Sentient ecologies: xenophobic imaginaries of landscapesBy Cotofana, Alexandra and HikmetKuran (Eds.), Berghahn: New York. 2023, 276 pages

Ordinarily in volumes of collected essays, editors attempt to make book titles, theoretical frameworks and contents coincide, at least loosely. But this is not exactly the case in Sentient Ecologies. It is true that the book does demonstrate how landscapes are assigned hostile socio-political values that express fear and loathing of outsiders, thus the subtitle, “xenophobic imaginaries of landscapes.” However, none of the chapters, the majority of which are written by anthropologists, have an overt or expressed concern for any recognizable notion of “ecology” and none of them demonstrate that the landscapes in question are autonomously or intrinsically “sentient.” Indeed, it is one of the book's editors himself who puts his finger on the main concept that seems to orient the volume—namely, that “landscapes are culture before they are nature; [they are] … constructs of the imagination projected onto wood and water and rock” (Simon Schama cited by Kuran, p. 122). The strong claim about “the sentience” of landscapes cleaves to the methodological mysticism that is having a moment in contemporary anthropological theory. But, as I say, after it is broached in Cotofana's Introduction, the authors basically ignore it the rest of the way. Instead, “landscapes” are just asked to carry a lighter theoretical load, which is to represent hostility and racism with which they are imbued by society. Here, the authors are very successful. One by one, they demonstrate how history suffuses particular landscapes with threatening outsiders. Let me briefly survey “their xenophobia.” The opening essays are set in South Africa, Quebec and Romania respectively. Scott Burnett presents a careful account of how Africaners, possessed by lingering uncertainty about the legitimacy of their relationship to the land as colonial and post-Apartheid foreigners, divided it up into racial categories, planted imported trees in Johannesburg and developed a pastoral vision of it as a hostile environment that had been brought to heal by their hard work. Philippe Blouin then turns to conflict between indigenous Cree people and nationalist French Canadians in Quebec who both claim sovereignty. Tracing the history of their relationship as mirrored in the landscape as one between wolves and beavers, the latter being industrious, while the former were wild and hostile. When the French nationalists sought to exclude Cree from a site where fish spawned and they used to pick wild berries as part of the construction of a dam, the Cree quipped that human beings should not play at being beavers. Cotofana's chapter also derives the “association of nature and nation” among Romanians from a long history in which they defended their territory for 500 hundred years, and points to how this history continues to inspire the contemporary hostility of the post-communist, far right to foreigners (p. 69). In the last essay in this group, Callum Pearce then discusses a landscape inhabited by angry, punitive spirit-beings in the Ladakh region of the Indian Himalayas where religious “ontologies” are not “radically distinct” (p. 101) from political processes and should not be essentialized and closed off from society. Here, Buddhists regard Muslims as enemies and outsiders, who do not worship the Ladakh spirit-landlords who reside in lakes and trees. The Ladakh Buddhist depiction of the landscape, in other words, “sides with power” against this marginalized people (p. 113). The second group of essays focuses on the relationship of national ideology to the landscape and is set in Germany, Spain, Japan and Chile. Hikmet Kuran, a co-editor of the book, argues that “imagined landscapes … function[ed] … as projective screens” (p. 123) in Germany where a mystical valuation of “natural” forests and the exclusion of non-native species, eventually led to “blood and soil” nationalism, racial superiority and the vilification of Jews whom the Nazis accused, among other things, of being “rootless” (p.138). Arvid van Dam then shifts the scene to the “unruly character” of the desert in southeast Spain (p.156), where the Franco regime sponsored the construction of thousands of greenhouses in which fruit and vegetables are still grown for European markets. As a desert, the region was known as politically marginal in the mass media. As a site of capitalist extraction, it has become known a “plastic sea” (p. 150) which has retained its unruly character, despite the best efforts of farming industry to portray it as a site of progress and development. David Malitz then presents an historical account of how sacred sites (shinkoku) dispersed throughout the landscape in Japan housed deities and ancestor-spirits who served as an ideological foundation for the legitimacy of the royal court, local clans and eventually the modern empire and the nation in the international realm. Of course, certain minorities, such as the Ainu, who did not worship them were thus marginalized, subjected to discrimination and outcast. George Krizmanics, in his turn, goes on to argue that the meaning of the landscape resulted from power relations and ideological disputes in 19th century Chile, where the indigenous Mapuche people, whose did hold a view of the landscape as alive, were eventually brought to heel in the 1880s by Chilean elites and Catholic missionization, who viewed it as separate from society. The last section of the book includes two case studies, one from Croatia and the other from the Czech Republic. Sarah Czerny and three co-authors completely demolish the notion of “sentient landscapes,” by discussing the case of forests in the Goraski Kotar region of Croatia. Under the cover of night, they report, illegal immigrants walk through them trying to sneak into the EU. Right wing citizens claim they leave garbage behind, threaten residents and disrupt animal life as they go. Do the forests have the agency, the authors bluntly ask, to distinguish between migrants, residents and the police? No. The forests do not discriminate and are not “intrinsically xenophobic” (p. 212). The forests are neutral. They provide cover for everyone and present an obstacle to everyone. Whether the forests are sentient or xenophobic, the conclude, is rather a “question … that belongs firmly in the human realm and is clearly a focus of human interest and discussion” (p. 224). Lastly, Susanna Trnka discusses how buildings, bridges and monuments in three cities in the Czech Republic are understood in terms of official and unofficial positions and contribute to a national identity that not only excludes Syrian Muslim refugees and Roma peoples, but omits Nazi and socialist pasts. Although Sentient Ecologies is absorbing, it is a fundamentally ambiguous book whose contributors basically want to have nothing to do with its main claim. (Perhaps this explains why Hikmet Kuran's Epilogue makes so little effort to synthesize or even comment on its chapters in any but the most perfunctory way.) Even so, a useful theme emerges in its wide-ranging, carefully drawn, ethnography which is that various forms of political sovereignty make use of the landscape to unify and consolidate power at the expense of minority communities. It is this claim, rather than the concept of “sentient landscape,” that is powerfully illustrated in cases that make the volume a valuable contribution to the burgeoning literature on the relationship of culture to the environment and the landscape.

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