ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to contribute to the reconceptualization of society-nature relations in geography by considering how particular, socially defined reality formations come into being and change over time and space in terms of their material and imaginary manifestations. It focuses on English royal forests and plantation forests and describes some of the multiple material, socio-cultural and symbolic relations formed in the course of their production. The notion of formative context stresses the influential, political nature of the surrounding conditions on which the achievement of meaningful, composite formations depend and is used in preference to that of structured system or bounded field. The chapter explores various aspects of the changing nature of royal forests and plantation forests as meaningful, composite formations. S. Daniels' study of the political iconography of woodlands in later Georgian England, for example, found that woodland imagery was deployed to signify, and furthermore naturalize, varying and conflicting views of social order.
