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- Convenors:
-
Katharina Lange
(Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient)
Katja Geisenhainer (Frobenius Institute Frankfurt)
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Short Abstract
This panel explores representations of "lost" rural liveworlds through narrative and/or visual means. Asking specifically what values are accorded to “nature” in these representations, the panel invites case studies from a broad range of historical as well as contemporary contexts and settings.
Long Abstract
Until the late 20th century, rural lifestyles were a commonly shared experience for many families and communities across the world. With increasing urbanisation and shifting economies, however, the realities of living with vegetal and agrarian cycles and temporalities have become increasingly removed from many people's everyday experiences. Clearly, the transition from rural to urban lifestyles is far from a unilinear process, as both can co-exist, intersect, and oscillate seasonally; while "nature" is part of urban life too. Nevertheless, wide-spread shifts to the city arguably entailed distinctly different and often more remote or mediated ways of cohabiting and relating to other-than-human living beings and “nature(s)”.
Conversely, narrative (and other) representations of "lost" or distant, sometimes imagined, rural pasts have gained new traction. Narratives may resonate with normative, ethical, and emotional overtones, as rural ways of life are often nostalgically imagined to be more “natural”, wholesome, and authentic than urban ones. Moreover, in political discourse, imaginations and imageries of – sometimes mythical - agricultural and rural pasts can be associated with claims of autochthony, particularism, or specific national identities. Urbanisation processes may thus be narrated as alienating, deteriorating or de-naturalising ways of life.
This panel explores popular, scholarly, political, mythical (and other) ways in which social actors represent their own, or others’, transitions from agricultural-rural to urban live-worlds through narrative and/or visual means. Asking specifically what values are accorded to “nature” in these transitions, the panel invites case studies from historical as well as contemporary contexts.
Accepted papers
Session 1 Monday 15 June, 2026, -Paper short abstract
This paper examines oral narratives of climate change in Romania’s Danube Delta, showing how local residents use storytelling to interpret ecological disruption, preserve cultural identity, and challenge dominant framings of crisis and conservation.
Paper long abstract
As climate change and ecological degradation increasingly affect vulnerable regions, there is growing interest in how local communities narrate environmental disruption. In Romania’s Danube Delta, a UNESCO World Heritage site, experiencing both climate-driven shifts and contested conservation governance, stories of environmental change are embedded in everyday life and oral tradition. Yet these narratives remain underexamined as sources of cultural meaning and environmental knowledge. This paper analyzes oral histories and narrative interviews collected during Fulbright-supported fieldwork in 2024-2025 across three communities in the Danube Delta. It examines how residents perceive and articulate environmental transformation, including climate variability, shifts in water levels, species decline, and socio-economic uncertainty. Drawing on a human security framework and interpretive narrative analysis, the study traces how interviewees frame resilience, belonging, and resistance through storytelling. These stories are shaped by both personal memory and regional folklore, revealing a localized epistemology grounded in relational knowledge of the delta landscape. Preliminary findings suggest that oral narratives function as culturally embedded tools for interpreting ecological instability, preserving place-based identity, and negotiating marginalization. Rather than passive accounts, these stories often challenge external narratives of conservation and crisis by foregrounding lived experience and adaptive knowledge. The paper contributes to the broader scholarship on environmental narrative, folklore, and cultural resilience, as well as the importance of local storytelling practices in shaping responses to ecological change in deltaic and other climate-exposed regions.
Paper short abstract
This study examines the narratives of nature that ethnographer, teacher, and photographer Samuli Paulaharju collected in northeastern Lapland, Finland, in the 1930s and 1940s. The descriptions tell us about disappearing ways of life, and nature that no longer exists or is very different today.
Paper long abstract
This paper examines narratives and notes from the 1930s and 1940s that describe the nature of Finnish Northeast Lapland. These narratives and notes were collected by Samuli Paulaharju, a teacher, ethnographer, writer, and photographer. Paulaharju lived and worked in Oulu, the capital of Northern Ostrobothnia. During the summer, he traveled around the heartlands of Finland, far from urban centers, collecting folklore. During the winter, he wrote books and taught at a school in Oulu. His extensive collecting trips resulted in a substantial archive at the Finnish Literature Society comprising over 65,000 notes and 4,000 pages of ethnographic notes and narratives. The collection also includes thousands of his drawings and photographs.
Paulaharju's trips and collections reflect his interest in nature and people living far from urban centers. His descriptions tell of a way of life and nature that had already begun to disappear in his own time, and which is very different from today. What kind of representations and imagery of the area's nature and rural ways of life do Paulaharju present through his written and photographic descriptions? Are the notes about preserving disappearing folk traditions and nature, or something else? The study focuses particularly on material from the Sompio area that has been stored in the archive. The analysis of the material uses methods from narrative research and environmental humanities.
Paper short abstract
The paper investigates how Polish wetland national parks and local activists draw on narratives of lost agrarian and amphibian worlds to ascribe distinctive values to protected landscapes, framing these efforts as practices of ‘past presencing’ (Macdonald 2013).
Paper long abstract
This paper examines how ‘past presencing’ practices (Macdonald 2013) in Polish wetland national parks and surrounding communities invoke the ‘lost’ agrarian and amphibian past to support the biocultural heritage making process and negotiate contemporary conservation governance. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, the paper analyzes narrative and visual strategies deployed in two contrasting sites.
In towns near Ujście Warty National Park, ‘past presencing’ addresses a collective memory gap created by the post-1945 population replacement. Local activists reconstruct both German everyday life and the early years of new settlers. It is a way of creating a connection with an abandoned landscape. The national park integrates these reconstructions, emphasizing also Frederick the Great’s Enlightenment-era Warthebruch drainage. It helps government agents to frame the landscape as biocultural heritage. Narratives of ‘lost’ agrarian worlds legitimize conservation by portraying human labor and hydrotechnical interventions as foundational to today’s more-than-natural biodiversity.
At Narew National Park, ‘past presencing’ asserts that the wetlands are inherently part of local collective memory after the decline of extensive farming under mechanization and intensification processes. The park honours pre-1970s mowing and grazing as a “golden age,” using photographs and storytelling to root large-scale conservation practices in traditional stewardship. For residents, these representations affirm individual ownership of the land and subtly challenge the park’s governance.
Together, these cases demonstrate that ‘past presencing’ can be functionalized in multiple ways: it legitimizes conservation measures, empowers local critique of conservation governance, and reconfigures wetlands into protected biocultural heritage – valued as integral more-than-human and more-than-natural landscape.
Paper short abstract
I explore different narratives and discourses to analyze the multi-semantic descriptions of nature in a small fishing community and place of sustainable tourism, in the Danube Delta: identity, source of food and livelihood, a place of relaxation, a resource to be saved and protected, or just home.
Paper long abstract
My research is based on extended anthropological fieldwork in the Romanian Danube Delta (since 2005), and a recent series of narrative interviews and participant observation conducted in the small village of Sfântu Gheorghe (2025); located on the southern ramification of Danube, the place is isolated between the river and the coast of the Black Sea. The village, with a Ukrainian (hahol) heritage, had a long tradition of sturgeon fishing (interrupted abruptly in 2006 by conservationist measures, with deep consequences on the livelihood and identity of the local community). While tourism has been (since late ‘60s), an additional source of income for many families, it becomes more and more important as an alternative to fishing. In Sfântu Gheorghe, tourism can be both a push for modernization (connecting a closed, traditional community to the rest of the world, in a meaningful cultural encounter) and a reminder of the good old times when everything was “natural’ and modest (originally, the village was attractive, mostly for urban intellectuals, for its simplicity and natural settings). While in elder’s narratives, nature is wild and rough and, in ecological discourses, nature is something pristine, to be protected, “nature”- as an asset to present to tourists - is domesticated, neat, beautiful, Instagram-able. I look diachronically at different narratives (discourses of various actors: local community, tourism operators, guides, researchers, tourists etc.) to explore the flexible and multi-semantic descriptions of nature, in a typical coastal environment, i. e. fluid, liminal and fluctuating.
Paper short abstract
This paper discusses nature in rural school oral history narratives. The objective is to explore what narrative role nature plays when memories of lost minor rural schools are concerned. The study bases on interviews about lost rural schools in eastern Finland from the 1970s to the 2000s.
Paper long abstract
This paper discusses how relation to nature is touched on in oral history narratives considering memories about lost rural schools in eastern Finland from the 1970s to the 2000s. This period was an era of major socio-economic changes in Finland for instance because of urbanization and developments with the welfare state. The waves of closing the rural schools wiped over rural areas of Finland already in the 1960s, and it seems that the closing of minor schools will continue also in the future. From the stance of the relation to nature, thus, it can be pondered what kind of opportunities or challenges the schools in the rural area create. This paper bases on a project Primary Schools Amidst Rural Transition: Oral History of Village Schools (1.1.2024–31.12.2027). The interviews made in this project touch on a great variety of topics regarding rural schools’ experiences and memories. The main objective in this case is to explore what kind of narrative role nature has when the memories of the lost minor rural schools are concerned. These narratives are interpreted especially through the framework of the societal and cultural changes in Eastern Finland. The study utilizes a method of comics-based studies, and thus another aim is to explore relation to nature in rural school settings through the means of art making. Thus, this paper discusses also how arts based research contributes to the study of rural ways of life and relation to nature, as well as the changes concerning them.
Paper short abstract
In a period of rapid socio-economic change, post-1945 folk museums redefined rural ‘rootedness’ from ethnic/nationalist framings to sociological ones. Comparing UK and West-German exhibitions, this paper traces how rural narratives were renegotiated by curators, locals, and academics.
Paper long abstract
Narratives about rural lifestyles organically frame people’s rootedness to place. Yet what constitutes this rootedness – ethnicity, agricultural customs, “mentalities” – is far from given. This paper considers how concepts of linking people to place were newly narrated in the post-1945 decades, comparing folk museums in West-Germany and the UK.
In this period, previously tacit naturalist understandings about rural rooted lifestyles came into question through the socio-economic changes that threatened the underlying customs themselves, but also through a host of new sociological and economic theories and models that reconceptualized rural (versus urban) lifestyles, and challenged the ethnic and nationalist underpinnings of these narratives. Museums are a particularly interesting place to trace these developments. In a democratized heritage landscape, folk, rural, and Heimat museums grew into hubs of exchange on regional identity, influenced by local cultural policy, and citizens. Yet, as this paper demonstrates, through museum professionals’ academic networks new models of historical linkage came on display.
Through a comparative overview of the public activities (exhibitions and books) of folk and rural museums across West-Germany and the UK, this paper analyses the subtle and less subtle shifts between ethnic and socio-economic narratives of rural life. It examines both prominent/national museums, as well as lesser known local ones. The paper shows that rural notions like Heimat through vivid debate were subtly redefined in the light of sociological critique. Those new definitions remain influential in current discourse.
Paper short abstract
The Latvian folklore revival movement (1970s–1990s) re-valorized and re-imagined rurality as a symbolic escape from Soviet rule. Interest in rural pasts and peasant lifeways provided spaces of alternative identities, cultural agency, and contributed to resistance during late socialism.
Paper long abstract
The folklore revival movement in Latvia (1970s–1990s) is both an emic and etic term that reflects on the heightened interest in folklore and traditional culture in large parts of society. In opposition to the staged folklore performances endorsed by Soviet cultural policy, the movement articulated countercultural creativity and alternative lifestyles. As a form of cultural resistance, it became a part of the Singing Revolution (1987–1991) that contributed to the Baltic states’ eventual independence.
The folklore revival exemplifies what Giustino, Plum, and Vari (2013) describe as “socialist escapes”: cultural practices that provided symbolic avenues of autonomy when physical escape from communist regimes was nearly impossible. In Latvia, the participants of the folklore movement, which were primarily urban youth, imagined and enacted a symbolic return to an idealized rural past. This nostalgia for imagined authenticity fostered both the search for continuity with pre-Soviet traditions and the creation of autonomous spaces outside the ideological framework of the Soviet state.
Central to the movement was the aspiration to embody folklore as a lived practice rather than as a staged performance. Relating to rurality, this was pursued by locating rural farmsteads for seasonal celebrations; conducting fieldwork with elderly residents in rural areas who preserved agrarian knowledge; and, during perestroika, engaging with environmental activism.
This paper investigates how rural lifeworlds were imagined and represented within the folklore revival movement and how such mythologized visions of rurality intersected with broader sociocultural processes of late socialism. The analysis draws on interviews, published sources, and audiovisual materials.
Paper short abstract
This paper explores narratives of the “lost” Bohemian Forest through the former German-speaking woodcutters’ settlements of Bučina and Knížecí Pláně, tracing how memories of bark beetle, displacement, and overgrowth intersect in representations of rural disappearance.
Paper long abstract
The Bohemian Forest (Šumava) has long been represented through narratives of disappearance. Already in the 1870s, following a large bark beetle outbreak and intensified logging, the then literature and journalism evoked the “vanishing” of old Šumava after this natural disturbance – a narrative that resonated again during another outbreak in the 2000s. After World War II, the forced displacement of German-speaking inhabitants and the demolition of borderland settlements close to the Iron Curtain such as Bučina (Buchwald) and Knížecí Pláně (Fürstenhut) added another layer of loss. Once embedded in forestry and agrarian life, these villages were erased from the map, their ruins overgrown, and the area later reimagined as a national park.
Today, these sites are reframed as places of remembrance and tourist destinations, where memories of rural life, forced displacement, and the value of “nature” intersect. Vegetation figures prominently in these framings: as romantic traces of a vanished world, as material to be curated or removed for more attractive and respectful representation, and as symbols in contemporary debates about nature conservation and forest management.
Drawing on ethnographic observation and analysis of media representations, the paper situates this case within broader discussions of nostalgia, touristification and more-than-human agency in memory studies. It highlights how successive narratives of disappearance and loss – cultural, political, and environmental – accumulate in the landscape, and how they shape collective imagination of rural life that is both irretrievably lost and continually commemorated.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines how rural – urban transitions are connected to elderly people’s lives and how these transitions are reflected in their more-than-human narratives in remote areas of Finland.
Paper long abstract
During the life histories of the aged, transitions from rural to urban (and back) can be subtle, abrupt or even involuntary. Events which lead to these transitions become an essential part of their life stories, part of their own biographical narratives which intertwine tightly with nature. Our study focuses on elderly people and their multispecies everyday lives. These 75+ aged people live in sparsely populated areas in Finland where forests, peatlands, hills and fells, rivers, lakes and the sea are their everyday landscapes. Currently, we have conducted ethnographic fieldwork with 14 elderly participants from different backgrounds. All of them are residents of rural areas, but their living conditions vary from a nursing home to their childhood homes, usually small farms, where some of them have recently returned to from cities. In our study, we ask: How do the life courses of these elderly people affect the ways they view and value their more-than-human environment, and what kind of emotions and affects are connected to their narrations on nature? To answer these questions, we use the methodology of sensory ethnography since sensory processes are significant in human engagement with and originate from the more-than-human world (Pink 2015; Vannini 2023). In our sensory ethnographic fieldwork, we move and spend time with the elderly in their everyday environments, and we document these with GoPro video camera. In our presentation, we will discuss how the verbal and the embodied experiences become entangled and construct narratives of nature.
Paper short abstract
Focusing on Slovakia, this research examines the UNESCO nomination of transhumance as both living heritage and a representation of disappearing rural life. It explores how values of nature are attached to pastoral practices, and how herders’ knowledge is translated or silenced.
Paper long abstract
This research examines the multinational nomination of Transhumance – the seasonal droving of livestock to UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, with a particular focus on Slovakia. It investigates how Slovak pastoral communities participate in this inscription process and how their knowledge, values, and concerns are recognised or marginalised in negotiations with institutional bodies. While the 2003 UNESCO Convention on Intangible Cultural Heritage highlights the importance of community involvement, heritage nominations remain ultimately controlled by state parties, producing power asymmetries. Slovakia’s role in the wider multinational nomination further complicates the dynamics of representation, as national agendas intersect within a single heritage-making process.
Transhumance, a practice deeply tied to agrarian cycles, seasonal rhythms, and cohabitation with non-human actors, is often represented as a “lost” or endangered way of rural life. These representations carry powerful normative and emotional connotations, evoking ideals of authenticity, tradition, and proximity to nature, even as they risk essentialising or romanticising rural livelihoods. By analysing how pastoralists’ lived knowledge of land, animals, and ecology is translated or silenced within bureaucratic frameworks, the research asks what values are mobilised, and by whom, in the inscription process.
Drawing on participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and document analysis, the study applies Miranda Fricker’s (2007) concept of epistemic injustice to explore how authority is negotiated across local, national, and international levels. It argues for moving beyond tokenistic participation towards equitable engagement with local epistemologies, opening space for more grounded and just ways of imagining rural futures.