Nature tourism and Irish film

This article provides a historical overview and reading of seminal Irish film from the perspective of nature tourism. Within Irish cultural studies, tourism is frequently equated with an overly romantic image of the island, which has been used to sell the country abroad. However, using notions like the tourist gaze and taking on board influential debates around space/place, one can posit a more progressive environmental vision of nature and landscape in our readings of film

Razão, religião e revolução: luzes e sombras nas telas de Jacques-Louis David

O artigo analisa a produção pictórica de Jacques-Louis David entre o final da década de 1770 e 1793, destacando o entrelaçamento entre arte, religião e política nas obras do artista francês. Em sua luta contra o Antigo Regime, “filósofos artistas”, como Jacques-Louis David, apossaram-se das armas que eram manipuladas, há séculos, por um de seus principais inimigos: a Igreja. A transmissão do ideário iluminista não poderia ficar restrita à “aridez” dos textos acadêmicos, devendo buscar na religião e nas artes o “encantamento” indispensável à conquista de olhos, ouvidos, cérebros e corações. Depois de recorrer aos heróis das antigas Grécia e Roma, Jacques-Louis David debruçou-se sobre os homens do seu tempo: os deputados de O juramento do jogo de pela e os mártires que sacrificaram suas vidas em prol da revolução. Entrelaçando a arte clássica com a cristã, razão, revolução e religião, Jacques-Louis David forjou estratégias que seriam mobilizadas na propagação de líderes e ideários políticos nos séculos XIX e XX.The article analyzes the pictorial production of Jacques-Louis David between the late 1770s and 1793, highlighting the links between art, religion and politics in the works of the French artist. In their struggle against the Old Regime “philosophers artists,” as Jacques-Louis David, they took possession of the weapons that were manipulated for centuries by one of its main enemies: the Church. The transmission of Enlightenment ideas could not be restricted to “aridity” of academic papers and should seek in religion and the arts the “enchantment” indispensable to the conquest of eyes, ears, brains and hearts. After resorting to the heroes of ancient Greece and Rome, Jacques-Louis David leaned across the men of his time: the deputies of Tennis Court Oath and the martyrs who sacrificed their lives for the sake of revolution. Interweaving classical art with Christian art, reason, revolution and religion, Jacques-Louis David forged strategies that would be mobilized in the spread of political leaders and ideologies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries

In search of the authentic nation: landscape and national identity in Canada and Switzerland

While the study of nationalism and national identity has flourished in the last decade, little attention has been devoted to the conditions under which natural environments acquire significance in definitions of nationhood. This article examines the identity-forming role of landscape depictions in two polyethnic nation-states: Canada and Switzerland. Two types of geographical national identity are identified. The first – what we call the ‘nationalisation of nature’– portrays zarticular landscapes as expressions of national authenticity. The second pattern – what we refer to as the ‘naturalisation of the nation’– rests upon a notion of geographical determinism that depicts specific landscapes as forces capable of determining national identity. The authors offer two reasons why the second pattern came to prevail in the cases under consideration: (1) the affinity between wild landscape and the Romantic ideal of pure, rugged nature, and (2) a divergence between the nationalist ideal of ethnic homogeneity and the polyethnic composition of the two societies under consideration

How landscapes remember

This paper considers the possibility that as subject or agent, the landscape might have the potential to contain, store or transmit memories of their past, which are engaged experientially as uncanny. In a simple sense it asks why there are some landscapes – or landscape features – that are regarded as spiritually animated by different social groups, at different times. The paper focuses on the Neolithic temple site of Borġ-in-Nadur, in Southern Malta, which as well as having been a site of prehistoric ritual activity has more recently been the site of a significant devotion to the Virgin Mary, who graced the site with regular apparitions, and a focus for national and transnational Goddess pilgrimage. The paper suggests that sites such as Borġ-in-Nadur can be seen as palimpsest landscapes, in which memory is layered such that experiential engagements with them draw the past in to the present, and forwards into the future. The paper examines the intertwining of prehistoric, Catholic and Neo-pagan engagements with Borġ-in-Nadur, extending Pierre Nora’s concept of lieux de memoire (sites of memory) to encompass the milieux de memoire, or memorial environments, which are themselves also context of, and for, the uncanny

The Inuit discovery of Europe? The Orkney Finnmen, preternatural objects and the re-enchantment of early-modern science.

The late-seventeenth century saw a peak in accounts of supposed encounters with ‘Finnmen’ in Orkney. These accounts have shaped the folklore of the Northern Isles. Scholars linked to the Royal Society suggested the accounts represented encounters with Inuit. Subsequent explanations included autonomous travel by Inuit groups and abduction and abandonment. These accounts should be understood as part of a European scientific tradition of preternatural philosophy, occupied with the deviations and errors of nature. Far from indicating the presence of Inuit individuals in Orkney waters, they provide evidence of the narrative instability of early-modern science and its habit of ‘thinking with things’. Captivated by Inuit artefacts, the natural philosophers and virtuosi of the Royal Society imagined Orkney as a site of reverse contact with the ‘primitive’. Nineteenth-century antiquarians and folklorists reliant on these texts failed to understand the extent to which objectivity was not an epistemic virtue in early-modern science