceptions of space, measurement, distance, surface, and perspective developed by traditional landscape studies.

Those writing in a vitalist Deluezian-Bersonian vein, for example, express space as a matter of force, energy and process, and thus present geographies as being animated through their continual becoming (e.g. Thrift 2000; Dewsbury 2002; Marston et al 2005). While such accounts have done much to re-stress the dynamic materiality of space, its ‘entanglements’, these topological accounts of space (particularly those drawing on Actor-Network Theory (ANT)) are at risk reiterating the world as a flat grid-like surface; as Euclidean geometries have done for centuries.

Some geographers, like Mitch Rose and John Wylie, therefore want to reinstate notions of ‘landscape’ or the ‘topographical’ back into topological and vitalist geographies…

Is it me…

(Mayan calendar)

Or does this look like an enormous Oreo cookie?

And another thing… do you want to trust ‘end of civilization’ predictions made by a people who failed to predict the end of their own civilization?

Nepal’s most famous ethnic group, the Sherpas probably migrated to Solu-Khumbu ( the nepalese district where is located the Mount Everest) four or five centuries ago from eastern Tibet; their name means “people from the east”. They were originally nomads, driving their yaks to pasture in Tibet and wintering in Nepal, until change came from an unlikely quarter : the introduction of the potato in the 1830’s is believed to have been the catalyst that caused Sherpas to settle in villages, and the extra wealth brought by this simple innovation financed the building of most monasteries visible today.

Sherpas maintain the highest permanent settlements in the world – up to 4700 m.- which accounts for their legendary hardiness at altitude. Their mountaineering talents were discovered as early as 1907, and by the 1920’s hundreds of Sherpa men were signing on as porters with expeditions to Everest and other Himalayan peaks –…