The exchange of landscape practice between China and Europe from 1500–1800 is an important chapter in art history. While the material forms of the outcome of this exchange, like jardin anglo-chinoisand Européenerie are well documented, this book moves further to examine the role of the exchange in identity formation in early modern China and Europe. Proposing the new paradigm of “entangled landscapes”, drawing from the concept of “entangled histories”, this book looks at landscape design, cartography, literature, philosophy and material culture of the period. Challenging simplistic, binary treatments of the movements of “influences” between China and Europe, Entangled Landscapes reveals how landscape exchanges entailed complex processes of appropriation, crossover and transformation, through which Chinese and European identities were formed. Exploring these complex processes via three themes—empire building, mediators’ constraints, and aesthetic negotiations, this work breaks new ground in landscape and East-West studies. Interdisciplinary and revisionist in its thrust, it will also benefit scholars of history, human geography and postcolonial studies.

Picture yourself in a panorama of giant flowers, mushroom-shaped houses, grinning suns and snoozing moons, with spaceships soaring between the stars. Thirty-one detailed scenes of fantasy landscapes offer scope for imagination.

«History has to reorient», as the historian and sociologist Andre Gunder Frank observed. In the global or globalised age, a culture is no longer regarded as a discrete entity, but rather as a hybrid formation that interacts with other cultures in an incessant process of multidirectional exchange. Bringing together «Eastern» and «Western» case studies ranging from the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries, this volume reminds historians that to conduct transcultural analyses they need to be alert to the multiple ways, comic intents included, in which difference is negotiated within contacts and encounters – from selective appropriation to rejection or resistance.

This book takes a unique approach to the ethnographic and analytical explorations of ecologies in the making. The core theme of the work will be the emerging anthropocene contexts that simultaneously bring unprecedented human interactions with the non-human as well as the emergence of hybrid ecologies. There will be dependence on existing literature, own ethnographic work that has already went into this, the closer introspection of immediate geographies as well as the pertinent debates. There has been a reconfiguration of meaning and nature of spaces in the context of social relations produced by neo-liberal globalization. States as they have been are transforming and are influenced by policies made beyond borders. This work is marked out by careful enquiry on ecologies in the making with the backdrop of distinct regional developmentalist trajectories as well as specific ethnography from Kerala, South-West India.

Dwelling in Political Landscapes contributes to the anthropology of landscape and the field of political ecology. Environments change at speeds never before experienced. Massive species loss is just one transformation affecting life forms and their interactions, climate change another, and there are many more rapid and sometimes profound material and social changes that anthropologists working around the world attend to and document. By exploring how the material and conceptual are entangled in and as landscapes, this book takes up the invitation posed by such emerging novel situations to explore the potentialities of anthropology and related fields, to understand life when 'things are not what they used to be'. The complex entanglements of seemingly disconnected processes and the recent sense of crisis concerning environment, movements of people, climate change and other planetary transformations, raise the question over the role of anthropology and proper methodologies for studying these developments.

Offering an intervention into larger conversations about local history, microhistory, and historical scholarship, Entangled Lives is a revealing journey through early America.