The Urban Invasion of Rural Culture: A Review of Landscape Sociological Research in France, 1970-1987

Abstract

Interest in landscape has led a small group of French sociologists to a renewed interest in social culture. Starting from inquiries into social differentiation mechanisms related to uses of landscape, they have moved into studies of landscape production. This has led to abandoning the classical opposition between the dominant (creative) culture and the dominated (submissive) culture and to a renewed interest in relationships between center and periphery. The creation of culture appears then as a process of exchange. Culture is born from social action. Landscape representations are part of this cultural change process. They cannot be isolated; their local fine-tuning and expansion is challenged in various ways by other social representations of nature. Nevertheless, empirical observations of social change have shown that aesthetic traditions of visual landscape appreciation can be transformed by the social groups who compete for the control of historicity in a place. Any research that increases a group's ability to express new cultural elements and to account for their expected impacts contributes to cultural change. In the same way, when it elucidates the social forces affecting changes in landscape representation, sociological work becomes part of the changes it is studying. Studying the social processes involved in landscape change demands a reflexive sociology.