Landscape, person and perspective: creativity and place-making in a Mexican town

Based on ethnographic research undertaken in a Mexican town in the southern desert highlands of Puebla, this dissertation explores the spatial relations and qualitative embodied scales of intimacy and distance, near and far, small and large, the encapsulated and the cosmic. It takes the anthropological concern with landscape environment to emphasize ethnography oriented towards questions about lived processes and the immersive sensory qualities of perception and practice. It examines the culturally constructed metaphors and ideational creativity in the principal arenas of the body, domestic and social places, territory and, the in the formation of worlds. Ethnographically, it builds upon a concern for how spatial orders relate historical developments through a sentient memory of place in a rural town in Central Mexico. Towards these ends, this dissertation employs a combined a phenomenological and semiotic approach aimed at developing an analytical framework within a descriptive practice. Within these parameters, the approach accepts that landscape creativity is largely image based, cosmogonic in orientation and necessarily exploits a pre-existing, if always indeterminate, Mesoamerican cultural milieu