Globalism and the Enclosure of the Landscape Commons
‘Enclosure,’ it will be argued, severs people from the landscape of not just the material commons, but the ‘cultural commons,’ thereby breaking the living bonds of custom that motivate sustainable use. Globalism, it will be further argued, is the contempo
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Globalism and the Enclosure of the Landscape Commons Kenneth R. Olwig
3.1 Introduction ‘Enclosure,’ it will be argued, severs people from the landscape of not just the material commons, but the ‘cultural commons,’ thereby breaking the living bonds of custom that motivate sustainable use. Globalism, it will be further argued, is the contemporary manifestation of the enclosure movement, and thereby a threat to both the material and the cultural commons. Enclosure leaves behind, however, a residue of the cultural commons, as picturesque tradition, that easily dissolves into death by nostalgia. But before delving into enclosure, globalism and picturesque tradition, the meaning of the ‘cultural commons’ in relation to the material commons will be explored. ‘The commons,’ in this analysis, is primarily an abstracted version of the historical commons as found notably in England (Rodgers et al. 2011), but also in other European countries more generally. The commons, as understood here, is the material landscape of common lands shared by a community of commoners with customary use rights in that land. Such a commons becomes a ‘cultural commons’ when the commons provides a foundation for culture in the dictionary sense of ‘the customs, arts, social institutions, and achievements of a particular nation, people, or other social group’ (NOAD 2005 custom). As a cultural commons the commons ceases to be simply a material landscape, and gains symbolic meaning by becoming the referent for a metaphor, growing out of daily life, through which the material commons is transferred into the realm of ideas, becoming ‘a thing regarded as representative or symbolic of something else, especially something abstract’ (NOAD 2005 metaphor). The commons thereby becomes something one can think with (as a symbol and idea), as well as K. R. Olwig (&) Department of Landscape Architecture, Planning and Heritage, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Box 58, Sundsvägen 4–6 23053 Alnarp, Sweden e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]
I. D. Rotherham (ed.), Cultural Severance and the Environment, Environmental History 2, DOI: 10.1007/978-94-007-6159-9_3, Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013
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about (as a material phenomenon). Thinking with the idea of the commons allows its extrapolation to include a broader idea of the commons that is more widely applicable to contemporary social and environmental issues.
3.2 The Commons Landscape As common land, the commons is part of the physical landscape, but as metaphor and symbol it carries broader meaning of landscape in the sense of being both material and an expression of culture, as in landscape art. The land in landscape becomes landscape through the addition of the suffix -scape, which is a spelling variant of the suffix -ship, meaning quality, character, or condition, as found in words like citizenship, friendship or fellowship (Olwig 2002, pp. 18–19). Thus, when an individual becomes part of a community of fellows this person becomes a fellow, and b
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