The occupation of beauty: Imagining nature and nation in Latvia

This article uses the case of Latvia to explore the relationship between discourses of nature, homeland, and national identity. National entrepreneurs construct homelands by infusing physical terrain with national meaning, thereby transforming landscape into "ethnoscape." The author traces this process in Latvia, beginning with the National Awakening of the 1860s, including the interwar period of independence, and the period under Soviet rule. By focusing on the intranational discursive construction of homeland, this article seeks to complicate the dominant understanding of national identity as a phenomenon linked solely to the drawing and policing of boundaries between members of the nation and outsiders.