Vietos dvasia: prijaukinimas ar medžioklė?

LTReikšminiai žodžiai: Vietos dvasia; Genius loci; Paveldosauga.

ENThe visual and symbolic landscape has special locations the attraction or mystery of which, or the fear they give rise to, have always made it possible to relate them to the actions of otherworldly good and evil spirits. The paper discusses the multi-faceted and polysemous links of the phenomenon of the 'spirit of the place' with different cultural, anthropological and philosophical contexts. The paper opens with the analysis of the archaic Roman phenomenon of genius loci, which actually reflected the antique religious worldview. It is also compared with the feeling of the sacrality of a location in other traditional cultures which allowed some of them to be seen as hierophanies, and others, on the contrary, as cursed and demonic, and therefore forbidden places. Rapid processes in the change of the living environment, which had begun under the impact of modernization and were inspired by industrialization, urbanization and the seculiarization of society, had a strong effect on the revival of the 'spirit of the place' in modern times. The romantic reaction to these processes, which were ruining and traumatizing traditional way of living and environment triggered bringing back to memory the term of genius loci. However, romanticists perceived it more like the catalyst of going back to the state of culture which was supra-temporal, pure and untouched by civilization, than one of the attributes of the temporality and historicity of those locations.In this respect the romantic approach differed from both the archaic and from the contemporary postmodern approach which, taking into account the accelerating processes of dehumanization, standardization and commoditization of locations, emphasizes the need to take care of the preservation of their distinctive nature and special atmosphere. This premise has been established in international documents on heritage protection. Preserved by traditional societies, the holistic approach to the living environment that connects people and animals, land and culture could be the essential source of revival of 'the sense of location' and 'the identity of place' in the conditions of the 'displacement' brought about by globalization. The new, dialogic, notion of the heritage makes it possible to transcend the dichotomies of nature/culture, material/immaterial values, and experts/society that have been established in postmodern heritage protection, thus qualitatively updating the category of genius loci and turning it into one of the essential components of heritage protection, ecology, architecture, and landscape management. [From the publication]