Place Naming and Place Making: The Social Construction of Rural Landscape

Abstract

A social constructivist approach has been applied in our case study analysis in order to explore the sense of place and the perception of landscape of local inhabitants. Fieldwork was carried out in three rural Hungarian microregions selected on the basis of a typology developed through statistical analysis. The central question of the study assumes that the way people name the place where they live is an expression of their sense of place and that it is related to their perceptions about narrower locality and also the general attitudes they have towards the rural or urban landscape. To prove this hypothesis, we examined, in three microregions, how people name their own living area, how they relate to the countryside and rural way of life, and how they describe their own locality in their own words (positive and negative aspects). Based on analyses, three different landscape perception types were outlined and were seen to be interconnected with three ways of place naming: (i) a “close-to-nature” perception in relation to geographical place names; (ii) a “cultural-historical” identification in connection with cultural names and (iii) “lifestyle-service” focused landscape perception linked to administrative place naming.