Cultures of Nature in Mid-Twentieth-Century Galicia

Abstract

First, this chapter defines the concept of “cultures of nature” as a theoretical lens to explore the material and semiotic interrelations among historical processes usually studied as either cultural or environmental. The idea of cultures of nature prompts us to look at human societies and the nonhuman world in relational, performative, and material-semiotic ways. Second, this chapter explores some socio-environmental processes and cultural practices in mid-twentieth-century rural Galicia, which involved interactions between humans and wildlife. It interprets these processes and practices as conflicts or frictions among different cultures of nature. These cultures of nature are the extractivism–productivism promoted by forestry engineers who worked for the early Francoist State, subsistence peasants’ environmental inhabitation and taskscaping, and the excursionism-landscaping practiced by Galicianist intellectuals such as Ramón Otero Pedrayo.

Many thanks to Belén Hernando-Lloréns, Dr. Katarzyna Beilin, Dr. José María Tubío-Sánchez and to the editors of this volume, Benita Sampedro Vizcaya and José A. Losada Montero, for their comments on previous drafts of this article.