Contenu du sommaire : De l'agricole au paysage

The Rural Landscape : The Color and Flavor of Agriculture : But What Is Left of Agriculture ? This analysis of iconographs of the landscape sheds light on how signs of fanning activities are vanishing in painting, lithographs and illustrations in general. This vanishing tangibly signals that the social elite has appropriated the countryside and is composing a landscape in conformity with its aesthetic aspirations. By interpreting surveys conducted in various areas, we can see the landscape's place in relation to the countryside in residents' perceptions ; and we can also assess the impact of "landscape models" on their mental representations.

What Remains from 3000 Years of Landscape Creation ? Research on rural landscapes is based on the idea that the latter have their origins in the Middle Ages. Archeological prospecting and excavations, and even more the archeology of landscape forms, provides evidence that the period from the Neolithic till the end of the Roman Empire accounts for much of the form of existing landscapes. Since ancient times, the land has been registered : these overlapping cadasters have definitively helped shape landscapes. The Feudal Ages "dressed" the landscape in new ways (open fields and groves), and added its own creations, but did not alter the land's fundamental structures.

Dry Hedges, Quickset Hedges and Artificial Brambles Types of bocages (groves) are usually described in terms of land divisions and hedge networks. Much less attention is paid to the makeup of the hedges and even less to their structure. The characteristics of various bocages have been strongly marked by changes in the techniques for setting, using and keeping up hedges made up of thickets of interplanted bushes and trees. These practices, whether maintained, adapted or abandoned, reflect the functions attributed to hedges, their place within what were — to speak anachronically — agroforestry systems. Hedge's characteristics can be used to examine whether those who own or work the land adhere to traditional ideas or, on the contrary, whether they have broken with former practices. As a means of expression, hedges reveal the social value of agrarian landscapes.

The Saint-Rivoal Valley : A Human Landscape In the Arrée Mountains (Britanny, France), the bocage has been conserved untouched. After clearing and then tilling the land, the people who settled in this area conserved a landscape that provides evidence of the material and social conditions with which they had to deal. Deeds, liege and land registries can be used to stratigraphically interpret and analyze the constitution of this landscape and to fix certain points in the gradual division of the land, sometimes only after the 17th century. Setting up, around the "ecological museum" in the Arrée Mountains (Regional Park of Armorica), a center for interpreting the landscape should make it possible to conduct experiments for dynamically conserving this heritage.

Swiss Mountains : Inventing and Using a Representation of the Landscape (18th-20th Century) This history of the process that crosses "spaciality" and "discursivity" at the point of identifying a type of landscape and its inhabitants (herein the Alps and Switzerland) shows how a set of places differentiated by use has served to gradually construct a landscape, which is to be interpreted in aesthetic and anthropological terms as of the 18th century, before it became mainly economic. In the case of Switzerland however, the "aestheticization" of the countryside into landscapes has been closely associated with building the nation during the 19th century, whence the necessity of an ideological sort of interpretation. Such is the problem of the chosen sites that landscapes represent as places of memory. Their production contrasts with another process, namely the diffusion of a Swiss ideal type of landscape and the misappropriation of a landscape, which gradually lost its symbolic contents throughout the 19th century.

Woods versus Underwood : Different Ways of Understanding the Ardennes Forest Landscape Is the forest a landscape ? An ethnographic survey of various categories of users (forest wardens, hunters, gatherers, holders of forest estovers, bird-catchers and women) was carried out in the wooded Ardennes mountains. It has shed light how people react to species of trees according to their knowledge, experiences, feelings and imaginary representations, which enter into the constitution of landscapes.

Landscape and Otherness : A Quest for "Landscape Cultures", a Methodological Reflexion For the tourist or hiker just passing through, there is a landscape. But is the countryside a landscape for farmers who live there and live on the land ? Sociologists, ethnologists and geographers hold differing opinions about this. Examining how they respond to this question reveals the complexity of their relation to this subject of research. This complexity is expressed especially during field work, when the countryside in the field does not let the "scientist" indifferent. Whether the researcher is conscious or not of it, his observation of farmers' relationship to space interacts with his own "landscape culture". This article sheds light on what remains implicit in researchers' responses to the fore- mentioned question. The term "landscape" can then be defined unequivocally throughout a single text — thus avoiding the quid pro quos that too often occur in studies of the landscape as a social perception and representation.

The Man Who Watched the Man Watching the Sea This commentary on the painting View from Venus Point, Looking Eastwards by William Hodges (1744-1797), the Cook expedition's official painter, draws attention to the attitude of the figure contemplating the landscape — an attitude apparently similar to that of many contemporary rural Tahitians.