• Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage
• Publicationsclose
• Research dataclose
• Other research productsclose
• Rural Landscapes: Society Environment History close
• Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage close

This paper addresses how co-producing knowledge can assist local farmers in reshaping their territories into sustainable farming systems. We describe the emergence and consolidation of an agroforestry system in an Eastern Amazon forest frontier, unpacking the co-production of a new farming system over recent decades. Instead of assuming pre-defined categories (e.g., traditional/technical, local/external), the analysis focuses on interactions among knowledge holders and how multiple knowledge sources are intercalated. The analysis is based on long-term ethnographic research, comprising of over 70 interviews, visits to 40 farm fields, and participation in several local meetings and four annual seminars. The agroforestry system – locally called SAFTA – has emerged from a farming crisis experienced by mid-scale farmers of Japanese descent. Grounded in traditional Amazonian farming practices, SAFTA has been enriched by scientific and organizational knowledge from various sources to become a local solution that reconciles economic, social and environmental demands. Built on a few basic principles, this new farm system enables flexibility in crop field designs according to each farmer’s preferences and available resources. SAFTA knowledge has spilled over to other farmer groups and has helped develop an innovative agroforestry system for oil-palm cultivation. The SAFTA model has been consolidated, legitimized by a range of national and international actors, and gradually institutionalized in policy and commercial circles. This case sheds light on the potential of knowledge co-production to transform complex rural landscapes featuring cultural diversity, asymmetrical relationships and history of land-use change. Analysis of social interactions and knowledge integration mechanisms give insight into how co-production under local cultural diversity and asymmetrical relations may yield mutual benefits among local farmer groups.

In Eastern Africa contrasting ecological zones within relatively short distances encourage economic specialisations which are reliant upon one another. Connections between different economic groups are facilitated by a variety of institutionalised networks that encourage the movement of both goods and people across boundaries. The role of livestock as essential capital ensures a strong impetus to increase agricultural production for exchange while, at the same time, the need to acquire livestock through ties to the pastoral community ensures that certain agriculturalists are confined to relatively limited areas at the margins of pastoral zones. In contrast to traditional models of agricultural development, the shift to intensive techniques may not be a radical departure from earlier practices, but rather much less labour intensive and gradually developed, aimed at expanding and improving natural zones of high productivity. This situation may have been exasperated by climatic fluctuations while lineage systems of social organisation encourage the localised marginalisation of politically unified descent groups and the development and expansion of large-scale agricultural works.

This paper uses Post Office (PO) petitions to uncover the complex spatial relationships that developed through the unique social space of the PO. These petitions were signed by the rural people of Middlesex County, Ontario, and submitted to the Postmaster General in order to request changes in the workings of their postal services. When used in a historical GIS they allow us to recreate and reconstitute postal communities in late-19th-century rural Middlesex. By observing the spatial relationships that surrounded the collective requests for changes in postal services, we show how the space of the post office reinforced and helped form rural community and neighbourhood networks. The participation of the post offices users who signed and conducted the petitions is developed at each level of the paper, showing that rural Ontarians were deeply involved in interpreting and altering their own community and neighbourhood landscapes.

Farm restructuring is a continuous on-going process supported by national agricultural policy in Sweden; while striving for more efficient farms in terms of labor and yields, farms enlarge their holdings of arable land and animals. The environmental consequences of more intensive land uses have in turn stimulated environmental policies to deal with negative environmental consequences. In this paper we argue that an underlying problem with both of these policy approaches is that they primarily emphasize specific components of farms and fail to see the farm as an interconnected system. In this paper we therefore focus on the farm as a ‘system’ and on the systemic role of farming in the broader landscape. We develop a theoretical framework of farming logics which help to better understand agricultural production systems. Drawing on 34 semi-structured interviews with farmers, we divide the farms into three farming logic categories: I) ‘production vanguards’; II) ‘landscape stewards’; and III) ‘environmental vanguards’. We use these categories to analyze the role of key aspects such as size, intensity of production, specialisation, how farmer preferences and knowledge influence land use systems, and interactions of these with the local landscape. The findings show how farms that on the one hand share some basic characteristics can display quite different farming logics and vice versa. We argue that these farming logics offer a potentially positive diversity in farming approaches, with complementary and mutually dependent roles in Sweden’s overall food system.

This review concerns when and why infield meadows developed, i.e. enclosed land, constructed and managed for production of livestock fodder. Meadows have been associated with ‘stalling’ of livestock, in turn associated with, for example, protection from adverse weather conditions, increasing efficiency of milk and manure production, or changing human-animal relationships. The suggested timing for origin of meadows ranges from the Neolithic to the Iron Age. Meadows are embedded in a complex of interactions, including aspects of culture, material conditions and the environment, and these were treated as different components, unfolding over time: harvesting fodder, stalling livestock, milk production, use of manure, crops and permanent fields, fencing systems, tools, and settlements and land ownership. The interpretation is based on Hodder’s entanglement theory. It is concluded that these component’s appearance is distributed over a very long time, from the Neolithic to the first centuries AD, when meadows, viewed as a ‘complete’ system, appeared. People most likely for long knew the advantages of feeding livestock, and the means to achieve this: collecting additional fodder, keep livestock in close quarters, eventually indoors, and collect and distribute manure on crop fields, but the introduction of iron tools during the centuries around AD was the key to develop meadows. Stalling livestock and construction of infield meadows may have been partly decoupled. Although climate change was not a driver behind development of meadows, the agricultural system with meadows and livestock stalling was adaptive during later periods of climate deterioration, and for colonization of northern forests in Sweden.

The story of Lough Derg in Ireland’s County Donegal is arranged around clusters of sectarian narratives in juxtaposition, synthesis and conflict. The Sanctuary of Saint Patrick sits on Station Island, a small rocky islet set within the waters of the lake. The site became well known in the early Middle Ages as the place of Saint Patrick’s delving of a cave that led to purgatory, allowing the sinner to experience a glimpse of the torments of hell while still in this life. The island then attracted pilgrims from all over Europe and became embedded into the Catholic literary and spiritual imagination. After the Protestant Ascendency and the Plantation of Ulster began in the seventeenth century, the place became a site of tension and narrative clashes between differing visions of rural place, each with its own spectrum of affect, emotions and ideals.This essay unpacks the resonances of Lough Derg as a site of sectarian narrative by 1) situating the discussion within a distinctly rural context; 2) adding the unique properties of spiritual waterscape to the discussion; and 3) discussing the Irish sectarian narratives and identities arising from the lake and its purgatorial isle. It focuses on a case study of Protestant and establishment accounts of the lake during the nineteenth century, depicting them as internally diverse as well as part of a larger ecology of sectarian contestations. It explores waterscape and its role in influencing community responses to and shaping of place, the manner in which sectarian responses to space are internally diverse, and the manner in which Catholic and Protestant narratives of place have intertwined to shape the lake in the twenty-first century.

Mires form a large part of the boreal Swedish landscape and are important for biodiversity and natural ecosystem processes. Historically, mires also played a key role for the expansion of agricultural practices, and later to create new forest land, but knowledge is limited on how the land use has affected the current ecosystem services and functions of mires. In this case study from northern Sweden, we have combined historical maps with remote-sensing data to analyze the use of mires over time. Here, 22% of the mire area has been used for hay harvesting, an activity that peaked in the late 1800s. Later, about 3% was reclaimed for intensive agriculture. Drainage to enhance wood production followed in the 1940s, and about 40% of the original mire area is currently forested. The most productive mires have been relatively more affected by human measures. We suggest that this past land use has legacy effects on several ecosystem services. Haymaking likely had positive effects on biodiversity, but may have negatively influenced carbon sequestration. Reclamation led to habitat loss and likely less carbon sequestration. Drainage to promote forest growth generally lowered the ground water level, which in turn enhanced peat decomposition and subsequently released CO2. However, if tree growth outpaces peat decomposition, drainage could increase carbon sequestration. The overall carbon balance is hence influenced by past management regimes, which implies that past human use must be taken into account when considering the role of mires in providing ecosystem services.

The future of inclusive forestry in Nepal depends on forestry professionals who can recognise patriarchal roots of gender injustice as they operate in the ideologies and apparatus of forest governance, and who can resist those injustices through their work. This paper uses the notion of knowledge practices to explore the recognition of injustice amongst Nepal’s community forestry professionals, and the relationship between recognition and resistance, highlighting the inherently political nature of all knowledge practices. By drawing on over fifty interviews and ethnographic insights, this paper goes beyond the typically black-boxed and essentialised ‘forestry professional’ and unsettles the false dichotomy between ‘the professional’ and ‘the personal’. Nepal’s community forestry professionals represent a plurality of knowledges, emerging from unique positionalities and personal experiences; however, the demand for quantifiable, short-term project outputs (attributed to funders and donors) shuts down their opportunities to meaningfully practice their knowledges. This paper articulates how, in order to resist injustices within both forest user communities and forestry institutions, professionals are demanding a greater focus on learning—from the lived realities of forest users, from each other as practitioners, from qualitative engagements with complexity and processes of change, from so-called mistakes, and ultimately from greater reflexivity. Through such learning and reflection comes the opportunity to recognise and resist injustices and create socially just community forestry. This paper urges scholars to go beyond black-boxing those in the forestry sector, and instead to offer solidarity and support in promoting knowledge practices that recognise and resist injustices and thus help build socially just forest futures.

After many centuries, much of Europe is now largely deforested. Today, plans for reforestation are ongoing. These plans have the potential to significantly impact the landscape. As a contribution to the current debate on large-scale reforestation in the Netherlands, we have tried to conduct a quick and overall scan to determine whether the spatial distribution of woodland-related place names can have an evidential value for locating surviving woodland in the high and late Middle Ages (AD 1000–1500). To do so, we have made extensive use of digital data sets and existing inventories (place names, field names, historical maps, charcoal production sites, ancient woodland, ancient woodland indicator plants). Two different indicative distribution maps (period maps) were produced and tested: period map 1 (AD 750–1350), based on woodland-related place names, and period map 2 (AD 1250–1650), based on historical woodland references. Results suggest that although the spatial reconstructions produced are biased due to multiple factors, pre-1500 place names in combination with historical woodland references and other woodland proxies can indeed be used to quickly and roughly reconstruct the distribution of woodland and even of specific historical woodland types. A precondition is the availability of existing inventories and digital data sets.

Radical land-use changes are under way in Bolivia’s Beni Department. As a prelude to changes, tales of idle land and premodern peoples have emerged, resembling the Pristine Myth that accompanied the ‘discovery’ of the Americas. In this article, I revisit the history of this area to show that its landscape and people have been re-narrated over time in ways that resonate with political economic concerns. I describe three dominant historical landscapes of Moxos, and the transformations that took place in between them, and show how material and conceptual landscape changes fed each other and obscured previous systems. In reinforcing loops they thus allowed for the birth or rebirth of myths of empty landscapes and traditional peoples, myths then used to naturalise transformations. I argue that new variants of the myths once again will erase indigenous peoples and their management practices from the landscape, and I stress the importance of investigating history with all its complexity when negotiating development. We must pay particular attention to the dangers of myth; essentialised characterisations of indigenous peoples and their interests risk reducing the available space for them to manoeuvre politically – but also for us to understand the nuanced relationships between history, landscapes, its peoples and the wider world. Radical land-use changes are under way in Bolivia’s Beni Department. As a prelude to changes, tales of idle land and premodern peoples have emerged, resembling the Pristine Myth that accompanied the ‘discovery’ of the Americas. In this article, I revisit the history of this area to show that its landscape and people have been re-narrated over time in ways that resonate with political economic concerns. I describe three dominant historical landscapes of Moxos, and the transformations that took place in between them, and show how material and conceptual landscape changes fed each other and obscured previous systems. In reinforcing loops they thus allowed for the birth or rebirth of myths of empty landscapes and traditional peoples, myths then used to naturalise transformations. I argue that new variants of the myths once again will erase indigenous peoples and their management practices from the landscape, and I stress the importance of investigating history with all its complexity when negotiating development. We must pay particular attention to the dangers of myth; essentialised characterisations of indigenous peoples and their interests risk reducing the available space for them to manoeuvre politically – but also for us to understand the nuanced relationships between history, landscapes, its peoples and the wider world.