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Reading the rural landscapes
Landscape and Urban Planning 70 (2005) 9–19
Reading the rural landscapes Paul Claval∗ Université de Paris-IV, 191, rue Saint-Jacques, 75005 Sorbonne, France
Abstract Rural landscapes express the logics behind the crop systems of farmers, the aesthetic or the visions of Arcady, real nature or outdoor recreation of their inhabitants. Linguistics, either structural linguistics or semiotics, provide useful tools for deciphering the resulting constructions. © 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Cultural geography; Rural landscape; Linguistics
1. Introduction Linguistics, in the forms it took during the 20th century, deals with languages seized as wholes and with their components, sounds, words and sentences. It delves on the way the components are conditioned by the wholes. It explores the significance of the signs it is made of. It insists on the two faces of signs, which appear at the same time as signifiers and signified. The explanations linguistics provides are not based on external forms of causation, but on the inner logic of the relations between the whole and the parts, and signifiers and signified. Some analogy exists between languages and landscapes. Both can be considered as wholes and decomposed into parts. It is the reason for which geographers often try to rely on linguistic models for interpreting landscapes.
∗ Present address: 29 rue de Soisy, Eaubonne 95600, France. Tel.: +33-1-3959-8383; fax: +33-1-3959-8383. E-mail address: [email protected] (P. Claval).
0169-2046/$20.00 © 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.landurbplan.2003.10.014
1.1. Structural linguistics and the rural landscapes of traditional societies In the studies of rural landscapes that geographers began to develop from the very end of 19th century, they used either a structural approach (each type of rural landscape had been shaped by a particular ethnic group from the beginning of history), a functional one (each rural landscape was organized in order to combine cultivation and cattle rearing and insure a sound crop rotation), or an archeological one (the observed features were born in the past and reflected the functional conditions which prevailed at that time). What these approaches shared was the idea that a few types of rural landscapes could be identified—open fields, infield–outfield systems, consolidated farmsteads with enclosed fields, etc. in Western and Northern Europe and elsewhere. It meant that rural landscapes were organized according to rules. They obeyed a certain grammar. Even if geographers did not refer to linguistic studies, their approaches were in a way close to the findings of the new structural linguistics of the time.
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Geographers did not take advantage of the whole evidence they collected in their enquiries. They rubbed out the subjective aspect of the testimonies they had gathered and selected only the rational elements of interpretation: they believed in the coherence of the landscape systems their analyses had discovered; their only aim was to understand them. The functional dimension was certainly essential, but it did not preclude other readings of the landscapes by local people—symbolic ones, for instance. 1.2. Readings of rural landscapes by urban dwellers A second way for analyzing landscapes developed in the 1960s and 1970s. In Italy for instance, Sereni (1961) was struck by the opposition between the beautiful landscapes of bel paesi, in the vicinity of cities, and the more banal forms, which prevailed elsewhere. The new urban landowners knew perfectly that crop rotation was a necessity and did not try to renounce the advantages it gave to those who know how to organize their fields, but they generally escaped the collective discipline which prevailed for ordinary farmers. As a result, they could introduce, in the way they organized their land, a new care for its aesthetic quality. This second tradition in the study of rural landscapes was best exemplified in Britain by Cosgrove (1984). When studying landscapes according to this perspective, functional features cease to appear essential. Geographers try to discover the dreams and artistic models used by the architects, landscape architects and gardeners responsible for drawing the villas, halls or castles of the well-to-do landowners. The language landscapes spoke were for them that of beauty and harmony. It conveyed also an ideological content. It has to be interpreted just like other forms of narratives, as a text. In this type of interpretation, geographers often rely on semiotics, specially the forms of topological or spatial semiotics developed by Greimas et al. (1979). The productivity of cultivation jumped during the 20th century. Hence a dramatic decline in the densities of farm employment, with two possible consequences, either a dramatic decline of the density of rural areas, or a complete reversal in the composition of their
populations, suburbanites or rurbanites becoming increasingly numerous. This demographic change has dramatic consequences on the composition of rural landscapes. The functional logic of crop rotation and the necessary association between tilling and cattle raising has ceased to rule over most of the territory. The new rural population has ceased to share the dreams of classical or romantic landowners. For them, traditional farming was a dirty activity. Modern rurbanites are fond of true nature, with its complexity and the struggle for life that characterizes it. Settling in a rural area also offers possibilities to practice sports, games and any other type of activity, which requires much room. Is an order emerging of the multiplicity of private and collective initiatives responsible for contemporary evolution? Is there anything like a consensus among the new suburbanites or rurbanites about what is a “good” landscape? 1.3. The chosen perspectives There were some analogies between the functional approach to the landscape and the first form of structural linguistics, and others between the aesthetic approach to the landscape, which developed from the 1960s and semiotics. The relevance of linguistics for explaining contemporary evolution is less evident. As a result, the first set of questions we shall cover will be the following ones: up to what point structural linguistics first, and later semiotics helped to enlighten the genesis and significance of traditional rural landscapes? Is there a form of linguistics relevant for the contemporary evolution? We shall also try to cover a second set of questions. Landscape specialists have generally focused on the way landscapes were conceived by land surveyors, landowners, landscape architects and gardeners. They did not explore the way landscapes were read and used by ordinary people, women and men who did not shape them, but were eager to find in the forms which surrounded them some relief for their existential anxiety, a shelter from the dangers of life and a meaning for their existence. Are linguistic models also useful for explaining these readings of rural landscapes?
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2. Traditional rural landscapes 2.1. Traditional rural landscapes as farming artifacts At the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th the majority of population in rural areas—sometimes more than 90%—was made of farmers and farmhands. Even in the regions where industrial activities were dispersed, most of the land was used for farming. As a result, the main social categories present in rural areas and interested in the organization of farmland were big landowners, small independent farmers, share-croppers and farm-hands. Traditional rural landscapes may be studied according to three perspectives: (1) as sets of fields, meadows, pastures, woods organized for agricultural production; (2) as expressions of the societies which inhabit them; (3) as a surface where to read nature and discover the existence of ‘Other Worlds’. When exploring the agrarian perspective, the processes, which were responsible for the genesis of landscapes, were not always the same. In some cases, landscapes resulted from planning actions; in other ones, they were generated through the prevalence of a farming system with an in-built logic. 2.2. Planned traditional rural landscapes and Jakobson’s structural linguistics The areas where rural landscapes resulted from the work of planning authorities are certainly more widespread than those, which evolved out of the independent choices of landowners and farmers. In many cases, land planning is a state privilege: we have testimonies of this type of situation in ancient China or Japan. In the Mediterranean, the Romans applied their system of geometric land division to extensive areas. To encounter as ambitious a scheme of land division planned by a state, we have to wait for the 18th century, with the decision taken in the young United States to apply a geometrical grid to all the open land of their Western margins: in less than a century, the regular squares of the land survey covered about 80% of the whole coterminous United States (Johnson, 1976). The concern of states was to draw plots big enough for a farm to be operated, but not too big since
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it seemed important to avoid the concentration of landownership in the hand of a too wealthy and powerful aristocracy. Farmers were free to use the land they got according to their own needs and preference: it meant that land planning concerned only the geometry of rural settlements, and not the crop systems they used. The operation of land planning schemes offers few possibilities to apply linguistics skills to the genesis of rural landscapes: it is not necessary to invoke structural linguistics to explain the geometries, which presided over these operations. They are, however, interesting exceptions. In Japan, Minoru Senda studied the jori settlement patterns of central Hondo, in the vicinity of Nara for instance, using models provided by modern linguistics (Senda, 1980). There were other forms of planning. Many of them were borne from the necessity to develop crop rotation systems in areas where properties or farms were too small to easily organize a harmonious combination of fields and pastures. Such programs could not be realized without an initial land consolidation: it was drawn at the scale of the elementary rural communities—the parishes generally. It means that the process of decision making and the ensuing planning operations remained in most cases local ones. When the problem of landscape organization is to combine efficiently the private cultivation of fields and the collective management of cattle rearing, there is no possibility to imagine many field patterns. The best solutions—i.e. the division of the land into two or three fields, with compulsory crop rotation and the collective use of fallow for grazing—appear as logical outcomes of the problem as soon as it is clearly analyzed. As a result, these solutions could certainly be invented independently in several places—Xavier de Planhol provided a good example of such a situation when he observed, in the 1950s, the creation of openfield systems in Anatolia by farmers who were not acquainted with European experiences (de Planhol, 1958). Locally, a diffusion process occurred around the places where these solutions had been invented or reinvented, but what was fundamental for the theoretical interpretation of rural landscape was that a possibility existed to reach, through trials and errors, the same result in different places. In a way, the genesis of the open field system evokes the genesis of American myths as analyzed by Claude
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Lévi-Strauss: the combination of elements was a natural outcome of their structural properties, which was the main idea of Roman Jakobson’s structural linguistics. The difference between landscape analysis and structural linguistics comes evidently from the fact that rural landscapes cannot be decomposed into sets of minimal units. 2.3. The genesis of unplanned rural landscapes and Noam Chomsky’s generative grammar A French historian, Annie Antoine, has recently presented an original analysis of the rural landscapes of Western France (Antoine, 2000). She used two types of documents: (1) the old land maps prepared for the big landowners, the local nobility, bishopries, monasteries; (2) land law as it was expressed through the customs of three provinces, Anjou, Maine and Bretagne, and used in the local courts. She studied more peculiarly the role of hedges in the rural landscape and the way fields were enclosed. She covered modern times, mainly the 18th and early 19th centuries. It was the time when physiocratism was very popular in France; for this conception of economics, agricultural production was considered as the only source of wealth, which meant that the essential responsibility of economists and agronomists was to promote more rational ways of farming. As a consequence: For the observer unfamiliar with the countryside, what was beautiful is what bears wealth, the (cultivated) nature is beautiful because it is a promise of crops. And in order to be truly beautiful, it had to be completely cultivated. (Antoine, 2000, p. 226) For the physiocrats, hedges had to lock up herds. For local farmers, the hedge was “a bulwark, a cage, which helped much more often to protect a cultivated plot of land, to forbid an access to cattle, rather than to contain it” (Antoine, 2000, p. 169). And Annie Antoine makes her analysis more explicit in the following quotation: The protest is general: those who wish to see a beautiful countryside, those who desire that roads do not look like ruts, all of them denounce the practices of farmers who persist in not ploughing the unculti-
vated land and using it in a disastrous way. Here is the crux of the problem: in the peasant practice, the cultivated land and the uncultivated land are the two components of the same system. (Antoine, 2000, p. 228). The last sentence is essential: in the perspective of the local farmers, landscape is conceived as the materialization of a farming system. It is made of parts, which are at the same time different and complementary. A farm need rough pastures, in which there is no need for hedges, since they are open to all the farmers of the community, and hedges, which protect the cultivated fields from the teeth of wandering cattle. It means that according to densities, the materialization of the farming system was conducive to a variety of landscapes: The scarcity of hedges, the fact that they are essentially present near the farms, or for enclosing large open spaces, bears witness for a very extensive use of land; on the reverse, a denser and above all more regular “bocage” is the traduction of a less “savage” and more organized style of cattle rearing. (Antoine, 2000, p. 172). The judgments of the local courts concerning land conflicts are peculiarly interesting, since they prove that all the members of local societies, farmers, landowners and judges, were perfectly aware of the nature of the landscape organization and its finalities. In the bocages of this part of France, the only actors were the landowners and the courts, which applied the rules of the local customs. Planning was only possible within the limits of private properties—big landowners dividing their land into farms. The rural landscapes were, in such a legal and social setting, a dynamic reality: hence their plasticity, and the slow genesis of the bocage as it existed at the end of the 19th century. The functional approach as used by Annie Antoine is certainly the most useful one for understanding the genesis, forms and dynamics of rural landscapes in areas where farming is the only activity and landscapes evolve without consolidation and planning. The processes analyzed by Annie Antoine differ from those used for the understanding of openfield systems. They are closer to those analyzed by Noam Chomsky, they belong to the family of generative grammars and the language of functionality.
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2.4. Traditional rural landscapes and the expressions of collective social realities 2.4.1. Landscapes as an expression of the political and cultural unity of social groups Kenneth Olwig has developed, during the last 10 years, a fascinating analysis of the early significance of the term landscape. The word landscape was widely used in the Netherlands and in other countries along the North Sea during the last centuries of the Middle Ages. Kenneth Olwig found it, with a slightly different spelling, landskip, in the border zone between Danish and German settlement in Schleswig and Holstein. In this area, it served to designate a small territory. A landskip was a physiognomic unit, but it was also a social and cultural unit: the area for which the name was used was perceived as the home of a specific group, with its customs, its institutions. It was also a unit of political management. Kenneth Olwig notes similar ways of perceiving the human environment in Switzerland. The thesis of Kenneth Olwig is based on this idea: for the farmers and dispersed population of rural areas, landscape was not basically perceived as scenery. It was a social and political construction embodied in a territory (Olwig, 2002). Historians have reached elsewhere similar conclusions. Durand (1988) in his book Vivre au pays au XVIIIe siècle, emphasized the way local population conceived the region in which they lived: for them, the pays (which served as root for paysage, landscape) was the fundamental social and political unit. It was the home country (see also Zink, 2000). For local populations, landscapes were not only based on the visual perception of a special combination of fields, hedges, walls, farms, villages, etc. They were the embodiment of basic social, cultural and political systems. 2.4.2. Traditional rural landscapes and the expression of social differentiation The interpretations local populations placed on landscapes resulted also from partial readings: each element was given a specific meaning. It often happens for houses and the gardens that surrounded them. When visiting the rural areas of Western Europe, most of the beautiful farms or handsome buildings in villages date back from the late 18th or 19th centuries.
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By the beginning of the 20th century, the permeability of rural areas to urban influences had become so great that the techniques of construction and the architecture were directly copied from urban models and had lost their previous originality. But there was a period, mainly before the construction of the railways, when urban influences began to transform the sensibilities in rural areas, without already outdating most of the techniques locally used. The people living in rural areas became increasingly aware of the existence of other communities, rural and urban ones. They reacted to this new level of transparency by asserting their identities. Each rural cell wished first to demonstrate how much it differed from its neighbors. An example: at the beginning of the 19th century, there were about 10 types of headgears for women in Britanny, by the end of the 19th century, more than one hundred. Each pays, and in some parts of Britanny, each parish had its own (de Planhol, 1988). Architectural forms began to be used as an indicator of the rural diversity of a country. It was in 1873 that Dr. Hazelius created the Nordiska Museet in Stockholm: each part of the kingdom was represented by one of its farms, cautiously taken apart in the place where it stood and reconstructed in the capital. The inhabitants became increasingly aware of this transformation: they began to see the forms of their houses and farms as a testimony about what they were. Rural landscapes were transformed into sceneries by the people who inhabited them in order to display to the travelers and tourists who they were and how they wished to be seen. The population of rural areas used landscape to express the social status of its members and increasingly, during the late 18th and 19th centuries, its specificities when compared with other rural areas or cities. Landscapes were not totally transformed by the will to give them this kind of imprint: the result was achieved through the use of a few markers. 2.5. Traditional rural landscapes and the relations of human groups with nature and the ‘Other World’ 2.5.1. The reading of rural landscapes as an expression of environmental specificity For the people living in rural areas, landscapes appeared both as an expression of the farming systems and as the material basis of social, cultural and political
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units. Other readings were also practiced: they stressed the natural dimension of landscape and the relations local groups developed with their environment. Landscapes ceased to be treated as totalities. Observers focused upon distinct features: slope, exposition to sun, vegetation, soils, etc. These were used for assigning values to interesting properties of the environment. In South-Western France, farmers were able to differentiate the fundamental types of soil: the terreforts which give their name to the country, heavy, difficult to plough after the rains or when too dry, but with an important capacity for retaining water, and the boulbènes, lighter, easier to plough, more acid and prone to dry up rapidly in summer time, or rougets, derived from clay on slopes oriented to the North. For maize, terreforts were more convenient, since they are cropped late, in September or October. Boulbènes were best for barley and wheat, which are harvested in early July (Toujas-Pinède, 1978, p. 201). In this naturalist perspective, a landscape was made of a combination of small areas or features, each one endowed with original characteristics. Local people considered the landscape as a surface where the properties of nature are noticeable through the presence of specific signs or marks. 2.5.2. Traditional rural landscapes and the expression of the ‘Other Worlds’ Landscape elements may appear as signs of a deeper reality. There are springs where naiads or the geniuses of water dwell, forests haunted by trolls or other spirits, trees inhabited by a god. Rocks, cliffs or other spectacular landforms are often the places where realities beyond what can be normally seen are present. Even in a plain with uniform vegetation, some spatial differentiation may occur in this way: areas of profanity are opposed to places loaded with sanctity. The ethnographers and geographers who study traditional societies in the Pacific Islands, Australia, the mountains of Indonesia or South-Eastern Asia, Africa or Indian America always stress the significance of these beliefs and the way they contribute to structure space (Raison, 1977; Bonnemaison, 1986). Similar interpretations existed in European societies. Christianity struggled hard to destroy them, but did not succeed completely. In many cases, it had to compose with the previous religions. As
a consequence, the Church often used old sacred places to build its new churches, chapels or crosses (Saintyves, 1907). For the local people, the Christian cult practiced there was generally loaded with pagan reminiscences. The analysis of the religious interpretations of landscapes or of some of their elements started in the 19th century (Mannhardt, 1875–1877; Hahn, 1896) and developed in the 20th (Sébillot, 1908; Rantasalo, 1919–1925; Lautman, 1979). Eliade (1949) offered a good account of this theme. The studies of historians and ethnographers provided evidence of the persistence of these traditional beliefs in modern rural societies, as exemplified by Ginsburg (1966) for Northern Italy. Schama (1995) published a fascinating book on landscapes. Many geographers liked it, but did not succeed in using it. It was not an analysis of the material aspects of landscapes, but a reflection on the ways its elements, woods and forests, rocks or water have been used in legends, in classical literature or in other literary productions—guides for instance. Instead of focusing on religious beliefs, the work was centered on mythologies. These refer to the deep forces at work in nature before the intervention of man; it is the reason for which the landscape of Schama is never a cultivated one. Civilization puts a ban on these forces that played such an important role in the oral traditions of many societies. Augustin Berque has recently wondered about the lack of an aesthetic dimension in the perception of landscape in most societies (Berque, 1995; Berque et al., 1999). For him, before the invention of landscape in 4th century a.d. in China and the 15th in Western Europe. the aesthetic feeling remains inserted into an ethnic more global perception, grasping directly a certain cosmology (i.e. the reasons of being a World) in the geograms of a given environment. Here are thus cosmophanic societies. (Berque et al., 1999, pp. 53–54). 2.6. Conclusion: the wide variety of readings of traditional rural landscapes The inhabitants, who shaped and used rural areas, read their landscapes in many ways. It proves that the
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relations between visible forms and their significance are not necessarily or always of the same type. Landscapes may be read as global systems, each of their components being tied to the whole through functional links (it is the case for farming landscapes), or as global homes for specific social, cultural and political uses. Landscapes may also be read as collections of independent signs, either created by men for conveying their ideas, or discovered by them as an expression of the inner order of nature or of a mythical and religious ‘Other World’. The analogies between landscape interpretation and linguistics are numerous: in both fields, people deal with wholes, which may be split into discrete components; in both cases, a meaning is conferred to these elements. In some cases, it results from the division of the reality itself and the articulation of its parts, which is an idea central to the first forms of structural linguistics, but equally present in the classical interpretations of rural landscapes. In other cases, landscape is made of the juxtaposition of discrete signs without any global coherence. The significance of these signs comes from the existence of signifiers, which are either man-made in order to communicate, or deciphered by them as testimonies about the real structure of the natural world, or representing the ‘Other World’. Geographers tried to apply semiology for modernizing their analyses of landscapes. However, the differences between landscapes and languages are such that this analogy appears not to work really well: language is made of arbitrary signs; a landscape is either structured by functional divisions, or doted with markers which indicate the clear intentions of men or reflect the existence of natural or supernatural systems. Some geographers, like Roger Brunet, tried to split the geographical space into sets of discrete units, i.e. choremes, just as the language is divided into sets of phonemes, morphemes, semes, etc. The choremes of Brunet may, however, always be divided a step further, when the phonemes, morphemes and semes are really the smallest units a language can be split into (Brunet, 1980). The analogy between linguistics and the geographic analysis of rural landscapes is certainly an interesting one, but it is not easy to take advantage of it in order to develop new insights on landscapes.
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3. The rise of urban perspectives on rural landscapes: their aesthetic dimensions 3.1. Landscape architecture at the landscape scale The analogies between linguistics and landscape analysis are different when dealing with the creations of artists, designers, and landscape architects. Emperors, kings or princes began early to organize huge gardens, parks and forests around their castles. We know examples of these huge enterprises in many civilizations: the tradition of “paradises”, as it evolved from antic Persia to Moslem Iran or Mughol India, was based on the drawing of rectangular gardens which covered tens or hundreds of hectares (Moynihan, 1979). The mosaics of Roman villas displayed large tracts of rural areas designed for pleasure. They were more or less intermingled with farmland. We know only the Laurentina, Plinus the Young’s villa, through his letters and are unable to evaluate its real dimensions and its impact on the landscape. With the ruins of villa Hadriana close to Tivoli, we have direct evidence of the scale in which landscape planning was conceived at that time: the gardens covered an important area, but in a deep valley, which limited their visual impact. Feudal lords were more interested in the defensive quality of their castles than in landscape design. As exemplified by the Allegoria del buono e cattivo governo of Lorenzetti, the situation began to change in the later Middle Ages: the urban elites who choose to spent summertime in villas were fond of gardens. Because of the accumulation of villas close to the cities, the character of the suburban regions changed: they became the bel paesi described by Sereni (1961). The art of the suburban villa throve in the 16th century. In Venice, the aristocracy discovered the interest of farm investment in Tierra firma at a time when the profit of trade was decreasing. Thanks to architects like Palladio, the design of the house was combined with that of a garden or a park. The idea to rely on the rules of linear perspectives to compose a majestic environment had become popular in the 1570s, with Cardinal Montalto, the future Sixte-Quint, drawing a beautiful park around his villa, close to the Roman forums. In the 16th and 17th centuries in Venice, as well as in the 18th and 19th centuries in England, big landowners launched bold initiatives in order to transform the
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landscapes of the areas they owned. They had impressive gardens and parks designed around their villas or castles. Through the invention of the ha-ha, they discovered that it was possible to integrate whole rural landscape beyond their estate grounds into the perspectives which can be discovered from the reception rooms of their residences, or when walking in the parks (Hunt, 1986; Jacques, 1983). Cosgrove (1984) provided us, nearly 20 years ago, with a fascinating book on the history of this venture. He reminded us of the social role played by the literary and pictorial representations of landscape in the transformation of rural areas during the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. The starting points were provided by the geometries which can be built out of the rules of the linear perspectives (as for Le Nˆotre’s landscape architecture for instance) or the images conveyed by the myth of Arcadia, and its literary and pictorial treatment, during the Renaissance and the 17th century. What was really new with Cosgrove was, however, his social and ideological interpretation of the landscape revolutions of the 17th and 18th centuries. The history he wrote deals with the aesthetics of the landscape designers of the time—Palladio in Italy, Lord Burlington, William Kent, Capability Brown and their imitators in Britain—and the history of an emerging class of landowners and the ideologies which motivated them. The aim of the rich landowners was to offer a testimony of their taste. For them, transforming and beautifying a landscape was a means to show their new knowledge and ability in aesthetic design. A successful achievement in this field insured them of the admiration of their friends and competitors. However, the search for appraisal was not their only motivation, they also wished to affirm the legitimacy of their social power. Their capacity to beautify a landscape justified intellectually the right they had acquired, through inheritance or purchase, to rule over vast tracts of land. Since they could impose upon the landscape the most admirable organization it was impossible to criticize them. In the example chosen by Cosgrove, parks were designed by artists and transformed into landscape thanks to the wealthy aristocrats. The message conveyed by the landscape was clear. It was partially an aesthetic one and translated, for a particular setting, the general principles of composition of that time. It
was also partly social: landowners tried to improve their status in the aristocratic circles, and to justify their economic and social responsibilities through cultural achievements such as landscaping. Landscapes have become messages. They had to be studied as texts. They translated into a visual form abstracts ideas, philosophical meditations or religious convictions. The parks designed at the end of the 18th century were full of false gothic ruins, mock temples, pseudo-graves. They reminded the visitors that all culture is mortal, decadence always follows prosperity, that only wisdom lasts and also the importance of the study and contemplation of nature, reflection on the human condition and a sincere admiration for the great men who were able to transcend the prevailing mediocrity of humankind. The grammar of the 18th century garden replaced an older one, which was based on the taste for Arcadia as a shared sojourn of shepherds, gods and goddesses. There, the main elements had been the sources, the basins where naiads settled, and caverns and grottos which gave a glimpse on the chthonian forces at work in the universe. The grammar of Western gardens was generally a simple one. Landscapes were more difficult to interpret when they had to visualize more complex messages. Duncan (1990) analyzed in this way the Buddhist cityscape of Kandy, in Sri Lanka: the Kings who reigned in this inland capital at the beginning of the 19th century, knew that their power was a fragile one: they were threatened by the British coastal settlements. In order to survive, they had to preserve the unity of their society. For them, the only way to achieve this was to diffuse the message of the Buddhist faith in its most favorable version for the civil power they represented. The messages embodied in rural landscapes are generally less complex that those orchestrated by the Kandian dynasty and the artists who worked for it in the 19th century.
3.2. The impact of Arcadian dreams At the end of the 18th century, the Arcadian dream took a new form: instead of being based on Greek and Roman mythology and a romantic vision of the lives of shepherds, it began to be associated with the pure communities of the Alpine valleys or other more or
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less archaic rural areas. The language of this new form of dream was less academic: instead of temples, ruins of castles and churches and mock tombs, landscapes had just to be decorated by a few thatched cottages, a milk shed and a sheep barn. As long as the taste for rural scenes was deeply intertwined with the knowledge of Greek or Latin mythologies, its impact was limited to the aristocracy and the intellectuals. In its new form, Arcadia became accessible to middle-class tastes. The economic transformations associated with the Industrial Revolution and the building of railroads popularized tourism: an increased number of urbanites could for the first time visit the small peasant communities along the coasts or in the mountainous areas which served as models for the new trend. The railway and later the tramway, made suburbanization possible for the middle classes. Living in suburbs was partly the realization of these new visions of Arcadia as a form of paradise on Earth (Ghorra-Gobin, 1987, 1997). If the dreams of city-dwellers was to choose for a more rural life, the result was quite different from what has been expected. All rural life rapidly disappeared of most suburbs. Instead of a ruralization of the city, an acceleration of urban sprawl could be observed! 4. Rural landscapes in the postmodern age 4.1. New types of activities and the social composition of postmodern rural areas The social and professional composition in rural areas changed completely during the last decades. The first effect of the Industrial Revolution was a simplification of the local professional activity: most of craftsmen disappeared. With a continuously growing agricultural productivity, farm densities are declining. In the areas where farming is still the major activity, it means a drastic decline of overall densities, with a spiral of desertion: young families leave localities where it is impossible to find the services they need for raising their children. The preservation of high densities is only possible through a change in the professional activities in of rural communities. In this way, rural areas transformed into new low-density suburban or rurban areas. Their population is diverse and is composed of
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a minority of farmers, often native, using highly differentiated forms of production (truck farming, cattle raising or a combination of farming and touristic activities), of people of local origin working in industry or services, of newcomers migrating from cities or abroad also with urban activities but a different background and of retirees, etc. It means that the suburban population is culturally more diverse than the former rural one. They are bearers of new forms of dreams. 4.2. Another conception of nature As long as modernity lasted, the idea of rural areas as a form of Arcadia survived. Even with the modernization of farming activities, it was still possible, 50 years ago, to find farms where cows were milked by hand and farmers selling their products to their neighbors. In the postmodern era, farming has lost its friendly and amateur-like character. It has become a highly industrial activity and farmers had to specialize in new technologies. It becomes also increasingly difficult to open farms for visitors. Contemporary rural areas have ceased to evoke the pastures, flocks and shepherds of Arcadia. Farming has ceased to be the model for the dreams of urban dwellers. Postmodern societies broke definitely the links with the classic rural civilization that subsisted well into the 20th century. The perception people have of rural areas has changed for other reasons. Until a generation ago, the contrast between agricultural areas and the wilderness did not seem very sharp. Farming involved a modification of nature, the destruction of woodland and the creation of meadows or pastures, which replaced partly the natural moors. Then, farming was not considered as a threat to nature. Modernization had deep consequences: fields or pastures became increasingly similar to chemical laboratories for fertilizers and pesticides. Cows, sheep and pigs breeding became a scientific selection. The farming environment became an artificial one under complete human control. Its management endangers natural equilibriums: soils and water are polluted by the overuse of fertilizers and pesticides and cause eutrophication. The break with the Arcadian tradition and the new farming style conducted to a new conception of nature: nature exists only where there is no human activity. Hunting and fishing has to be
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prohibited in the new natural areas, and so is the tradition of extensive grazing in woodland. The environment of ecologists and nature conservationists is completely different from the one of classical or romantic poetry or literature. Their aim is to transform parts of the rural areas back into “genuine” nature. Everyone knows that this will take a long time and that the newly created natural parks and reserves will only subsist with a very careful human management. 4.3. New forms of communities The fascination for rural villages, specially those located in the remote parts of mountainous areas or along the rocky seashores of the Atlantic Ocean or the Mediterranean Sea, is based upon the image of closely tied local communities they have. The idea was born with the Letters of a Savoyard Vicar by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Kenneth Olwig has shown that the landskips of Schlewsig–Holstein were good examples of this form of social organization. Ferdinand Tönnies, the great theoretician of the idea of Gemeinschaft, was born in the German part of Schlewsig. Olwig suggests that his conceptualization of rural communities was implicitly based on his early experience in this part of the German–Danish border. The ideal of a local community is not dead, but it has ceased to be associated with rural groups devoted to farming. With postmodernity, utopias have to be built now, and if it is possible, where we are living. It was the motor behind the hippies’ communes in the late 1960s and early 1970s and which survived this period of contestation. Much of the people who settle in rural areas still wish to participate in some form of community. Local traditional communities are sometimes still used as reference. They had a strong identity, clearly expressed by the landscape and landmarks. Other new communities, which try to use the folklore inherited from the past, also take over their feasts, rituals and ceremonies. More numerous are, however, those which rely on other models. Some groups are looking for Oriental traditions to try to build their identity on Zen Buddhism, transcendental meditation or other fashionable philosophy imported from Eastern or Southern Asia.
4.4. The countryside as a playground Most of the newcomers in the countryside appreciate above all the low population density and the ample space available. The presence of “genuine” nature and the possibility of finding new local communities are often secondary factors that attract them. They need space because they love outdoor recreation, such as hiking, climbing, jogging, rafting, or practice golf on a perfect green, play tennis on well trimmed courts, etc. The rural countryside offers a perfect multifunctional space for a mix of these recreational activities. 4.5. The countryside as a palimpsest of unrelated and utterly different land uses All these new activities demand an adapted land use, need special equipments and well designed environments. The countryside has ceased to be a domain for intuition or improvization, it needs to be planned and managed by professionals. Each activity has its own specificities, and land zoning is a result as different types of land uses are incompatible. Postmodern landscapes are, in this way, shaped by conflicting interests. It is not a new situation—the problems that arose between ploughmen and cattle raisers hold a central place in the development of traditional crop rotation systems. What is new is that the conflicting groups do not always live in the contested areas. It also means that the outcome of decisions and conflicts are generally untidy and chaotic. Even when each piece of land is well managed, the whole landscape is not harmonious any more. 5. Conclusion Landscapes are the result of human interests and activities. Their forms may be interpreted as a language, but not a universal one. In this paper, we proposed a classification of the languages of rural landscapes based on the economic, social, and cultural position of the groups which were or are responsible for their genesis: (1) the languages of function, the generative grammars of landscape elements and the semiotics of religious signification for traditional farming groups; (2) the rhetoric of harmony, purity and social status and power for upper or middle class urbanites from
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the Middle Ages to the 20th century; (3) the languages of genuine nature, amenities and outdoor activities for the new rural population which resulted from the 20th century revolutions in mobility and activity. Linguistic models are helpful for geographers who try to decipher and interpret specific forms of rural landscapes. They may rely on: (1) the dialectical relations between words and things at all stages of evolution (the naming of soil, plants, environments), the naming of the countryside itself; (2) the models of structural linguistics and generative grammars for classical forms of agrarian landscapes; (3) semiotics for the aesthetic and social readings which were so important in the religious fields of purely rural societies, or in the ideological ones for modern urban societies. Geographers have an obvious interest in borrowing tools developed by linguists, but they have to know that none of these tools would be able to provide them with a universal key for reading and interpreting landscapes. References Antoine, A., 2000. Le Paysage de l’historien. Archéologie des bocages de l’Ouest de la France à l’époque moderne. Presses Universitaires de Rennes, Rennes. Berque, A., 1995. Les Raisons du paysage. De la Chine antique aux envionnements de synthèse. Hazan, Paris. Berque, A., et al., 1999. Mouvance. Cinquante mçts pour lepaysage. Editions de la Villette, Paris. Bonnemaison, J., 1986. Les Fondements d’une identité. Territoire, histoire et société dans l’archipel du Vanuato, vol. 2. ORSTOM, Paris. Brunet, R., 1980. La composition des modèles en analyse spatiale. L’Espace Géographique 9 (4), 253–265. Cosgrove, D., 1984. Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape. Croom Helm, London. Duncan, J., 1990. The City as a Text: the Politics of Landscape Interpretation in the Kandyan Kingdom. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Durand, Y., 1988. Vivre au pays au XVIIIe siècle. PUF, Paris. Eliade, M., 1949. Traité d’histoire des religions. Payot, Paris. Ginsburg, C., 1966. I Benandanti: richerche sulla stregoneria e sui culti agrari tra cinquecento e seicento. Giulio Einaudi, Turin.
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Ghorra-Gobin, C., 1987. Les Américains et leurs territoires. Mythes et réalités. La Documentation française, Paris. Ghorra-Gobin, C., 1997. Los Angeles. Le mythe américain inachevé. CNRS, Paris. Greimas, A.J., et al. (Eds.), 1979. Sémiotique de l’espace: architecture, urbanisme—sortir de l’impasse. Denoël-Gonthier, Paris. Hahn, E., 1896. Demeter und Baubo. Versuch einer Theorie der Entstehung unseres Ackerbau, Lübeck. Hunt, J.D., 1986. Garden and Grove. The Italian Renaissance Garden in the English Imagination: 1600–1750. Dent, London. Jacques, D., 1983. Georgian Gardens. The Reign of Nature. Batsford, London. Johnson, H.B., 1976. Order upon the Land. Oxford University Press, New York. Lautman, F. (Ed.), 1979. Religions et traditions populaires. Editions de la réunion des Musées nationaux, Paris. Mannhardt, W., 1875–1877, Wald- und Feldkulte, vol. 1 and 2. Berlin. Moynihan, E.B., 1979. Paradise as a Garden. In Persia and Moghul India. Braziller, New York. Olwig, K., 2002. Landscape, Nature and the Body Politic: from Britain’s Renaissance to America’s New World. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, WI. de Planhol, X., 1958. De la Plaine pamphylienne aux lacs pisidiens, nomadisme et vie pastorale. Maisonneuve, Paris. de Planhol, X., 1988. Géographie historique de la France. Fayard, Paris. Raison, J.-P., 1977. Perception et réalisation de l’espace dans la société Mérina. Annales E. S. C. 3, 412–432. Rantasalo, A.V., 1919–1925. Der Ackerbau im Volksaberglauben der Finnen und Esten mit entsprechenden Gebräuchten der Germanen vergliche, vol. 1–5. Sortavala, Helsinki. Saintyves, P., 1907. Les Saints successeurs des dieux. Essais de mythologie chrétienne. Nourry, Paris. Schama, S., 1995. Landscape and Memory. Fontana Press, London. Sébillot, P., 1908. Le Paganisme contemporain chez les peuples celto-latins. Doin, Paris. Senda, M., 1980. Territorial possession in ancient Japan: the real and the perceived. In: Association of Japonese Geographers (Eds.), Geography of Japan. Teikoku Shoin, Tokyo, pp. 101–120. Sereni, E., 1961. Storia del Paesaggio agrario italiano. Laterza, Bari. Toujas-Pinède, C., 1978. Les collines et les plateaux du Quercy. In: Taillefer, F. (Ed.), Atlas et géographie du Midi toulousain. Nathan, Paris. Zink, A., 2000. Pays ou circonscriptions. Territoires du Sud-Ouest sous l’Ancien Régime. Concevoir l’autre, Publications de la Sorbonne, Paris.
Reading the rural landscapes Paul Claval∗ Université de Paris-IV, 191, rue Saint-Jacques, 75005 Sorbonne, France
Abstract Rural landscapes express the logics behind the crop systems of farmers, the aesthetic or the visions of Arcady, real nature or outdoor recreation of their inhabitants. Linguistics, either structural linguistics or semiotics, provide useful tools for deciphering the resulting constructions. © 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Cultural geography; Rural landscape; Linguistics
1. Introduction Linguistics, in the forms it took during the 20th century, deals with languages seized as wholes and with their components, sounds, words and sentences. It delves on the way the components are conditioned by the wholes. It explores the significance of the signs it is made of. It insists on the two faces of signs, which appear at the same time as signifiers and signified. The explanations linguistics provides are not based on external forms of causation, but on the inner logic of the relations between the whole and the parts, and signifiers and signified. Some analogy exists between languages and landscapes. Both can be considered as wholes and decomposed into parts. It is the reason for which geographers often try to rely on linguistic models for interpreting landscapes.
∗ Present address: 29 rue de Soisy, Eaubonne 95600, France. Tel.: +33-1-3959-8383; fax: +33-1-3959-8383. E-mail address: [email protected] (P. Claval).
0169-2046/$20.00 © 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.landurbplan.2003.10.014
1.1. Structural linguistics and the rural landscapes of traditional societies In the studies of rural landscapes that geographers began to develop from the very end of 19th century, they used either a structural approach (each type of rural landscape had been shaped by a particular ethnic group from the beginning of history), a functional one (each rural landscape was organized in order to combine cultivation and cattle rearing and insure a sound crop rotation), or an archeological one (the observed features were born in the past and reflected the functional conditions which prevailed at that time). What these approaches shared was the idea that a few types of rural landscapes could be identified—open fields, infield–outfield systems, consolidated farmsteads with enclosed fields, etc. in Western and Northern Europe and elsewhere. It meant that rural landscapes were organized according to rules. They obeyed a certain grammar. Even if geographers did not refer to linguistic studies, their approaches were in a way close to the findings of the new structural linguistics of the time.
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Geographers did not take advantage of the whole evidence they collected in their enquiries. They rubbed out the subjective aspect of the testimonies they had gathered and selected only the rational elements of interpretation: they believed in the coherence of the landscape systems their analyses had discovered; their only aim was to understand them. The functional dimension was certainly essential, but it did not preclude other readings of the landscapes by local people—symbolic ones, for instance. 1.2. Readings of rural landscapes by urban dwellers A second way for analyzing landscapes developed in the 1960s and 1970s. In Italy for instance, Sereni (1961) was struck by the opposition between the beautiful landscapes of bel paesi, in the vicinity of cities, and the more banal forms, which prevailed elsewhere. The new urban landowners knew perfectly that crop rotation was a necessity and did not try to renounce the advantages it gave to those who know how to organize their fields, but they generally escaped the collective discipline which prevailed for ordinary farmers. As a result, they could introduce, in the way they organized their land, a new care for its aesthetic quality. This second tradition in the study of rural landscapes was best exemplified in Britain by Cosgrove (1984). When studying landscapes according to this perspective, functional features cease to appear essential. Geographers try to discover the dreams and artistic models used by the architects, landscape architects and gardeners responsible for drawing the villas, halls or castles of the well-to-do landowners. The language landscapes spoke were for them that of beauty and harmony. It conveyed also an ideological content. It has to be interpreted just like other forms of narratives, as a text. In this type of interpretation, geographers often rely on semiotics, specially the forms of topological or spatial semiotics developed by Greimas et al. (1979). The productivity of cultivation jumped during the 20th century. Hence a dramatic decline in the densities of farm employment, with two possible consequences, either a dramatic decline of the density of rural areas, or a complete reversal in the composition of their
populations, suburbanites or rurbanites becoming increasingly numerous. This demographic change has dramatic consequences on the composition of rural landscapes. The functional logic of crop rotation and the necessary association between tilling and cattle raising has ceased to rule over most of the territory. The new rural population has ceased to share the dreams of classical or romantic landowners. For them, traditional farming was a dirty activity. Modern rurbanites are fond of true nature, with its complexity and the struggle for life that characterizes it. Settling in a rural area also offers possibilities to practice sports, games and any other type of activity, which requires much room. Is an order emerging of the multiplicity of private and collective initiatives responsible for contemporary evolution? Is there anything like a consensus among the new suburbanites or rurbanites about what is a “good” landscape? 1.3. The chosen perspectives There were some analogies between the functional approach to the landscape and the first form of structural linguistics, and others between the aesthetic approach to the landscape, which developed from the 1960s and semiotics. The relevance of linguistics for explaining contemporary evolution is less evident. As a result, the first set of questions we shall cover will be the following ones: up to what point structural linguistics first, and later semiotics helped to enlighten the genesis and significance of traditional rural landscapes? Is there a form of linguistics relevant for the contemporary evolution? We shall also try to cover a second set of questions. Landscape specialists have generally focused on the way landscapes were conceived by land surveyors, landowners, landscape architects and gardeners. They did not explore the way landscapes were read and used by ordinary people, women and men who did not shape them, but were eager to find in the forms which surrounded them some relief for their existential anxiety, a shelter from the dangers of life and a meaning for their existence. Are linguistic models also useful for explaining these readings of rural landscapes?
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2. Traditional rural landscapes 2.1. Traditional rural landscapes as farming artifacts At the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th the majority of population in rural areas—sometimes more than 90%—was made of farmers and farmhands. Even in the regions where industrial activities were dispersed, most of the land was used for farming. As a result, the main social categories present in rural areas and interested in the organization of farmland were big landowners, small independent farmers, share-croppers and farm-hands. Traditional rural landscapes may be studied according to three perspectives: (1) as sets of fields, meadows, pastures, woods organized for agricultural production; (2) as expressions of the societies which inhabit them; (3) as a surface where to read nature and discover the existence of ‘Other Worlds’. When exploring the agrarian perspective, the processes, which were responsible for the genesis of landscapes, were not always the same. In some cases, landscapes resulted from planning actions; in other ones, they were generated through the prevalence of a farming system with an in-built logic. 2.2. Planned traditional rural landscapes and Jakobson’s structural linguistics The areas where rural landscapes resulted from the work of planning authorities are certainly more widespread than those, which evolved out of the independent choices of landowners and farmers. In many cases, land planning is a state privilege: we have testimonies of this type of situation in ancient China or Japan. In the Mediterranean, the Romans applied their system of geometric land division to extensive areas. To encounter as ambitious a scheme of land division planned by a state, we have to wait for the 18th century, with the decision taken in the young United States to apply a geometrical grid to all the open land of their Western margins: in less than a century, the regular squares of the land survey covered about 80% of the whole coterminous United States (Johnson, 1976). The concern of states was to draw plots big enough for a farm to be operated, but not too big since
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it seemed important to avoid the concentration of landownership in the hand of a too wealthy and powerful aristocracy. Farmers were free to use the land they got according to their own needs and preference: it meant that land planning concerned only the geometry of rural settlements, and not the crop systems they used. The operation of land planning schemes offers few possibilities to apply linguistics skills to the genesis of rural landscapes: it is not necessary to invoke structural linguistics to explain the geometries, which presided over these operations. They are, however, interesting exceptions. In Japan, Minoru Senda studied the jori settlement patterns of central Hondo, in the vicinity of Nara for instance, using models provided by modern linguistics (Senda, 1980). There were other forms of planning. Many of them were borne from the necessity to develop crop rotation systems in areas where properties or farms were too small to easily organize a harmonious combination of fields and pastures. Such programs could not be realized without an initial land consolidation: it was drawn at the scale of the elementary rural communities—the parishes generally. It means that the process of decision making and the ensuing planning operations remained in most cases local ones. When the problem of landscape organization is to combine efficiently the private cultivation of fields and the collective management of cattle rearing, there is no possibility to imagine many field patterns. The best solutions—i.e. the division of the land into two or three fields, with compulsory crop rotation and the collective use of fallow for grazing—appear as logical outcomes of the problem as soon as it is clearly analyzed. As a result, these solutions could certainly be invented independently in several places—Xavier de Planhol provided a good example of such a situation when he observed, in the 1950s, the creation of openfield systems in Anatolia by farmers who were not acquainted with European experiences (de Planhol, 1958). Locally, a diffusion process occurred around the places where these solutions had been invented or reinvented, but what was fundamental for the theoretical interpretation of rural landscape was that a possibility existed to reach, through trials and errors, the same result in different places. In a way, the genesis of the open field system evokes the genesis of American myths as analyzed by Claude
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Lévi-Strauss: the combination of elements was a natural outcome of their structural properties, which was the main idea of Roman Jakobson’s structural linguistics. The difference between landscape analysis and structural linguistics comes evidently from the fact that rural landscapes cannot be decomposed into sets of minimal units. 2.3. The genesis of unplanned rural landscapes and Noam Chomsky’s generative grammar A French historian, Annie Antoine, has recently presented an original analysis of the rural landscapes of Western France (Antoine, 2000). She used two types of documents: (1) the old land maps prepared for the big landowners, the local nobility, bishopries, monasteries; (2) land law as it was expressed through the customs of three provinces, Anjou, Maine and Bretagne, and used in the local courts. She studied more peculiarly the role of hedges in the rural landscape and the way fields were enclosed. She covered modern times, mainly the 18th and early 19th centuries. It was the time when physiocratism was very popular in France; for this conception of economics, agricultural production was considered as the only source of wealth, which meant that the essential responsibility of economists and agronomists was to promote more rational ways of farming. As a consequence: For the observer unfamiliar with the countryside, what was beautiful is what bears wealth, the (cultivated) nature is beautiful because it is a promise of crops. And in order to be truly beautiful, it had to be completely cultivated. (Antoine, 2000, p. 226) For the physiocrats, hedges had to lock up herds. For local farmers, the hedge was “a bulwark, a cage, which helped much more often to protect a cultivated plot of land, to forbid an access to cattle, rather than to contain it” (Antoine, 2000, p. 169). And Annie Antoine makes her analysis more explicit in the following quotation: The protest is general: those who wish to see a beautiful countryside, those who desire that roads do not look like ruts, all of them denounce the practices of farmers who persist in not ploughing the unculti-
vated land and using it in a disastrous way. Here is the crux of the problem: in the peasant practice, the cultivated land and the uncultivated land are the two components of the same system. (Antoine, 2000, p. 228). The last sentence is essential: in the perspective of the local farmers, landscape is conceived as the materialization of a farming system. It is made of parts, which are at the same time different and complementary. A farm need rough pastures, in which there is no need for hedges, since they are open to all the farmers of the community, and hedges, which protect the cultivated fields from the teeth of wandering cattle. It means that according to densities, the materialization of the farming system was conducive to a variety of landscapes: The scarcity of hedges, the fact that they are essentially present near the farms, or for enclosing large open spaces, bears witness for a very extensive use of land; on the reverse, a denser and above all more regular “bocage” is the traduction of a less “savage” and more organized style of cattle rearing. (Antoine, 2000, p. 172). The judgments of the local courts concerning land conflicts are peculiarly interesting, since they prove that all the members of local societies, farmers, landowners and judges, were perfectly aware of the nature of the landscape organization and its finalities. In the bocages of this part of France, the only actors were the landowners and the courts, which applied the rules of the local customs. Planning was only possible within the limits of private properties—big landowners dividing their land into farms. The rural landscapes were, in such a legal and social setting, a dynamic reality: hence their plasticity, and the slow genesis of the bocage as it existed at the end of the 19th century. The functional approach as used by Annie Antoine is certainly the most useful one for understanding the genesis, forms and dynamics of rural landscapes in areas where farming is the only activity and landscapes evolve without consolidation and planning. The processes analyzed by Annie Antoine differ from those used for the understanding of openfield systems. They are closer to those analyzed by Noam Chomsky, they belong to the family of generative grammars and the language of functionality.
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2.4. Traditional rural landscapes and the expressions of collective social realities 2.4.1. Landscapes as an expression of the political and cultural unity of social groups Kenneth Olwig has developed, during the last 10 years, a fascinating analysis of the early significance of the term landscape. The word landscape was widely used in the Netherlands and in other countries along the North Sea during the last centuries of the Middle Ages. Kenneth Olwig found it, with a slightly different spelling, landskip, in the border zone between Danish and German settlement in Schleswig and Holstein. In this area, it served to designate a small territory. A landskip was a physiognomic unit, but it was also a social and cultural unit: the area for which the name was used was perceived as the home of a specific group, with its customs, its institutions. It was also a unit of political management. Kenneth Olwig notes similar ways of perceiving the human environment in Switzerland. The thesis of Kenneth Olwig is based on this idea: for the farmers and dispersed population of rural areas, landscape was not basically perceived as scenery. It was a social and political construction embodied in a territory (Olwig, 2002). Historians have reached elsewhere similar conclusions. Durand (1988) in his book Vivre au pays au XVIIIe siècle, emphasized the way local population conceived the region in which they lived: for them, the pays (which served as root for paysage, landscape) was the fundamental social and political unit. It was the home country (see also Zink, 2000). For local populations, landscapes were not only based on the visual perception of a special combination of fields, hedges, walls, farms, villages, etc. They were the embodiment of basic social, cultural and political systems. 2.4.2. Traditional rural landscapes and the expression of social differentiation The interpretations local populations placed on landscapes resulted also from partial readings: each element was given a specific meaning. It often happens for houses and the gardens that surrounded them. When visiting the rural areas of Western Europe, most of the beautiful farms or handsome buildings in villages date back from the late 18th or 19th centuries.
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By the beginning of the 20th century, the permeability of rural areas to urban influences had become so great that the techniques of construction and the architecture were directly copied from urban models and had lost their previous originality. But there was a period, mainly before the construction of the railways, when urban influences began to transform the sensibilities in rural areas, without already outdating most of the techniques locally used. The people living in rural areas became increasingly aware of the existence of other communities, rural and urban ones. They reacted to this new level of transparency by asserting their identities. Each rural cell wished first to demonstrate how much it differed from its neighbors. An example: at the beginning of the 19th century, there were about 10 types of headgears for women in Britanny, by the end of the 19th century, more than one hundred. Each pays, and in some parts of Britanny, each parish had its own (de Planhol, 1988). Architectural forms began to be used as an indicator of the rural diversity of a country. It was in 1873 that Dr. Hazelius created the Nordiska Museet in Stockholm: each part of the kingdom was represented by one of its farms, cautiously taken apart in the place where it stood and reconstructed in the capital. The inhabitants became increasingly aware of this transformation: they began to see the forms of their houses and farms as a testimony about what they were. Rural landscapes were transformed into sceneries by the people who inhabited them in order to display to the travelers and tourists who they were and how they wished to be seen. The population of rural areas used landscape to express the social status of its members and increasingly, during the late 18th and 19th centuries, its specificities when compared with other rural areas or cities. Landscapes were not totally transformed by the will to give them this kind of imprint: the result was achieved through the use of a few markers. 2.5. Traditional rural landscapes and the relations of human groups with nature and the ‘Other World’ 2.5.1. The reading of rural landscapes as an expression of environmental specificity For the people living in rural areas, landscapes appeared both as an expression of the farming systems and as the material basis of social, cultural and political
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units. Other readings were also practiced: they stressed the natural dimension of landscape and the relations local groups developed with their environment. Landscapes ceased to be treated as totalities. Observers focused upon distinct features: slope, exposition to sun, vegetation, soils, etc. These were used for assigning values to interesting properties of the environment. In South-Western France, farmers were able to differentiate the fundamental types of soil: the terreforts which give their name to the country, heavy, difficult to plough after the rains or when too dry, but with an important capacity for retaining water, and the boulbènes, lighter, easier to plough, more acid and prone to dry up rapidly in summer time, or rougets, derived from clay on slopes oriented to the North. For maize, terreforts were more convenient, since they are cropped late, in September or October. Boulbènes were best for barley and wheat, which are harvested in early July (Toujas-Pinède, 1978, p. 201). In this naturalist perspective, a landscape was made of a combination of small areas or features, each one endowed with original characteristics. Local people considered the landscape as a surface where the properties of nature are noticeable through the presence of specific signs or marks. 2.5.2. Traditional rural landscapes and the expression of the ‘Other Worlds’ Landscape elements may appear as signs of a deeper reality. There are springs where naiads or the geniuses of water dwell, forests haunted by trolls or other spirits, trees inhabited by a god. Rocks, cliffs or other spectacular landforms are often the places where realities beyond what can be normally seen are present. Even in a plain with uniform vegetation, some spatial differentiation may occur in this way: areas of profanity are opposed to places loaded with sanctity. The ethnographers and geographers who study traditional societies in the Pacific Islands, Australia, the mountains of Indonesia or South-Eastern Asia, Africa or Indian America always stress the significance of these beliefs and the way they contribute to structure space (Raison, 1977; Bonnemaison, 1986). Similar interpretations existed in European societies. Christianity struggled hard to destroy them, but did not succeed completely. In many cases, it had to compose with the previous religions. As
a consequence, the Church often used old sacred places to build its new churches, chapels or crosses (Saintyves, 1907). For the local people, the Christian cult practiced there was generally loaded with pagan reminiscences. The analysis of the religious interpretations of landscapes or of some of their elements started in the 19th century (Mannhardt, 1875–1877; Hahn, 1896) and developed in the 20th (Sébillot, 1908; Rantasalo, 1919–1925; Lautman, 1979). Eliade (1949) offered a good account of this theme. The studies of historians and ethnographers provided evidence of the persistence of these traditional beliefs in modern rural societies, as exemplified by Ginsburg (1966) for Northern Italy. Schama (1995) published a fascinating book on landscapes. Many geographers liked it, but did not succeed in using it. It was not an analysis of the material aspects of landscapes, but a reflection on the ways its elements, woods and forests, rocks or water have been used in legends, in classical literature or in other literary productions—guides for instance. Instead of focusing on religious beliefs, the work was centered on mythologies. These refer to the deep forces at work in nature before the intervention of man; it is the reason for which the landscape of Schama is never a cultivated one. Civilization puts a ban on these forces that played such an important role in the oral traditions of many societies. Augustin Berque has recently wondered about the lack of an aesthetic dimension in the perception of landscape in most societies (Berque, 1995; Berque et al., 1999). For him, before the invention of landscape in 4th century a.d. in China and the 15th in Western Europe. the aesthetic feeling remains inserted into an ethnic more global perception, grasping directly a certain cosmology (i.e. the reasons of being a World) in the geograms of a given environment. Here are thus cosmophanic societies. (Berque et al., 1999, pp. 53–54). 2.6. Conclusion: the wide variety of readings of traditional rural landscapes The inhabitants, who shaped and used rural areas, read their landscapes in many ways. It proves that the
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relations between visible forms and their significance are not necessarily or always of the same type. Landscapes may be read as global systems, each of their components being tied to the whole through functional links (it is the case for farming landscapes), or as global homes for specific social, cultural and political uses. Landscapes may also be read as collections of independent signs, either created by men for conveying their ideas, or discovered by them as an expression of the inner order of nature or of a mythical and religious ‘Other World’. The analogies between landscape interpretation and linguistics are numerous: in both fields, people deal with wholes, which may be split into discrete components; in both cases, a meaning is conferred to these elements. In some cases, it results from the division of the reality itself and the articulation of its parts, which is an idea central to the first forms of structural linguistics, but equally present in the classical interpretations of rural landscapes. In other cases, landscape is made of the juxtaposition of discrete signs without any global coherence. The significance of these signs comes from the existence of signifiers, which are either man-made in order to communicate, or deciphered by them as testimonies about the real structure of the natural world, or representing the ‘Other World’. Geographers tried to apply semiology for modernizing their analyses of landscapes. However, the differences between landscapes and languages are such that this analogy appears not to work really well: language is made of arbitrary signs; a landscape is either structured by functional divisions, or doted with markers which indicate the clear intentions of men or reflect the existence of natural or supernatural systems. Some geographers, like Roger Brunet, tried to split the geographical space into sets of discrete units, i.e. choremes, just as the language is divided into sets of phonemes, morphemes, semes, etc. The choremes of Brunet may, however, always be divided a step further, when the phonemes, morphemes and semes are really the smallest units a language can be split into (Brunet, 1980). The analogy between linguistics and the geographic analysis of rural landscapes is certainly an interesting one, but it is not easy to take advantage of it in order to develop new insights on landscapes.
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3. The rise of urban perspectives on rural landscapes: their aesthetic dimensions 3.1. Landscape architecture at the landscape scale The analogies between linguistics and landscape analysis are different when dealing with the creations of artists, designers, and landscape architects. Emperors, kings or princes began early to organize huge gardens, parks and forests around their castles. We know examples of these huge enterprises in many civilizations: the tradition of “paradises”, as it evolved from antic Persia to Moslem Iran or Mughol India, was based on the drawing of rectangular gardens which covered tens or hundreds of hectares (Moynihan, 1979). The mosaics of Roman villas displayed large tracts of rural areas designed for pleasure. They were more or less intermingled with farmland. We know only the Laurentina, Plinus the Young’s villa, through his letters and are unable to evaluate its real dimensions and its impact on the landscape. With the ruins of villa Hadriana close to Tivoli, we have direct evidence of the scale in which landscape planning was conceived at that time: the gardens covered an important area, but in a deep valley, which limited their visual impact. Feudal lords were more interested in the defensive quality of their castles than in landscape design. As exemplified by the Allegoria del buono e cattivo governo of Lorenzetti, the situation began to change in the later Middle Ages: the urban elites who choose to spent summertime in villas were fond of gardens. Because of the accumulation of villas close to the cities, the character of the suburban regions changed: they became the bel paesi described by Sereni (1961). The art of the suburban villa throve in the 16th century. In Venice, the aristocracy discovered the interest of farm investment in Tierra firma at a time when the profit of trade was decreasing. Thanks to architects like Palladio, the design of the house was combined with that of a garden or a park. The idea to rely on the rules of linear perspectives to compose a majestic environment had become popular in the 1570s, with Cardinal Montalto, the future Sixte-Quint, drawing a beautiful park around his villa, close to the Roman forums. In the 16th and 17th centuries in Venice, as well as in the 18th and 19th centuries in England, big landowners launched bold initiatives in order to transform the
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landscapes of the areas they owned. They had impressive gardens and parks designed around their villas or castles. Through the invention of the ha-ha, they discovered that it was possible to integrate whole rural landscape beyond their estate grounds into the perspectives which can be discovered from the reception rooms of their residences, or when walking in the parks (Hunt, 1986; Jacques, 1983). Cosgrove (1984) provided us, nearly 20 years ago, with a fascinating book on the history of this venture. He reminded us of the social role played by the literary and pictorial representations of landscape in the transformation of rural areas during the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. The starting points were provided by the geometries which can be built out of the rules of the linear perspectives (as for Le Nˆotre’s landscape architecture for instance) or the images conveyed by the myth of Arcadia, and its literary and pictorial treatment, during the Renaissance and the 17th century. What was really new with Cosgrove was, however, his social and ideological interpretation of the landscape revolutions of the 17th and 18th centuries. The history he wrote deals with the aesthetics of the landscape designers of the time—Palladio in Italy, Lord Burlington, William Kent, Capability Brown and their imitators in Britain—and the history of an emerging class of landowners and the ideologies which motivated them. The aim of the rich landowners was to offer a testimony of their taste. For them, transforming and beautifying a landscape was a means to show their new knowledge and ability in aesthetic design. A successful achievement in this field insured them of the admiration of their friends and competitors. However, the search for appraisal was not their only motivation, they also wished to affirm the legitimacy of their social power. Their capacity to beautify a landscape justified intellectually the right they had acquired, through inheritance or purchase, to rule over vast tracts of land. Since they could impose upon the landscape the most admirable organization it was impossible to criticize them. In the example chosen by Cosgrove, parks were designed by artists and transformed into landscape thanks to the wealthy aristocrats. The message conveyed by the landscape was clear. It was partially an aesthetic one and translated, for a particular setting, the general principles of composition of that time. It
was also partly social: landowners tried to improve their status in the aristocratic circles, and to justify their economic and social responsibilities through cultural achievements such as landscaping. Landscapes have become messages. They had to be studied as texts. They translated into a visual form abstracts ideas, philosophical meditations or religious convictions. The parks designed at the end of the 18th century were full of false gothic ruins, mock temples, pseudo-graves. They reminded the visitors that all culture is mortal, decadence always follows prosperity, that only wisdom lasts and also the importance of the study and contemplation of nature, reflection on the human condition and a sincere admiration for the great men who were able to transcend the prevailing mediocrity of humankind. The grammar of the 18th century garden replaced an older one, which was based on the taste for Arcadia as a shared sojourn of shepherds, gods and goddesses. There, the main elements had been the sources, the basins where naiads settled, and caverns and grottos which gave a glimpse on the chthonian forces at work in the universe. The grammar of Western gardens was generally a simple one. Landscapes were more difficult to interpret when they had to visualize more complex messages. Duncan (1990) analyzed in this way the Buddhist cityscape of Kandy, in Sri Lanka: the Kings who reigned in this inland capital at the beginning of the 19th century, knew that their power was a fragile one: they were threatened by the British coastal settlements. In order to survive, they had to preserve the unity of their society. For them, the only way to achieve this was to diffuse the message of the Buddhist faith in its most favorable version for the civil power they represented. The messages embodied in rural landscapes are generally less complex that those orchestrated by the Kandian dynasty and the artists who worked for it in the 19th century.
3.2. The impact of Arcadian dreams At the end of the 18th century, the Arcadian dream took a new form: instead of being based on Greek and Roman mythology and a romantic vision of the lives of shepherds, it began to be associated with the pure communities of the Alpine valleys or other more or
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less archaic rural areas. The language of this new form of dream was less academic: instead of temples, ruins of castles and churches and mock tombs, landscapes had just to be decorated by a few thatched cottages, a milk shed and a sheep barn. As long as the taste for rural scenes was deeply intertwined with the knowledge of Greek or Latin mythologies, its impact was limited to the aristocracy and the intellectuals. In its new form, Arcadia became accessible to middle-class tastes. The economic transformations associated with the Industrial Revolution and the building of railroads popularized tourism: an increased number of urbanites could for the first time visit the small peasant communities along the coasts or in the mountainous areas which served as models for the new trend. The railway and later the tramway, made suburbanization possible for the middle classes. Living in suburbs was partly the realization of these new visions of Arcadia as a form of paradise on Earth (Ghorra-Gobin, 1987, 1997). If the dreams of city-dwellers was to choose for a more rural life, the result was quite different from what has been expected. All rural life rapidly disappeared of most suburbs. Instead of a ruralization of the city, an acceleration of urban sprawl could be observed! 4. Rural landscapes in the postmodern age 4.1. New types of activities and the social composition of postmodern rural areas The social and professional composition in rural areas changed completely during the last decades. The first effect of the Industrial Revolution was a simplification of the local professional activity: most of craftsmen disappeared. With a continuously growing agricultural productivity, farm densities are declining. In the areas where farming is still the major activity, it means a drastic decline of overall densities, with a spiral of desertion: young families leave localities where it is impossible to find the services they need for raising their children. The preservation of high densities is only possible through a change in the professional activities in of rural communities. In this way, rural areas transformed into new low-density suburban or rurban areas. Their population is diverse and is composed of
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a minority of farmers, often native, using highly differentiated forms of production (truck farming, cattle raising or a combination of farming and touristic activities), of people of local origin working in industry or services, of newcomers migrating from cities or abroad also with urban activities but a different background and of retirees, etc. It means that the suburban population is culturally more diverse than the former rural one. They are bearers of new forms of dreams. 4.2. Another conception of nature As long as modernity lasted, the idea of rural areas as a form of Arcadia survived. Even with the modernization of farming activities, it was still possible, 50 years ago, to find farms where cows were milked by hand and farmers selling their products to their neighbors. In the postmodern era, farming has lost its friendly and amateur-like character. It has become a highly industrial activity and farmers had to specialize in new technologies. It becomes also increasingly difficult to open farms for visitors. Contemporary rural areas have ceased to evoke the pastures, flocks and shepherds of Arcadia. Farming has ceased to be the model for the dreams of urban dwellers. Postmodern societies broke definitely the links with the classic rural civilization that subsisted well into the 20th century. The perception people have of rural areas has changed for other reasons. Until a generation ago, the contrast between agricultural areas and the wilderness did not seem very sharp. Farming involved a modification of nature, the destruction of woodland and the creation of meadows or pastures, which replaced partly the natural moors. Then, farming was not considered as a threat to nature. Modernization had deep consequences: fields or pastures became increasingly similar to chemical laboratories for fertilizers and pesticides. Cows, sheep and pigs breeding became a scientific selection. The farming environment became an artificial one under complete human control. Its management endangers natural equilibriums: soils and water are polluted by the overuse of fertilizers and pesticides and cause eutrophication. The break with the Arcadian tradition and the new farming style conducted to a new conception of nature: nature exists only where there is no human activity. Hunting and fishing has to be
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prohibited in the new natural areas, and so is the tradition of extensive grazing in woodland. The environment of ecologists and nature conservationists is completely different from the one of classical or romantic poetry or literature. Their aim is to transform parts of the rural areas back into “genuine” nature. Everyone knows that this will take a long time and that the newly created natural parks and reserves will only subsist with a very careful human management. 4.3. New forms of communities The fascination for rural villages, specially those located in the remote parts of mountainous areas or along the rocky seashores of the Atlantic Ocean or the Mediterranean Sea, is based upon the image of closely tied local communities they have. The idea was born with the Letters of a Savoyard Vicar by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Kenneth Olwig has shown that the landskips of Schlewsig–Holstein were good examples of this form of social organization. Ferdinand Tönnies, the great theoretician of the idea of Gemeinschaft, was born in the German part of Schlewsig. Olwig suggests that his conceptualization of rural communities was implicitly based on his early experience in this part of the German–Danish border. The ideal of a local community is not dead, but it has ceased to be associated with rural groups devoted to farming. With postmodernity, utopias have to be built now, and if it is possible, where we are living. It was the motor behind the hippies’ communes in the late 1960s and early 1970s and which survived this period of contestation. Much of the people who settle in rural areas still wish to participate in some form of community. Local traditional communities are sometimes still used as reference. They had a strong identity, clearly expressed by the landscape and landmarks. Other new communities, which try to use the folklore inherited from the past, also take over their feasts, rituals and ceremonies. More numerous are, however, those which rely on other models. Some groups are looking for Oriental traditions to try to build their identity on Zen Buddhism, transcendental meditation or other fashionable philosophy imported from Eastern or Southern Asia.
4.4. The countryside as a playground Most of the newcomers in the countryside appreciate above all the low population density and the ample space available. The presence of “genuine” nature and the possibility of finding new local communities are often secondary factors that attract them. They need space because they love outdoor recreation, such as hiking, climbing, jogging, rafting, or practice golf on a perfect green, play tennis on well trimmed courts, etc. The rural countryside offers a perfect multifunctional space for a mix of these recreational activities. 4.5. The countryside as a palimpsest of unrelated and utterly different land uses All these new activities demand an adapted land use, need special equipments and well designed environments. The countryside has ceased to be a domain for intuition or improvization, it needs to be planned and managed by professionals. Each activity has its own specificities, and land zoning is a result as different types of land uses are incompatible. Postmodern landscapes are, in this way, shaped by conflicting interests. It is not a new situation—the problems that arose between ploughmen and cattle raisers hold a central place in the development of traditional crop rotation systems. What is new is that the conflicting groups do not always live in the contested areas. It also means that the outcome of decisions and conflicts are generally untidy and chaotic. Even when each piece of land is well managed, the whole landscape is not harmonious any more. 5. Conclusion Landscapes are the result of human interests and activities. Their forms may be interpreted as a language, but not a universal one. In this paper, we proposed a classification of the languages of rural landscapes based on the economic, social, and cultural position of the groups which were or are responsible for their genesis: (1) the languages of function, the generative grammars of landscape elements and the semiotics of religious signification for traditional farming groups; (2) the rhetoric of harmony, purity and social status and power for upper or middle class urbanites from
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the Middle Ages to the 20th century; (3) the languages of genuine nature, amenities and outdoor activities for the new rural population which resulted from the 20th century revolutions in mobility and activity. Linguistic models are helpful for geographers who try to decipher and interpret specific forms of rural landscapes. They may rely on: (1) the dialectical relations between words and things at all stages of evolution (the naming of soil, plants, environments), the naming of the countryside itself; (2) the models of structural linguistics and generative grammars for classical forms of agrarian landscapes; (3) semiotics for the aesthetic and social readings which were so important in the religious fields of purely rural societies, or in the ideological ones for modern urban societies. Geographers have an obvious interest in borrowing tools developed by linguists, but they have to know that none of these tools would be able to provide them with a universal key for reading and interpreting landscapes. References Antoine, A., 2000. Le Paysage de l’historien. Archéologie des bocages de l’Ouest de la France à l’époque moderne. Presses Universitaires de Rennes, Rennes. Berque, A., 1995. Les Raisons du paysage. De la Chine antique aux envionnements de synthèse. Hazan, Paris. Berque, A., et al., 1999. Mouvance. Cinquante mçts pour lepaysage. Editions de la Villette, Paris. Bonnemaison, J., 1986. Les Fondements d’une identité. Territoire, histoire et société dans l’archipel du Vanuato, vol. 2. ORSTOM, Paris. Brunet, R., 1980. La composition des modèles en analyse spatiale. L’Espace Géographique 9 (4), 253–265. Cosgrove, D., 1984. Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape. Croom Helm, London. Duncan, J., 1990. The City as a Text: the Politics of Landscape Interpretation in the Kandyan Kingdom. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Durand, Y., 1988. Vivre au pays au XVIIIe siècle. PUF, Paris. Eliade, M., 1949. Traité d’histoire des religions. Payot, Paris. Ginsburg, C., 1966. I Benandanti: richerche sulla stregoneria e sui culti agrari tra cinquecento e seicento. Giulio Einaudi, Turin.
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