Presentation. Rural Landscapes Beyond the Idyll

Abstract

Geography as a discipline has purposely studied rural landscapes since at least its early modern period. In 1801, for instance, the founder of geographical science in its contemporary dimension, Alexander von Humboldt, when traveling in the Cauca region (currently South-Western Colombia, at that time belonging to the Viceroyalty of New Granada), described the process by which the Coconuco Indians had been expelled from the fertile plains - where the city of Popayán was founded by the Spanish conquerors - and forcibly displaced to the inclined slopes of the Puracé volcano. Agriculture was tough in these highlands because of the squalid soils and freezing climate, "where the frost kills their potatoes, cabbage and onion crops, while they watch how the most beautiful fields of wheat grow in their former lands of mild and more benign climate" (apud Avendaño, 2015: 19; our translation). Narratives of this type expressively capture Humboldt's 'landscape style' (Ortega Cantero, 2004; Gómez Mendoza, 2008; López Silvestre, 2009), here, in reference to a rural area and, interestingly, describing a process of colonial dispossession. Importantly, in Humboldtian landscapes we not only find reflections on their material or tangible features (e.g. the contrast between the ravaged potato fields on the slopes and the fields of ripe wheat in the plains), but also the author's associated perceptions, feelings and even imaginations - i.e. the open condemnation of colonial processes, including an apparently empathetic complicity with the feelings of the Coconuco Indians as they look back at their old lands from the mountain slopes.