The editors of this volume, Backhaus and Murungi, find "themselves" in an uncomfortable situation. Our last two volumes concerned concept-formations for which the tasks of epistemological and ontological grounding and development were our own responsibility— "lived topographies" and "ecoscapes." But for this volume, we have taken the concept of "symbolic landscapes" from the literature of cultural geography, toward which this collection of essays makes a contribution. Back in 2004 we entertained the concept of symbolic landscapes and concluded that it would be a legitimate and viable thematic for our projects—a three-day international conference and subsequent publications, one of which has become this edited volume. During the time that we were soliciting submissions, we began writing this introduction. We had all along assumed that we sufficiently understood the sense of the concept, for we were familiar with major works in cultural geography that had explored geographical symbolism. We had heard some great presentations at the conference and were in the process of reviewing the essays that you will read in this volume. Nothing arose that led us to question the adequacy of our preparation, an informed, preliminary conceptualization from which we had proceeded successfully with our projects. Too optimistically perhaps, we presumed that we would be able to explicate the concept of symbolic landscapes to our philosophical satisfaction, based upon the expectation of apprehending a sound articulation of the concept, which we intended to extricate from the important theorists. But when we sought to provide a sophisticated, deeper grounding of the significance of symbolic landscapes on the basis of our scientific orientation, Geophilia, we ran headfirst into a very problematic state-of-affairs. The senses given for the concepts in the available literature, "symbol,' "landscape,' and thus "symbolic landscape,' had been found to be unsettled/tenuous. We were confused as to whether disagreements arise on the basis of judgment-formations, or referent-distinctions, or both.