Introduction: Imagining Landscapes

This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. An imagined landscape, then, is a landscape not of being but of becoming: a composition not of objects and surfaces but of movements and stillness, not there to be surveyed but cast in the current of time. The book describes the contestations over land use and indigenous entitlement which accompany processes of ‘development’ in rural Belize. It also suggests that having at a distance is not necessarily limited to vision, and that it could extend to tactile and auditory perception as well. The book explains the challenge, however, with which the people of the Kelabit Highlands of Sarawak, whose understandings of their rainforest landscape. The book addresses a vivid account of the arrival of an unusual visitor to the Orkney Islands, an archipelago located just to the north of the Scottish mainland.