Gastón Gordillo speaks with Stuart Elden about his bodies of work, including "Landscapes of Devils: Tensions of Place and Memory in the Argentinean Chaco " and "Rubble: The Afterlife of Destruction".

Humanity, the editors argue, is neither pre-given through biology, nor learned through culture, but instead fashioned through the processes of life itself. In making these claims, the book aims to question and counteract entrenched divisions between cultural and biological anthropology, developing a unified approach to understanding social and biological dimensions of human life beyond the somewhat ingrained dualisms of biology-culture within evolutionary biology and biological anthropology itself.

Novak begins by considering the rise of noise over the past thirty years and focusing on the initial forays of Japanese experimental musicians in urban centres in the 1980s. According to the author, ‘Japa-Noise' is what results from the mediated feedback between two spaces in particular, Japan and America, the latter being the country where the sub-genre was in fact ‘discovered’.

An important aspect of the book is that it allows one to understand that space is a result of practices which imbue it with sense and meaning. In "The Common Place", abstract space thus turns into a landscape; it becomes symbolic and founded on an aesthetics that is temporally as finite as it is dynamic.

Macdonald’s "Memorylands" is an ambitious synthesis of a very wide range of literatures from multiple disciplines relating to the intersections between heritage, memory, place and identity in contemporary Europe. It is one of those books you read with a pad of paper and pencil at your side, hastily scribbling down articles and essays that you’ve not encountered before but are sure – from Macdonald’s reportage – you simply must read.