ABSTRACT
Landscape is constituted as an enduring record of, and testimony to, the lives and works of generations who have dwelt within in it (Ingold 1993: 152). The landscape is always in the nature of ‘work in progress’, ‘never complete’, but ‘perpetually under construction’. Thus according to Ingold (1993: 172) in order to appreciate the landscape in the dwelling perspective or as ‘lived in’ we must begin by recognising its temporality. Such an understanding is important in comprehending how societies can mobilise the past in order to tackle present circumstances. As ‘work in progress’, it is shown in this chapter that the landscape has been constructed out of juxtaposed, intersecting and articulating multiple social relations characterised by mobility of people, places and boundaries (Chapman 1998). As such, the identity of the places and spaces is always contested, mediated and negotiated. In the Eastern Highlands of Zimbabwe case study, the contestations are apparent from the time of the emergence of written records and have continued into contemporary times. The result is multiple meanings, values and mappings of the lived landscapes in the present as people try to establish identities of places (Chapman 1998; Moore 1998; Van Dyke and Alcock 2003).
