Towards the Imaginary Reconstitution of Society
The Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, The University of Edinburgh
Sponsored by an Innovation Initiative Grant from the University of Edinburgh Development Office
On 27 February 2014, the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities played host to over 30 academics from Edinburgh and further afield, who gathered to explore landscape as a locus of hope. Organized and opened by Dr Maxim Shadurski, the symposium featured 4 plenary and 5 panel presentations, which focused on various political, social, environmental, linguistic, artistic, and cultural aspects of landscape. Hope was seen to underpin the possibilities of rethinking land use; it took precedent in the opportunities offered by the proposed construction of a co-operative town in South Lanarkshire. Hope was also explored through its adversaries – despair and disappointment – as a necessary component to an objective and imaginary ruination of landscape, and to the radicalization of hope. Featuring discussion of landscapes as close as England and Norway, and as far-flung as New Zealand and Chile, the symposium tended to stay thematically at home. On the eve of the Independence Referendum, Scottish landscape invited the most attention, posing questions about how its future will be born of hope.
If you have further questions or comments about the symposium, please contact Dr Maxim Shadurski at Maxim.Shadurski(at)ed.ac.uk
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Clicking on the titles below will take you to the abstracts.
Opening Address
Dr Maxim Shadurski (Edinburgh, English Literature): Fields of Vision: Utopia and Landscape (no abstract)
First Plenary
Professor Michael Northcott (Edinburgh, Ethics): Land Reform and a Sustainable Scotland
Dr Jim Arnold, MBE (New Lanark Trust): Owenstown
Second Plenary
Dr Fraser MacDonald (Edinburgh, Human Geography): Hope in Ruins: Erskine Beveridge and the Hebridean Iron Age
Dr Alex Thomson (Edinburgh, English Literature): Stony Landscapes and Radical Hopes: Hugh MacDiarmid and Scottish Ecological Imagination
Panel A
Dr Simon Grimble (Durham, English Studies): Absurd hopes curled around my heart’: Landscape and Social Hope
Dr Magnus Course (Edinburgh, Social Anthropology): The hill that walked away: Inconstancy and Hope in Southern Chile
Dr Franklin Ginn (Edinburgh, Human Geography): Echoes of History from Pūtaringamotu, a New Zealand Swamp Forest
Panel B
Dominic Hinde (Edinburgh, Scandinavian Studies): Practice, Virtue and Sustainability: The Nordic as Scotland’s Better Self
Dr Guy Puzey (Edinburgh, Scandinavian Studies): Linguistically Contested Landscapes in Scotland and Norway: Language Policy and Place Branding
Concluding discussion
The symposium featured an installation of artwork by Sam Caldwell of The Edinburgh College of Art.
Abstracts
Professor Michael Northcott:
Land Reform and a Sustainable Scotland
Discourse around sustainability and nationalism in Scotland rarely acknowledges the extent to which much of the land itself is still in the hands of a very small number of people, many of them absentee and foreign owners of sporting estates, and used very unproductively. Land reform as it emerged in Scotland since before Devolution demonstrates the possibilities for renewal of community access and ownership of forests, moorland and spaces for horticulture. But land reform remains on the margins of the Scottish political agenda, and of the nationalist vision of an independent Scotland. Without a return of the land to the people in new forms of distributed ownership and use, and as shared site of food growing, making and production for the common weal, it is hard to envisage what economy Scottish nationalist discourse realistically promotes.
Owenstown is an inspiring proposal for a new co-operative settlement located in southern Scotland about 5 miles south west of New Lanark World Heritage Site, which was where Robert Owen initiated a utopian social experiment from 1800-1825. The historic example of New Lanark has inspired a local charitable trust, the Hometown Foundation, to put forward a concept of a new co-operative community. Initial projections are for a town of 3,200 dwellings, with environmental, community, and infrastructure support investment, and a population of 8-9,000. Ecological sensitivity in terms of the 21st century is a foundation assumption. The business plan assumes no public sector financial support. Ownership and control of all aspects of the investment will be controlled by the resident community, and a number of democratic co-operative organisational structures are proposed to realise this objective. The specific location is a greenfield site, of minimal environmental quality, in an area of severe rural deprivation.
Fundamentally the Owenstown proposal is intended to realise a major reform of society, which is a contemporary reflection of the historic Owenite tradition. A formal application for Planning Approval in Principle was submitted to South Lanarkshire at the end of 2013. A decision is expected in Spring 2014.
This paper outlines the development of the Owenstown project and how it relates to the utopian traditions, and the proposers’ intention to create a new dynamic organism which is designed to realise the reconstruction of society. The paper gives initial consideration to the issues of landscape and design, and cultural and social organisational issues in the context of the historic utopian impulse, and invites participation in this innovative project.
Dr Fraser MacDonald:
Hope in Ruins: Erskine Beveridge and the Hebridean Iron Age
This paper develops the landscape narrative form in cultural geography, looking at the unfolding of expectation and disappointment in a remote island community. The animating purpose of the paper is stylistic as much as analytic. It is a story; and, unusually for academic geography, the story is primary. The essay has no deferred object; it is not ‘about’ something more academic but nor does it abrogate the work of analysis. It narrates the story of the Scottish archaeologist Erskine Beveridge and his family, as told through a prolonged encounter with the ruins of his house situated on the Hebridean island of North Uist. A discussion of ruins, archives and fieldwork runs parallel with, but always subsidiary to, the main narrative.
Dr Alex Thomson:
Stony Landscapes and Radical Hopes: Hugh MacDiarmid and Scottish Ecological Imagination
Hugh MacDiarmid’s 1934 collection Stony Limits has come to be viewed as one of the inaugural texts in a distinctive tradition of Scottish ecological writing. At the centre of his meditative lyrics of the period lies the apparent indifference of world to man he found figured in the stony landscapes of Shetland. This has been seen as an anticipation of a contemporary ecopoetics which rejects sentimental nature writing – accused of romanticism – and seeks to rethink the relationship between nature and culture. However, this presentation of MacDiarmid is problematic and forecloses on the specific political and philosophical drama enacted in his work of the period. In this paper I will return to Stony Limits in the light of its critical and poetic afterlife, in order to explore the ambivalence of MacDiarmid’s legacy. In his prose writing of the period MacDiarmid’s views are crisis-driven and crudely eschatological: political and social hope are pinned to a radical transformation of philosophical, economic and cultural conditions. His poetry is more circumspect. Re-reading ‘On a Raised Beach’ in the light of MacDiarmid’s knowledge of Husserl’s philosophy suggests the presence of an alternative thinking of hope – perhaps more radical still; but also a series of sceptical challenges that remain to be faced by any attempt to connect poetry, politics and environment.
Dr Simon Grimble:
“Absurd hopes curled around my heart”: Landscape and Social Hope
Writing about landscape in England since the industrial revolution has always tended to produce a conflicted sense: on the one hand, the landscape is often pictured as actually or potentially ‘scarred’ or ‘desecrated’, divided up or compromised, and on the other, those very same landscapes are often figured as a symbol of some kind of deferred social hope, even if that can’t quite be explained or elaborated on, as we move ‘away to where the sky appeared to meet the earth, as if there were no immensity of space between mankind and Heaven’ (Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend). This paper will examine a series of these kinds of images from the nineteenth century to the present, with examples from John Ruskin, William Morris, George Orwell and Owen Hatherley, before concluding by asking – very tentatively – what is the possible future for the this connection between landscape and social hope.
Dr Magnus Course:
The hill that walked away: Inconstancy and Hope in Southern Chile
Both state and non-state organizations pay token respect to indigenous territoriality in southern Chile, but constantly lament the fact that their attempts to cartographically engage with Mapuche ideas about land are scuppered by supposed indecision and confusion on the part of local people. Although these non-Mapuche actors acknowledge that the Mapuche landscape has different ‘meanings’, they still take it to be a fixed, inanimate backdrop, an ‘object’ upon which culture operates. Many Mapuche, however, understand the world around them to be in an inconstant state of fluidity and flux. I focus particularly on the idea that hills can, quite literally, get up and walk away. This occurred both in times of myth, but also during the earthquake of 1960 when the local topography was altered dramatically. The landscape, then, ceases to be a static thing against which culturally-distinct ‘meanings’ are overlaid, but is instead understood as a rather capricious and fickle actor in its own right, a source of both danger and, as I seek to demonstrate, hope.
Dr Franklin Ginn:
Echoes of History from Pūtaringamotu, a New Zealand Swamp Forest
Pūtaringamotu is the Māori name for a small forest on New Zealand’s South Island. The name means ‘place of an echo’. Inspired by the name, this paper attends to the echoes that can be heard from this place, commonly known as Riccarton Bush, and asks what these echoes can tell us about nature, loss, and recovery. Listening closely, the paper discerns echoes of the past: the dying words of a hard-nosed Scottish farmer; the rustle of oak leaves; the squeal of trapped possums; the desire of settler culture to erase colonial sins; subjugated and resurgent Indigenous identity – echoes from beyond history, too: the promise of science to eternalize ecology. And as Pūtaringamotu faces an uncertain future, the forest echoes with the threat of possible extinction.
Dominic Hinde:
Practice, Virtue and Sustainability: The Nordic as Scotland’s Better Self
Both rural and urban Scotland have turned to Nordic practice and planning as a means of articulating a better future in a post-devolution, and potentially post-independence, context. This desire to reinvent Scotland as a Nordic space is a complex and potentially beneficial process. Evident through the policy statements of the Scottish Government in their environmental policy and through organisations such as the Nordic Horizons think tank and the land reform lobby, ‘Nordicness’ often becomes a virtue in itself. In opposition to the historicised nature of Celtic Scotland and the dominant paradigms of the United Kingdom, I argue that Nordicness allows Scotland to assume a new aspirational spatial identity in areas from forestry to urban planning.
A prime example of this is the construction of the Mareel arts centre in Shetland with a self-consciously ‘Nordic’ design, alongside its Nordic road signs and new-build painted wooden houses, but also in the building of the Scottish Parliament itself, as noted by Andrew Newby, and in the commissioning of Danish architects to redesign aspects of Edinburgh city centre (although the eventual proposals were rejected). In each case it is possible to trace cases where Nordicness in itself, rather than the actions taken in terms of design or architectural merit, are given considerable moral weight.
Dr Guy Puzey:
Linguistically Contested Landscapes in Scotland and Norway: Language Policy and Place Branding
Language policy has the potential to be an important transformational tool for societies in which minority languages are spoken. Researchers have long emphasised domains such as the law, education and the media as key mechanisms in which language policy can be seen, but there is a growing interest in the role of different languages in the landscape and in public spaces, typified by the linguistic landscape approach, focusing on the relative visibility of languages in the spaces that surround us. This paper will draw on examples from the linguistic landscapes of Scotland and Norway to explore how activist organisations, policy-makers and individuals have attempted to assert or contest the visibility of minority languages, in particular Gaelic and Sámi.
Place names are central to official linguistic landscape initiatives involving Gaelic and Sámi, and toponymic identity is a key part of place identity. The debate about the relative visibility of minority and majority languages in Scotland and Norway often refers back to ancestral time and the historical territoriality of the languages in question, bringing to light the current nature of ethnolinguistic identity and conflict in an area and sometimes making that conflict a visible part of the landscape. Nevertheless, it will be seen that in terms of promoting multilingualism and multiculturalism, the linguistic landscape can be a beacon of hope for a utopian notion of organic linguistic democracy.
This paper will conclude with considerations on the linguistic and toponymic implications of cultural and corporate-style place branding in Edinburgh, including its status as a UNESCO City of Literature and the ‘Edinburgh Inspiring Capital’ brand.