NATIONAL LANDSCAPE

NATIONAL LANDSCAPE

A concept combining a territory that is politically and/or emotionally close to a nation with the needs, values, representations and traditions of that nation associated with or defining the characteristic elements of a certain landscape through the prism of national values.

The concept of national landscape finds the most coherent expression in nation states (Cosgrove). The idea of such a landscape is often built around country-specific flora and fauna (e.g. white-tailed eagle, weeping willows and oaks as symbols of Poland, moorland as characteristic features of Scotland), topography and physiography (e.g. Norwegian fjords, Swiss Alps), geography (e.g. Poland as a country stretching between the Baltic Sea and the Tatra Mountains), climate (e.g. the presence of four seasons), country-specific land use methods (e.g. village morphology, field layout, Greek olive groves, Polish orchards, Chinese rice terraces, differences between desert Palestine and agriculturally developed Israel), national monuments and symbols (e.g. the Statue of Liberty, the destroyed WTC towers, the Eiffel Tower), religions and ways of erecting and situating temples, recognition of aesthetic values of a given area (e.g. French formal gardens and English landscape gardens), approaches to the environment (Finnish or Canadian landscapes are considered to be “clean”, and Chinese as “polluted”). Iconic images that illustrate the relationship between people or nation and their inhabited territory and nature (Cresswell) are involved in the creation of such landscapes. The concept of the national landscape (that which constitutes it in our minds), as well as the concept of a nation, is sometimes strongly ideologised and has an imaginative character (Gellner, Anderson).

The ideas of nation and patriotism that bound people to the local environment appeared among the educated Romans as early as the first century A.D., but on a wider scale came into being only in the second half of the nineteenth century and during the twentieth century, when European nation states were being formed. The authors of the ideas of the nation and the national landscape were artists and historians, depicting imaginative and sensitive images of the relationship between nature and its inhabitants (e.g. in the late 19th century Meitzen published a work in which he proclaimed that each people created a unique form of land organisation and that the landscape is an important determinant of ethnic or national character; similar ideas were announced in Germany by Herder, in Poland by Mickiewicz and Słowacki). Some landscapes (and their iconic representations) were particularly valued for their role in building the nation’s identity and shaping its culture. In the Polish culture there were images of Tatra highlanders against the background of mountains; in Germany, united as a national state under Prussian rule, the image of a muscular German standing among mountains and forests was promoted. In Ireland, attempts were made to define the national landscape by emphasising Celtic cultural elements (Cosgrove). In the 20th century, landscapes became recognisable national symbols and elements of national heritage on an equal footing with flags or languages (Lowenthal).

Imaging a national landscape helps to create a national identity and maintain cultural unity (striving to preserve identity through regulations protecting the “view”). It is inscribed in the founding myths, it is connected with the fate of the heroes and public memory. This type of landscape is built on the basis of a commonwealth of experience, but it can cause exclusion (who has the right to reside in a given territory, who has the right to inherit the land [Rose, Philips]); it can also become a tool of imperial policy where the landscapes of the colonisers’ nation begin to be created in the conquered territory. In South Dakota, on Plains Indian tribes territory, busts of four American presidents were carved out of the Rushmore rock, illustrating and at the same time legitimising the power of the white man, while the native Americans, who originally lived in this area, were locked up in reservations. Aborigines in Australia were treated in a similar way. Catholic churches are inscribed in the national landscape of the Philippines, and parts of the landscape of Tahiti, New Zealand and India (Smith) have been developed along the lines of the European landscape. In 2001, in the Afghan city of Bamian the Taliban destroyed the statues of Buddha to bring the local landscape closer to the idea of the Islamic State.

The concept of a nation and the instilling of love for the national landscape means that social inequalities are no longer perceived – the promotion of love for mining life leads to a situation where it is easy to ignore the danger of working in a mine. In England and France, in the 18th and 19th centuries, gardens were created in the countryside – “beautifying” the landscape was a legitimisation of power over the lower classes. In the USA and Canada, the importance given to the natural landscape and its role in shaping national identity still serves today as an argument for refusing to return land to the indigenous populations. The idea of the national landscape is therefore entangled in politics and ideology (Agnew), in economic or utilitarian senses (Agnew), sometimes marked by imperialism and nationalism (Mitchell) and cannot be treated only in terms of the contemplated view. Sometimes it becomes the object of claims of two or more nations, if it is a part of their tradition and an identity component (the Gates of Dawn in Vilnius known to the Poles as the Sharp Gate [Ostra Brama], Cemetery of the Lviv Eaglets, Jerusalem) becoming a part of the historical policy pursued by a given country (state). The national landscape can also contribute to the development of tourism (trips to places recognised as iconic for the countries concerned: Niagara Falls in Canada, national parks and safaris in Kenya, Japanese Mount Fuji, American Grand Canyon in Colorado, Yellow Mountains in China, etc.).

[M.G. ]

Literature:

Agnew, John A., Corbridge, Stuart. Mastering Space: Hegemony, Territory and International Political Economy. London: Routledge, 1995.

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983.

Cosgrove, Denis. „Landscape and the European Sense of Sight – Eyeing Nature“, In: Handbook of Cultural Geography, K. Anderson, M. Domosh, S. Pile, N. Thrift (eds.), pp. 249-268. London: Sage, 2003.

Cresswell, Tim. Place: a Short Introduction. Malden, USA, Oxford, UK and Carlton, Australia: Blackwell Publishing, 2004.

Gellner, Ernest. Nations and Nationalism. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2007.

Lowenthal, David. Lowenthal, David. “European Landscape Transformations; the Rural Residues”. Landscape Research, Vol.32, no.5, 2007, pp. 637-659.

Mitchell, Katharyne. „Multiculturalism, or the United Colors of Capitalism?” Antipode 25 (1993): 263–94.

Phillips, Richard. „Imperialism, sexuality and space: purity movements in the British Empire.” W: Postcolonial Geographies, red. Alison Blunt, Cheryl McEwan.  London: Continuum, 2002.

Rose, Gillian.  Feminism and Geography. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993.

Smith, Bernard. European Vision and the South Pacific, 1768–1850: a study in the history of art and ideas. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985.