Professor Anssi Paasi: Finnish Landscape as Social Practice: Mapping Identity and Scale

Professor Anssi Paasi delivered a lecture on 1 May 2008 on the topic of 'Finnish Landscape as Social Practice'

Event details

Lecture title: Finnish landscape as social practice: mapping identity and scale

Date: 1 May 2008, 5.15pm

Venue: The Old Library, Institute of Geography, Drummond Stree, Edinburgh

Lecture abstract

I will shape a framework in this paper to facilitate an understanding of the relations between landscape as a visual and territorial category in the Finnish context and, further, to map the roles of landscape understood as a set of social practices and discourses.

I will begin from the two meanings of the Finnish idea of landscape. Whereas in most languages the word landscape includes two dimensions, that is an idea of a field of vision or perceived environment and an idea of an areal unit with a territorial or bounded extension, in Finnish these meanings are more complicated so that the word ’maisema’ points nowadays typically to the visual dimension and the word ’maakunta’ to the areal, vernacular and administrative dimension of landscape. A specific Finnish combination of these dimensions is the word maisemamaakunta (literally ‘landscape province’) which typically refers to the products of scientists by which they aim at the spatial classification of the visual elements of nature and culture. It has been typical to connect the idea of a specific regional identity both with these products of scientists as well as with the vernacular maakunta areas. This implicates that the ideas of distinction and identity are closely linked with both dimensions. Landscape implies therefore a sort of dialectic between closure and opening or inclusion and exclusion, i.e. certain natural, cultural and symbolic entities are understood to come together in a ‘landscape’, and these make it to differ from some other landscapes. The practice of distinction and classification is therefore implied in this category, both in ordinary daily experience and academic studies.

The idea of landscape will therefore be contextualized here in relation to some major social and cultural practices, particularly administration and government, the action of geographers in the production of landscape provinces and national landscape ideals, and the role of media in the production and reproduction of these ideas. These social practices and discourses produce and reproduce specific ’readings’ of landscapes and turn them into sets of (spatial) representations and meanings, whether visual (cartography, paintings, photography, film), verbal (written texts) or audial (music).

All these practices and discourses are characterized by power relations, as well as representations are manifestations of power. They are produced in the context of social and spatial division of labor and some actors are always more powerful in the production of representations than others.

Further, one object of crucial interest in the presentation is the vernacular, daily life in the landscape and the collective representations of media that literally wrap people inside of the media discourses. In all of these practices discourses either visual, regional, symbolic - or all - dimensions of maisema, landscape, are crucial.