Year: 2013
Type: article
Abstract: In Swamplife: People, Gators, and Mangroves Entangled in the Everglades, anthropologist Laura Ogden traces the lives of poor, rural whites called gladesmen through the hidden cultural, political, and ecological history of the Florida Everglades.She invites the reader to imagine a world of mythological outlaws, giant reptiles, political intrigue, conservation, and rural life in order to reveal how "oppositional culture and social class operate in our understandings of wilderness in the United States" (p.2).Her monograph is based on the stories and practices of gladesmen, and unfolds as a fluid, tangled, and lush record of the history of the Everglades landscape.Throughout her book, Ogden challenges notions of the landscape as a space of cultural significance scripted by human ideas, customs, practices, and stories.She seeks to reclaim the landscape "as a place of people and human history" through understanding "how what it means to be human is constituted through changing relations" with other species and objects (p.2).Ogden (2011) develops the term landscape ethnography to describe the method of writing culture that is "attentive to the ways in which human relations with nonhumans produce what it means to be hu-book rEviEws swamplife: People, gators, and mangroves Entangled in the Everglades
Author: Maryann Cairns
Language: English
Subfield: Anthropology
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Life on land
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2009544447