THE RHETORIC OF THE CULTURAL LANDSCAPE OF SLOVENIAN ISTRIA

A landscape always tells a story about the people who created it, and therefore analyzing its "language" not only reveals the past and present, but also indicates what the future is likely to hold. Social concepts of landscape reveal that it is not only a material reality, but also a social and cultural document. This article focuses on presenting the landscape and history as represented in various written sources: literary, professional, and scholarly. Each type of literature may represent a source for scholarly study and enables the creation of new knowledge. This study builds upon the metaphor "the landscape is a text" written (or shaped) by society. This text is read and interpreted by both experts (i.e., scholars) and those who use the landscape. A landscape is no longer that which we see; it is a construct of that world. This study used a qualitative method known as grounded theory. The empirical part of the study was carried out using the ATLAS.ti program to analyze the extensive material. More than one thousand concepts connected with the landscape were coded, and these were combined into groups or categories. Instead of only traditional landscape components, complex content was shaped, containing traditional and other components in different connections and contexts. The following cultural landscape content groups were created: the landscape as a source of livelihood, the landscape as affiliation, alienation from the landscape, and the landscape as a rural idyll. Two concepts recur in all of these content groups, defining the landscape and at the same time serving as a synonym for it: the land and Istria.