Dr. Martin Rundkvist is a Swedish archaeologist, journal editor, public speaker, chairman of the Swedish Skeptics Society, atheist, lefty liberal, bookworm, and father of two.
The former Cistercian abbey of Alvastra in 1639.
My brother in arms against pomo nonsense, human/cultural geographer Clas Tollin, has put half the manuscript of his forthcoming book on-line beforehand (fully illustrated, in Swedish). The title is Storgårdar, egenkyrkor och sockenbildning i Omberg-Tåkernområdet under äldre medeltid, "Manorial farms, private churches and the genesis of parishes in the Omberg-Tåkern area in the Early Middle Ages". (These are the Swedish Early Middle Ages, dating from about AD 1100 to 1250.) Hugely useful to me as I'm doing fieldwork and writing about the period up to AD 1000 in that very area, and likely to be interesting to many others too.
Via LL.
[More blog entries about medieval, middleages, archaeology, humangeography, Sweden, 12th, century; arkeologi, kulturgeografi, 1100-talet, Östergötland, medeltiden.]
Humanities & Social Science
Comments
1. Clas Tollin defended his PhD in 1999. Whatever the published manuscript is the half of, it is not his PhD. Read his published PhD: Tollin, C. 1999. Rågångar, gränshallar och ägoområden : rekonstruktion av fastighetsstruktur och bebyggelseutveckling i mellersta Småland under äldre medeltid. Diss. Stockholm.
2. The Swedish word Kulturgeografi rightly translates Human Geography. The English "Cultural geography" is usually translated to Kulturens geografi or a little bit more clumsy Kulturell geografi. Clas Tollin is hardly a Cultural Geographer. I suspect Martin with his strict hate against everything that has a slight smell of post-modernism would not count the majority of Cultural Geographers as "brothers in arms". And I also guess Clas do not. Read here what the UGU commission on the cultural appraoch in geography emphasises:
"The Commission 'Cultural Approach in Geography' has contributed substantially to the critical analysis of geographical representations of cultural realities over the last decades. Foci of interest have been in particular: the interrelation of culture, region and space the cultural approach in the different sub-disciplines of geography spatial aspects of cultural processes (modernization, formation of regional identification, social exclusion, policies of preservation etc.)"
Posted by: Mats Widgren | April 23, 2008 12:01 PM
Wow! What eyecandy!
Posted by: Christina | April 23, 2008 4:26 PM
Mats, 1: Silly me, I knew that Clas had published a thesis. But since this new work was advertise3d on SLU's web site as a "half-way seminar", and as it was to have an "opponent", I thought maybe the earlier thesis had been for a fil.lic.
2. Aha, so "cultural geography" is actually pomo meta-geography. Good to know.
Christina, yeah, early maps are great!
Posted by: Martin R | April 24, 2008 2:35 AM
Martin. Let me just hastily add that a strong group of cultural geographers do very good empirical and theoretical work. Don Mitchell e.g. writes sharply on landscapes from a materialist viewpoint and often publishes in cultural geography journals. His story of strawberry eating on his parents terrace and the hidden labour behind the beatiful Californian landscape is a classic. I f I remember correctly it is in: "California Living, California Dying: Dead Labor and the Political Economy of Landscape," in K. Anderson, S. Pile, and N. Thrift (eds.), Handbook of Cultural Geography (London: Sage, 2003), 233-248
Posted by: Mats Widgren | April 24, 2008 4:09 PM