Action and Noise Over a Hundred Years: The Making of a Nature Region

Abstract

This article explores the cultures of nature and the body in the Norfolk Broads region of eastern England, where relations of body and nature are central to culture and economy. Themes of moral geography and history are shown to run through the production of Broadland as a nature region over the past 100 years. The article discusses the contrasting presentation of the region as a space of improving and non-improving pleasure, the assertion of the former entailing a rejection of the latter as something going against the cultural grain of a nature region. Both are considered in terms of the particular modes of corporeality promoted, and the balance of mind and body held to be cultivated or disturbed. The possibilities of bringing displaced popular pasts back into the regional story are explored. The article concludes by reflecting on how the balance between freedom and regulation in moral geographies of conduct has been tipped over by those demanding either disciplinary regulation or bodily freedom.