Landscapes of Silence

A dazzling tapesty of personal memory and distant landscapes from the renowned anthropologist and film-maker, Hugh Brody.

This is a book about silences. And land.

Renowned anthropologist and film-maker Hugh Brody weaves a dazzling tapestry of personal memory and distant landscapes: childhood in England in the shadow of the Second World War, the Derbyshire hills, a kibbutz in Israel and the deep Canadian Arctic.

Growing up on the outskirts of Sheffield, Hugh Brody ate roast beef and Yorkshire pudding but was always given to understand that the real, the perfect food came from his mother's home, Vienna. He attended Hebrew classes three times each week but was sent off to a Church of England boarding school. Conflicted and bewildered, he sought places to which he could escape - but everywhere he discovered deep and troubling silences.

He takes us on his first journeys to the Arctic, a world so far removed from anything he had known as to be a chance to learn, all over again, what it can mean to be alive. As he reveals, the realities of the far north were a joy, but even there he found abuses of the people and the land - and voices that were deeply silenced by the forces of colonialism.

In these landscapes, human well-being appears to be both possible and impossible. Yet in memory, in the land, in the defiance of silence, Hugh Brody sees a profound humanity - as well as hope.

Author Bio:

Hugh Brody was born in 1943 and educated at Trinity College, Oxford. He taught social anthropology at Queen's University, Belfast. He is an Honorary Associate of the Scott Polar Research Institute at the University of Cambridge, and an Associate of the School for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto.$$$In the 1970s he worked with the Canadian Department of Indian and Northern Affairs, and then with Inuit and Indian organizations, mapping hunter-gatherer territories and researching Land Claims and indigenous rights in many parts of Canada. He was an adviser to the Mackenzie Pipeline Inquiry, a member of the World Bank's famous Morse Commission and chairman of the Snake River Independent Review, all of which took him to the encounter between large-scale development and indigenous communities. Since 1997 he has worked with the South African San Institute on Bushman history and land rights in the Southern Kalahari.