Influence of Landscape on Identity

In essence, the landscape is not just a physical backdrop, but an integral part of how people understand themselves and their place in the world. The lifelong influence of one's formative landscape is a key part of personal identity.

-"Perplexity"

Changing landscape identity—practice, plurality, and power

Landscape has always been in constant flux; yet, historically landscape change was local, gradual, and nested within existing landscape structures. By contrast, contemporary landscape changes are often seen as threatening, characterized as abrupt, unpredictable, and highly dynamic transformations with little relation to locality. Such transformations are driven by interrelated factors including globalization, urbanization, level of accessibility, calamitous events, economic factors, technological development, as well as changing cultural values.

Historically, the environment in which identities form was downplayed in academic studies. However, relationships and connections to others are always geographically located, as in ‘To be human is to have and know your place’. The relations we develop with our surroundings create and establish belonging, meaning, and security.

A significant step in the landscape identity concept is the unique psycho-sociological perception of a place as a spatial-cultural space as both a physical entity and a vessel for existential meaning. Alterations to the landscape affect how people see themselves. If changes are negative or non-democratic, they undermine the relationships individuals and communities have to their surroundings.

Changes to the landscape’s physicality may result in continued connection becoming untenable or only possible to maintain through increased effort, as the practice no longer fits the landscape and results in a ‘tipping point’ to landscape identity where through change new identity forms. Such change has the potential to create ‘landscape induced alienation’ or Solastalgia, homesickness without leaving home. Recognizing the psychological impact can help explain why landscape change arouses resistance. Identities become important when they are perceived to be under threat. As individuals, if we perceive a threat to the landscape, we find the need to defend it as an identifiable space; consequently, new relations to the landscape develop.

Such connections and understanding impact spatial behavior, the extent of which becomes clear when we are faced by people or practices that appear ‘out of place’, bringing into question who is recognized as a worthy or responsible community member. Yet, identity can also be constructed through change with such change having a positive effect if it provides increased self-esteem.

Contemporary landscape identities are situated in a world characterized by mobility where identities undergo a perpetual process of “rewriting”. Disembodied global processes are manifested in local landscapes restructuring localities from outside. The awareness of being part of global flows and systems undermines local place identity.

The uncertainty generated through global flows and resulting landscape change creates a search for identities of resistance, creating tension between globalization and the local. Landscape identity as a local construct is anchored in a specific place while global identities are abstract, generalized, subsuming the specific and the unique. In spite of and also as a response to global drivers, local identities and landscape distinctiveness become more significant as they provide a sense of security.

As such, location-based identities have to be seen as solid and fixed in order to provide anchors where collective practices, traditions, and shared material can form. The identity individuals draw on depends on the issue being addressed as individuals and groups draw on identity from various sources; place of residency, social standing, ethnicity, practices. Consequently, as individuals, we position ourselves on many axes at the same time depending on the issue at hand.

Multiple identities entail power structures, with different value holders vying for recognition, with global community values taking priority over local agendas and informing landscape identity. This raises a need to question the drivers in order to understand what instigates change in identity. Although landscape identity is generally perceived as having positive connotations, joining people together and developing shared values, it also constructs exclusion through the distinction of ‘I’, ‘we’ and ‘the other’.

Identity, including landscape identity, becomes utilized as a means for classification, an objectifying scientific tool, masking the conflicts and ignoring the question of who belongs, who has a right to engage in landscape activities, legitimizing their identity in their surroundings. This discussion reframes landscape identity as a political entity, underwritten with power struggles, as all attempt to make their view and position significant. Landscape identity defines who can inhabit the place, who is included and who is excluded, and how people relate to each other.

Implicit Bias ~ Face to Face

I know when I first recognized my own implicit bias about gender. It was in the Fall of 2006 during a high school speech tournament in Helena Montana. I’d volunteered to judge the Lincoln Douglas debates and, along with a few other adults, was tired from a long day of civil argument as we sat to evaluate the final, prize-winning round.

The realities of gender inequality were not new to me. I was a fifty-two year old woman who had graduated from a women’s college at the peak of 1970’s Feminism. Over decades of work in film production, computer animation, and the Web, my primary colleagues were all men. Some of them, like my son’s father, were generous collaborators in favor of opportunity for all people. The majority, though, were male endowment heirs intent on seizing personal trophies. Harassment was surprising only when absent.

The Lincoln Douglas debate style takes its name from the original 1858 match between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas which focused primarily on slavery.  Now practiced mostly in high school speech tournaments, topics commonly center on moral questions argued between two people who are assigned either the affirmative or negative position.  The topic for the final round in Helena was: Civil disobedience in a democracy is morally justified.

The young contestants, a male and female, were both attractive, white, successful high school Seniors probably destined for law school.  Both were tall and well-groomed in conventional, tailored clothing. The young women had every sartorial detail crisp, tucked and aligned. In contrast, there was a noticeable rumple in the young man’s shirt. His tie, striped classic blue and red, was loosely knotted and slightly askew, suggesting an ivy league rebel.  

Throughout the debate, the young woman’s arguments were the most compelling and well-conceived, clearly affirming that civil disobedience is morally justified in a democracy. Her delivery was sincere and precise. I naturally agreed with her position.

Perhaps to mask his own distaste for having to support the negative view, the young man adopted a casually entertaining sarcasm that even highlighted the weakness in his argument, yet somehow also made it more appealing. Culture had granted him a wider range of persuasive tools than to his opponent.  On her, this approach would likely have seemed sloppy.  On him, though, it was charming and confident.  I found myself wanting to call him the winner.

Even the most intelligent and analytic of us will rely on cultural “rules of thumb” in everyday life. Acting without thinking because the situation appears to be “without question”. Face to face, these two young people seemed so evenly matched. Before laying down my final marks, I did shake off the enchantment of cultural mythology and gave the rightful win to the young woman.  But I had to consciously recognize and question my own conditioned bias in order to do it.

Making Pasta in Bologna

Fresh Laid Italian Eggs

Fall was the season for holiday food preparation in my mother’s Italian family. Raviolis were the centerpiece. Through October and most of November we made hundreds of them. All rolled, stuffed, and closed by hand on a massive kitchen table.

In 2013, I decided to deepen my childhood ravioli memories during a trip through Italy’s Emilia-Romagna region and registered to attend an official pasta making school in Bologna, the place even Italians recognize as the source of authentic Italian cuisine.

Cooking schools are an industry in Bologna and are plentiful since just offering lunch in a home kitchen could qualify. Visitors looking for particular experiences, especially with time and money constraints, should do as much research as their satisfaction level demands.

Francesca Prepares Dough

Being on a limited budget, value was a significant part of my decision mix. But I also wanted to "live" the culture of an Italian kitchen.  So I chose the Vecchia Scuola Bolognese primarily because of its very affordable five day immersion course, allowing me to spend an entire workweek absorbing the sights, sounds, and sensations I craved.

Minimum research suggestions:

• Identify your parameters for the experience, including cost, location, and particular food interests
• Use guide books, magazines, and a variety of Web resources in your research.
• Pare down candidates using available reviews. Interact with reviewers whenever possible.
• Correspond directly with the schools by email or even by phone. This can assure you that the school is still operating, will give you a sense of their customer service standards, and help you to better understand important details such as payment options.
• Finally, as a general rule of travel, be open to making the best of whatever actually happens.

Ancient but Accurate Scale

I didn’t fully appreciate Vecchia Scuola Bolognese as a serious culinary production and training facility until I arrived. They do offer a casual half day tourist course with lunch included, but their primary students are those beginning or extending professional careers in Italian pasta and pastry making.

The five day course I took is actually considered the first step toward earning the school's three month professional culinary certification. Vecchia Scuola is also an ongoing pasta production facility supplying food establishments throughout the region. Students are expected to practice their skills creating usable product. Nothing is wasted. What may not be “beautiful” enough for sale to an outside client will certainly be used in the school's student staffed Trattoria.

Basic Riccota Filled Tortelloni

I paid for the class about six months before my trip. Arrangements such as available course times and dates were made through email in both Italian and English, using Google translate when necessary. Payment was sent and confirmed via an international wire transfer made through my bank.

My hotel in Bologna, Albergo Rossini, was a short portico covered walk from the Vecchia Scuola. Class started at 9 AM and lasted about four to five hours. The only new students on the day I started were myself and a twenty-four year old Israeli pastry chef who had just completed a four month certification in gelato making. He was planning to open his own cafe on a beach in Tel Aviv.

Alessandra Spisni (shown above in a screenshot from their website) is the unifying force of Vecchia Scuola. Though she was traveling outside of Bologna during the time I were there, signora Spisni was none the less a constant presence in the many attractive product displays throughout the school. Alessandra Spisni and her entire family are endowed with an insatiable appetite for life.

Maestro Allessandro

The signora's brother, Alessandro, casually oversees the culinary school by correcting students with warnings lightly disguised as jokes. Much of his work day was spent enjoying food, family and friends. 

Our actual teacher was an impressive twenty-seven year old Sicilian woman named Carla.  She is the real head and heart of day to day pasta instruction and production at Vecchia Scuola. Alessandro even acknowledged this fact by joking about how often he loudly called her name. (CarrrrLLA!!)

Carla Instructs a Student from Texas

Fluent in four languages with a graduate degree in Cultural Anthropology, Carla led an ever changing group of students through various levels of instruction while managing overall production (rolling sheets of perfect pasta herself), quality control, and distribution for Vecchia Scuola.

During a break, I asked Carla how she chose pasta making rather than pursuing a career in her degree. She told me that she came to Vecchia Scuola to do a cultural research project then discovered she both enjoyed the physical exercise of the work and had a natural talent for it. Signora Spisni offered her a job. Carla took it, still loves it, and sees no reason that will change.

Filei Calabresi ~ Our First Pasta

Culinary Cathedral

The Israeli pastry chef and I were given official aprons, assigned lockers, oriented to the work space, and began making pasta alongside more advanced students.

We started with a batch of Filei Calabresi, a simple pasta made with just water and flour rolled by hand into a hollow tube that embraces any sauce. Using a classic industrial scale, we weighed rather than measured all ingredients. Weight, even for liquids, makes it easy to accurately increase or decrease the size of a recipe. We got a feel for how to properly knead dough and assess its readiness for rolling.

Tortelloni in Process

The most exciting part of the process was using long wooden rolling pins or poles, called matterellos, to flatten the dough. In the video at the end of this post, Carla uses a matterello to roll a double volume of dough into a translucent gossamer sheet, closely resembling fine cloth, in less than five minutes.

Both the matterello and table must be made of wood. Marble and stainless steel are too cold for pasta making. In contrast, wood warms the dough as it is worked and the grain imparts a surface texture that better holds sauces and condiments to the pasta.

Dried Spinach Tortelloni

At the start of this post I mentioned that making ravioli was my reason for taking the class. And we did make one batch of ravioli at Vecchia Scuola. But what we produced every day in quantity was tortelloni, the much larger version of tortellini.

Bologna is known for its tortelloni, pasta with a big stuffed "belly" that brings to mind the city's Medieval nickname, "La Grassa" (The Fat).  Of course tortelloni is much more popular than ravioli in Bologna!

One fundamental variation between types of stuffed pasta is the thickness of the dough. Tortelloni requires pasta that is as thin as possible because of its many layered folds.  On the other hand, ravioli doesn't have any folds and needs to be slightly thicker to hold stuffing in place with just crimping around the edges. I may not have made many ravioli at Vecchia Scuola, but I did gain a deep reverence for the skill and talent of handcrafting this seemingly simple food.

For those wanting to experiment for themselves, we used the basic recipe below for all variations of stuffed and flat pasta. A large wooden rolling pin can sufficiently flatten the dough but it's actually the length of the mattarello that makes it fun (and an art) to use.

There are no handles on a mattarello.  It moves with pressure applied from the palm of your hands, pushing and pulling like a massage as they move back and forth across the entire length of the pin. Yes. It is sensual. Lacking a real mattarello, a two inch diameter dowling, thirty-six inches long, sanded and bleached, will work.

Have fun making pasta! Even the mistakes are edible.

Basic Filled Pasta Recipe for +/- 100 Tortelloni Ingredients are measured by weight so the recipe can easily be scaled for quantity.
Pasta	Filling
Ingredient Ratio: 100 grams of "00" Flour per 50 grams of liquid. Liquid can be water, egg, broth, or a cooked vegetable such as spinach or mushroom. One shelled egg = 50 grams (Should be weighed if very large or small) 50 grams of cooked spinach = one egg.  The following mixtures allow for additional 50 grams of flour during kneading. Plain Pasta 6 eggs and 550 g flour Spinach Pasta 6 eggs, 50 g cooked spinach, 650 g flour  To Mix Form the flour into a bowl shape on the table.   Place liquids in the center of the flour. Gently blend flour into liquid. Knead until dough forms and stickiness is gone. Add flour as necessary.  Wrap kneaded dough in plastic. Let dough rest at least one hour before rolling.	Quantity Ratio:  Filling Weight = Dough Weight 1.5 kilos Ricotta (cow) 200 grams grated Parmesan cheese 20 grams salt (to taste)  1 Egg Nutmeg to taste
Roll dough into a sheet carefully but quickly to avoid drying. Cut rolled sheet into one inch squares. Place a dollop of filling into the center of each square. Fold dough corner to corner into a triangle over the filling. Squeeze the bottom tips of the triangle together to form a tortelloni shape. Practice often and eat your work!

Public Opinion - Extracts: The Making of a Common Will

Walter Lippmann published Public Opinion in 1922. Following is a short extract describing the role of leadership in creating public acceptance. The entire book is available online for free through Project Gutenburg.

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The established leaders of any organization have great natural advantages. They are believed to have better sources of information. The books and papers are in their offices. They took part in the important conferences. They met the important people. They have responsibility. It is, therefore, easier for them to secure attention and to speak in a convincing tone. But also they have a very great deal of control over the access to the facts.

Every official is in some degree a censor. And since no one can suppress information, either by concealing it or forgetting to mention it, without some notion of what he wishes the public to know, every leader is in some degree a propagandist. 

Strategically placed, and compelled often to choose even at the best between the equally cogent though conflicting ideals of safety for the institution, and candor to his public, the official finds himself deciding more and more consciously what facts, in what setting, in what guise he shall permit the public to know. 

That the manufacture of consent is capable of great refinements no one, I think, denies. The process by which public opinions arise is certainly no less intricate than it has appeared in these pages, and the opportunities for manipulation open to anyone who understands the process are plain enough. 

The creation of consent is not a new art. It is a very old one which was supposed to have died out with the appearance of democracy. But it has not died out. 

It has, in fact, improved enormously in technic, because it is now based on analysis rather than on rule of thumb. And so, as a result of psychological research, coupled with the modern means of communication, the practice of democracy has turned a corner. A revolution is taking place, infinitely more significant than any shifting of economic power. 

Within the life of the generation now in control of affairs, persuasion has become a self-conscious art and a regular organ of popular government. None of us begins to understand the consequences, but it is no daring prophecy to say that the knowledge of how to create consent will alter every political calculation and modify every political premise. 

Under the impact of propaganda, not necessarily in the sinister meaning of the word alone, the old constants of our thinking have become variables. It is no longer possible, for example, to believe in the original dogma of democracy; that the knowledge needed for the management of human affairs comes up spontaneously from the human heart. Where we act on that theory we expose ourselves to self-deception, and to forms of persuasion that we cannot verify. 

It has been demonstrated that we cannot rely upon intuition, conscience, or the accidents of casual opinion if we are to deal with the world beyond our reach.

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Public Opinion - Extracts: The Enlisting of Interest

Walter Lippmann published Public Opinion in 1922. Following is a short extract describing how to engage and hold public attention. The entire book is available online for free through Project Gutenburg.

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When public affairs are popularized in speeches, headlines, plays, moving pictures, cartoons, novels, statues or paintings, their transformation into a human interest requires first abstraction from the original, and then animation of what has been abstracted.

 

We cannot be much interested in, or much moved by, the things we do not see. Of public affairs each of us sees very little, and therefore, they remain dull and unappetizing, until somebody, with the makings of an artist, has translated them into a moving picture. Thus the abstraction, imposed upon our knowledge of reality by all the limitations of our access and of our prejudices, is compensated. 

Not being omnipresent and omniscient we cannot see much of what we have to think and talk about. Being flesh and blood we will not feed on words and names and gray theory. Being artists of a sort we paint pictures, stage dramas and draw cartoons out of the abstractions.

...

A “clear” thinker is almost always a good visualizer. But for that same reason, because he is “cinematographic,” he is often by that much external and insensitive. 

For the people who have intuition, which is probably another name for musical or muscular perception, often appreciate the quality of an event and the inwardness of an act far better than the visualizer. They have more understanding when the crucial element is a desire that is never crudely overt, and appears on the surface only in a veiled gesture, or in a rhythm of speech. 

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Nevertheless, though they have often a peculiar justice, intuitions remain highly private and largely incommunicable. But social intercourse depends on communication, and while a person can often steer his own life with the utmost grace by virtue of his intuitions, he usually has great difficulty in making them real to others. When he talks about them they sound like a sheaf of mist. For while intuition does give a fairer perception of human feeling, the reason with its spatial and tactile prejudice can do little with that perception. 

Therefore, where action depends on whether a number of people are of one mind, it is probably true that in the first instance no idea is lucid for practical decision until it has visual or tactile value. But it is also true, that no visual idea is significant to us until it has enveloped some stress of our own personality. Until it releases or resists, depresses or enhances, some craving of our own, it remains one of the objects which do not matter. 

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Pictures have always been the surest way of conveying an idea, and next in order, words that call up pictures in memory. But the idea conveyed is not fully our own until we have identified ourselves with some aspect of the picture. The identification, or what Vernon Lee has called empathy, may be almost infinitely subtle and symbolic. The mimicry may be performed without our being aware of it, and sometimes in a way that would horrify those sections of our personality which support our self-respect.

In sophisticated people the participation may not be in the fate of the hero, but in the fate of the whole idea to which both hero and villain are essential. But these are refinements. In popular representation the handles for identification are almost always marked. You know who the hero is at once. And no work promises to be easily popular where the marking is not definite and the choice clear. But that is not enough. 

The audience must have something to do, and the contemplation of the true, the good and the beautiful is not something to do. In order not to sit inertly in the presence of the picture, and this applies as much to newspaper stories as to fiction and the cinema, the audience must be exercised by the image. 

Now there are two forms of exercise which far transcend all others, both as to ease with which they are aroused, and eagerness with which stimuli for them are sought. They are sexual passion and fighting, and the two have so many associations with each other, blend into each other so intimately, that a fight about sex outranks every other theme in the breadth of its appeal. There is none so engrossing or so careless of all distinctions of culture and frontiers. 

The sexual motif figures hardly at all in American political imagery. Except in certain minor ecstasies of war, in an occasional scandal,...to speak of it at all would seem far-fetched...But the fighting motif appears at every turn. Politics is interesting when there is a fight, or as we say, an issue. And in order to make politics popular, issues have to be found, even when in truth and justice, there are none,--none, in the sense that the differences of judgment, or principle, or fact, do not call for the enlistment of pugnacity. 

[Footnote: Cf. Frances Taylor Patterson, Cinema Craftsmanship, pp. 31-32. “III. If the plot lacks suspense: 1. Add an antagonist, 2. Add an obstacle, 3. Add a problem, 4. Emphasize one of the questions in the minds of the spectator.,..”]

But where pugnacity is not enlisted, those of us who are not directly involved find it hard to keep up our interest. For those who are involved the absorption may be real enough to hold them even when no issue is involved. They may be exercised by sheer joy in activity, or by subtle rivalry or invention. 

But for those to whom the whole problem is external and distant, these other faculties do not easily come into play. In order that the faint image of the affair shall mean something to them, they must be allowed to exercise the love of struggle, suspense, and victory. 

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In order then that the distant situation shall not be a gray flicker on the edge of attention, it should be capable of translation into pictures in which the opportunity for identification is recognizable. Unless that happens it will interest only a few for a little while. It will belong to the sights seen but not felt, to the sensations that beat on our sense organs, and are not acknowledged. 

We have to take sides. We have to be able to take sides. In the recesses of our being we must step out of the audience on to the stage, and wrestle as the hero for the victory of good over evil. We must breathe into the allegory the breath of our life. 

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