Uncolonized - Between Man and Place
The time in which nature and humanity engaged in dialogue, a relationship of mutual taming, in many ways sustainable, became, with the turn of the twentieth century, artificial. The spatio-temporal rhythms that had long governed the rural world were suddenly cancelled, forced to conform to the new pulse that modernity imposed. These rhythms, lived and represented circularly in the rural world through the concrete enactment of myth and the eternal return of the seasons, which incessantly repeated the circular passage of time, now tended increasingly toward linearity. The chronometric flow of contemporary social complexity no longer allows humanity to aspire to any return to origins. The arrow of time knows only a single rational direction, meticulously recording the inevitable consummation of our being in the world. It abandons us to a life that no longer knows oral memory as a collective, communal model of survival.
Rural culture, transplanted into the city, had no hope of survival. The orality underlying the magical and religious world, which had nourished the long history of the countryside, was not functional to the factory. Industry saw in humanity only a useful labour force for a new model of development, one that tended to exalt and perpetuate the glorious fortunes of industry. The industrious metropolis could not pause to reflect on those aspects of collectivity that belonged to the past, to a time that did not flow for work alone, but also to refine the evolutionary process by which humanity carves out the traits that distinguish it from mere animality.
This rupture was not accidental but ideological. The "empty, homogeneous time" of modernity, as Benedict Anderson describes it, was necessary for the rise of the nation state and capitalist industry, both of which demanded synchronisation and uniformity rather than cyclical renewal.¹ In traditional communities, time was woven into cosmology: harvests were not simply agricultural events but rituals of return, ways of re-enacting origins. Mircea Eliade reminds us that archaic societies sought not to live within history but to continually re-enter sacred time, refusing to be trapped by linear progression.² Modernity, however, transformed this entirely: history became inescapable, progress an unquestioned horizon. Walter Benjamin saw in this transformation not liberation but catastrophe, the storm of progress carrying humanity helplessly into the future while piling wreckage at its feet.³
It is therefore no coincidence that we observe, with ever growing and anxious concern, how the instrumental use of time and space that modernity has bequeathed us is severely limiting the processes of civil coexistence and affective relationship. We increasingly reach for postmodern expressions, rooted in an aggressive and barbaric view of life, to explain the abnormality of behaviour and the instrumental urban vivacity that characterises the inhabitant of the metropolis.
We all find ourselves running after a world that moves faster than we do. But where are we running, and to what end? And are we truly so certain of running in the right direction, or do we simply run? Almost as though movement itself, being dynamic, productive, and efficient, were already its own reward, a useful and satisfying result in and of itself.
This collection of writings contemplates the relations between humanity and place, environment, seasons, and the passing cycle of things within the rural world. The starting point is Ermanno Olmi's film The Tree of Wooden Clogs, a work that portrays a universe excluded from everything, a world that in many ways remained uncolonised. Set in Italy in 1898, in a poor rural district, the film follows four peasant families who share the same farm complex, tilling the soil for a landowner who claims three quarters of whatever they produce. The lives of these families are spare, centred on the changing of seasons, the condition of the soil, their births, deaths, and illnesses, their faith and their traditions. Elsewhere in Italy, a social revolution is taking shape and demonstrations are filling the streets, but to these peasants, that is a world away.
My grandmother told stories not to instruct but to repeat. Her voice wove memory into the present. These stories, about harvests and weather, about the quirks of relatives and neighbours, how they would switch off the lights whenever Pippo passed, functioned less as lessons than as rituals of return. Listening to them, I felt the circularity of time: the past was never gone, but continually revisited. Today, by contrast, my days are measured not by shared stories but by deadlines, notifications, digital reminders, and above all by numbers. My memory feels scattered, outsourced to devices rather than carried in community.
The city makes this fragmentation almost inevitable. As Georg Simmel observed, the relentless overstimulation of urban life forces its inhabitants to adopt a blasé attitude, a protective indifference that permits survival, but at the cost of depth.⁴ The metropolis demands speed, efficiency, and abstraction; it offers little space for myth, ritual, or the oral traditions that once bound people to one another. To move to the rhythm of the city is to live always forward, rarely sideways or backward, rarely in the gentle loop of repetition.
Ermanno Olmi's The Tree of Wooden Clogs captures this contrast with quiet force. Set in rural Italy in 1898, the film follows peasant families tethered to soil, season, and faith. Their lives are undeniably harsh, shaped by poverty and subservience to the landowner, yet they carry within them a profound sense of rootedness. Watching them, I am struck by how hardship and continuity coexist: rituals of community, faith, and storytelling that make survival not merely bearable but meaningful. In their world, time still breathes.
I feel no nostalgia for their suffering, but I do feel tenderness for the rhythms they kept alive. Raymond Williams called such textures of life a "structure of feeling", not nostalgia, but the lived sense of solidarity and continuity that saturates experience from within.⁵ These peasants were not free in any political or economic sense, yet their lives carried a rhythm that modernity would soon dissolve. To witness this, even through film, is to sense what may have been lost: a way of living in which memory was not optional but essential, not individual but collective.
Philosophy makes clear that this loss was not incidental. Michel Foucault's notion of biopower helps us understand how modernity disciplines bodies by regulating time, labour, and life itself.⁶ To destroy cyclical time was to produce obedient workers, synchronised citizens, and rational subjects. What appears as mere acceleration is in fact colonisation: the capture of time itself by industry and state.
Yet memory remains a form of resistance. To remember is to pause, to reintroduce breath into the suffocating logic of progress. When I stop to walk slowly, to listen to an old story, or to cook a meal without haste, I feel something of that other temporality return. These are not merely personal choices; they are small refusals, gestures of reclaiming uncolonised time. They remind me that life need not be measured solely in output, but can be inhabited as rhythm, ritual, and relationship.
Perhaps this is our task today: not to reject modernity wholesale, but to soften its edges, to weave fragments of cyclical time back into our linear lives. Between the relentless forward arrow and the eternal return lies a third possibility: to live rooted in the present yet open to memory, to let history and myth coexist, to craft rhythms that sustain rather than exhaust.
To live uncolonised, then, is not to flee the modern world but to resist its totalising grip. It is to cultivate solidarity, to remember myth, to dwell in ritual, to pause amid speed. It is to insist that life must mean more than labour, that memory and affection are not relics but resources. And it is to recognise that even in the age of progress, the cyclical breath of time has not vanished. It still waits, quietly, to be remembered.
In this anthology, artists and writers have investigated different aspects of the rural world with an awareness of their own cultural constructs and political self-understanding. They have given voice to a rural civilisation by returning to its origins, bringing a gentle and profound gaze to the condition of humanity amid the frenetic flow of the world's artifices, honouring the feelings of people and of the places where nature meets man. They observe disparities and inequalities, but also the purity and the deep roots of humanity. Not nostalgia for a life made of labour, religious practice, magical rituals, nursery rhymes, and dreams, but memory, respect, and affection. Observing from below the real that we imagine before our eyes, with the experience of the present, trying to trace its contours more clearly and perhaps grasp its enduring gifts.
Footnotes
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), pp. 22–36.
Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954), pp. 10–25.
Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History," in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1968).
Georg Simmel, "The Metropolis and Mental Life" (1903).
Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), esp. his concept of "structure of feeling."
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction (New York: Pantheon, 1978).