cultural geographies

This paper considers the work of the ecologist Marietta Pallis (1882-1963), retracing the fieldwork associated with her 1916 paper on ‘The structure and history of Plav’, the floating fen of the Danube delta. Attending to links between field and home, politics and ecology, the paper explores how field cultures are implicated in the mutual and imaginative constitution of nature and society. The paper examines the scientific culture within which Pallis operated, and the wider cultures of travel and identity within which her scientific fieldwork took place. Fieldwork was facilitated and shaped by a range of encounters with officials and informants whose presence is variously engaged with and erased in Pallis’s published account. We emphasize Pallis’s understanding of Plav as a ‘benign’ form of ecology, highlighting the political complexity of that term, and of the vitalism espoused by Pallis as part of her conservative eco-philosophical imagination.

This paper narrates a collaborative effort to re-place a local culture of ‘the field’. By oscillating between two geography field courses in Glenmore, Scotland - one in 1951, the other in 2002 - it traces a route through different residues of fieldwork: material objects (photographs, log-books, diaries, equipment), mnemonic devices (biography, oral narrative, re-enactment, technology) and physical phenomena (footpaths, landscape features, field sites). Framed as an ongoing and mobile event, overlapping versions of the field course(s) are then recounted through embodied methodological strategies, or ‘taskscapes’. These close observations of the processes of field practice focus on walking, sensing, talking and archiving. They resist easy interpretation, and do not always register a resolved narrative. What is more pertinent, I argue, is to understand them as an unfinished and active archive that speaks of the localized, everyday conditions in which geography’s history is made.

This paper traces a historical geography of antiquarianism in the English county of Cornwall, paying particular attention to the period from 1750 to 1900 and to research conducted into the region’s ancient stone monuments. The paper argues that from the mid-eighteenth century onwards Cornish antiquarianism was largely a field-based activity. After a short discussion of the work of notable eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century antiquarians the paper focuses on the labours of those in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Differences between the two periods are discussed - these, it is argued, centred around different valuations of place and method - before the anatomy of Victorian antiquarianism’s field culture is mapped out. The paper concludes with a discussion of the place of Cornish antiquarianism in wider networks of intellectual exchange.

This paper examines the role of fieldwork in the activities of natural history societies in Victorian Scotland. Fieldwork, it is argued, was an important constituent in the making of local natural knowledge. Being and doing ‘in the field’ was a means to establish through fieldwork given scientific fields and, in turn, to promote civic identity through scientific conduct.

In 1960 the Royal Geographical Society published The making of the Broads: a reconsideration of their origin in the light of new evidence. This monograph, the work of an interdisciplinary team, argued that the shallow lakes of the Norfolk Broads in eastern England had their origins in the medieval peat-digging industry. This paper shows how the origins work can be understood in terms of debates and tensions concerning the cultural authority of science over landscape and the nature of local knowledge, and addresses the implications for the currency of the local within studies of scientific knowledge. Drawing on archival work and oral history, the paper shows how local acceptance or rejection of the theory turned on assertions of scientific or non-scientific cultural authority. First publication of the theory in 1953 triggered angry exchanges in the local press over the next decade; the paper reconstructs these debates in terms of their claims to local knowledge, and the constitution of authority over the field. Science and local knowledge are opposed categories for some but mutually constituted for others, such that science itself becomes a matter of local pride. The paper concludes by considering the relationship between the origins research and debates over the past, present and future of the region.