Periphery, Margins and Self

Periphery, a concept originally developed in the late sixteenth century denoting a line that forms the boundary of something, gradually started to be used to define “the outer limits or edge of an area or object” or “outermost part or region within a precise boundary” and has been regarded historically by post-Enlightenment Europe as culturally inferior. ¹ Although to a lesser extent than the oriental “other,” traditionally it still represents the margins of the civilised world. According to Gavroglu, the countries of peripheral Europe are those of the Iberian Peninsula, the Balkans and the Eastern European and Scandinavian countries. ² This may explain why conservation concepts in countries such as Bulgaria in the Balkans or the more recently established European Union countries of the Baltic are rarely mentioned in pertinent publications. Even the more celebrated peripheral countries of European culture, like Greece and Spain, only found their proper place in books dealing with building conservation for the first time in Jokilehto's admired comparative approach, first published in 1999. ³ In this popular book, he also innovatively discussed countries in Asia and South America, the latter being in a sense a periphery of both Spain and North America. In Sciences in the European Periphery during the Enlightenment, Gavroglu and his coauthors discuss how, while social and conceptual repercussions of Enlightenment ideas have been systematically studied in those countries where the movement originated, only a few historical works have dealt with the introduction of these ideas to the countries in the periphery of Europe. ⁴