Chapter 3 focusses on the temple of Hera at Foce del Sele north of the Greek colony of Poseidonia-Paestum in southern Italy. New archaeometric analysis on the metopes from the Hera sanctuary near the mouth of the river Sele has made it possible to propose a new reconstruction of the oldest Hera temple on the site, which belongs to the first generation of Doric stone temples. The study of the architectural elements confirms the decorative nature of the first Doric friezes. Moreover, by analyzing the mythological subjects on the frieze and comparing them with other early Doric temples in Selinous, Delphi, and Athens, it can be shown that the tendency to choose Panhellenic themes over local traditions is a general feature of early Doric temples. Because of the detachment of the imagery from local traditions, the Doric temple is described as a “non-place” according to the definition of the French anthropologist Marc Augé. Conceiving temples as standardized “non-places” that could be set up in any given local environment was crucial to the agendas of Greek elites, who needed to reorganize agricultural and urban landscapes to regulate population pressure and social tensions – both in the colonies and in homeland Greece.

In the past, architectural change in Archaic Greece was often explained as a somehow natural, coherent evolution from “primitive” wooden structures to sophisticated stone temples. Following the ancient writer Vitruvius, modern authors have attempted to demonstrate that the architectural orders, in particular the Doric, can be traced back to functional necessities typical of wooden buildings. While this explanation of the Doric order has long been questioned, few attempts have been made to explore alternative explanations. The chapter lays out a methodology to analyze architectural change by asking how the experience of sacred spaces and landscapes changed and who were the social groups interested in promoting such change. The chapter highlights the kinetic and multisensorial dimension of the experience of space and architecture, as stressed also by authors from other fields. Further, a survey of recent contributions to the study of the Doric and Ionic orders suggests that they emerged suddenly in the early sixth century BC, rather than evolving slowly over centuries. The emergence of the Doric order went hand in hand with the emergence of architectural sculpture on pediments and friezes. By looking at a series of case studies the book aims to shed light on the relation between the various transformation processes.

Chapter 5 frames the book’s narrative in the style of a lengthy coda. It is concerned with how the bark’s prevalence, wide fame and general ‘usefulness’ in therapeutic practice among geographically disperse and socially diverse societies affected its natural habitat in the central and northern Andes. The bark’s very ‘mobility’ and the popular demand that arose for it, the chapter argues, altered the harvest areas’ landscape of possession, commerce and demographics, the distribution and abundance of vegetation, and the livelihood, health and fate of the men and women implicated in harvesting, processing and conveying the bark. The chapter reminds readers, at parting, how plant trade, therapeutic exchange and epistemic brokerage are not extricable from time and space. Consumption and the imaginaries, therapeutic practice and medical understandings attendant to it invariably begins with changes to the material world, to physical nature and society.

Chapter 3 provides the historical context in which to understand land and political violence in Kenya. It does so by comparing the histories of land ownership and distribution between Kenya’s highlands and the Coast region. The chapter’s central question asks how and why practices of land allocation vary between regions. Drawing on patterns of land allocation, archival data, and in-depth interviews, the chapter argues that two styles of political leadership – the vote-seeking land patron and rent-seeking landlord – reflect different modes and logics of land accumulation and distribution that have developed over each political regime. The chapter further explains how these different modes of land distribution and the broader politics of land play out under three phases of Kenya: colonial rule and the Mau Mau civil war (1900–1962), the single party rule of Jomo Kenyatta (1962–1978), and the de facto single party rule of Daniel arap Moi (1978–2002).