B 4.1 The role of familiar landscapes

"When living in a place, the forms of hills, the vegetation of slopes, the pattern of fields, the lace that hedges and walls draw in the countryside, the colour of roofs, the stones, bricks or wood they are built of, the breadth of streets, their shops, their animation, constitute the background in front of which human roles are performed. All these elements participate in the general atmosphere, and give it its pecularities, perfume and originality. People cannot imagine their lives out of a setting which has become so familiar to them that it forms part and parcel of their identities.
Geographers who work on the native populations of East Africa, Madagascar, Australia or Melanesia are struck by the strength of the links woven between these indigenous peoples and their environments (Raison, 1977; Bonnemaison, 1981). Australian aborigenes were semi-nomadic peoples, who did not practice farming or sheep- or cattle-raising. The resources their lives depended upon were present in most Australian environments. During the nineteenth centuries, British settlers did not hesitate to push the natives every day deeper into the continent. They did not understand for what reasons the displaced populations lost their taste for life and often chose to die. They ignored the role of the founding spirits which had inhabited the land during the time of Dream and had chosen to transform themselves into sacred rocks or springs just after having bequeathed human beings all the elements of culture (Elkin, 1937). The story is in many ways similar in Melanesia or East Africa.
A generation ago Pierre Nora showed that the way identities were built on familiar landscapes and ways of life was different in most traditional cultures (Nora, 1984). In them, the religious dimension was less important – even if there was a significant presence of sacred places, pilgrimages and the constant reaffirmation of specific symbols in the landscape. In a community, people were able to understand the way fields were tilled, cattle was raised and houses were built. They knew the tools used by the stone-masons, carpenters and slaters who built houses, the shoemakers and tailors which produced shoes and clothes, the butchers, bakers and grocers which prepared and sold food: in societies in which vernacular cultures were the depositaries of practically all the productive techniques, everyone had the possibility to understand, at least partly, how things were made and landscapes shaped. They were all the most familiar with visible forms than they knew the way they were generated.
We are experiencing a fundamental change in the nature of vernacular cultures. Those of the past were mainly built on the oral transmission and visual imitation of the words and gestures of people living in the same home or the same place. We are entering the age of vernacular mass cultures: the passing down of habits, attitudes and know-hows has ceased to rely on local processes; it is largely based on the new capacities of media to broadcast scenes of daily life filmed in distant places; vernacular cultures are now mainly made of consumption habits and the capacity to repair the manufactured items which presently constitute the largest part of daily environments.
Landscapes have ceased to be shaped through the use of tools and techniques everyone is able to understand. They are planned by engineers, architects or landscape architects who often have no previous knowledge of the environments in which they work, and master techniques which allow them to ignore most of their characteristics. Such landscapes have ceased to pertain to the living memories of local people: even if they are technically well organized and ecologically sound (which is seldom the case), they have no appeal to the local populations."

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