Preliminary Programme

Wed 30 March
    8.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 18.30

Thu 31 March
    8.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 18.30

Fri 1 April
    8.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 18.30

Sat 2 April
    8.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 18.30

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Wednesday 30 March 2016 8.30 - 10.30
H-1 RUR17 Regional Identities
Aula 5, Nivel 0
Network: Rural Chairs: Dulce Freire, Tim Soens
Organizers: - Discussant: Sándor Horváth
Francisco Arenas-Dolz : Reshaping L’Horta’s Landscape: Experiences in Education for Rural Development around the Farinós Mill
L’Horta de València region represent a magnificent example of human cooperation, but this area around the city of Valncia is now doomed. The reasons are endemic to modernity and require serious consideration.
Water is a scarce resource, essential for life. If you can take water for your own crops, basic economic ... (Show more)
L’Horta de València region represent a magnificent example of human cooperation, but this area around the city of Valncia is now doomed. The reasons are endemic to modernity and require serious consideration.
Water is a scarce resource, essential for life. If you can take water for your own crops, basic economic theory says you will take lots of it even if others downstream don’t get enough. The rain and the river can’t be privatized in simple ways. The state can police water-use, but it’s hard and rare to build states that are smart, responsive, virtuous, and just enough to accomplish tasks like efficient and fair water-management.
But, contrary to a simplistic economic model, farmers in Valencia, Spain, have been distributing very scarce water consistently since before 1238. Their tribunals and other processes were already in place during the Muslim period and may have predated the Islamic conquest. They continued more or less smoothly despite the Christian Reconquista, the unification of Spain, its economic decline, Civil War, and fascism.
But it is now disappearing. Former farmers are moving to high-rises in the city, and suburban sprawl is swallowing up agricultural land. One cannot blame people for “exiting.” Despite the radical shifts in Valencia’s political and religious regimes over a millennium, one thing remained constant: peasants couldn’t leave the land. Now they can leave, and they are leaving, and I don’t lament that.
But we can lament two outcomes. First, L’Horta de València have aesthetic, cultural, and environmental value that individual participants (as well as outsiders) prize. The individuals’ exit benefits them but destroys something that they love. They would all be better off if somehow L’Horta de València could be preserved. The agricultural landscape could perhaps have evolved into something new and better, an economy that offered higher-skilled and more profitable jobs to a few people still in touch with their traditions. Instead, it is just vanishing.
Second, L’Horta de València taught ethics, skills, habits, and techniques for solving collective-action problems. Even if we give up on small-scale agriculture in València, we still face inescapable problems at a bigger scale. Climate change is only the most dire example. If everyone exits the huertas and that model vanishes, how will we learn to address bigger Tragedies of the Commons?
Rural culture is an anthropic reality and a suitable framework to address cross-cutting issue. It constitutes a real laboratory for carrying out educational experiences that are present in the study of nature and the responsibility of human action in its imbalances.
By engaging university students with a service-learning methodology focused on the recovery and rehabilitation of the Farinós Mill area in L'Horta de València, we have studied different aspects related to rural culture and values. The results have been used to make educational proposals that promote commitment to sustainable territorial management. (Show less)

Javier Calatrava : The Role of Farming Systems in Rural Tourism: Evolution (1965-2015) and Perspectives of Agro-tourism in Mountainous Areas of South-eastern Spain
After some conceptual and terminological considerations on rural tourism and its types, emphasizing on agro-tourism, the paper deals with the different levels or degrees of linkage and synergy between agriculture and tourism that may occur in rural areas, defining different roles that local farming systems can play in tourism. These ... (Show more)
After some conceptual and terminological considerations on rural tourism and its types, emphasizing on agro-tourism, the paper deals with the different levels or degrees of linkage and synergy between agriculture and tourism that may occur in rural areas, defining different roles that local farming systems can play in tourism. These degrees of linkage between tourism and agriculture can range from mere aesthetic appreciation and enjoyment by tourists of the agricultural landscape and its components, the introduction of agricultural cultural elements or products as part of the tourist offer, to the experiential agro-tourism at the farmhouse. A review is made latter of the policies that have aimed to support the link between agriculture and rural tourism in Spain in the last half of century, from the pioneering program "Vacaciones en Casas de Labranza” (“Holidays in farmhouses"), initiated in 1967 to the various actions linking tourism and agriculture in the current programs of endogenous development, with LEADER approach, within the European R.D. policy.
As a study case, the development of rural tourism and the impacts of these policies in the mountainous region of the Alpujarras (southeastern Spain), is presented. In the area various forms of rural tourism have been heavily developed, to not always desirable limits, while the experiential and / or participatory agro-tourism has barely known a very limited development. Some conclusions, in which strategies to support the agro-tourism in the area studied are suggested, have finally been drawn .


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Claus K. Meyer : Between Serene Beauty and “Dens of Infamy:” the Plantation Landscape, the Argument over Slavery, and the Regional Identity of the Antebellum South
The landscape and built environment of Southern plantations have long provided the leitmotif of an apologetic view of American slavery, which still reverberates today in advertisement campaigns and the marketing of historic plantations. Historians of slavery, to be sure, effectively demolished the foundations of the plantation myth in the years ... (Show more)
The landscape and built environment of Southern plantations have long provided the leitmotif of an apologetic view of American slavery, which still reverberates today in advertisement campaigns and the marketing of historic plantations. Historians of slavery, to be sure, effectively demolished the foundations of the plantation myth in the years following World War II. But with few exceptions, it is only much more recently that the literature of antebellum slavery has begun systematically to subject plantation buildings and landscapes in their social, economic, cultural, and political aspects to critical scrutiny. This historiographic development received an initial impulse from historical geographers, came into its own with the rise of plantation archaeology, and received widespread attention with Michael Vlach’s pioneering exploration of the photographic record of plantation buildings preserved by the Historic American Buildings Survey (“Back of the Big House,” book 1993; exhibition at the Library of Congress, 1995).

The literature of antebellum slavery has so far paid little attention to the role that the landscape and built environment of Southern plantations played for the debate over slavery. Southern apologists of slavery portrayed the institution as the 'cornerstone' of civilization and regional identity – an image that presented itself to visitors of the South first of all through the medium of landscapes and buildings. As sober and critical an observer as Frederick Law Olmsted could be overwhelmed by the beauty of a well-kept plantation in the Georgia Low Country. By the same token, Olmsted combined the description of a dilapidated plantation house in Texas with an account of the despotic abuse of slaves. Ramshackle buildings, abandoned plantations, and eroded soils gave the lie to the claims of progress and civilization that formed a key component of the proslavery argument and thus of the construction.

Mainly relying on visual documents and printed sources, this paper therefore argues that the plantation landscape and its built environment were significant for the debate over slavery. The myth of the white-columned plantation house has come to play a key role in the plantation legend. But in the antebellum period, apologists of the slave South were much more on the defensive when it came to the physical setting of plantation slavery. Even as antebellum Southerners argued for the distinctiveness of their region, they did not develop characteristic styles of architecture or landscaping. Instead, in the architectural and agricultural practices they advocated, most concerned members of the Southern elite aspired to general models they shared with the North and with England, in particular. (Show less)

Krisztina Slachta : The Dissapeared Village. The Process and Reasons of the Depopulation of the Village ‘Gyurufu’ in the Hungarian Countryside in 1971
The dissapeared village. The Process and Reasons of the Depopulation of the Village ‘Gyurufu’ in the Hungarian Countryside in 1971

The whole population of Gyurufu, a village of Baranya situated in the Eastern Zselic moved off in December 1971. The incidence had a great effect on the public opinion of ... (Show more)
The dissapeared village. The Process and Reasons of the Depopulation of the Village ‘Gyurufu’ in the Hungarian Countryside in 1971

The whole population of Gyurufu, a village of Baranya situated in the Eastern Zselic moved off in December 1971. The incidence had a great effect on the public opinion of the country and among social scientists since this was the first village to lose its population as a result of the socialist settlement-developmental politics. In my paper I intend to analyse the process and the reasons of the depolulation of the village, of the fully migration of people, so the socio-geographical and demographic conditions of the village together with its changes in settlement structure and in the social system formed with the villages surrounding it.
The village Gyurufu lived in close connection with the surrounding villages: Csebény, Horváthertelend, Ibafa and Korpád. At the census of 1941 Gyurufu had a population of 253, who claimed themselves to be Hungarian, however the inhabitants of the surrounding villages claimed themselves to be of German nationality. The development of the villages after 1945 was influenced by nearly all historical and political events and decisions: the expulsion of the German minority, the forced formation of cooperatives, the regionalization, and then the settlement developmental conceptions of the communist regime. The unfavourable features were strengthened by the settlement-political, economic decrees issued from 1945, as a result of which the lives of the villages changed radically.
Parallel with the expulsions the poorer peasants living on local and surrounding villages started to move in, and Hungarians from Felvidék (Slovakia) were relocated in the former houses of the Germans. These two groups arrived from totally different social conditions and brought different farming cultures. People from Felvidék arrived with experiences gathered in the previous decades of agriculture producing for market, and had a more urban lifestyle. These significant moves happening in a few years affected the villages deeply; the previously formed social and economic relationships were reformed or abandoned.
In the following years it became clear what long-term problems were caused by such a radical change in the composition of the society of the village and of its neighbourhood. The community which had existed for several decades was damaged, economic relationships, experiences were abandoned, and the organically formed regulating system, which had determined the migration among villages, disappeared. As a result of expulsions and relocations the population of the region was nearly completely replaced.
In the following years the great migration continued, which was characteristically directed from smaller villages to larger ones and to towns. According to the population registers from 1949 to 1974 2.5 times of the original population turned up in this five villages, while the population of Ibafa, Csebény and Hertelend decreased fast; and the population of Gyurufu and Korpád decreased very quickly. This great fluctuation almost washed out the society of the villages, accelerated the processes even further, and went along with the gradual decline of the local society. (Show less)

Ira Spieker : Contact Zones. Constructing Identity in the Polish-Czech-German Border Region
Due to the politics of the German Nazi regime and in consequence of WW II large-scaled regions in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Germany passed through a drastic process of transformation. Borders were shifted, millions of people lost their homes and were obliged to resettle. This forced migration caused the emergence of ... (Show more)
Due to the politics of the German Nazi regime and in consequence of WW II large-scaled regions in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Germany passed through a drastic process of transformation. Borders were shifted, millions of people lost their homes and were obliged to resettle. This forced migration caused the emergence of an entirely new society – simultaneously, the three nations transformed to socialistic regimes. Especially, rural areas in borders regions experienced a major change: a significant transfer and/or a considerable increase of population. Therefore, these zones represent a kind of laboratory; developments and its consequences can be analysed within this restricted area.
The papers deals with the parameters of constructing ‘new’ identities and the needs of affiliation. It results from a research project (Institute of Saxon History and Cultural Anthropology, Dresden, and several Polish and Czech partners). The project centres special initiatives (with regard to culture, history and recreation) which form, interpret and transfer commemorative culture. Representations and functions of commemorative culture are specific issues as well as the negotiation of the past and the present. The data is based on field research (interviews and participation), records and the analysis of social media.
The main questions are: How did (and do) people cope with their own past and the accredited representation of history? Which consequences are still evident today, since the Czech Republic and Poland are EU-members? What kind of new impulses come from the (mostly young) residents who choose the border regions as their home today (f.i. artists or people who fancy an alternative lifestyle)? How do they appropriate space as well as ‘history’ to form a regional identity (‘lost’ vs. ‘regained’ territories)? (Show less)



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