The Waldensian Valleys
The Waldensian Valleys
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For my book, The Geopolitics of Mormonism, I have been mapping ethnoreligious minorities. An ethnoreligious group "can be defined as one where ethnic and religious identities are inseparable in the making of community." (Taras, R., Ganguly, R. (2015)). These communities tend to be endogamous, or marry within their ethnoreligious group. A forgotten example includes the Waldensians. Formed out of the religious upheaval of 12th century Southern France along with the Cathars, they were persecuted by the Catholic Church, and was forced to move into the Piedmont of Northwestern Italy. There they endured several invasions for the next three to four centuries by the French, the Piedmontese, the Papal States, and others who thought they were heretics. They managed to survive in time for the Protestant Reformation, where they were adopted as "proto-Protestants"--Protestants who were cool before it was cool to be Protestant in Europe. They endured several massacres of their colonies in Italy and Germany, pastors, and missionaries, but it was here in the upper valleys of the Piedmont that they survived because they could sustain a guerilla war and resistance against their French and Italian occupiers. The rugged terrain limited points of access to their homeland, and is one of the principal reasons they survived. I used the Focal Statistics tool with the Range setting to show the ruggedness, blue meaning least rugged, yellow meaning more rugged, and red meaning most rugged. In other words there is greatest variability between types of terrain in the red zones than in the blue or yellow zones.
Here are some really great examples of ethnoreligious groups pulled from this page on Wikipedia:
I'm mapping them to help understand where, how, and why conflicts between ethnoreligious groups happen, and to figure out how to reduce conflict between such groups. Specifically, I theorize that successful ethnoreligious groups migrate to defensible mountainous terrain to protect themselves. I use the disciplines of religious and military geography, human/cultural geography, conflict geography, and political geography to explain how and why each one succeeded and failed. I use the tools of conflict analysis, modern geospatial technologies, and peacebuilding to show how and why each one failed. The most successful, such as the Waldensians, Sikhs, Druze, Jews, and the Latter-Day Saints (Mormons), molded a large defensible region to help defend themselves. The failures such as the Radical Anabaptists of Munster, Germany, or the Cathars of Southern France, or the Bogomils of Bosnia fell to European siege technologies, and the inherent instability of borderlands. I used a 10m DEM raster from TINitaly to help me create the giant raster needed to map the watershed above, and then the flow accumulation, flow direction, and the watershed delineation tool in ArcGIS Pro to define the Waldensian valleys of the Valle Chisone, and the Valle Germanasca. I will probably use a dataset of Waldensian settlements to help define the Waldensian Cultural Region using kernel density in the future in an updated version of this webpage.
If you want to download the PDF of this map, try it here.
A map using the USGS K3 mountain classification, where blue or 31 equals the most mountainous.
"The K3 resource was developed using a finer spatial resolution (250 m) DEM and feature-based extraction algorithms with variable NAW sizes used to extract a set of global Hammond landforms with 16 landform types, of which four were mountain classes. E. H. Hammond was a pioneer of landform mapping and described three parameters for distinguishing different types of plains, hills, mountains, and tablelands. The three classification parameters are slope, relative relief, and profile, where the profile parameter assesses the amount of relatively flat terrain in upland locations to delineate tablelands. The 250 m global Hammond landforms product was based on an automated extraction of classes in a GIS environment, and the K3 mountains product was an export of the four mountain classes into a global mountains datalayer. "
Karagulle, D., C. Frye, R. Sayre, S. Breyer, P. Aniello, R. Vaughan, and D. Wright. 2017. Modeling global Hammond landform regions from 250-m elevation data. Transactions in GIS, DOI: 10.1111/tgis.12265
https://rmgsc.cr.usgs.gov/gme/
Taras, R., Ganguly, R. (2015). Understanding Ethnic Conflict. United Kingdom: Taylor & Francis.
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