A5 - Landscapes, identities and political consciousness yesterday and today

[TERCUD]

"Kenneth Olwig has shown how the strong identities of many traditional communities was based on the perception of the landscape (or landskip) as a fundamental natural and social unit (Olwig, 1996). The local communities of coastal Schlewsig-Holstein, for instance, were proud at the same time of their environment, of the way they inhabit and exploit it, and of the rules they had chosen to manage it.
Geographical mobility was already important in the upper classes at the time of the Renaissance, and ideas travelled widely : the aesthetic conception of landscape rapidly spread all over Western Europe. It was used as an instrument of class domination by the elites of Venice and Britain, as demonstrated by Denis Cosgrove – and in other Western countries (Cosgrove, 1984).
With the democratic and industrial revolutions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, new forms of communities had to be invented and taught (Anderson, 1983). Landscape was used as a political tool in another way : in order to give strong support to national consciousness, essayists and painters selected landscapes with which a large group (either regional or national) could identify.
Nation states are still important since they are the only institutions which can enforce laws, but they have ceased to appear as almost self-contained and self-sufficient Worlds : with the enlargement of the circles of travel, economic exchange and intellectual cooperation which characterizes contemporary societies, solidarities have become wider – and at the same time, much more diluted. Hence the often difficult mobilization of citizens on political issues !
The question is the following one: would it be possible to rely on a new sensitivity to landscape in order to make people more aware of contemporay ecological threats, and provide them with a new basis for identities centred on local problems and conscious of the role played by interterritorial relations ?
During the Conference, John Adam will sum up the lessons of landscape as a tool for the construction of nattional consciousness. Is there any possibility to use such a tool in a different context and with different aims ? Landscapes have a strong appeal on persons because of their ecological complexity, efficiency and fragility, and because of their beauty. This appeal may serve different causes : in some cases, it is used today to reinforce a feeling of local specificity and legitimate a will to protect it against whatever comes from outside. This communitarian use of landscapes is only one of those which can be imagined.
At what conditions could landscapes become useful instruments for the construction of modern identities and the successful enactment of sustainable development policies ?"

References
Anderson, Benedict, 1983, Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London, Verso.
Cosgrove, Denis, 1984, Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape, London, Croom Helm.
Olwig, Kenneth, 1996, "Recovering the substantive nature of landscape", Annals of the Association of American Geographers, vol. 86, n° 4, p. 63653.

(This is an excerpt from the text by Professor Paul Claval “NEW STRATEGIES FOR MANAGING LANDSCAPES AND STRENGTHENING IDENTITIES AS TOOLS FOR A SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT”)