Weaving nostalgia into sense of place: Linking memory, identity, and land in working landscapes

Abstract

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  Sense of place (SOP) in working landscapes is a conceptual framework that describes how farmers, ranchers, and other land actors connect with the land they operate, including emotional bonds, meanings, functional dependence, and identity shaping.
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  Nostalgia, a bittersweet emotional reflection on the past, weaves through SOP dimensions and other social-ecological dynamics, intensifying emotional connections, evoking memories, and reinforcing continuity across generations amid environmental and land-use change.
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  In interviews with Utah ranchers, nostalgia surfaces across place attachment (“inborn connection to the land”), physical identity (“fifth-generation rancher”), social identity (“built on the past for the future”), economic dependence (“farm was making enough to get by”), and place dependence (“now it’s bone dry”), offering a lens into their experience of place.
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  Rather than a stand-alone SOP dimension, nostalgia functions as a cross-cutting thread linking past and present, emotion to action, and memory to land management, enhancing understanding of ranchers’ relationships with working landscapes. Nostalgia can also enrich other social-ecological research in rangeland, including work on value systems, socioeconomic studies, and succession or transition planning.
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  Future research could employ multimethod approaches to capture nostalgic elements often overlooked in interviews or surveys and compare how nostalgia shapes SOP across differing land tenures or regional contexts.