Mats Widgren

Can Landscapes be Read

This paper takes as its starting point a question which can be formulated like this: Through reflection and deconstruction, is it at all possible at this time to maintain the idea that landscapes can be read and analysed in a scientific manner?1 It is appropriate to ask this question in the context of the Permanent European Conference for the Study of the Rural Landscape (PECSRL). Throughout the history of this conference, the idea that landscapes can be explained in a way that stands over and above local, national and ethnic understandings has formed an important line of thought. What was sometimes in the 1960s and 1970s referred to as the “modern” school of cultural landscape research was thus based on the idea of cultural landscape studies as an international, comparative science. Here, I deliberately use the word science, not simply the Swedish vetenskap or the German Wissenschaft — but science as in natural science (cf. Schaefer 1953: 236).

LABOUR AND LANDSCAPES: THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF LANDESQUE CAPITAL IN NINETEENTH CENTURY TANGANYIKA

Abstract. In a long‐term and global perspective irrigated and terraced landscapes, landesque capital, have often been assumed to be closely associated with hierarchical political systems. However, research is accumulating that shows how kinship‐based societies (including small chiefdoms) have also been responsible for constructing landesque capital without population pressure. We examine the political economy of landesque capital through the intersections of decentralized politics and regional economies. A crucial question guiding our research is why some kinship‐based societies chose to invest their labour in landesque capital while others did not. Our analysis is based on a detailed examination of four relatively densely populated communities in late pre‐colonial and early colonial Tanzania. By analysing labour processes as contingent and separate from political types of generalized economic systems over time we can identify the causal factors that direct labour and thus landscape formation as a process. The general conclusion of our investigation is that landesque investments occurred in cases where agriculture was the main source of long‐term wealth flow irrespective of whether or not hierarchical political systems were present. However, while this factor may be a necessary condition it is not a sufficient cause. In the cases we examined, the configurations of world‐systems connections and local social and economic circumstances combined to either produce investments in landesque capital or to pursue short‐term strategies of extraction.

Reading property in the landscape

An important focus of research in landscape geography has been the documentation, classification and analysis of field patterns. This research has provided examples of how different societies and different property regimes leave their own very specific imprints on the landscape, many of which can still be seen. If this kind of landscape geography is to play a role today, it must be able to show that it can transgress both classification and simple evolutionary schemes and provide original contributions to the study of societies, property regimes and power. This article approaches this problem at two levels. I first discuss the historical role of boundaries versus the role of other ways of solving questions of land rights. Second, I take one particular field type – broad strip parcels (German: Breitstreifenfluren) – as a starting point for discussing the relation between societies, property regimes and field geometry. A field system in Marakwet in Kenya, which was undergoing change in the 1990s, will serve as the main empirical example. Property rights seem to be most clearly expressed on the ground during phases of transition and contested rights.

Green economy, Scandinavian investments and agricultural modernization in Tanzania

‘Green economy’ is a broad concept open to different interpretations, definitions and practices ranging from the greening of current neoliberal economies to radical transformations of these economies. In Africa, one emerging and powerful idea in the implementation of the green economy seems to be to use a green agenda to further strengthen development as modernization through capital-intensive land investments. This has again reinvigorated old debates about large-scale versus smallholder agriculture. Influential actors justify large-scale ‘green’ investments by the urgency for economic development as well as to offset carbon emissions and other environmental impacts. In this contribution, we discuss the case of the Southern Agricultural Growth Corridor of Tanzania (SAGCOT) to give examples of how the green economy may materialize in Africa. SAGCOT is presented by the Tanzanian government as well as investors and donors as a leading African example of an ‘investment blueprint’ and as a laboratory to test green growth combining profitable farming with the safeguard of ecosystem services. In particular, we discuss three Scandinavian investments within SAGCOT, their social implications and their discursive representations through the public debates that these investments have generated in Scandinavia.

Besieged Palaeonegritics or Innovative Farmers Historical Political Ecology ofIntensive and Terraced Agriculture in West Africa and Sudan

This article provides an overview of the historical occurrences of terracing, manuring and other features of intensive agriculture in West Africa and Sudan. The aim is to shed more general light on the political, economic and social contexts of precolonial intensive farming in sub-Saharan Africa. The article uses the vantage point of recent debates on driving forces behind terracing and irrigation in East Africa. It argues that despite being regularly cited as fact in the literature on terraced agriculture on West Africa, no clear historical evidence is available to show that slave raiding was indeed the determining factor behind the first settlement of these hills and the terracing. The farming systems of the late precolonial period must definitely be seen as an outcome of the political economy of the slave trade period. But the idea that the intensification is the outcome of the retreat of decentralised societies into hills and mountains is challenged by the fact that intensification also occurred on the plains and in areas dominated by stratified social organisation and predatory states. It seems as if the labour mobilisation required for intensive agriculture was achieved at both ends of this social continuum. Conflicts and defensive strategies, as well as cooperation in the forms of intermarriage, trade, etc, formed part of a long-term process of different groups relating to one another, intensifying their agriculture and developing a geographical division of labour.

A simulation model of farming systems and land use in Sweden during the early Iron Age, c. 500 b.c. – a.d. 550

In investigating an area with deserted fields and boundaries in the province of Ostergotland, Eastern Middle Sweden, pollen analysis has been used as a tool in describing the ecological base of different phases in the development of the cultural landscape. The characteristics of the early Iron Age expansion have thus been proven to be the simultaneous expansion of cattle breeding and arable farming. This indicates an integrated system, with intensely tilled fields, knowledge of manuring and, therefore, need of a vast fence system to gather the cattle and make efficient use of the manure. Assuming a social organization of families with a size of eight to ten individuals, the amount of land required to feed each unit has been calculated. Three hectares of arable land, 30 ha of meadow land and 30 ha of pasture is suggested as a possible combination to support a family. Using a desk computer, units with these proportions of land have been randomly located in an area of 2 × 2 km2 taking soil differences into account. Agrarian units can be located several times at random and the resulting land-use patterns studied. The simulated results often very well describe the actual land-use pattern during the early Iron Age as indicated by deserted fields, boundaries and dwelling sites.

Climate and causation in the Swedish Iron Age: learning from the present to understand the past

The paper reassesses the role of climate as a factor shaping changes in settlement and landscape in the Swedish Iron Age (500 BC–AD 1050). Two reasons motivate this re-evaluation. First, high-resolution data based on climate proxies from the natural sciences are now increasingly available. Second, the climate-related social sciences have yielded conceptual and theoretical developments regarding vulnerability and adaptability in the present and recent past, creating new ways to analyse the effects of climatic vs. societal factors on societies in the more distant past. Recent research in this field is evaluated and the explicitly climate deterministic standpoint of many recent natural science texts is criticized. Learning from recent approaches to climate change in the social sciences is crucial for understanding society–climate relationships in the past. The paper concludes that we are not yet in a position to fully evaluate the role of the new evidence of abrupt climate change in 850 BC, at the beginning of the Iron Age. Regarding the crisis in the mid-first millennium AD, however, new climate data indicate that a dust veil in AD 536–537 might have aggravated the economic and societal crisis known from previous research.

Strip fields in an Iron-Age context : A case study from Västergötland, Sweden

Abstract As part of a project on the origin of subdivided fields in Western Sweden some surprisingly old planned fields have been investigated in the southern parts of the province of Vastergotland. A type of large fossilised field consisting of long strips bounded by banks of stone and earth was found while searching for partially deserted medieval sub-divided fields. The breadth of the strips varies from approximately 7 to 40 metres. To judge from the remaining evidence, the fields often covered areas of over 50 hectares. The spatial relationship between the fields and other ancient monuments points to a date in the last centuries B.C. This dating has also been confirmed by radio-carbon datings from field boundaries, indicating a use in the period 500 B.C. to A.D. 200. The layout of the strips follows geometrical principles rather than the terrain and gives the impression of deliberate planning according to some yet unknown principle. Some of the localities consist of broad strips which have functioned ...

Precolonial agricultural terracing in Bokoni, South Africa : Typology and an exploratory excavation

Earlier work on the terraced settlements of the Bokoni area (16th to 19th century, Mpumalanga province, South Africa) focussed on the homesteads, their contents, layout and chronology. This paper s ...

Linking Nordic landscape geography and political ecology

Widgren, M. 2015. Linking Nordic landscape geography and political ecology. Norsk Geografisk Tidsskrift–Norwegian Journal of Geography Vol. 00, 00–00. ISSN 0029-1951 The article analyses and compares two schools of landscape research – post-war European landscape history and Nordic landscape geography – and compares them with political ecology. Each of them developed within a specific political, environmental, and intellectual context. European landscape history developed as curiosity-driven research, but in the shadow of previous ideological misuse of settlement history. Political ecology developed in the context of the Sahel crisis and provided a radical answer to Malthusian simplifications of the desertification and land degradation. In contrast to that, Nordic landscape geography grew as an intellectual critical reaction to a European situation in which post-productivist landscape policies were on the agenda. The article also speculates on challenges ahead and suggests that the epoch when we understand European landscapes mainly from a post-productivist standpoint may be over.