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RESEARCH PRODUCT

The Rise and Fall of the Aizjomi Landscape†

subject

description

Jurmalciems, an ancient fishing-farming village on the Baltic Sea coast in southwestern Latvia, provides the setting for this article. In this setting I focus on the notion of dwelling in a landscape that comes to reflect the residents' lifeworld. The holistic notion of "dwelling" incorporates the complex and multiple dimensions of human life spent in the physical landscape, where time and space, nature and culture, are bound together and where local and macrolevel historical and social circumstances determine them both. This study is my attempt to understand a visible reality: the aizjonii landscape that is etched into the topography in the form of fields carved and embosomed into sandbanks. The study began unintentionally when I visited Jurmalciems for the first time in 2005. The scene I encountered was curious and intriguing; indeed, the amount of human energy that has obviously been expended to create tillable land astonishes everyone who comes sees it. In order to shape this distinctive landscape, local residents had to move thousands of kilograms of sand, level infertile sandy soil into hundreds of fields, and dig kilometers of drainage ditches. Observers are struck by the obvious irrationality of the human effort required to transform a place that is totally inappropriate for farming into viable agricultural land. Over the years I spent working on my own family's farms, I became familiar with traditional small-scale agricultural practices such as planting and gathering potatoes, making hay, and breeding cattle. I gained knowledge and experience, and I also came to understand the inner logic of premodern farming. My personal experience underscores the certainty that behind the visible scene lies a special story, revealing existential circumstances that have compelled people to dig and maintain agricultural plots nestled in the expansive dune fields. Decisions to invest enormous amounts of energy to create aizjomi were not spontaneous. To claim that such decisions were the result of the industrious and sensible actions of poor Latvians in the premodern world would be a simplified and naive view of the processes that form the landscape. As Kenneth Olwig reminded us, all landscapes are related in complicated chains of causal relationships and have "almost never, in historic times, simply been a product of local conditions" (2001, 341). To find answers to the seemingly simple, but in reality complex, questions of who created and managed the aizjomi, and why, I proceeded from Denis Cosgrove's observation that "landscape is embedded in the practical uses of the physical world as nature and territory" (1998, xi). In addition, I drew on Cole Harris's use of Jurgen Habermas's concept of "traditional lifeworld" (1991). This concept frames the human actions that preceded modernity and considers the completely different circumstances of individuals' actions, in contrast to modern lifeworlds, in which they are expanded. Traditional lifeworlds do not provide much space for individual choices; people have to live and subsist in "taken-for-granted worlds dominated by custom and tradition, by a set order of things that gives meaning to and imposes close limits on individual lives" (Harris 1991, 672-673; see also Samuels 1979). The history of the aizjomi landscape reflects the movement from a traditional lifeworld to a modern one. The people who created aizjomi and performed inefficient farming there were situated in "circumstances of life that were accepted without question" (Harris 1991, 673). As modernity arrived in the region, the productivity of aizjomi fields could not be substantially increased due to physical constraints, so farmers abandoned them as soon as "the individual was freed ... from the ... givens of the traditional lifeworld" (p. 673) and was able to find a more rational and secure form of living. DWELLING AND LANDSCAPE Since the nineteenth century the study of landscape history has played a prominent role in cultural geography. …