Gunhild Setten

The habitus, the rule and the moral landscape

Human interaction with the environment, particularly when the latter is conceived as nature, is often measured against moral standards for ‘appropriate behaviour’. Different, and frequently conflicting, ways of being-in-the-world are the theme of moral geographies. This paper seeks to elucidate the relation between morality, landscape and environmental practice by focusing upon a particular Scandinavian case. The Jæren district on the south-western coast of Norway has become one of the most intensively farmed areas in the country, undergoing radical changes causing contemporary farmers to become subject to moral condemnation from a wide range of bodies and people. The paper argues that in order to understand how the culture-nature relationship reflects and produces moral judgements there is a need to investigate how the production and meaning of a lived landscape becomes a moral landscape. Two questions are addressed: What is the ‘nature’ of the moral geographies in the area? How do differing ‘moral geographies’ affect the land and its perception as landscape? Understanding the moral landscape of the Jæren district allows us to identify the dialectics and contradictions inherent in the production of the landscape, and the ways rules and regulations for appropriate behaviour are the result of these contradictions. By adopting Bourdieu‘s notion of habitus, we are able to capture how such rules work and how they shape the landscape.

Ecosystem services and landscape management: three challenges and one plea

This article identifies three interrelated challenges concerning the ecosystem services (ES) framework and the nature of landscape dynamics within the context of landscape management. These challenges are set within a problematic externalization of nature inherent in the ES framework. The first challenge concerns the lack of compatibility between the ES framework and the logics of landscapes. The second challenge addresses the complexity of ecosystems, unsubstitutable values, and intangible dimensions in economic valuation when applied to landscapes. The third challenge points at how the ES framework has problems in accounting for how and why sociocultural processes are crucial to environmental attitudes and behavior. We argue that the idea of landscape and its inherent landscape dynamics, a crosscutting dimension of these challenges, is a missed opportunity for the ES framework in order to take immeasurable and context-specific social and cultural processes more seriously and consequently deliver sounder advice on landscape management. We thus make a plea for the importance of creating platforms for dialogue across research communities working to improve the understanding of human–nature dynamics.

Fusion or exclusion? Reflections on conceptual practices of landscape and place in human geography

This article has its premise in two of the most cherished and complex concepts within human geography, namely landscape and place. They have been subject to both endless and some of the most significant discussions within the discipline. These concepts are also subject to some of the most confusing debates among human geographers – they clearly overlap and are frequently conflated. It is argued here that present conceptualizations and wider discourses of landscape and place are very similar within strands of the discipline. Furthermore, it is argued that it is particularly due to recent theorizations of (embodied) practice that landscape and place become conflated. Practice may then inform our understanding of present uses of both terms. An obvious, but ultimately populist, ahistorical and sidetracking conclusion to draw from the arguments presented in this article is that human geography can do away with one of the concepts. The article concludes by suggesting that the disciplinary practices of landscape and place can be seen rather as struggles over disciplinary vocabulary serving to hold certain academic communities together while keeping others apart.

Holding Property in Trust: Kinship, Law, and Property Enactment on Norwegian Smallholdings

In this paper we discuss relations between kinship, law, and property enactment. A recent revision of The Norwegian Act Relating to Concession in the Acquisition of Real Property is designed to influence the relation between subjects (property owners) and objects (properties) through ceasing the obligation of residency and cultivation on certain properties, which in turn is intended to increase sales prices of the respective properties. Drawing upon empirical research conducted in four Norwegian local authority districts, we argue that responsibility for past, present, and future generations of family or kin is highly important in property enactment. Although relations between subjects and objects are powerful and inform policy actions, relations between social subjects might be just as influential and powerful. When enacting properties, people may live in more complicated worlds than is often assumed. We assert that further research in legal geography and the emerging field of ‘geographies of relatedness’ might profit from seeing kinship and property as coconstituted.

ROMANCE, PRACTICE AND SUBSTANTIVENESS: WHAT DO LANDSCAPES DO?

Abstract. Although Torsten Hägerstrand is not known primarily as a landscape geographer, he made significant contributions to the understanding of landscape in Swedish geography. This paper argues that Hägerstrand examined the importance of representation for the understanding of landscape as place and territory, which is a key ingredient in current engagements with landscape within (Nordic) geography and the broader European political context. The current debate on landscape, however, reaches beyond Hägerstrands rather “scientistic” approach and brings out a stronger sense of the cultural, social and political powers conveyed by landscape and representation. We show that this is made explicit in recent scholarly work on the so‐called substantive landscape. The paper also provides an introduction to the essays of this theme issue, which reflects a selection of the landscape research presented at the Inaugural Meeting of Nordic Geographers at Lund, Sweden, in May 2005.

Changes in land use and landscape dynamics in mountains of northern Europe: challenges for science, management and conservation

Changes in land use and landscape dynamics in mountains of northern Europe: challenges for science, management and conservation Gunhild Setten a & Gunnar Austrheim b a Department of Geography, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, NO-7491, Trondheim, Norway b Museum of Natural History and Archaeology, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, NO-7491, Trondheim, Norway Version of record first published: 30 Nov 2012.

Naming and Claiming Discourse

This is a paper about concepts, classification and the ordering of knowledge. Conceptualising the world consists of labelling knowledge by another name — we employ suitable concepts using our worldly experiences and knowledges. Withers (1996: 275) claims that “classification is intrinsic to knowledge”, hence, “we label knowledge as an inevitable consequence of ordering the world”. the relationship between concepts and categories and the world is thus dialectical — concepts and categories “are contexts and subjects of geographical experiences” (Relph 1985: 21). Therefore, there is a need to always “be sensitive to the reciprocal relationships between geographical ‘texts’ and the epistemological contexts of their production and use” (Withers 1996: 275). Consequently, the dialectics of language (i.e. its concepts and classifications) and their relationship to the world provide meaning and direction to the world. Even more importantly, dialectics of language annex the world.

Modernity, Heritage and Landscape: The Housing Estate as Heritage

Abstract Housing estates are rarely considered as specific landscapes with particular histories, social and physical fabrics, let alone considered of relevance to heritage debates. Both popularly and among experts, housing estates are often taken to be the symbols and materialisation of modernity’s failed planning and architecture, and consequently socially alienating and homogenising environments. In this article, we present findings from a qualitative study among residents in a housing estate in Trondheim, Norway. It is argued that the residents’ processual perspective on landscape, heritage and home produces an understanding of the housing estate, which rests on what the housing estate offers, rather than what it lacks. A processual perspective hence allows for a more critical understanding, socially and morphologically, not only of estate living “on the ground”, but of hegemonic discourses of contested relations between heritage, landscape and modernity.

Vik, Marte Lange. 2015. Landskapsdemokrati som metafor og materialitet: Eksempler på landskapspraksiser i møte med den europeiske landskapskonvensjonen

mated by different actors. The article provides some novel insights into some of the nuances employed in the production of TBPAs, and the ways in which they may be produced almost more as rhetorical devices to gain access to power and resources for various actors than for purposes of conservation or peacemaking. Barquet includes a strong discussion of relevant theory and some clearly articulated research questions. One theoretical idea missing from this article is Ferguson’s concept of ‘antipolitics’ – the political act of doing away with politics – which might have been used as a lens for understanding the seemingly contradictory practices of actors who claim to be doing one thing while doing quite another. In addition, the discussion of the treatment of scale by geography leaves out some interesting recent ideas in the discipline – particularly scale bending, scale jumping and ‘scalecraft’. Karina Barquet’s thesis is strongly interdisciplinary and ambitious. Perhaps inevitably given this scale of ambition, it lacks detail and theoretical depth in some of its constituent parts, and there is a lack of middle ground to connect the details of the grounded case study to the regional and global analyses. However, these limitations do not invalidate the important finding of the thesis that the environmental peacemaking hypothesis is at best limited and at worst flawed. It opens up numerous future research avenues and is a commendable piece of work.

Barquet, Karina. 2015. Transboundary Conservation and Conflict

The thesis addresses the broad question of how transboundary protected areas (TBPAs) affect relations of peace or conflict between neighbouring countries. In doing so, Barquet investigates the environmental peacemaking hypothesis, which holds that cooperation over environmental issues between nation states reduces the likelihood of armed conflict between them. This overarching topic is unpacked through a series of research articles, two of which are sole-authored and two co-authored: