Showing papers in "Rural History-economy Society Culture in 1991"

British National Identity and the English Landscape

Abstract: Heritage is a messy concept ill-defined, heterogeneous, changeable, chauvinist – and sometimes absurd. In a TV programmer's words, just as ‘lifestyle has replaced life, heritage is replacing history'. Rather than ‘history’, Philadelphia's tourist boss now ‘talk[s] about heritage – it sounds more lively’. It is also more equivocal; as Walter Benjamin put it, every cultural treasure that is a ‘document of civilization is at the same time a document of barbarism’. Yet for all its ambiguity, ‘the idea of “Heritage” [is] one of the most powerful imaginative complexes of our time’.

Local History and National History: The Quest for the Peoples of England

Abstract: It is arguable that what has most bedevilled the recent academic practice of history in Britain has been the triumph over integrative history - or that mode of history which seeks to reconstitute and to explain the multi-dimensional nature of past experience - of what might be called the disintegrative historical approach, that is, specialised thematic history. The former mode includes local history, national history (by which here is meant much more than the political or constitutional history of the Nation State), international history - even histories of ‘civilisations’ or of the world - and takes ‘society’ as the central organising principle over time. The latter mode comprises, for example, political history, demographic history, economic history and so on through to such exotic sub-species of the so-called new social history as the histories of class, gender, sex, crime or leisure. Put crudely, if this second type of historical approach concerns itself with particular categories of persons or activities, with pre-selected processes and with highly specific tendencies in the relatively short term, then the first has to do with the fluctuating development of recognisable social entities in the round, and with their changing interrelationships usually over longer time scales. Instructive and fascinating as is undoubtedly the detailed thematic approach, and vital as it continues to be as the indispensable technical preliminary to the accurate reconstruction of the past in a multi-dimensional sense, it is hardly deniable that - as the Victorians recognised - it is the broader interdisciplinary approach which should represent the ultimate aspiration of the historical practitioner, simply because it is that which is most culturally relevant to the education of the citizen. It is equally clear, however, that few professional historians today are seeking either to construct their undergraduate syllabuses on such lines or to write connectedly for a wider public about such matters over periods much longer than a century or two.

Picturesque Landscaping and Estate Management: Uvedale Price at Foxley, 1770–1829

Abstract: Georgian landscaping is conventionally studied as an example of high culture, in terms of the history of art, literature and aesthetics. We take a more down to earth view and look at landscaping as an example of estate management, in terms of such topics as farming, planting, leases and rents. We do not pretend that the study of estate management offers a sort of ground-truth for understanding landscaping. Terms like ‘rent’ and ‘estate’ are of course no more eternal, nor less ideological, than terms like ‘picturesque’ and ‘landscape’. We will not neglect high culture, indeed a central theme of the paper is how the aesthetics of painting helped frame estate management. Even a casual reading of the literature on ‘improvement’ in the eighteenth century reveals a complex overlapping of not just economic and aesthetic issues but moral and political ones too. And the point of this paper is to reinsert landscaping and estate management into this complex.

The Local Legend: A Product of Popular Culture

Abstract: In the study of folktales, both in Britain and internationally, the privileged genre has always been the fairytale, the marchen or ‘Wonder Tale’. These complex, picturesque stories, such as ‘Snow White’ or ‘Cinderella’, have attracted innumerable scholarly collectors and interpreters. There is, however, another kind of oral folk narrative, equally widespread but less glamorous, which has far more to offer to the student of popular rural culture. I refer to the kind of story technically known to English-speaking folklorists as a ‘legend’ (German Sage). This centres upon some specific place, person or object which really exists or has existed within the knowledge of those telling and hearing the story. It reflects the beliefs, moral judgements and everyday preoccupations of the social group, and is in many cases, though not invariably, told ‘as true’. Its aim is to hand on accounts of significant events alleged to have occurred in a particular community or area and it has no truck with ‘once.upon a time’ and the ‘never-never land’. While the fairytale is long and is told for its entertainment value, the legend is almost always brief, for its normal context is casual conversation, where it is recounted in order to inform, explain, warn or educate. Its style is sober and realistic, for though it may contain supernatural and fantastic elements, these are given maximum plausibility by being brought into close association with the physical localisation of the tale.

Irish Neolithic Landscapes and Land Use Systems: The Implications of Field Systems

Abstract: I approach this paper as a prehistorian whose research has been primarily in areas with little or no surviving evidence for prehistoric fields, so that my only close encounter with field systems has been at Kilmashogue and other sites in the uplands just to the south of Dublin (figure 1 shows the location of the main areas and sites in Ireland mentioned in the text). These are certainly fixed in space but unfortunately are as yet floating in time (Cooney, 1985). But this personal predicament is in fact central to the problems approached in this paper: that while there is increasing evidence for prehistoric field systems in Ireland, they are frequently perceived as occurring in the archaeological record only in certain areas; that the relationship between them and other aspects of the archaeological record is not always clear; and that there are major problems in dating these field systems.My second introductory point is to comment that the sequence of the title is deliberate. The significance of field systems must be seen in the context of what would have been the contemporary cultural landscape and land use, and the various interpretations which have been made of these. The occurrence of field systems has major implications for the way we view the human impact on the environment and use of the land during the Neolithic period in Ireland (4,000 – 2,500 BC).

Rural Wales and the Welsh Language

Abstract: Since the early 1960s the ‘language question’ in Wales has excited deep and often fractious debate. It is to the pace and pattern of change in the Welsh-speaking population of Wales, and the efforts that have been made to halt the long-standing spiral of linguistic decline that this study addresses itself. Of particular interest is the situation prevailing in rural areas of the north and west of the Principality. These areas have long been regarded as the traditional bastions of the language, and it is here that the forces of anglicisation are currently having such a profound effect on indigenous communities. Together, these communities occupy and define a heartland — a linguistic domain — that is frequently referred to as Y Fro Gymraeg (literally the Welsh-speaking Region). No firm boundaries can be specified, but this core is normally thought to include areas where more than seventy per cent, or even eighty per cent, of the resident population aged three years and over is able to speak Welsh. Beyond this boundary lies Cymru di-Gymraeg (literally non Welsh-speaking Wales); for some, the land from which the language has been disinherited.

Romanian Villages: Rural Planning under Communism

Abstract: The village is an important research theme in Romania in view of its significance for culture and ecology as well as the modernisation process. Interest developed after Romanian Independence but the efforts of the early historians like A.D. Xenopol (1847–1920) were greatly extended after the First World War, when the enlargement of frontiers, adding Transylvania (and temporarily Bessarabia) to the Old Kingdom embracing Moldavia and Wallachia, gave Romanian scholars access to the whole of the central Carpathian belt. Historians like C. Daicoviciu (1898–1973) and C.C. Giurescu (1901–77) were joined by ethnographers and sociologists, such as D. Gusti (1880–1955) and R. Vuia (1887–1963), ecologists like I. Simionescu (1873–1944) and geographers including I. Conea (1902–74) and V. Mihailescu (1890–1978).1 Interdisciplinary research stimulated by royal patronage was particularly fruitful in the case of the project involving a selection of some sixty representative Romanian villages (‘60 sate romanesti’).2 This gave rise to numerous publications, including monographs and shorter pieces, which formed the core of a distinguished sociology journal of the 1930s: Sociologie Romaneasca.

Mangles, Muck and Myths: Rural History Museums in Britain

Abstract: In the field of cultural studies, it is well established that no history comes to us innocently. The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves are laden with preferred myths and the gentlest of facts. The challenge facing those operating within the field is to develop critical practices which expose some of the nonsense that disempowers our understanding. This demands the strengthening of those practices which promote new forms of knowledge. The identification of appropriate questions, the constructive use of all forms of evidence, the adoption of relevant, analytical methods, and the formation of coherent conclusions are essential to the health and future of any academic discipline. Within the field of museum studies, such rethinking has been taking place since the early 1980s (for example, Cannizzo, 1987; Hooper-Greenhill, 1988; Jenkins, 1987; Jenkinson, 1988; Kavanagh, 1991; Pearce, 1988; Porter, 1988).