The eye and the hand: Professional sensitivity and the idea of an aesthetics of work on the land

Academic aesthetics is guided by the visual and notions of distance. In this article I want to study how an aesthetics of work, of process and proximity, could function. I am asking why the peasant population has been always been supposed not to have an aesthetic appreciation of their land. I contend that they had some kind of appreciation, but that this was conceived expressed in terms fundamentally different from the academic and pictorial landscape aesthetics. With the term 'professional' sensitivity and examples from the Swiss Alps and Southern France, I discuss the question of how an archaeology of an autochthonous aesthetics can be done.