nordic landscapes: region and belonging on the northern edge of europe
TRANSCRIPT
This article was downloaded by: [Florida Atlantic University]On: 22 November 2014, At: 22:33Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House,37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK
Norsk Geografisk Tidsskrift - Norwegian Journal ofGeographyPublication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/sgeo20
Nordic Landscapes: Region and Belonging on theNorthern Edge of EuropeGeorge HendersonPublished online: 16 Sep 2009.
To cite this article: George Henderson (2009) Nordic Landscapes: Region and Belonging on the Northern Edge of Europe,Norsk Geografisk Tidsskrift - Norwegian Journal of Geography, 63:3, 223-223, DOI: 10.1080/00291950903239238
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00291950903239238
PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE
Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) containedin the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make norepresentations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of theContent. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, andare not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon andshould be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable forany losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoeveror howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use ofthe Content.
This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematicreproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in anyform to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions
BOOK REVIEWS � LITTERATURANMELDELSER
Jones, Michael & Olwig, Kenneth (eds.) 2008. Nordic Landscapes: Region and
Belonging on the Northern Edge of Europe. University of Minnesota Press,
Minneapolis and London. Halftones, graphs, maps, index, ix�xxix, and 628
pp. ISBN-13: 978-0-8166-3914-4; ISBN-10: 0-8166-3914-0; ISBN-13: 978-0-
8166-3915-1 (pb: alk. paper); ISBN-10: 0-8166-3915-9 (pb: alk. paper).
Despite a certain ebb and flow, interest in landscape remains an essential
feature of the geographic imagination. This is true for geographic imagina-
tions of many kinds, if not all. Diverse students of the vernacular scene,
humanists, feminists, Marxists, historians, planners, ecologists, and many
others have studied landscape, alternately folding, stretching, cracking and
breaking with traditional approaches along the way. What has emerged is less
a ‘‘landscape studies’’ discipline (though some might debate the point) than a
grouping of individuals willing to gather around a word and enunciate it in the
ways that inspire them. Not that that it is bad. Indeed, it is the conclusion I
draw from this book. Yet what of the gathering itself ? What does it mean?
What can it mean? Why have it? These are questions to which I will return.
The landscapes to which the book’s title refers are in Norden, a polyglot
region inclusive of Denmark, Iceland, Finland, Sweden, and Norway, plus the
internally autonomous territories of Greenland, the Faeroe Islands, and
Aland. The territory that really counts as ‘‘Nordic’’ though is a question to
which the answer, Kenneth Olwig reminds us, depends on when one is asking.
The Scandinavian countries once extended to other domains, while Denmark
once encompassed all of Norden. It depends, too, on who is asking, as now
the Baltic states bid for consideration in a wider Nordic identity. How much
lies in (and outside) a word. There is nothing given, then, about Norden, and
approaches to the study of its landscapes can vary widely, as this book of
nearly two dozen chapters shows. (The chapters are arranged largely on a
state-by-state basis, with several chapters devoted to each state.)
One finds several of the essays structured around different meanings of the
word landscape itself (including ‘‘landscape’’ in various translations, e.g., the
Finnish maisema and maakunta). The contributions by Kenneth Olwig,
Tomas Germundsson, Gabriel Bladh, and Anssi Paasi all adopt this strategy,
and are by and large very effective at showing how different conceptions of
landscape (whether as scenic view, area/territory, administrative unit, or
private estate) gain real purchase on the world. As shown in Germundsson’s
essay on an ‘‘(un)Swedish landscape,’’ for example, one notion of landscape
animated an early incipient urbanism, another was implicated in the spread of
peri-urban private estates, a third type was embodied in the ‘‘districting’’ of
Skane, while still another legitimated the waves of enclosure movements in
Skane.
Other contributors are less taken with an etymological approach. For
Kirsten Hastrup landscape is simply the local, earthy (or aqueous) terrain as
perceived, felt, and lived*and is no less for it. Some wonderful insights and
telling details emerge through this lens. Hastrup, who writes here on Iceland
and Icelandic identity, argues that Icelandic words (e.g., names given to
particular stones or glacial features), rather than built structures, are the most
significant remains from the past. For this reason, she writes, ‘‘space takes
precedence over time.’’ Contra David Lowenthal, for whom the past is a
foreign country, it is precisely the country, the landscape, through which the
past gains its real, living significance, Hastrup writes. In a chapter on land
rights, land division, and landownership in the Faeroe Islands, Arne
Thorsteinsson, offers a painstaking reconstruction of ancient usufruct rights.
As a landscape in near constant interaction with the sea, especially interesting
are details concerning use of that which the sea brings to shore: driftwood,
seaweed, dead whales. Claims to these resources depended on whether the
resources were still afloat (and if so, at what depth) or had washed ashore.
Some of these resources could be claimed only by the landowners adjacent to
the shore where they lay; others were shared by all landowners. The highlight
of the chapter though, is a scholarly reconstruction of the system of land
evaluation. Here the author makes the highly perceptive observation that even
though the records available to do the reconstruction work are patchy at best,
the written record can be as restrictive as it is enabling: sometimes the most
sensible conclusions are those won through thoughtful speculation and
inference. (The emphasis on systems and structures in this chapter is perhaps
inevitable, given available sources, but I hope one day the author finds his
‘‘Martin Guerre’’ to bring these systems to life: How was the system of rights
and land evaluation actually lived in real human terms? It would be a shame
to not ever know.) Still other authors (e.g., Bo Wagner Sorenson, Maunu
Hayrynen) pay special attention to how landscape imagery was recruited into
projects of nation-building. For example, Hayrynen, focusing on Finland,
offers an exhaustive and potentially useful inventory of all the published
landscape images that have been claimed as representative ‘‘national land-
scapes.’’ If the conclusions drawn do not seem terribly profound, they at least
collectively tell a revealing story of the increase in number and kind of
landscapes that could be considered representative of the national by cultural
authorities and tastemakers.
In my reading of this book and of landscape itself, the strongest chapter is
Kenneth Olwig’s piece on Jutland, which appears early in the volume.
His essay is a rich engagement with the historical-geographical peculiarity
that is Jutland and its place in the Danish national imaginary. However, most
especially, it is a fascinating engagement with the connection between
etymology, politics, and philosophy. None of the other chapters come close
to Olwig’s in grappling with the suggestiveness of landscape as an idea. One
thing he does so well is to illuminate the landscape idea from side-stage, as it
were, constructing its meaning relationally through the meanings of other
very simple, associated words, such as ‘‘build,’’ ‘‘thing,’’ and ‘‘shape.’’ He
traces these words etymologically back to their root concerns with the human
condition as a perpetual state of encounter among humans and between
humans and non-humans. His goal is to once again send home the idea that
landscape does not just have a politics or arise from politics; it is itself a
political term or idea. I say ‘‘once again’’ because this has been Olwig’s
distinctive and erudite contribution to the scholarly conversation on land-
scape, more so than any other writer of whom I am aware.
The origins of this book are worth pondering. Nordic Landscapes was
inspired by Conzen’s The Making of the American Landscape (1990), the
editors advise, but also by later reworkings of landscape study, as conducted
by scholars such as Stephen Daniels, Denis Cosgrove, and Tim Ingold. The
book does not proceed in such linear fashion: many epistemological
perspectives are offered, as I have pointed out already. (Indeed, there are
approaches represented in the book that I have not mentioned. Anders
Lundberg’s chapter, for example, is a history of land uses in Western Norway,
the main intent of which is to illustrate the difficulty of deciding boundaries
between biophysical regions. There are also approaches that are eschewed.
One would not know from this volume of the uptake of actor network theory
and other ‘‘topological’’ approaches in geography.) Why put these diverse
perspectives between the pages of a single book? Well, why not? Olwig and
Jones write in their introduction to the volume, ‘‘It is not our goal to create a
holistic vision of landscape, but to show how different discourses meet and
can speak to one another in the understanding of particular places.’’ Yet that
is just it, the book does not so much ‘‘show how’’ as simply juxtapose. For
instance, the last chapters on ‘‘Norden’’ might have attempted a ‘‘showing
how’’ more strenuously. Instead, they retreat into landscape as the ‘‘naively
given,’’ to use one of Carl Sauer’s early phrases (from his 1925 essay, ‘‘The
morphology of landscape’’). Surely, this is not the lasting impression the
editors wish to leave the reader. The book remains in many ways a fine
volume. I do not need a single, holistic vision any more than the editors.
However, it would be beneficial to know more of what the editors hoped to
achieve in convening these many voices and methods.
George Henderson, Associate Professor, Department of Geography, University
of Minnesota, 414 Social Sciences Building, 267 19th Avenue S., Minneapolis,
MN 55455, USA. E-mail: [email protected]
George Henderson # 2009
DOI 10.1080/00291950903239238
Norsk Geografisk Tidsskrift�Norwegian Journal of Geography Vol. 63, 223. Oslo. ISSN 0029-1951
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Flor
ida
Atla
ntic
Uni
vers
ity]
at 2
2:33
22
Nov
embe
r 20
14