Landscape, discourse, and identity across the borders of European national minority cultures

Hodsdon, Laura ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0817-4852 (2024) Landscape, discourse, and identity across the borders of European national minority cultures. In: 30th Jubilee Session of the Permanent European Conference for the Study of the Rural Landscape (PECSRL), 9-15 September 2024, Lublin & Zamość, Poland.

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Abstract / Summary

European cultural landscapes constitute ‘ethnoscapes’ (Appadurai 1991) where migration and movement over centuries have shaped shifting layers of identities within, between, and across national borders. One layer within these, often linked with areas that are geographically peripheral within the nation state, are European national minority cultures. These are variously defined, but here I mean groups with a historical link to a territory which does not align with the nation state, and a shared sense of identity (which of course is likely to intersect with many other identities national and otherwise). These are often linked to post-industrial regions attracting in-migration from incomers or tourists seeking a rural idyll and ‘escape’ from city life, and subject to out-migration as younger people move to the socio-economic ‘core’. Their cultural distinctiveness can become the focus of identity constructions from both national majority and minority groups; which can lead to contestation and sometimes division over heritage, identity, and relationship to the meaning and uses of space.

In this paper, I draw on primary qualitative data from a research project focusing on three minority cultures across four European countries (Cornish in the UK, Frisian in the Netherlands, and Livonian in Latvia and Estonia). The project considered the interplay between majority and minority through minority cultures’ intangible cultural heritage, asking how social cohesion and cultural resilience can be maintained in these contexts (Hodsdon et al. (eds) forthcoming). Here, I draw on interview data to ask how various people – from tourists to locals – differently construct landscape identities of themselves and others in this shifting, plural context, how they understand their crossings into and out of the minority cultural landscape, and consider the implications on socio-spatial narratives of the minority culture itself on social cohesion.

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