Landscape and national identity and geographies of nature Flashcards
late 18th and early 19th Century Landscape view
development of a style called ‘picturesque’. the development of this style was linked to the new importance of images of the countryside in art. Aristocratic owners of old landed estates commissioned paintings of the land they owned, and of their country homes within their landscaped-escapes in ways that presented these patterns of property and privileged as natural. There was also a new and growing metropolitan middle-class market for landscape pairing and interest in travelling to see picturesque landscapes
Lower classes and landscape
The lower classes and especially those who worked the land, they suggested, were not able to see the landscape in this way, since they supposedly lacked the distance and objectivity that defined both the ability to govern and to see the world.
Mitchell, 1994
The way those who worked the land were represented in landscape representations in Britain and in British colonial contexts abroad reflected unequal social relations of wealth and power (Mitchell, 1994).
Lanscape in the 20th Century
Landscape in this period, between the First and Second World Wars, and especially vigorous physical activity in the countryside, was seen as an antidote to the degenerating effects of urban industrial living. (Matless, 1995)
Raymond Williams, 1988
‘Nature is perhaps the most complex word in the language’ (Raymond Williams, 1988, Keywords).
If nature is other from culture
If nature is other from culture then some argue that it is not nature that should be protected from culture, but rather the other way round: it is humans and their culture that should be protected from nature. here nature is framed as wild, uncontrolled and a threat to humans.
In framing nature as outside human culture
In framing nature as outside human culture, a third practice suggests that the common sense way to deal with nature is not to protect or tame it, but to exploit it. As a place yet to be influenced by human culture, nature offers a range of free resources that can be tapped by cultures to allow them to meet their own needs.
Nature being reconstituted materially
The realisation that the material world of nature is throughly imbued by culture is something that social sciences, have explored in detail in recent years - Nature is increasingly being reconstituted materially, even down to the atomic level… nature is being physically ‘produced’ (Castree and Macmillian).
Marxist Geographers view on nature
Marxist geographers would consider this reconstitution as the destruction of ‘first nature’ transforming into ‘second nature’ - commodified as an input to the industrial system, or into ‘third nature’ - whee humans manipulate the genetic coding for nonhuman flora and fauna in order to gain more profitable or patentable commodities.
Whatmore
Whatmore, when we consider nature we should remember that: the representation of nature is not a neutral process that simply provides a mirror image of a fixed reality, representations of the natural world should not be taken at face value, they have social meaning and there are many ways of seeing the same thing - need to situate ways of seeing in social and historical contexts of representation
Latour (1993) and how this requires recfocusing on views
If you were to capture some water in a cup and excavate the networks that brought it there, you would ‘pass with continuity from the local to the global, from the human to the non human (Latour, 1993, 121). These flows would narrate interrelated tales… of social groups and classes.Viewing nature as ‘socionature’ thus requires a further refocusing on how we should think about the places of nature - not as general types, but as specific compositions of unique traces
Wilson, 1992
Our experience of the natural world…is always mediated. It is always shaped by constructs like photography, art, advertising’ (Wilson, 1992, p.12).
