What do you think?
Rate this book
Stonehenge: Making Space
This book is an imaginative exploration of a place that has fascinated, intrigued and perplexed visitors for centuries. Instead of seeing Stonehenge as an isolated site, the author sets the stones within a wider landscape and explores how use and meaning have changed from prehistoric times right through to the present. Throughout the millennia, the Stonehenge landscape has been used and re-used, invested with new meanings, and has given rise to myths and stories. The author creatively explores how the landscape has been appropriated and contested, and invokes the debates and experiences of people who have very different and often conflicting experiences of the same place. Today, heritage managers, archaeologists, local people, free festivallers, and druids come to the place with entirely different understandings and agendas. The book demonstrates that the creation of spaces and places for people to express divergent viewpoints is powerfully constrained by social and political forces that allow some voices to be heard while others are marginalized. With dialogues and illustrations that range from the conventional to the cartoon strip, this multi-vocal book not only presents a wide range of views in an innovative way, but provides important new insights on how people shape and are shaped by landscape.
272 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 1998
2 people are currently reading
35 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
May 29, 2008
Took a quick scoot through Stonehenge, by Bender the week before last. It's a quick read, and an interesting one.
She wrote it in 1999 and it is on the recommended list for the course I'm doing in Sept. The book is interesting mainly because of the way it presents the multivocality of the site. Interesting to note that there aren't too many general books which highlight the appalling state of archeology throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. It's not something archaeologists themselves do too much of! There is much tooing and froing with various archaeologists and experts on the stones and there is a meal made of the reflexivity which descends into extreme navel gazing and at one point I thought it looked like she was getting into people commenting on her work too much. There were also some places where I felt the ethnographic work was not extensive enough (with English Heritage for example) and anthropological conclusions were thin on the ground, for example, when she relied too much on her own involvement eg with conversations and exhibitions. However, that said, it was an interesting attempt to make anthropological archeological knowledge accessible and present the many, often competing, voices on the subject. I liked the way that she included the exhibition and it's always interesting to note the 'sticking points' and places where people make assumptions, and where stuff doesn't work. That often says more than describing how something does work. I enjoyed the 'conversation' style and the cartoons, which (for this visual anthropologist) was nicely done and added to the intertextuality. Nice to see Ron Hutton pop up too. I think I met him once (or twice) and came across him in different places over the years. Not sure I'd know him now, nor would he know me, but there you are.
She wrote it in 1999 and it is on the recommended list for the course I'm doing in Sept. The book is interesting mainly because of the way it presents the multivocality of the site. Interesting to note that there aren't too many general books which highlight the appalling state of archeology throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. It's not something archaeologists themselves do too much of! There is much tooing and froing with various archaeologists and experts on the stones and there is a meal made of the reflexivity which descends into extreme navel gazing and at one point I thought it looked like she was getting into people commenting on her work too much. There were also some places where I felt the ethnographic work was not extensive enough (with English Heritage for example) and anthropological conclusions were thin on the ground, for example, when she relied too much on her own involvement eg with conversations and exhibitions. However, that said, it was an interesting attempt to make anthropological archeological knowledge accessible and present the many, often competing, voices on the subject. I liked the way that she included the exhibition and it's always interesting to note the 'sticking points' and places where people make assumptions, and where stuff doesn't work. That often says more than describing how something does work. I enjoyed the 'conversation' style and the cartoons, which (for this visual anthropologist) was nicely done and added to the intertextuality. Nice to see Ron Hutton pop up too. I think I met him once (or twice) and came across him in different places over the years. Not sure I'd know him now, nor would he know me, but there you are.
October 1, 2011
The author comes across as fairly egotistical, but the book discusses some interesting issues, albeit in not the most riveting fashion
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews