FIRST CALL Spatializing Sedimentations and Erosions of Time in Urban Landscapes
2023-09-19
Dear Colleagues,
We invite you to participate in our upcoming thematic issue of the journal Geoadria [1], "Spatializing Sedimentations and Erosions of Time in Urban Landscapes." The theme of this issue draws upon a processual reformulation of Reinhart Koselleck's concept of 'sediments of time' that has recently been proposed [i] as a framework for understanding how societal identities and historical narratives are shaped, preserved, and transformed slowly through time in part through competitive physical transformations of key elements of social landscapes. At the core of this concept lies the recognition that the fluidity of collective identities is viscous, changing slowly because of competing intergenerational, intersecting markers such as kinship terminologies, patterns of preferred marriages, personal and family naming systems, food prohibitions and preferences, and ritual calendars. In the modern period, such identities have often been linked to religious heritage (which does not necessarily mean religiosity), even during periods of state atheism. Processes of competitive construction, destruction, and modification of religiously-linked edifices such as churches, mosques, synagogues, shrines to saints/ holy men, temples, cemeteries, and monuments to heroes, victims and martyrs can be regarded as spatial-physical identity markers, which as social-physical sediments can accumulate or “erode” (be destroyed, converted), marking and thus (re)shaping the way communities perceive themselves, others and the urban landscape in which members of Self- and Other-differentiating communities interact through time.
[1] Published by University of Zadar and Croatian Geographical Society – Zadar. Indexed in WosCC and Scopus.
[i] See Robert M. Hayden and Mario Katić, “The Fluid Dynamics of Viscous Identities: Sedimentations of Time in Five Late-Ottoman Refugee Towns in Bosnia since 1863,“ Slavonic and East European Review 101 (1): 114-150 (2023) 10.1353/see.2023.a897287