B 4.2 Landscapes, national memory and the national character

[TERCUD]

"The feeling of identity that landscapes create is not only linked with the familiarity people have with the environments of their daily life and the way they are built. It results also from forms of memory encapsulated in specific elements: the tombs and cemeteries which speak of the ancestors who were born and died there; the churches, mosques, stupas which remind of the faith shared by the population; the monuments built in the glory of the revered God (or gods), the memory of local heroes. In this way, landscapes are transformed into depositories of the memory of the group and contribute to its collective identity.
A generation ago, Benedict Anderson analyzed the way national consciousness was developed in Western countries from the end of the eighteenth century (Anderson, 1983). Nobody was able to know the whole territory of Britain, Germany, France or Italy; it was truer for Canada, the United States, Brazil, Australia or Russia. Nobody was able to anchor his/her national identity in a direct experience of national environments. This experience had to be taught by the rulers and learnt by the population.
History and geography played a central role in the construction of nations, the best known of imagined communities – but the situation was not very different at the regional scale. History drew attention to the places where decisive battles were won, where soldiers lost their lives for saving their home countries. It stressed the role of big abbeys, cathedral churches and pilgrimages in shaping the faith which held the nation together in difficult times. It showed the role of the castles of the King and his nobility who succeeded in gathering counties, dukedoms, bishopries which initially form a patchwork. It explained the role of the capital city in organizing the national territory and developing a national civilization. In this way, history paved the way to geography.
Geography brought other considerations: sacred places where the national destiny was forged were scattered all over the territory or concentrated in specific areas: every pupil had to get acquainted with this form of knowledge. Geography also spoke of landscapes. Their role in building imagined communities was not evident. In France, for instance, Hippolyte Taine, one of the main historians and essayists who contributed to the construction of national consciousness, traveled widely in the country (Taine, 1863/1865). He was born in Northern France. The Mediterranean nature was completely foreign to him: he did not feel at home in this part of France; he had the feeling that the local population had been unable to protect the natural cover and was thus responsible for extensive soil erosion and the decline of this part of the country. Out of such interpretations, it was difficult to build a strong sense of national unity.
In order to avoid this kind of reaction, the variety of landscapes had to be interpreted in terms of complementarity, or superseded thanks to the choice of a national stereotype: the first solution was illustrated in the case of France by Jules Michelet, an historian, in the 1830s, and Paul Vidal de la Blache, a geographer, at the beginning of the twentieth century (Michelet, 1833; Vidal de la Blache, 1903). The second possibility was explored in other countries: it relied on the selection of a type, or a few types, of landscapes, which express(es) the genius of the people and the way it conquered the land and transformed the difficulty of its settlement into a collective achievement. In Denmark, as showed by Kenneth Olwig, the moors of Jutland served as a federative theme (Olwig, 1884): their initial poverty, their harshness gave them a romantic and somewhat sublime aura; their conquest by farmers was one of the major achievements of the Danish peasantry during the nineteenth century.
In Switzerland, the Alps provided a wonderful national stereotype. The nation was born out of the initiatives of the mountaineers of the primitive cantons, in the thirteenth century; herdsmen who spent several months every year on the high pastures enjoyed a difficult, frugal, but healthy life, which hardened their character; they had a direct experience of freedom. All the qualities of the country, its beauty, its purety, the quality of its inhabitants were examplified by the Alp mountains."

(This is an excerpt from the text by Professor Paul Claval “THE IDEA OF LANDSCAPE”)