Retrieving Landscape: A Biography of Nanhai in the Pearl River Delta, China

This poster presents a general outline of my PhD research, which takes as its starting point my ancestral village located in a peri-urban area of Nanhai district in the Pearl River Delta in China. Prevalent readings of the Delta focus on the striking spatial contrasts and large scale developments that have come about since the start of the economic reforms in 1978. Instead, my research starts from the observation that it is insufficient to view this area from a developmental point of view, which risks homogenising this multi-layered landscape. Informed by my experiences on the ground, I propose a leap from the quantitative territory to the qualitative landscape, to what Tim Ingold would call “the world as it is known to those who dwell therein.”

I center ways in which people dwell, make inhabitable the world despite marked spatial changes. This is done on the one hand on the abstract level of representing this inhabiting through text and visualisations, on the other hand on the concrete level of inscribing the lived landscape through everyday activities, thus interpreting it as “an enduring record of – and testimony to – the lives and works of the past generations who have dwelt within it, and in so doing, have left there something of themselves.” Processes today are equally valued as another chapter in the ongoing life.

Drawing from the field of landscape biography as proposed by the Dutch archaeologist Jan Kolen and colleagues, a longue durée approach is taken in order to grasp processes and transformations of Nanhai at different rhythms and on different timescales for three aspects: the cosmological, the ancestral, and the working landscape. My PhD is structured around these three aspects of landscape, each thus forming another lens and entryway. The poster shows a glimpse of each chapter.