Eine Plattform für die Wissenschaft: Bauingenieurwesen, Architektur und Urbanistik
Eine Plattform für die Wissenschaft: Bauingenieurwesen, Architektur und Urbanistik
Pastoral entrapment and the idyllic-carceral continuum
Agrilogistics, a frame of mind and a set of behaviours that consider the environment as existing outside of humans and as inherently pliable to utilitarian and economic purposes, has determined human engagement with the countryside for centuries without second guessing the logics of its approach. Why are such agrilogistics maintained despite proving toxic to humans and other lifeforms? This essay argues that the genre of the pastoral, although based on ambivalence towards the dispossession and exclusion that structures it, forms a linchpin in sustaining agrilogistics’ feedback loops between the imaginary, the material, and the social, thereby determining who does and does not gain access to the rural idyll’s promise of ‘the good life’. Such incorporated pastoral attitudes, I argue, are caught between idyllic habits of signification and the carceral effects and experiences that these idyllic habits effect on others. The essay offers the concept of pastoral entrapment to capture the ubiquity of carceral structures in the rural while indicating the persistence with which we remain tethered to idyllic renditions that actively cover such structures up. After bringing into view the historical imbrications between the countryside as we know it today and the confinement of people, livestock, and ecosystems in general, the essay proceeds to suggest that the rise of domestic colonisation in the Netherlands in the nineteenth century was heavily invested in rural idylls and could be approached as an agrilogistic enterprise that, despite its charitable overtones, encouraged harmful feedback loops between the exploitation of colonised populations (both impoverished and racialised), the depletion of the environment, and a drive for profit. Finally, such an agrilogistic mindset can only be undone by recognising how we remain tethered to pastoral models of thought and what such pastoral entrapment really means for those at the receiving end of it.
Pastoral entrapment and the idyllic-carceral continuum
Agrilogistics, a frame of mind and a set of behaviours that consider the environment as existing outside of humans and as inherently pliable to utilitarian and economic purposes, has determined human engagement with the countryside for centuries without second guessing the logics of its approach. Why are such agrilogistics maintained despite proving toxic to humans and other lifeforms? This essay argues that the genre of the pastoral, although based on ambivalence towards the dispossession and exclusion that structures it, forms a linchpin in sustaining agrilogistics’ feedback loops between the imaginary, the material, and the social, thereby determining who does and does not gain access to the rural idyll’s promise of ‘the good life’. Such incorporated pastoral attitudes, I argue, are caught between idyllic habits of signification and the carceral effects and experiences that these idyllic habits effect on others. The essay offers the concept of pastoral entrapment to capture the ubiquity of carceral structures in the rural while indicating the persistence with which we remain tethered to idyllic renditions that actively cover such structures up. After bringing into view the historical imbrications between the countryside as we know it today and the confinement of people, livestock, and ecosystems in general, the essay proceeds to suggest that the rise of domestic colonisation in the Netherlands in the nineteenth century was heavily invested in rural idylls and could be approached as an agrilogistic enterprise that, despite its charitable overtones, encouraged harmful feedback loops between the exploitation of colonised populations (both impoverished and racialised), the depletion of the environment, and a drive for profit. Finally, such an agrilogistic mindset can only be undone by recognising how we remain tethered to pastoral models of thought and what such pastoral entrapment really means for those at the receiving end of it.
Pastoral entrapment and the idyllic-carceral continuum
Stuit, Hanneke H. (Autor:in)
The Journal of Architecture ; 28 ; 1275-1284
03.10.2023
10 pages
Aufsatz (Zeitschrift)
Elektronische Ressource
Englisch
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