Landscapes Beyond Land: Routes, Aesthetics, Narratives 9780857456724

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LANDSCAPES BEYOND LAND

EASA Series Published in Association with the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) Please see full volume listing in the back matter.

Landscapes beyond Land

Routes, Aesthetics, Narratives

Edited by

Arnar Árnason, Nicolas Ellison, Jo Vergunst and Andrew Whitehouse

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

Published in 2012 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2012, 2015 Arnar Árnason, Nicolas Ellison, Jo Vergunst and Andrew Whitehouse First paperback edition published in 2015 All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Landscapes beyond land : routes, aesthetics, narratives / edited by Arnar Árnason…[et. al.]. — 1st ed.    p. cm.    Includes bibliographical references and index.    ISBN 978-0-85745-671-7 (hardback : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-178238-915-6 (paperback : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-85745-672-4 (ebook)    1. Landscape assessment. 2. Landscape changes. 3. Geographical perception. I. Árnason, Arnar.   GF90.L3814 2012   304.2’3—dc23 2012001637 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Printed on acid-free paper ISBN: 978-0-85745-671-7 hardback ISBN: 978-1-78238-915-6 paperback ISBN: 978-0-85745-672-4 ebook

Contents

List of Figures

vii

Preface and Acknowledgements

ix

Introduction Jo Vergunst , Andrew Whitehouse , Nicolas Ellison and Arnar Árnason

1

1. Walking the Past in the Present Christopher Tilley

15

2. ‘A Painter’s Eye Is Just a Way of Looking at the World’: Botanic Artist Roger Banks Griet Scheldeman

33

3. Encountering Glaciers: Two Centuries of Stories from the Saint Elias Mountains, Northwestern North America Julie Cruikshank

49

4. Fences, Pathways and a Peripatetic Sense of Community: Kinship and Residence amongst the Nivaclé of the Paraguayan Chaco Suzanne Grant 5. Elements of an Amerindian Landscape: The Arizona Hopi Patrick Pérez 6. Thalloo My Vea: Narrating the Landscapes of Life in the Isle of Man Sue Lewis

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83

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vi ◆ Contents

7. Cairns in the Landscape: Migrant Stones and Migrant Stories in Scotland and its Diaspora Paul Basu

116

8. Beholding the Speckled Salmon: Folk Liturgies and Narratives of Ireland’s Holy Wells Celeste Ray

139

9. How the Land Should Be: Narrating Progress on Farms in Islay, Scotland Andrew Whitehouse

160

10. Visible Relations and Invisible Realms: Speech, Materiality and Two Manggarai Landscapes Catherine Allerton

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11. The Shape of the Land Tim Ingold

197

Notes on Contributors

209

Figures

2.1 A generous splash of vodka has just livened up the sauce. 2.2 The ‘real’ Roger Banks with pet pug in front of Lobster Cottage, Crail. 6.1 Green hills by the sea; looking towards the Stacks from Stroin Vuigh. © Peter Killey. Reprinted with permission. 6.2 A Manx tholtan, near Cashtal yn Ard. © Peter Killey. Reprinted with permission. 6.3 A tractor at work on a farm near St John’s. © Peter Killey. Reprinted with permission. 6.4 The Mount Murray development, Santon. © Peter Killey. Reprinted with permission. 7.1 ‘The moon looks abroad from her cloud. The grey-skirted mist is near; the dwelling of the ghosts!’ J. S. Cotman, ‘Moonlight’, 1803, inspired by Ossian’s Temora. © Trustees of the British Museum. 7.2 Clach-an-éig in the foreground, with Torr-an-riachaidh to the right in the middle distance. Kildonan, Sutherland. © Paul Basu. 7.3 ‘Culloden Field’ c. 1890, showing the clan grave markers and memorial cairn prior to the felling of the conifer plantation and rerouting of the B9006 road. © Francis Frith Collection. 7.4 Stone-clad panels interpreting the cairn-like settlement remains at Rosal, Strathnaver. The township was ‘cleared’ between 1814 and 1819. © Paul Basu. 7.5 The surviving fragment of the Duke of Gordon cairn, which recalls the emigrants’ farewell on St Columba’s Day, 1838. Kingussie, Inverness-shire. © Paul Basu. 7.6 Unveiling of the ‘cairn of remembrance’ at Badbae, Caithness, November 1912. © Highland Council.

37 47 98 103 104 109

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128 129

viii ◆ List of Figures

7.7 The Grandfather Mountain Memorial Cairn, MacRae Meadows, Linville, North Carolina. © Grandfather Mountain Highland Games. 7.8 Members of the International Clan Macpherson Association gathered around the memorial cairn dedicated to Cluny Macpherson of the ’45. Glentruim, Badenoch, Inverness-shire. © Jerome LeRoy Lewis. 9.1 A typical Islay hill farm, with the rougher hill ground in the distance and improved pastures in the foreground. 9.2 The Islay Creamery after closure. 9.3 Freshly cut grass for making into silage. 10.1 An agricultural ritual in a new field, with flat stone and tripods on which to place offerings. 10.2 Katarina sowing corn in a kinswoman’s field.

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133 164 165 170 187 191

Preface and Acknowledgements

Landscapes beyond land? Do we mean far away or stretching out over the horizon? Or beyond the surface properties of land, into the social and cultural realm that anthropologists are so famously interested in? Well, neither. The landscapes described in this book are sometimes picturesque and certainly infused by social and cultural processes, but for us they are defined by neither of these. Instead they go beyond land to involve the relations between people, animals and plants – ultimately between beings and ways of being – in a variety of locales. People tell stories, hold to aesthetic values and engage in political activity through their relationships to land, and, while building on previous work in the anthropology of landscape, this book shows how they do so. Our book draws together papers from a series of three two-day seminars that we ran with funding from the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council’s programme on Landscape and Environment. We also ran an opening seminar at the 2006 European Association of Social Anthropologists conference in Bristol, UK, entitled ‘Landscapes for Life: Integrating Experiential and Political Landscapes’. Of the AHRC-funded seminars, ‘Routes, Boundaries, Journeys’ and ‘Landscape and Narrative’ took place at the University of Aberdeen, while ‘Ecological Perception and Landscape Aesthetics’ took place at the Collège de France. We thank Philippe Descola in particular for hosting us in Paris. The seminars were extremely lively affairs and we hope that the spirit of discussion and debate has been transferred to this book. Although it has taken some time to come to fruition, it has been a pleasure to work with these chapters and we hope readers will enjoy them too. We thank all the seminar participants and contributors to this book for their efforts. Arnar Árnason, Nicolas Ellison, Jo Vergunst and Andrew Whitehouse Aberdeen, February 2011

Introduction Landscapes beyond Land Jo Vergunst, Andrew Whitehouse, Nicolas Ellison and Arnar Árnason

‘Landscape’ has been one of the keywords of anthropology and allied disciplines over the last twenty years. As anthropologists sought to move beyond what they saw as troublesome Cartesian dichotomies, ‘landscape’, along with ‘the body’ and ‘emotion’ amongst others, was put forward as a concept and focus that necessarily brought together the physical and the cultural, the mental and the material. When inviting the contributors to this collection to demonstrate how they are exploring landscape in their ethnographic research, our starting point has been Pierre Bourdieu’s insistence that anthropological accounts should be truthful to individual or subjective experiences while at the same addressing the question of how these particular experiences are possible in the first place, that is as ‘a science of the dialectical relations between the objective structures to which the objectivist mode of knowledge gives access and the structured dispositions within which those structures are actualised and which tend to reproduce them’ (1977: 3, emphasis in original). The contributions to Landscapes beyond Land show that it is through activities – and in particular, making routes, forming aesthetics and narrating – that landscape emerges as an experience, as a category, as a target of political projects and as the subject of judgements. The direct, experiential qualities of these activities, their performance in the world, need to be understood as being at the heart of landscape, yet, as we argue here, activity also gathers up symbolism and objective structures and processes into the landscape. The emphasis on activity in this book follows from Kenneth Olwig’s investigations into the etymological and political history of the concept of landscape, and specifically its links to the Germanic Landschaften. These were small, place-based political entities within modern-day Germany, the Netherlands and Denmark in the Middle Ages. Laws were customary and so were not written down but practised within the landscape: ‘The physi-

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cal manifestation of that place was a reflection of the common laws that defined the polity as a political landscape’ (Olwig 2002: 9). As such, land and polity shared common traits and could not be thought of in isolation from each other. Olwig (2002: 16) draws a sharp contrast between the ‘quantitative geometric, spatial, rationality of the map’ and the ‘qualitative logic based on an analogic “platial” imagination’ of the Landschaften, yet shows how discourse and practice based on both may be present today. For us, the possibility of landscape being intrinsically ‘political’, or ‘dwelt-in’ in the latter of these senses focuses us on landscape as emergent in relation to the activities of those that live there. Despite Olwig’s reevaluation of the etymology of ‘landscape’, in modern English usage it often appears to hover between a natural-science ‘form of the environment’, and an art-historical concern with how the environment is represented. One purpose of this book, then, is to move beyond such narrowly prescribed conceptualisations to explore different landscape traditions in ethnographic and theoretical terms. In the seminar series that this book is based on, we began by considering the differences between British and French traditions of landscape study. In French, as in other Latin languages, paysage was a neologism coined within new artistic canons of landscape painting. ‘Landscape’ came to denote a progressive distancing between subject and object (or person and environment) through the influence of perspectival art and centralised nation-state authority in Europe and its colonies (Olwig 2002). This understanding is reflected in Daniels and Cosgrove’s influential collection The Iconography of Landscape. Daniels and Cosgrove begin their introduction by stating: ‘A landscape is a cultural image, a pictorial way of representing, structuring or symbolising surroundings’ (1988: 1). In both Germanic and Latin languages the different meanings have become conflated in common speech, and paysage has also come to mean the physical landscape for physical geographers in France. Anthropologists and cultural geographers agree that the European aesthetics of perspectival art is far from universal and should not ethnocentrically be projected onto other people’s relations to the environment or landscape. Augustin Berque has demonstrated that the latter pictorial and aesthetic landscape sensibility developed in China in the 4th century AD, as well as in Renaissance Europe, so this notion of landscape needs to be understood as emerging in particular cultural contexts (Berque 1995, 1999; see also Roger 1997; Descola 2005). French anthropologists and some cultural geographers have therefore chosen to discard the use of paysage in talking of more general relationships, instead favouring other terms such as environment, milieu or von Uexküll’s concept of Umwelt. Such choices are aligned with different research agendas. Illustrating the latter position, Descola’s research on landscape consists in asking the following: if paysage or landscape in the European art tradition expresses Western naturalism (the nature-culture and subject-object divides) in depiction, then,

Introduction ◆ 3

how are other forms of relation and identification with the environment (such as animism and totemism) expressed in depiction? And how do these ‘symbolic’ expressions relate with people’s practical engagement in the environment? In anthropology written in English, however, ‘landscape’ has been kept as a general term which, once its limited meaning in European art history is recognised and set aside, seems productive because of its very ambiguity in presenting both material interactions and cultural understandings. We have decided to follow this general usage while underlining the possible misunderstandings this can create in conjunction with more specific notions of landscape, such as the scenic paysage. Without imposing one usage of the word throughout the book, we have asked authors to specify their understanding and use of landscape when necessary. Probably one of the most convincing implications of the ‘all-encompassing’ approach to landscape, closer to that developed by Olwig, is the theoretical basis it provides for doing away with such dichotomies as between culture and nature (Ingold 2000). In a phenomenological mode, we may investigate how the propensity to dwell, to make one’s way through the world and to make oneself at home in it, is tied up with relationships to one’s surroundings. This is to treat landscape not as an object of study, but as a way of reckoning – summing up – the temporal, relational qualities of the world. It goes without saying of course that cultural diversity of relations with the environment is tremendous, as other ethnographic collections have shown (e.g., Bender 1993; Hirsch and O’Hanlon 1995; Voisenat 1995; Bender and Winer 2001; Ellison and Martínez Mauri 2009). In this book we aim to explore the multifarious cultural potentialities of landscape (Hirsch 1995: 4), without losing the activities, perceptions and sensual interactions that are at the heart of lived experience. A formulation that became particularly influential for us is derived from Martin Heidegger’s suggestion that landscape is the earth ‘gathered’, for example by a ‘thing’ that draws its relations in time and space into its being. His example in the essay ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’ is a bridge that crosses a river and in doing so gathers the two banks and their hinterlands together (Heidegger 1978: 354). A thing is present through its relations and associations in the world rather than as a neutral or free-floating entity: the bridge is a bridge because it affords passage from one bank to another. Importantly, this sense of being denies any separation of the ‘essence’ of a thing from its ‘expression’ as a symbol. For Heidegger a thing gathers together within its essence all that belongs to it. In practical terms, this means that the user of something deals with it directly rather than as a before-and-after perception followed by understanding or symbolising. Such reasoning surely works for landscape itself as much as for any identifiable ‘thing’ within it. If we were to take such an approach, then landscape has a being in itself. To say that a landscape ‘is’ thus necessarily refers to this gathering of relations within itself that is apparent to those

4 ◆ Jo Vergunst, Andrew Whitehouse, Nicolas Ellison, Arnar Árnason

who live and move in a place. What follows from this is not a disentangling of the symbolic from the physical aspects of place, or the subjective from the objective, but an inquiry into how, for different people and in different ways, paths of relations serve to open up the complexity of landscape, while recognising that only partial views and transient sounds are possible. Christopher Tilley in this volume uses the idea of gathering to ground his account of walking in landscape: ‘Walking gathers known past histories, practices and traditions as for the most part, following a path, I am walking where others have walked, in the footsteps of previous generations, the ancestors’. The walk is above all about bringing the landscape together, rather than sectioning it up. This seems to require a holistic approach to person-and-environment, fundamental to phenomenology but that can result in a separation of lifeworld and ‘structure’. We would rather conceive of landscape in such a way that it contributes to the broader issue of engaging with both personal experience and social structure. An example of the alternative approaches that authors contributing to this volume have taken to this challenge arises from the different ways in which Ingold and Basu discuss the effects of cairns and mounds in the landscape. For Ingold a mound, such as a cairn, is fundamentally not designed but emergent – a kind of living and growing earth that is quite different to the ‘structurally coherent’ and complete monument that might be envisaged by the heritage industry. Basu, on the other hand, argues that cairns are ‘material metaphors’ that draw together connections and meanings through time and space. The experience of the cairn is thus structured by this distilling of narratives of ‘Scottishness’ into the emergent form of stones. There is in both these chapters an oscillation between experience and structure – a point we will return to later. For the people our contributors have worked with, the activities of landscape take place in the phenomenal world, yet have gathered within them the potential for symbolised discursive mediations. Contributors centre their analysis ethnographically on how people actively bring their worlds together through such processes of landscape. The contributors thus explore landscape as a process that arises from activities in addition to investigating many different landscapes. We set our contributors the initial task of responding to three more specific themes in the anthropology of landscape: the ways that routes are made, senses of aesthetics are formed and depicted, and land and experience are narrated. The rest of this introduction explores how these activities become significant as linked ways of knowing through which people engage with landscape. While some of the chapters focus mainly on one of these activities, most articulate their interrelatedness. Contributors emphasise how landscapes may become known through movement and journeying rather than stasis (in particular Tilley, Grant, Basu and Ray). They explore the depiction and aesthetics of landscape as they happen on the ground, describing the diversity of landscape not only from the ethno-

Introduction ◆ 5

graphic evidence but also in the variety of uses that scholars make of the concept, such as from ‘representation’ to ‘lifeworld’ (in particular Scheldeman, Pérez and Ingold). And they investigate the relationship of narrative to landscape: how landscapes are constituted and recollected in the stories people tell of their journeys through them and how, in turn, these stories are embedded in landscaped forms (for example, Cruikshank, Basu, Lewis, Whitehouse and Allerton). In a number of chapters the theme of ritual as an activity in landscape also emerges, particularly in the form of pilgrimage (Allerton, Pérez, Basu and Ray). Crucially, the book examines how these activities are interwoven as ways in which people engage with and come to know the world around them.

Routes, Boundaries and Journeys Routes are the ways we go, and the ways we think we can go. ‘Ways’ in English, in common with other Germanic languages, has a very appealing ambiguity in referring both to the path and the manner of movement along it. The same is true by analogy for ‘route’, which connotes both the established (routine) direction of someone moving along a road or path, and the potential for finding a way to somewhere new. A necessary implication of a route is therefore the maintenance or creation of a path. Landscape with routes is about paths, or possibilities, lines that come together and diverge and tie together places (Ingold 2007a). But we have to equally consider the manner of moving. For Basu, for example, there is both the movement of a landscape form – the cairn – and the movement of the Scottish diaspora, as both appear and reappear in proximity. For Tilley walking is the means of embodying the material experience of landscape par excellence. Ray, meanwhile describes the ritual movement of pilgrims through a landscape of holy wells, which themselves are more mobile than one might at first assume. Boundaries, on the other hand, are the limits, the end of the way, and where we cannot go without making some kind of transgression. Where a landscape of routes is made by links, a landscape of boundaries is about fixity, a delimitation of inside and outside and, often, a cartographic rationality (see Grant’s chapter in this volume). This is the contrast between the line of a route, which is travelled along, and the line of a boundary, which curtails movement. Boundaries can affect the area between them as well, by inducing a kind of homogeneity. A farmer’s fence could be an archetypal boundary, describing the land within it as field to be managed by the farmer, and outside it as hillside for free and open ranging. The field, of course, is an internally uniform area that is available for working on, and this set of meanings has methodological implications for ethnographers as well, which have been the subject of critique (Gupta and Ferguson 1997). As Grant points out, for the Nivacle of the Paraguayan Chaco, their past

6 ◆ Jo Vergunst, Andrew Whitehouse, Nicolas Ellison, Arnar Árnason

and present culture is divided in the landscape by fence lines that have ordered the arid landscape into fields and enclosures. We also suggest that it is the interaction of routes, boundaries and indeed journeys that form what we come to know as our research fields. If crossed, boundaries are, as Heidegger notes, the beginning of something new. Beyond the edge of the map is the place for exploration, or for trespassing or poaching. Overcoming a boundary in one’s life, in a rather different sense, might relate to entering a new kind of personhood or status. Boundaries are often mediated by rituals that happen as much in places, or in landscape, as they do in the life course. Here we find the possibilities of liminal stages, limited or exclusive access and secret places. The narratives and archival sources about the St Elias Icefields in Yukon studied by Cruikshank give a particularly vivid ethnographic example of how peoples’ lives and landscapes are interwoven precisely in liminal stages. This can be a case of life and death, as in ritual prohibitions when approaching a glacier. Many boundaries and liminal changes are juxtaposed here: the liminality of the colonial encounter, international and subnational state borders as well as the moving boundaries of receding icefields. In these narratives, liminal stages and the dangers they entail, as in the case of the collapse of glacier dams, appear to be an inherent part of the movement of both people and glaciers. Journeys are what actually happens as we go along. They are the unfolding moments of movement that do not so much link together past and future as expand the present. We are in a journey, the entire course of which is ‘now’ in the sense that we are leaving somewhere and we are getting somewhere else, in a continuous present. The exception of course is when we cross boundaries, and there we may have definitive points of departure and arrival. But to experience a journey in its entirety is about a rather different kind of temporality to past-present-future. It also questions the notion of landscape as a kind of receptacle for the past where we can ‘read history’, perhaps. A journeyed landscape is about the temporal and spatial co-mingling of all sorts of presents, which leave their traces for others to find, as Tilley describes through his own practice of archaeology. According to Allerton, for villagers in Manggerai in eastern Indonesia, settlements coalesce the history of ancestral journeys into the present. We can then consider the techniques that enable the journey to continue. Some of the most interesting of these are found in the contact between the traveller and their surroundings. Footsteps, for example, get formed through the textural interaction between foot (and perhaps a shoe) and the ground, where landscape is about grip and slipperiness, solidity and crumbliness, where we may sink in or have to swim through. So, as both Tilley and Ingold argue herein, it is through footsteps that walkers come to know vital things about their environment. As Grant points out for the Nivacle, journeying is a means to become knowledgeable, and also to create and maintain kinship relations. In other cases we may have

Introduction ◆ 7

to deal with maps, clothing or modern technologised transport systems (Urry 2007). There may also be distinctive kinds of vision that allow journeying to carry on. Rarely, it might be a gaze or a sighting on afar, a static view on to landscape. More likely, it might be a pause to look around, a particular kind of ‘gathering’ with the eyes to recognise or become familiar with the land. Vergunst is reminded of a story he was told by a walker who trekked across Scotland in the company of a donkey who lived at the children’s charity where she worked. The donkey would stop every few minutes and look back at where they had just come, as if remembering how to get home. This kind of looking itself makes and remembers a route through the landscape, to progress the journey. Vision during movement is not a singular gaze, but involves glances, distractions, and a specific and lively being-aware rather than the generalised awareness of consciousness. That is, by being careful and by looking out for the tree roots or cracked paving stones, we are paying attention rather than falling into the reverie that the rhythms of journeying can so easily bring on. Finally, while roads and routes structure the ways in which we can move through landscape, we also have to be aware of the possibilities for improvisation in all of this. As the journey moves on, the route can be made or remade in a new direction. Even commuters, whose movements are otherwise so controlled by the need to reach their destination and by the environments they journey through, have the opportunity to try things differently and sometimes are forced to do so by circumstances outside their control. It might even be that these improvisational moments, where we are faced with the unexpected, the unwanted or the newly opportune, provide a rich seam for understanding the gathering of ‘structural’ phenomena into the lived reality of landscape.

The Aesthetics of Landscape Landscapes can be powerful. The chapters in this book describe how people are affected by the places that they inhabit in all kinds of ways. To take a few examples, Ray and Pérez show how ritual behaviour can be oriented by the landscape through sacred sites, while Cruikshank describes life amongst glaciers that are sentient and able to engage in social relationships that demand respectful behaviour. No less vividly, Whitehouse’s farmers on the Scottish island of Islay have a clear notion of how the land ought to be that is shaped by previous work in it. We might think of the land imprinting this notion onto the farmers as much as the other way round. Might these all be examples of the aesthetics of landscape? A way towards answering this question is through Howard Morphy’s discussion of the categories of ‘indigenous’ and ‘contemporary’ art. Morphy notes the tension in how indigenous art is presented between the art

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market, where an anthropological approach to exhibiting is eschewed because of its ‘othering’ of the objects, and anthropologists who decry the ethnocentrism of including such objects within the Western category of art in the first place (Morphy 2007: 175). Part of the problem as Morphy describes it is that art is often held to be a ‘unitary category of objects … to be viewed together as an exclusive set specifically for their aesthetic effect’ (2007: 174). Tied to the realm of art objects, aesthetics is just a judgement of beauty or ugliness of an object within this category. It is a distanced appreciation reliant, in a Kantian metaphysics, on the rational and disinterested judgement of the mind (recalling Olwig’s rationality of the map). But if it is grounded in relations with landscape, aesthetics might be thought of as being much closer both to the embodied person and the flows of sociality within which they are living. To take a farming example that some of Lewis’s informants on the Isle of Man might recognise, judging the straightness of a ploughed furrow is not to do with an ‘object’, but is instead a practice, an expression of how well the plough has been set and pulled, of the farmer’s history of working the land, and of the care with which they look after their machinery. Indeed, a furrow cannot be an object – it is rather a folding over of the land onto itself by way of the plough. Unpacking the idea of the gaze in landscape, John Wylie (2006), following Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty, describes at a conceptual level how ‘folding’, which might be glossed as the implication of self and landscape in each other, works along with ‘depth’ as ‘the potentiality or incipiency of the actualised situation of gazing’. Our surroundings have within them the potential for engagement, the coming-together of person and landscape. Wylie continues: ‘Thus landscape is neither simply seeing nor seen, neither an object seen by a gaze nor a particular way of seeing. It concerns the immanent relation which inspires these orders’ (2006: 531). Aesthetics, as just such an immanent relation in landscape, is a term that gets us closer to the affects and sensibilities described ethnographically by our authors. The meanings and moralities that our authors describe through aesthetics are immanent in the engagement of people and landscape. A clear contrast has therefore to be drawn between the aesthetics of landscape art, which is what influences the gaze and creates a demand for the picturesque, and an aesthetics of the land embedded in an active engagement with the environment through daily practices. These contrasting aesthetics can be seen in Lewis’s study on the Isle of Man, with on one hand the demand for scenic views in property developments for newcomers on the island and on the other the farmers’ and local inhabitants’ aesthetics of specific places that are charged with meaning through daily practices, such as farming or journeying, and that are also recounted in stories of the past about these same places. If, therefore, the notion of aesthetics can be pulled away from the qualities of an art object, and especially those defined within Western fine art, then these possibili-

Introduction ◆ 9

ties are available. Furthermore, if we extend aesthetics into the nonvisual realms, as Cruikshank, Lewis and Allerton do, then the concept can be made richer still. A distinctive emphasis that a number of our contributors develop concerns the relationship between landscape aesthetics and ethics. What this makes clear is that for many people their ideas about how landscape should be are bound up with ideas of appropriate relations and actions. Whitehouse, for example, describes how for farmers in Islay an ethic of productivity that could alter the appearance of the landscape was not perceived as a change but as marking continuity with previous generations of farmers who shared the same ethic. A productive farming landscape was thus a means through which appropriate relations with the land and the past were made and expressed. Grant, meanwhile, explains how for Nivacle beauty is not understood as an external ideal but as emerging from a ‘virtue-centred ethics’. Beauty, whether in behaviour, the land or in objects, is produced through the embodied skills needed to conduct everyday tasks and activities. A clean, straight path is thus beautiful because it is indicative of knowledgeable and good behaviour. Two of our papers in particular contrast and complement each other in their approaches to aesthetics. Scheldeman recounts a series of encounters with an artist in Scotland who has long been concerned with nature. The artist has travelled around the world, visiting the sublime landscapes of Antarctica, and has recreated scenes and features of ‘nature’ for popular consumption. The reader might expect an anthropological reading of the gaze and the process of creating ‘art objects’, in Morphy’s sense, from the landscape, but instead the artist exemplifies the gathering of landscape that Tilley describes herein, i.e., bringing the world close to hand and exploring it through art practice. It is an ontology of presencing – ‘seeing from within’ – rather than representation. Furthermore, a rather different form of consumption is invoked: in a ‘personal aesthetics of landscape’, ‘he paints what he sees and cooks what he finds’. At the same time, this very personal account actually questions Tilley’s claim of the possibility of directly connecting either with the past or with someone else’s experience of place through the direct experience of landscape. Pérez meanwhile explores the aesthetics of landscape rather differently, as his study is partly grounded in French anthropology of paysage and partly in phenomenology. Drawing on his work amongst the Arizona Hopi, he shows how shared aesthetics of colour, perspective and scale are reminiscent of, yet also different from, the categories of Western ‘fine art’ landscape. This aesthetics shapes Hopi practices and attitudes to their surroundings. They do not traditionally paint landscapes as such, but for them the morning sunrise is a kind of painting. Gazing out over the mesa is an occasion for appreciation and prayer. Their shared understandings of landscape seem sometimes familiar to a reader imbued with a Western

10 ◆ Jo Vergunst, Andrew Whitehouse, Nicolas Ellison, Arnar Árnason

landscape aesthetic, and Pérez makes connections to that tradition as a means to dismantle the sole association of the West with (in the narrow sense) the aesthetic appreciation of landscape. So the aesthetics of landscape may confound expectations both conceptually and empirically. By not limiting themselves to the interpretation of objects, the authors show how all kinds of alternative aesthetic relations become apparent. Notions of aesthetics can be a useful way to consider affect and power in landscape, and indeed the politics of landscape are also close by. Julie Cruikshank presents what might sadly be a more traditional anthropological scenario than the two cases just described: she finds that the tourist aestheticisation of St Elias National Park directly competes with the conceptions of the Aboriginal residents. The Tlingit dwelt-in lifeworld is in tension with the tourists’ distanced judgement of beauty and the sublime. Perhaps a recognition of the powerful nature of landscapes for the people who inhabit them as a kind of aesthetic might help equalise the ways of seeing, and ways of being, not so much ‘in’ (as if positioned in scenery) as ‘through’ and ‘with’ the landscape.

Landscape and Narrative We also find narrative immensely useful in approaching landscape anthropologically, being a further activity associated with landscape. Straightforwardly narrative is the product of narrating, but this narrating might also be conducted through other activities: journeying, making music, building and, ultimately, living. ‘Narrative’ in its broadest sense is a meaningful sequence of information, or events, in which the ordering and unfolding of that information is integral to the meaning of the account. One might refer to this ordering as an emplotment (Carrithers 1992), and such orderings are extremely important to human beings. As Bateson noted, ‘People … think in terms of stories’ (1979: 12). But people not only think in stories, they also live in stories. As Rapport and Overing observe, ‘Our conscious lives constitute dramas in which our selves, our societies and our reference groups are central characters, characters whose significance we interpret even as we live out their stories’ (2000: 285). And as we go about in the world, inhabiting landscapes and journeying within them, stories unfold through the activities of telling, moving and acting. Earlier we argued that routes, boundaries and journeys are a means, in Heidegger’s terms, of gathering relations together. In this sense, narratives are also gatherings of related components generated through our activities in the landscape. These components are not just about the landscape but are in the landscape and in our experience of that landscape. We argue then, that narrative is the process of gathering relations with landscape par excellence. By narrating landscape and landscaping narrative, relations of personal experience are combined with the broader

Introduction ◆ 11

normative, economic, political and physical processes that contribute to structuring those experiences. Creating, telling and interpreting narratives are all activities that can recombine potentially oppositional foci and experiences of scale, such as movement and fixity, time and space and local and global. The sorts of ‘entangled narratives’ that Cruikshank describes complicate and enrich glacial landscapes in such a way as to undermine assumptions of a pristine nature. According to Lewis, Manx narratives of place draw together external landscapes and internal senses of self and, following Basso, she argues that they also summon associations across time and space. The Scottish landscape is, according to Basu, infused with such associations, particularly as they relate to the narrative of Scottish emigration and clearances – a story that shapes both the self-perception of a diaspora and their relations with the often distant landscapes of the Highlands. The memorialising of these narratives in the form of cairns thus gathers together the romantic traditions that have shaped perceptions of the Highlands for centuries. Ray meanwhile argues that pilgrims in Ireland ‘fix’ the movements of pilgrimage through narrative, aided by the constancy of narratives in the face of wider social change. By attending to these activities, the authors in this collection describe and examine not only the ways in which relations, identities, memories and knowledge are produced, stored, mapped and revealed but also how they are scrutinised, critiqued, reimagined and concealed. As landscapes change and as people move within them, there is a corresponding movement of the imagination that elicits both the creation of new narratives and reinterpretations of old ones. It thus becomes apparent that, whilst these narratives might not always be homely, it is through them that people make themselves at home in the landscape because narrative is the defining form through which we understand who we are and how we are related. The link between landscape and narrative also raises questions, as Allerton points out, of assumptions made on the relations between words and things. Following Keane, Allerton argues that the ethnographer needs to attend to semiotic ideologies (i.e., ideas about how signs function), including that of phenomenology. There is a danger that such approaches privilege a separation of words and things, narratives and landscapes, that is incongruent with how her informants in Manggarai understand their interaction with landscape. For these people, speech is not simply a ‘covering’ for the land but is materially constitutive of it.

Approaching Landscape Research through Ethnography Many of the debates both within this volume and in other anthropological work on landscape are shot through with the contrast between phenomenological and structural approaches. Are the ways that people experience landscape directly – through the essential qualities of being human – most

12 ◆ Jo Vergunst, Andrew Whitehouse, Nicolas Ellison, Arnar Árnason

significant, or is landscape primarily a culturally and historically particular way of experiencing the environment that is given to us as individuals and into which we have to be educated? According to the former, landscape may be at least similar to environment, although emphasising, as we have argued, its temporal and relational qualities. According to the latter, landscape is a historically and culturally specific mode of appropriating the environment and only some societies, some cultures, understand their environment as paysage or landscape in this ‘restricted sense’ as Eric Hirsch (1995) would put it. This contrast is of course deeply, and some might say disappointingly, familiar to social scientists. It is another manifestation of the dichotomy between individual and society, agency and structure (see Strathern 1988), or subjectivism and objectivism, to use Pierre Bourdieu’s (1977: 3) terms. We do not assume the power to resolve this dichotomy between phenomenological and structural approaches in landscape research. In fact, as editors of this collection, just as the authors of the individual chapters, we represent different positions within this debate and think that their tension is a fruitful one as long as we keep clear what the terms of the debate are. We accept fully that the two approaches to some extent at least ask different questions and require different material in order to address these. Instead we emphasise three points that emerge strongly in the various chapters; first we argue that activity at least as much as discourse is the means by which individual experience and structure are revealed; second, we underline the significance of Heidegger’s notion of gathering through which the presence of landscape and the things within it are bound together; and third, we emphasise that ethnographic writing is a means by which the essential unity of experience and structure in the lives of our informants can be demonstrated, even if our theoretical approaches are unable to entirely capture this unity. We therefore wish to invoke the practice of ethnography as a means to move beyond, rather than resolve as such, the dichotomy between experience and structure. We entitled this book ‘Landscapes Beyond Land’ because we wanted to encourage our authors to consider the full range of elements that are drawn together in the human production and engagement with landscape. Our authors continue with this broad take on the elemental and material conditions of landscape and they also explore the wider structuring and meaning-making activities that spread through space and time to coalesce in the fashioning of the present. Our intention in this book has also been to emphasise the continuing relevance of landscape to theoretical debates within anthropology. We note, with Kenneth Olwig (2003: 874), the vitality of landscape research traditions within Europe that are also highly significant for how Europeans have encountered other parts of the world. The part that an engaged anthropology of landscape plays in this is open to us all – both in processes of change in the immediate lifeworlds of peo-

Introduction ◆ 13

ple in diverse societies and in the politics and conflicts that are gathered up within them.

References Bateson, G. 1979. Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity. Cresskill: Hampton Press. Bender, B. (ed.). 1993. Landscape: Politics and Perspectives. Oxford: Berg. Bender, B. and M. Winer (eds). 2001. Contested Landscapes: Movement, Exile and Place. Oxford: Berg. Berque, A. 1995. Les Raisons du Paysage: de la Chine Antique aux Environnements de Synthèse. Paris: L’Harmattan. ———. 1999. ‘Paysage à la Chinoise, Paysage à l’Européenne’, in J. Mottet (ed.), Les Paysages du Cinéma. Champvallon: Editions Seyssel, pp. 61–69. Bourdieu, P. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Carrithers, M. 1992. Why Humans Have Cultures. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cosgrove, D. 1984. Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape. London: Croom Helm. ———. 1993. The Palladian Landscape: Geographical Change and its Cultural Representations in Sixteenth Century Italy. Leicester: Leicester University Press. ———. 2006. ‘Modernity, Community and the Landscape Idea’, Journal of Material Culture 11(1/2): 49–66. Cosgrove, D. and S. Daniels (eds). 1988. The Iconography of Landscape. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Daniels, S. and D. Cosgrove. 1988. ‘Introduction’, in D. Cosgrove and S. Daniels (eds), The Iconography of Landscape. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1–10. Descola, P. 2005. Par-delà Nature et Culture. Paris: Gallimard. Ellison N. and M. Martínez Mauri (eds). 2009. Paisaje, Espacio y Territorio. Reelaboraciones Simbólicas y Reconstrucciones Identitarias en América Latina. Quito: Ediciones Abya Yala. Gupta, A. and J. Ferguson. 1997. ‘Discipline and Practice: “The Field” as Site, Method and Location in Anthropology’, in A. Gupta and J. Ferguson (eds), Anthropological Locations: Boundaries and Grounds of a Field Science. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 1–46. Heidegger, M. 1978. ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’, in D. Krell (ed.), M. Heidegger, Basic Writings. London: Routledge, 347–63. Hirsch, E. 1995. ‘Landscape: Between Place and Space’, in E. Hirsch and M. O’Hanlon (eds), The Anthropology of Landscape: Perspectives on Place and Space. Oxford: Clarendon, pp. 1–30. Hirsch, E. and M. O’Hanlon (eds). 1995. The Anthropology of Landscape: Perspectives on Place and Space. Oxford: Clarendon.

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Ingold, T. 2000. The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London: Routledge. ———. 2007a. Lines: A Brief History. London: Routledge. ———. 2007b. ‘Earth, Sky, Wind, and Weather’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.): S19–S38. Morphy, H. 2007. Becoming Art. Oxford: Berg. Olwig, K. 2002. Landscape, Nature, and the Body Politic: From Britain’s Renaissance to America’s New World. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. ———. 2003. ‘Landscape: The Lowenthal Legacy’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 93(4): 871–77. Rapport, N. and J. Overing. 2000. Social and Cultural Anthropology: The Key Concepts. London: Routledge. Roger, A. 1997. Court Traité du Paysage. Paris: Gallimard. Strathern, M. 1988. The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia. Berkeley: University of California Press. Tilley, C. 1994. A Phenomenology of Landscape. Oxford: Berg. ———. 1999. Metaphor and Material Culture. Oxford: Blackwell. ———. 2004. The Materiality of Stone: Explorations in Landscape Phenomenology 1. Oxford: Berg. ———. 2008. Body and Image: Explorations in Landscape Phenomenology 2. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press. Urry, J. 2007. Mobilities. London: Routledge. Voisenat, C. (ed.). 1995. Paysage au Pluriel: pour une Approche Ethnologique des Paysages. Paris: Éd. de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme. Wylie, J. 2006. ‘Depths and Folds: On Landscape and the Gazing Subject’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 24: 519–35. ———. 2009 ‘Landscape, Absence and the Geographies of Love’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 34(3): 275–89.

1 Walking the Past in the Present Christopher Tilley

In this essay I want to reflect on a form of research practice that I have been undertaking for the last ten years or so to understand the relationship between prehistoric and contemporary landscapes (Tilley 1994, 1999, 2004, 2008; Bender, Hamilton and Tilley 2007). This is the humble art of walking. Walking the landscape is an attempt to understand it at a human scale. The limits of this knowledge are essentially the limits of my own body and the manner in which this body both limits and facilitates my perception. The objective is to gain an ‘insider’s’ knowledge of archaeological places such as megalithic monuments and settlements in their landscape contexts as opposed to a knowledge acquired by mediated representations that can only provide an ‘outsider’s’ perspective. I understand the term ‘landscape’ anthropologically. For me it refers to the richly nuanced contextual surroundings in which people move and think and dwell in opposition to notions of landscape as scenery or as environment and topography. It is the case that the vast majority of landscape research is thoroughly mediated by various representations and technologies of abstraction. By the former I mean the representations provided by texts, photographs, paintings, sketches, maps or in other words the entire discursive panoply by which we normally inform ourselves about places and landscapes while sitting at our desks. The effect of this is that we tend to perceive landscape through the minds and eyes of other people. Such representations are inevitably selective, framed (often quite literally in the borders of the painting, photograph or map) and ideological. We encounter the landscape through its always partial representation, and such an encounter encourages us to build new texts and representations on the basis of old ones in an endless series of repetitions of the same. This is never a lived landscape but is forever fixed in the words or the images, something that becomes dead, silent and inert, devoid of love and life. By ‘technologies of abstraction’ I refer to statistical analyses of landscape

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involving measurement and quantification, computer simulations and the creation of virtual landscapes you might walk around in with your cursor, together with the use of various forms of Geographical Information System technologies for landscape analysis that like all new technologies are popular largely for their newness rather than for the kind of interpretative information that they are actually capable of providing. The problem I have with all such mediated approaches to the landscape is firstly that they obviously constrain and limit my possibilities for perception in that I do not need to leave my desk in order to learn. Secondly, such textual and visual representations tend to encourage the highly suspect view that landscape and landscape research is just about representation. Taking this view we recognize that landscapes are being represented in a particular manner within a particular cultural or historical context but that these are only representations and might always be different. We recognize that such representations are therefore essentially arbitrary and ideological and we set about investigating this. Ultimately in a Foucauldian sense we end up talking about the discursive construction of landscapes, of landscapes of power. The danger of such a view is that the landscape itself becomes inert, a blank slate upon which culture is written. Such a relativist and ‘postmodern’ view makes perfect sense when we study the landscape through mediated forms in which stone and wood; grass and trees; the sun, the moon and the stars; the heat of the day or the coolness of the evening become words and images. The literary turn in anthropology (e.g., Clifford and Marcus 1986; Hastrup 1992; James, Hockey, and Dawson 1997) in which ethnographies become just forms of writing has undoubtedly promoted an involuted style of thinking that rather than encouraging a meaningful encounter with landscapes has operated as a means of escape from them. This has frequently been combined with an ocularcentric view of landscape as image. The approach that I undertake demands by contrast that I immerse my body in the landscape and allow it rather than texts, images or diagrams to mediate my encounter. When I feel the sun or the rain on my face, landscape becomes anything but representation – it becomes part and parcel of my lived sensual experience, of my carnal being. The sensuous character of this human experience is absolutely primary. There are three reasons why this is the case: (1) the material character of the walking; (2) walking as an act of gathering; (3) the temporality of walking. I shall consider each of these in turn.

Walking and Materiality Walking, and under this term I also subsume other modes of movement such as crawling, climbing, jumping, stumbling etc., involves embodied experience. The character of the walk is such that it is thoroughly medi-

Walking the Past in the Present ◆ 17

ated through the effects of the weather and the qualities of the light on perception. The landscape alters according to the time of the day, the day of the week or the months and seasons of the year, whether the rain falls, the sun shines or the wind howls, whether it is misty or clear. All these affect how I sense and relate to the qualities of the landscape. To walk is to adopt different bodily postures, sometimes upright, sometimes bent, sometimes looking up, sometimes looking down. This is in turn related to the surfaces on which I walk and their characteristics: hard or soft; dry or slippery; even or stony; flat, rising or falling; firm or boggy. In a stony landscape I must look down most of the time or I will fall over and bump into things; in a bog I must test every step; on a flat pavement I can move less tentatively and look straight ahead. My calf and leg muscles sense and register various degrees of energy and strain. These direct sensory relations engage my body as part of the landscape. I may feel that it has been very easy to reach this place and very difficult to reach that one. This directly affects the manner in which I think about places, landscapes, relationships. Sometimes on the walk I may find myself high up on a hilltop with a panoramic view of the world with a circular horizon. I can see a great deal of the sky. I will be exposed to the wind and the elements. At other times I might be in a sheltered valley. My lateral vision will be restricted by the valley sides as will my view of the sky, my senses of sight and sound and smell will reach out before and behind me to a further horizon line. The power of the wind and rain may be broken. I feel that I am in a different world to that of the hilltop. Perceptive experience as mediated by the body in this manner is processual and always changing. It inevitably has profound effects not only on what I can perceive but what I am able to think and emotionally feel. My body becomes the measure of all things in relation to me and the possibilities, or affordances, and constraints that the landscape provides. I am a part of that which I seek to describe and understand. I rapidly learn that in order to inhabit a landscape I need to know how to walk in it and that certain practices of walking are appropriate in particular places at particular times and seasons. After a while they become routinized and embodied; the landscape becomes part of me in a way that is never possible if I encounter it from a car or a train or an aeroplane where my experience is more or less limited to the visual appreciation of something shut away and distantiated from my physical being.

Gathering Walking is always a gathering together of places encountered along the way and the sequences in which they are encountered and the effects these have on my body. A walk is thus a material journey and a temporal narrative. A walk gathers together the landscape in relation to my body: it col-

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lects together continuous visions, smells, tactilities, sounds and tastes in relation to my body always in various degree of association and intimacy: it has synaesthetic effects. We take on board Tim Ingold and Ken Olwig’s critique of the multiplication of ‘scapes’ especially when this use is based on an etymology of ‘scape’ understood as ‘scope’ (as visual) whereas it actually comes from forms such as skap/skip that relate to quality as in ‘fellow-ship’ (Olwig 2002: 19; Ingold personal communication). A walk not only gathers together and mediates places and their material properties, including the weather, along its path but also events, things that take place, social encounters with people and plants and animals. It was Bergson’s (1991) fundamental insight that there is no perception that is not replete with memories. Such memories are almost always path bound, and place bound. Everything is always somewhere and in process, in some place with its thresholds, boundaries and transitions to other places along paths. The changing human and nonhuman horizons of the walk continually alter my understanding of place and landscape so much so that one walk will provide a whole series of expectations of what may be encountered on another. My expectations may be fulfilled or continually surprised. Thus to walk is to fuse past with present with future. Walking gathers known past histories, practices and traditions as for the most part, following a path, I am walking where others have walked, in the footsteps of previous generations, the ancestors. The paths I take may, in this sense, be weak or strong, well-trodden and known or new and fragile. Walking a landscape is thus to gather together through my body its weathers, its topographies, its people, histories, traditions and identities. The walk gathers itself through my own body to create my own identity. In this sense the sum of my embodied being in motion is the sum of the walks I have taken and what and whom I have encountered along the way.

The Past in the Present Until very recently everybody walked. Walking was life. To live was to walk, to be a socialized being was to walk and work, usually involving particular practices of walking whether hunting or gathering or fishing and farming, in the landscape. Being in the landscape, being part of the landscape, inevitably resulted in the kind of intimate knowledge of it that is for the most part lost today. Walking the past in the present is an attempt to regain at least some of that intimacy and lost experience. It is simply to attempt to walk the landscape as other people might have done and to familiarise myself with it through the process of walking. The contemporary skin of the land has itself more often than not been irrevocably altered but its bones, the hills and the valleys, springs, river courses and the coasts, high and low-lying areas, rocky and steep or flat places are often the same.

Walking the Past in the Present ◆ 19

The walk unites the walker and the landscape in a lived dialectic of being and becoming, acting and being acted upon. In the process of walking we communicate with the landscape that surrounds us, not with words, but through our bodies. To experience the walk is to experience our own carnal bodies. My walk involves embodied immersion in a landscape. By contrast I am not embodied in the same sense in any image or artefact I might produce. It is always externalized, out there, apart from my body. Walking is in and of the body; it cannot take place outside of the body. It is a wholly lived and participatory corporeal practice. The body cannot be reduced to the status of an object because it is always a minded and mindful body, and the relation is internal. The mind is not external to the body controlling it as it were from the outside, but part of it. Thus thought is of, through and in the body. The body is lived through its actions and movement is both the medium and outcome of embodied knowledges. Walking the past in the present thus involves a material experience, and a mode of gathering together of this experience in a temporal mode of narrative understanding. A new walk may jog one’s memory of a previous walk, encounter or understanding. It is a process of linking different kinds of experiences. While the walk is obviously in one sense a personal experience, it is directed to a broader, more generalized understanding in relation to characteristics and qualities of the walk that stand out not only for myself but for others: approached from this direction, it is only from this particular point one sees that distant hill for the first time; the rocks look far more jagged from this direction than from that; this place in the landscape echoes, that does not and so on. Thus the art of walking the landscape is one in which experience of the particular leads to considerations of the general and the gradual building up of a holistic interpretative account through comparing and contrasting and reflecting on these experiences.

Styles of Walking in Modernity and Styles of Writing The actual practice of walking has as yet scarcely been studied in any of the social sciences. While we have various generalized histories of walking (e.g., Marples 1959; Jarvis 1997; Solnit 2002), studies of people actually walking are conspicuously absent and this lacuna is only just beginning to be addressed (see Lee and Ingold 2006; Ingold and Vergunst 2008). The manner in which we walk influences the manner in which we write and, more broadly, re-present that experience. The material practice of walking and the physical conditions encountered through movement in the landscape are very different from other modes of travel. Walking has its own rhythms and modalities influencing different styles of writing. Today three distinct styles can be distinguished: walking as a romantic encounter, walking as a practice of bodily discipline and walking as an act of consumption.

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In our industrialized modernity walking in ‘nature’ has increasingly developed into an outdoor leisure pursuit. One walks in order to gain pleasure and that pleasure is overwhelmingly expressed in the form of the tourist gaze (Urry 1991). The landscape is encountered in the romantic sense as something that can uplift the human spirit. The encounter is aesthetic, a search for beautiful places and vistas and quite often for a sense of its past in the form of enigmatic ruins, traces of a distant and (morally) better past. This is the English tradition beginning with Wordsworth and Coleridge, their walks through the Quantock hills and the Lake District in search of aesthetic satisfaction and the picturesque. Landscapes once considered barren, frightening and useless became rewritten as sublime. Modernity becomes seen as a blot to be erased from the text. The narrative structure is broken and progressive in the sense that the poetic descriptions move from one place to another presented as highlights of this experience with much left out in between. These landscapes are for the most part unpeopled. Walking them is an escape from the teeming humanity of the city. Such landscapes are crowded with rocks rather than people. Jarvis has cogently argued that the fluid and improvised quality of blank verse, its perceived ‘naturalness’ as opposed to other forms of poetry and its syntagmatic ordering, sequences of this after that, made it the preferred metrical vehicle to describe pedestrian travel for the Romantic poets (1997: 139). Another form of contemporary walking overlapping with the Romantic gaze is walking as a form of bodily discipline, a task undertaken to cover so much distance in so many days, to climb the highest peaks and quite literally cover the ground and exert a form of physical mastery over it. Much writing in this mode extols bodily skills and virtues, the ‘mastery’ of a landscape as a form of conquest. Ultimately it is the body that moves that becomes the focus of attention in the literature and the technical skills of map reading, orientation and the types of equipment (walking boots, rain jackets, rucksacks etc.) required: a disciplined body whose involvement in the landscape is facilitated by a disciplined technical knowledge (Michael 2000; Ingold 2004). Linked to this in a less-punishing mode are discourses promoting walking as a means of healthy living and bodily maintenance (Edensor 2000). A third mode of walking is, by contrast, situated not in the rural landscape, but in the city. Rather than an escape from urban modernity, this style of walking embraces it and the new opportunities this opens up. Here we encounter the textual image of the flâneur as developed by Baudelaire and Benjamin ‘botanizing on the asphalt’ (Tester 1994). Flânerie is an activity of strolling and looking and writing. It originated in Paris, metropolitan capital of the nineteenth century, as conceived by Walter Benjamin in his discussions of the prose and poetry of Charles Baudelaire (Benjamin 1973). The male (and they are always male, lone female street walkers are inevitably prostitutes) flâneur is one who loses himself in the

Walking the Past in the Present ◆ 21

crowd and dwells and participates within it as an observer of modern life. But while of and in the crowd the flâneur observes it dispassionately from within, experiencing a new form of solitude and anonymity whilst amongst teeming humanity. The poet observes in order to write, peopling his solitude in order to make sense of the metropolis and the spectacle of the crowds. He throws himself open to being a witness of the unexpected. Wandering and losing himself in the city, he is most productive in his apparent indolence, the secret spectator of the places of the city, constantly restless, wandering, in search of the new experiences modernity constantly throws up, observing the fleeting and the transitory. Walking here is a consumptive act, sucking in disparate and transitory experiences, which in De Certeau’s (1984) terms is part of the practice of everyday life through which the rhythms of the city (Lefebvre 2004) may be experienced.

Walking the Past Walking understood in these three contemporary modes is a pursuit undertaken for itself, or in pursuit of knowledge, part of a set of peculiarly exotic practices that have developed in modernity. Walking today has become an option or lifestyle choice like everything else and the necessity of walking has been for the most part evacuated from our lives except as part of the process of commuting to work or going shopping. But walking for most of the human past has been a necessity. As Ingold (1993) has put it ‘landscape’ and ‘taskscape’ have been intimately linked and this is mainly through the medium of the walk. The landscape is intimately linked to those who dwell within it, their practices and activities and movements. To dwell fuses together past, present and future through the corporeality of the body. It would be possible to develop an entire typology of different styles of walking either in the past or the present, relating to different styles of intentional activity. Here I want to define three ideal types or modes of ‘taskscape walking’: walking as pursuit, walking as husbandry and walking as a resource for social knowledge. These, of necessity, remain ideal types, analytical distinctions, simply because there are so few detailed accounts of walking, to my knowledge, in the social sciences (Ingold and Vergunst 2008). The walk, its form and duration, the kinds of embodied motility required, and the kinds of experiences gained along the way have been left almost entirely undescribed and undiscussed. From the anthropological literature we know about routes of movement across the landscape in general, but virtually nothing about the specificity of actual walking practices at any particular time or on any particular day with reference to any particular locality, with the exception of the analysis of certain ceremonies and ritual practices.

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Walking as Pursuit Most of the human past has involved walking as the pursuit of resources: game, fish and fowl, plants and raw materials. The hunter-fisher-gatherer requires an acute knowledge and awareness of landscape in order to survive. In the polar regions walking is even a primary way of keeping warm. Walking the landscape is a process of intricately interpreting the signs that enfold within it, anything from the direction of the winds, to the droppings of animals, to footprints in the snow. The paths taken by huntergatherers are in an obvious way intimately linked to their taskscapes, the types of game pursued, the best places to fish and fowl and gather plants. They are also intimately linked to changes in the seasons. This walking as pursuit must involve continuous attentive activity in relation to the environment and the weather. Such matters as the direction and form of the winds may be crucial in structuring direction. Gait will alter according to the activities involved: stalking game, inspecting the ground while searching for edible tubers, looking up to collect nuts from the trees, picking berries and mushrooms on the forest floor. The spatial threads of these walks across the landscape may be incredibly complex and involuted, and different parts of it will be inhabited and walked at different seasons. Walking is thus doubly temporal in terms of taking time and being keyed into cyclical times. Different areas of the occupied territory have their own times and are characterised by different kinds of meeting places. People may aggregate in particular places or disperse across places as part of this process of inhabitation. The sensory dimensions of these seasonally occupied landscapes may be quite different, a dominant visual perception of signs in some open landscapes, sound and smell in others (e.g. Carpenter 1973; Gell 1995). The seasonal paths taken across the landscape may often be customary, involve various degrees of the strategic management of resources (stimulating browsing; managing game), routes taken to integrate a wide variety of different resources (larger and smaller game, water rhizomes and water fowl) and be understood in terms of natural landmarks: river courses, springs, lakes, bays, creeks, headlands, particular hills, rocks, important trees etc. There is no need to mark the land by building monuments or shrines, for it already has its own embedded social and cosmological significance, encultured places such as the bend of a creek, a pavement of flat stones, a gnarled tree. In general the paths, as remembered by individuals, may be followed from one generation to the next and the biographies of different individuals appear remarkably similar in terms of the paths trodden (e.g., Brody 1982) but in the actual practice of any particular hunt the paths will invariably be new and continually improvised from one season to the next. Success or failure in one year may determine the character of movement in the next. Walking gathers together often contingent and improvised perceptive experiences in a complex mesh of overlapping tem-

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poral and seasonal knowledges. To move is not to follow a strict course between fixed points. To inhabit is not to inhabit a particular place and go back and forth between it and other places but to inhabit an entire region that becomes a supraplace. Localisation in a specific place is momentary, fleeting and as is the case for the Mongol tent, one takes the world along as one goes, being always at its centre (Humphrey 1995). The place is not somewhere I go to but where I am, the end of this day’s walk. To walk is to walk in rather than between places. The region as place has its landmarks but these are not places in the sense that they have special significance as gathering places for histories, emotions, memories, people in the manner places become when the walk becomes husbandry (see below). Hugh Brody recounts a fourteen-mile-round journey in northwest British Columbia undertaken by the Beaver Indians as an adjunct to visit a wooden cross. It was enough to reach the place, to ascertain that it was still there. The cross, long since broken and rotting, was not even a landmark (Brody 1982: 106ff.). It was the place as region that it was in, and the walk to reach it, that was far more significant than the particular locale itself. For the Beaver Indians as for most Aboriginal groups elsewhere, the paths taken in the actual lives of people invariably have their parallels in the paths of dreams and dreaming, myths and cosmology. Paths draw together past, present and future, the ancestors and the living, taskscapes and cosmological powers in a place lacking in borders and limits, hierarchies of significant and insignificant places. It is the pattern of movement, process rather than form, that has essential significance. Rival describes this process well in her discussion of the Huaorani of Amazonian Ecuador: Huaorani is … a fluid and ever evolving network of paths used by people when ‘walking in the forest’. Walkers keep paths open through many small and careful gestures, such as the picking up of a thorny leaf fallen during the night, the breaking of bending branches, or the cutting of invasive weeds. … Well-trodden paths, located at strategic intersections, have become the repositories of traumatic memories in the same way that physical landmarks, such as creeks, particularly tall and old trees, lagoons, or hill formations recall bloody attacks or spearing raids. … Trekking in the forest is like walking through a living history book in which natural history and human history merge seamlessly. (2002: 1)

Hunting and gathering is part and parcel of the act of ‘forest visiting’ when one leaves the longhouse. It is as much a style of walking as a mode of food procurement, which Rival describes as ‘cruising’: A style of displacement markedly different from the one used when visiting distant kin or when transporting food from one place to another, people are not simply checking the state of their ‘larder’. They collect what they need for the day, recording patches of resources for later use, and monitor vegetation growth and changes in general. If they are not already familiar with the area, they also look for old cultigens and other plant species denoting former human occupation. (2002: 69)

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Thus an economy of procurement becomes embodied in a particular style of locomotion and perception of the environment.

Walking as Husbandry For subsistence farmers and pastoralists the walk often has a very different nature. It usually represents a gathering together of the landscape that is far smaller in spatial extent and involves many more permanent or fixed places that become nodes through which the surrounding landscape is drawn together and interpreted. Movement here is not about moving in place so much as moving between places, named, differentiated and hierarchically stratified in terms of their meaning and significance. Paths of movement may similarly be far less improvised in character and there is a hierarchy of less- and better-known places, some inhabited for long periods, others rarely visited, maybe places of special pilgrimage. Knowledge of the landscape is usually either concentric, radiating out from a fixed place, or linear in form, along a corridor of traditional movement between places. For example in medieval Europe the experience of walking was normally bounded by an individual’s day’s walk within which everyday activities were confined (Pred 1986). Due to locally constituted boundaries there was a dearth of through tracks to go beyond the immediate terrain. The whole network of tracks formed a kind of labyrinth. The system of tracks in an open-field parish was primarily for the circulation of people within the parish and there was often no distinction between a track linking one parish with another and one leading the farmer or the labourer to their work, which would take a traveller from outside nowhere (Barrell 1972: 85). The paths used by migratory pastoralists are seasonal, linking together inhabited contrastive landscapes held at a distance through definite and customary migration routes that open out in the landscape at either end and only then become more extensive and reticulated (see e.g., Schlee 1992). The paths used by subsistence farmers are linked together in relation to the patterns of gardens, fields and grazing land creating a tapestry of movement where the same paths may be walked on a daily basis no more than a few kilometres from the village. The variable uses of such paths are strongly linked to the space-time routines of the agricultural cycle. Knowledges are more intensive and less extensive. While for the hunter-gatherers and migratory pastoralists distant places may be equally familiar, subsistence farmers live in what Deleuze and Guattari (1987) refer to as a jagged and broken kind of space, striated by social boundaries and borders, often marked by physical or cultural boundaries across which one does not venture. The routes people take are their daily and seasonal routines, linked with the movement of other people and animals. Networks of such paths

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cross-cutting the landscape may often be labyrinthine in nature, whose secrets cannot be learned by a stranger without a guide. Weiner (1991: 38) likens the paths of the Foi of Papua New Guinea to the human circulatory system, a common enough metaphor also employed by the Ancient Greeks. There are the main arteries used by everyone, paths that branch off and finally the small paths to individual houses and garden plots made and used by current occupiers. The character and the structure of feeling for locality is produced and reproduced through the routes followed back and forth to cultivated land and to the forest and the bush. Motion and movement is always a reading of signs that may involve productive activity, collecting rattan here, grubs there, and so on along the way. The biography of a person, or a group, can be found in the sum of the paths that are walked, ‘place ballets’ (Seamon 1979) for the production and reproduction of locality. Changes in the character of these paths are part and parcel of the transformation of social relations. So, for example, the time-space routines of working the land in the preenclosure medieval field strip system in northern Europe, where members of one household cultivated far-flung land holdings, required a radically different timing, synchronisation and ordering of labour and movement from the consolidated postenclosure system in which localities became ever more closely bounded with all the landholdings around the individual farm having a dramatic effect on the structuration of social relations and the biographies of persons (e.g., Pred 1986). A husbanded landscape as a reticulated series of paths linking places and tasks within it is both a physical and social construction with its own peculiar order and character. Here, places and times played out in embodied routes and routines. Fixed topographic features in such a landscape exert agency and are fundamental in articulating a sense of place and its experience. The husbandry of resources is intimately tied in with the husbandry and maintenance of a particular place and a body in place in the landscape in which people themselves, as well as things, can become mobile monuments. Writing of European peasant communities John Berger comments: Scarcely anything changes in a peasant’s entourage, from the clouds to the tail feathers of a cock, without his noticing and interpreting it in terms of the future. His active observation never ceases and so he is continually recording and reflecting upon changes. … Peasants live with change hourly, daily, yearly, from generation to generation. There is scarcely a constant given to their lives except the constant necessity for work. Around this work and its seasons they create rituals, routines and habits in order to wrest some meaning and continuity from a cycle of remorseless change. (1979: xxi–xxii)

As such place and locality are always fragile. They require continuous material acts to reproduce them through endlessly walking the same paths, gardening, ploughing, harvesting, hedging, collecting water etc., some-

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times erecting monuments and memorials, and the routines and rituals attached to all these practices (Appadurai 1995).

Walking as Social Knowledge Particular practices of walking may in certain social circumstances and in different social landscapes be deliberately undertaken in order to structure knowledge of landscape, locality and identity. Such styles of walking are intimately bound up with processions and ceremonies and rites of initiation. There are always the leaders and the led, those that go before and those that come behind. Walking becomes a performative act. In controlling the walk one controls the manner and style of the release of knowledge and the manner in which places are experienced. In these walking practices what cannot be experienced and remains hidden may be of equal significance to that which is revealed. An art of showing things may simultaneously be an art of hiding others, some knowledges will be revealed, others only made available to the initiated few. Rites of passage quite typically take the form of seclusion in the bush, and transformations of the initiates occur in liminal places that are outside and away from those that are familiar. This will frequently involve the control and heightening of different sensory domains and the revelation of features of the landscape that normally remain hidden. During Rogation week in the preenclosure open field landscape of England, walking was integrated into the ritual marking of parish boundaries, a custom known as ‘beating the bounds’ or ‘perambulating the parish’. It had the secular purpose of guarding against encroachments and preventing the destruction of field boundaries and the religious purpose of creating mutual respect and solidarity. Such perambulations provided the community with an embodied map of the parish, which effectively became its collective memory. During the perambulation, the community was enjoined to ‘consider the old ancient bounds and limits’ so that each individual should ‘be content with our own’ (Bushaway 1982: 82). The existence of processional ways across the landscape may sometimes become formalized by the construction of monuments that both constrain movement and indicate the correct way to move and experience place and landscape. There may well be prescribed ways in which to approach sacred places and monuments and ways to leave them, propitious directions, and those that are not permitted. Such processional ways may also act as landscape markers and landscape boundaries, and the nature of their enclosure may have various degrees of permeability allowing or restricting experience of the landscape beyond them. Their directionality and orientation may be as important as where they lead from and what they lead to. Such ceremonial ways are commonplace in British prehistory in the form of early Neolithic cursus monuments: embanked and ditched

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linear avenues that lead one across the landscape, in the case of the Dorset cursus for 10 km (see Tilley 1994: 173ff). There are also the numerous Bronze Age stone rows and associated standing stones and burial cairns that lead one across Dartmoor and other landscapes of the present past. The most famous of these processional ways are the stone avenues leading up to Avebury in Wiltshire and the earthen avenue linking the river Avon to Stonehenge (see Pollard and Reynolds 2002; Parker-Pearson et al. 2006). The use of such prehistoric prescribed processional ways finds its historical and modern expressions in the long and arduous pilgrimage routes of medieval and contemporary Europe, aiming at a religious purification of the body, in the grand urban processional ways associated with nationstates such as the use of the Mall leading up to Buckingham Palace in London, the Champs-Elysées in Paris or the route to the Nuremberg parade grounds. The journey or the path that is taken and the manner in which it structures experience along the way is as important as the place of arrival. As a counterpoint to this there are the walks and dances of resistance, reversal and transgression, of radical protests and demonstrations, of the carnival, of the fiesta, and those contemporary festivities associated with sporting occasions and so on. In all these cases there are always the watchers and the watched, those who participate and those who are excluded. The ceremonial walk may be a collective occasion in which people present themselves to themselves and are often surprised by the result, key events in the ongoing structuration of the social. They may involve various degrees of corporeal bodily discipline as in the military gait of the marching soldier or in the choreography of the parade, or inversely degrees of bodily abandon as in the carnivalesque. Styles of walking may be competitively assessed and evaluated signifying social well-being and solidarity in the social body of the walkers. Or alternative styles of walking and dancing may signify social differences within the community of walkers, different walks being associated with different localities and landscapes (e.g., Guss 2000; O’Hanlon 1995). Walking, the deportment and the kinaesthetics of the body are signifiers of the intertwining and entanglement of landscapes, places and identities. These experiences may be intensive or extensive, have various degrees of uniformity or hybridity, link near or distant places with different sensory affordances and constraints in relation to the body. Furthermore, different styles of walking have different meanings attached to them. Gell links different styles of walking to different styles of Umeda ceremonial dance in Papua New Guinea. He argues that dance meanings originate through a process in which characteristic nondance motor patterns are formalized and exaggerated. The way Umeda walk is intimately linked to their dense forest environment with many obstructions, roots and thorns, rocks etc. and the lack of shoes. Beyond this, female gait is intimately related to carrying heavy net bags that rest on their backs. In dance they lean their bod-

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ies forward as if they were carrying loads (Gell 1999: 149). Men, who do not carry loads in this manner, dance with a completely different kind of gait. From this perspective dance is essentially a stylized deformation of embodied forms of nondance mobility. So to understand the dance one must be familiar with the walk.

The Phenomenological Walk So far I have considered different styles of walking and walking in relation to ‘taskscapes’, or in other words the relationship between walking and social practices. I now want to consider walking in an entirely different way: walking as an active interpretative and methodological practice, as a means of study rather than something that might be studied. The phenomenological walk is the walk of the walk, a walk that may be undertaken either in relation to a study of the present or the past, in rural or urban landscapes. It is a participatory understanding produced by taking one’s own body into places and landscapes and opening up one’s perceptual sensibilities and experience. Such a walk always needs to start from a bracketing off of mediated representations of landscapes and places. It is an attempt to learn by describing perceptual experiences as precisely as possible as they unfold during the course of the walk. As such it unfolds in the form of a story or a narrative that needs to be written as one walks. Walking and writing become synonymous acts as language and knowing are synonymous. This is simply because the act of writing slows experience down and focuses attention. To write is always to write of something. In order to be able to write one must look, listen, smell, and feel that which is in reach. Filming the walk while walking it (except afterwards on another walk) as an alternative, or equivalent, is entirely problematic because one cannot film before one knows how to look and how to hear and it can only frame and encase visual and auditory perception. So one walks in order to be able to write, and one writes in order to be able to walk. Different landscapes provide affordances and constraints for different forms of motion and perception. Walking the landscape allows that landscape to exert its own agency in relation to my body. There are the shifting and changing horizons beyond which I cannot see, the hills and valleys that come into sight and disappear, the specific places where monuments and settlements were built, places for the living and places of burial and death, the streams and rivers I must cross or navigate. My perception is intimately related to these material presences and absences and gradually develops as a structure of feeling and an awareness of the material character of place and landscape. Walking the landscape takes time and in principle the more time and care one takes in this art of walking the more that is likely to be understood. As I walk the landscape this very landscape

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becomes embodied in my being, unfolds itself, and I can begin to build up a comparative understanding of places in that landscape and their relationships: similarities and differences. How similar is that river valley to this? How does that street compare with this? How does the location of the imagery on this rock or temple compare with that one? What influence might that hill or that river have on places deemed suitable for inscribing images in the landscape? It is only after walking in a landscape that I can learn how to see, and more broadly, sense that landscape through my body, for the act of walking is sensing that landscape at a human pace. The encounter is radically different from those kinds of speeded up and essentially visual experiences available from a vehicle. I can stop, turn, pause, change direction. I do not need to keep to the road. The process of walking is one in which the landscape teaches me and it opens my experience up to this landscape. I am always surprised at first and cannot predict what I will find. After I have walked the landscape, places and their relationships become much more predictable. I know how to find my way, the kinds of relationships to expect and those that will not occur. The phenomenological walk involves a gathering together of synaesthetic, material and social sensory experiences as they unfold in the sequence and duration of the walk. It attempts to show what is there from the perspective of the flesh, from embodied experiences. Such a walk is utterly different from an ordinary walk in space-time since it involves temporal expansion. Attempting to write such a walk involves pausing, looking around, sensing place from different perspectives along the route, going back as well as moving forward. There is always sensory overload and decisions have to be taken with regard to what appears to be significant. Such a walk takes time and is far from spontaneous. It is an analytical walk that selects from experiences often gathered at different times to create the narrative. The process of walking is one in which a person perceives in order to be able to know. To know is to know how to perceive and bodily perception is a form of cultural knowledge. As well as describing some perceptual experiences it must inevitably filter out or ignore others. For example the sounds of machinery are irrelevant to understanding a Bronze Age landscape but characteristic and important in a contemporary context. Experience will vary according to the walker’s skilled practice of walking. We can never walk in precisely the same manner as in the past but through the phenomenological walk we can hope to reduce these differences in motor habits. Similarly, the words we use to describe such a walk never capture experience. They can only evoke and in the final result the phenomenological text is inevitably another mediated representation for all representations are, of course, mediated. The present is where we meet the past in and through the medium of our carnal bodies. We meet then, here, in a place and in a landscape, in stasis and in movement, through the medium of the walk. The phenom-

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enological walk is a performative kinaesthetic walk connecting past to present, here to then and now. It involves a distillation of perceptive experience, of embodied memories that sit in the body rather than in the mind. Through movement in it the landscape effectively writes itself in me by virtue of my participatory experience in it. The walks discussed here have been described in terms of the perception of the landscape as experienced through the body, but the account is not personal in intent. The writing is propelled by a generalizing imperative to try to describe what is fundamental to the landscapes being considered from a bodily point of view. This involves not only an attempt to describe what is there but also conceptual reflection in relation to that experience. The descriptions undertaken are inevitably based upon personal experience but the experiences can be held in common with others, in other words shared and generalised beyond the autobiographical self, in the form of what I have termed the phenomenological walk. Landscape is a set of platial relationships in which the experience of one place, landmark, carved rock or monument depends on its relationship with another and its mode or directionality of encounter. The phenomenological walk attempts to annotate and record these experiences such as the main direction taken, intermediate directions, going up or going down, moving to the left or right, the manner in which horizon lines increase or recede with reference to other places in the landscape, the different forms of bodily motion required, the sounds and smells and tactile experiences encountered along the way. For such a walk to be successful the landscape needs to be as familiar as it would be to a hunter. Just as hunters need an intimate knowledge of their game and their movements, a phenomenologist needs to hunt out the forms and characteristics of the landscape and the places and paths within it. This is a move from naïve to informed experience. The hunter’s walk is tuned to a specific experience, the pursuit of game; the phenomenological walk is in pursuit of another: interpretation. Ideally one tries to understand a place from the point of view of moving towards it or away from it from another place at different times, days, seasons, directions, orientations, sensory points of view. Such a practice of walking encourages an account stressing a progressive or syntagmatic ordering of reality in which sequence and succession become primary in the account rather than an abstracted categorical ordering of landscape in terms of geology, topographic features, settlement patterns etc. The latter is landscape only in the weakest sense of the word, synonymous with ‘environment’. Walking the landscape is thus fundamentally linked with orientation. Having a sense of orientation, knowing where to go is dependent on familiar and place-bound memories. To be orientated in a landscape is to know it through these embodied experiences. Being a walk of the walk, a walk informed by previous walks, the phenomenological walk is always a composite walk, a synthesis of temporally sequenced perceptions that

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must be understood imaginatively and is always informed by embodied memories. The memory work involved is thus fundamentally different from the usual Western notions of memory as relating to representations or images of the past. It is memory that sits in the body as it moves, memory stemming from the kinaesthetics of the body (Tilley 2008). Thus the phenomenological walk has an inherently ambiguous character in relation to an ordinary walk insofar as it records much more than could ever be perceived or remembered, and as regards various embodied sensory experiences, far less. It thus has a simultaneous character of excess and indeterminacy. It attempts to embrace an aura of the real by being surreal through writing the kinaesthetic experiences of the body in motion, in being and becoming.

References Appadurai, A. 1995. Modernity at Large. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Barrell, J. 1972. The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place, 1730–1840: An Approach to the Poetry of John Clare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bender, B., S. Hamilton and C. Tilley. 2007. Stone Worlds: Narrative and Reflexivity in Landscape Archaeology. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press. Benjamin, W. 1973. Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism. London: New Left Books. Berger, J. 1979. Pig Earth. London: Bloomsbury. Bergson, H. 1991. Matter and Memory. New York: Zone Books. Brody, H. 1982. Maps and Dreams. London: Faber and Faber. Bushaway, B. 1982. By Rite: Custom, Ceremony and Community in England 1770–1880. London: Junction Books. Carpenter, E. 1973. Eskimo Realities. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Clifford, J. and C. Marcus (eds). 1986. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press. de Certeau, M. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus. London: Athlone. Edensor, T. 2000. ‘Walking in the British Countryside: Reflexivity, Embodied Practices and Ways to Escape’. Body and Society 6 (3–4): 81–106. Gell, A. 1995. ‘The Language of the Forest: Landscape and Phonological Iconism in Umeda’, in E. Hirsch and M. O’Hanlon (eds), The Anthropology of Landscape. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 232–54. ———. 1999. The Art of Anthropology: Essays and Diagrams. London: Athlone. Guss, D. 2000. The Festive State. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hastrup. K. 1992. ‘Writing Ethnography: State of the Art’, in J. Okely and H. Callaway (eds), Anthropology and Autobiography. London: Routledge, pp. 116–33.

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Humphrey, C. 1995. ‘Chiefly and Shamanist Landscapes in Mongolia’, in E. Hirsch and M. O’Hanlon (eds), The Anthropology of Landscape. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 135–62. Ingold, T. 1993. ‘The Temporality of Landscape’, World Archaeology 25(2): 152–74. ———. 2004. ‘Culture on the Ground: The World Perceived through the Feet’, Journal of Material Culture 9(3): 315–40. Ingold, T. and J. Vergunst (eds). 2008. Ways of Walking. Ethnography and Practice on Foot. Aldershot: Ashgate. James. A., J. Hockey and A. Dawson (eds). 1997. After Writing Culture: Epistemology and Praxis in Contemporary Anthropology. London: Routledge. Jarvis, R. 1997. Romantic Writing and Pedestrian Travel. London: Macmillan. Lee, J. and T. Ingold. 2006. Fieldwork on Foot: Perceiving, Routing, Socializing’, in S. Coleman and P. Collins (eds), Locating the Field. Oxford: Berg, pp. 67–85. Lefebvre, H. 2004. Rhythmanalysis. London: Athlone. Marcus, G. and M. Fischer. 1986. Anthropology as Cultural Critique. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Marples, M. 1959. Shanks’ Pony: A Study of Walking. London: Dent. Michael, M. 2000. ‘These Boots Are Made for Walking…: Mundane Technology, the Body and Human-Environment Relations’, Body and Society 6(3–4): 107–26. O’Hanlon, M. 1995. Reading the Skin. London: British Museum Press. Olwig, K. 2002. Landscape, Nature, and the Body Politic: From Britain’s Renaissance to America’s New World. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Parker-Pearson, M., M. Pollard, C. Richards, J. Thomas, C. Tilley, K. Welham and U. Albarella. 2006. ‘Materializing Stonehenge’, Journal of Material Culture 11(1/2): 227–61. Pollard, J. and A. Reynolds. 2002. Avebury: The Biography of a Landscape. Stroud: Tempus Publishing. Pred, A. 1986. Place, Practice and Structure: Social and Spatial Transformation in Southern Sweden 1750–1850. Cambridge: Polity Press. Rival, L. 2002. Trekking Through History. New York: Columbia University Press. Schlee, G. 1992. ‘Ritual Topography and ecological Use: The Gabbra of the Kenyan/Ethiopian Borderlands’, in E. Croll and D. Parkin (eds), Bush Base: Forest Farm. London: Routledge, pp. 110–30. Seamon, D. 1979. A Geography of the Lifeworld. London: Croom Helm. Solnit, R. 2002. Wanderlust: A History of Walking. London: Verso. Tester, K. (ed.). 1994. The Flâneur. London: Routledge. Tilley. C. 1994. A Phenomenology of Landscape. Oxford: Berg. ———. 1999. Metaphor and Material Culture. Oxford: Blackwell. ———. 2004. The Materiality of Stone: Explorations in Landscape Phenomenology 1. Oxford: Berg. ———. 2008. Body and Image: Explorations in Landscape Phenomenology 2. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press. Urry. J. 1991. The Tourist Gaze. London: Sage. Weiner, J. 1991. The Empty Place. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

2 ‘A Painter’s Eye Is Just a Way of Looking at the World’ Botanic Artist Roger Banks Griet Scheldeman

Today our sight is a little weary, burdened by the memory of a thousand images … we no longer see nature, we see pictures over and over again. – Cézanne in conversation, 1902, in M. Andrews, Landscape and Western Art (1999: 177). Perceiving environment from within, as it were, looking not at it but in it, nature … is transformed into a realm in which we live as participants, not observers. – Arnold Berleant (1993: 236).

A Western aesthetics of landscape tends to emphasize the perspective of ‘looking at’ (see Cresswell 2004; Cosgrove 2008; Ingold 2000). It does so in two distinct ways. Aesthetics, with its stress on appreciation, conceives of an observer interpreting and valuing what she is looking at, or perhaps, cognitively and emotionally engaged with. As the philosopher Carlson (2001) notes, environmental aesthetics has since the eighteenth century shifted between modes of disinterestedness, in which landscapes became separated objects of appreciation (such as through the sublime and the picturesque), and more recent modes of engagement based in a multisensory and somatic immersion of appreciator with the appreciated. Carlson also describes the influence of scientific knowledge – biology, ecology and geology – on environmental aesthetics, resulting in a combined emotional and cognitive engagement with the environment. Yet most aesthetic approaches still posit a ‘viewer’ engaging with (looking at and appreciating) a world she is separate from, rather than a participant moving, acting and living always already inside it.

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I have a similar feeling when reading anthropologies of landscape, where landscape is often taken as ‘something to look at’, even though now it is usually seen as a cultural process. It still connotes a vast expanse, a visible rural, or sometimes urban, background against which we foreground our daily activities (Hirsch 1995). Starting from two poles means we spend all our effort trying to bridge them again. Is it useful to have ‘image’ (in our head) on one side and ‘representation’ on the other? I suggest that this is another form of looking at. Both aesthetics and landscape, it seems, posit the individual (appreciator, actor, artist) as separate from the landscape. The person is ‘out of the picture’ looking at, but not really seeing. While looking is a part of seeing, we (need to) do more. Indeed every day we practice a full somatic engagement with our environment: we smell, feel, listen, touch, get wet, walk, fall over, get back up, think, remember and improvise. This is how we get to know and see our world. Taking this more-encompassing stance may better allow us to ask how the world becomes visible and discloses itself to us. In a move to go against the detached approach to perception − which distinguishes the ‘real’ landscape from the image the artist makes of it − I wish to start with the person within landscape. I want to consider how the world reveals itself to us and how we in turn reveal it to others. While we are all engaged in this, painters in particular actively endeavour to reestablish the richness of the world as immediately experienced. How do they show the environment they see? Far from just making ‘pretty pictures’, painters select and translate to share their experience with others. Numerous academic works on landscape, nature perception and aesthetics plead a return to the immediacy of experience (see Lorimer 2005; Wylie 2009). I wonder though whether what they call for is to put back in our theories and writings what in our everyday lives we have been experiencing all along − be it as farmers, sun bathers, painters, photographers, playing children, grumpy walkers and enthusiastic ramblers. In his theory of aesthetic appreciation, philosopher Arnold Berleant (2002, 1997, 1993) foregrounds experience – ‘sensory, but also informed by memory, knowledge and conditioning and habits of the body’ (Berleant 1997: 3) – against Western aesthetics’ still-prevalent premise of objectification – people live in and appreciate a world of objects. In Berleant’s world of lived experience we actively engage with our environment and perceive the world from within. We are participants, not observers. His stress on the senses is reminiscent of Susan Sontag’s plea ‘Against Interpretation’ of artworks (Sontag 1990) where she disputes the stress Western art critics put on the content of a work of art, its ‘meaning’. For Sontag, to interpret is ‘to deplete the world’. Thus in appreciating an artwork, we do not need to understand what it says or means; rather. we should see it for what it is. For this we need to recover our senses, ‘we must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more’ (1990: 14).

A Painter’s Eye: Botanic Artist Roger Banks ◆ 35

I explore the dynamics of seeing together with Roger Banks, a renowned botanic artist whose early painting experience in the Antarctic led him – somewhat surprisingly perhaps – to become a flower painter. Yet to him it was a most natural progression: apart from the speed required to record both topics, the technique is also similar. Sunlit glaciers demand the same light touch as pinkly white rose petals, not unlike making a soufflé, he declares: overbeat and you kill it. Though not a creator of ‘high’ art − he paints what he sees and cooks what he finds, in both cases any kind of animal and plant substance − it is precisely Roger’s personal aesthetic of landscape, his creative, multisensory embodied being-in-the-world, that tells us about seeing from within and sharing this with others. For Roger, painting is not about representation (looking at) but rather about making visible (seeing), as he affirms his main reason for painting: ‘I like to help others to see.’ In this chapter, then, I understand the aesthetics of landscape as a creative engagement with landscapes, questioning the commonly held view that any aesthetic engagement necessarily implies an extent of disengagement. Indeed my engagement-versus-detachment question will prove irrelevant to Roger in the sense that it is all about engagement: he is moved by what he sees to the degree he wants to share it with others. He does not talk about the need to stand back to take in the landscape; rather, he is viscerally immersed in it. Roger’s landscapes range from the Antarctic and British wild gardens over mountains and orchid fields in the Himalayas to a picturesque little fishing harbour on the east coast of Scotland. These are not landscapes in the detached sense of the vast expanse as background to our daily activities: they are his daily habitats. He lives in them, observes them, tries to paint them in their textural diversity, harvests them and eats them: I could say he digests his environment fully. Is this not an ecology of perception, a lived aesthetics? My initial worry is that Roger, who talks about painting and cooking and other carnal pleasures, does not really personify the phenomenologically inspired painter of the experience. He is not, at least, a ‘major artist’. Later I realise that Roger is exactly what I am looking for: a painter of his world, engaging with it and disclosing it for others to see.

Botanic Artist, Author, Harbour Master and Ecologist Are Brussels sprouts in a hard frost so very different from a snowcapped peak rising above its rock buttresses and forested lower slopes? A painter’s eye is just a way of looking at the world. – Roger Banks

Roger was the first person that sprang to mind when thinking of the ecology of perception, the aesthetics of landscape. When I contacted Roger and explained to him what I was about, he was very enthusiastic. When I

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said I had come across his botanical drawings in many places he replied, ‘I do more than just paint flowers you know, and the real bee in my bonnet at the moment is global warming.’ Finding it hard to imagine him with a bonnet (though a bee buzzing around his head easily comes to mind) I was happy to hear that at the blessed age of seventy-eight he was still on the ball, concerned about the current state of the world. He invited me for lunch and a chat at his harbour cottage. ‘My sight being a little weary’, the initial plan for this project was to learn a new way of seeing, by becoming skilled in a certain way of looking. Would engaging in the practices of a botanical artist, observing and drawing with him, give me a new way of seeing? Would it make me notice other things, look out for details I usually ignore, do not see because I do not know they are there to see? Does an artist skilled at drawing look at what he draws in a certain way, informed by his drawing techniques and materials? Does he translate what he sees through his skill at manipulating the charcoal to translate what he sees onto paper? Does a painter of wild flowers think through his watercolour paints, brushes and skilled strokes? That was the plan. Life interfered. We did not get beyond the ‘getting to know each other’ stage, several afternoons during spring 2007. By spring 2008, when I had hoped to ask him whether I could accompany him on one of his visits to the Highlands to draw and paint orchids, Roger had died after a short illness, quite unexpectedly as he was so sprightly for his age. But through our meetings and conversations I did learn from Roger, and though – contrary to the initial scope of this project – we never ventured further than his garden or the beach next to his cottage, he has informed my way of engaging with the natural world. Over leisurely lunches in his harbour cottage, I did not stop probing him about his painting and drawing, which brought out his life and worldview, perhaps more aptly called his aesthetics, or better still his way of being-in-the-world. He did not fail to ignite those who met him. I can only try to pass on some of his spark. As I pull the bell cord vigorously – elegantly painted letters on the entrance wall advise ‘Visitors pull tentatively; friends pull strongly and allow patience and grace for old age’ – I feel slightly apprehensive. Roger’s reputation is widespread and has travelled ahead of him. Over many years I have come across his botanic watercolours at several houses of friends in Fife, immediately recognizing his particular style and his habit of scribbling functional explanations alongside the flower or its roots, in the same handwriting that now invites me to choose whether I am merely a visitor or a friend. I have heard legendary stories of how he would gather sacks of wildflower seed mixtures, drive through the countryside and throw the seeds through the car window, shouting ‘Sex everywhere’. I am anxious because Roger has invited me for lunch and a mutual friend warned me not to be surprised if the meal turns out to be raw seal (which he has been known to serve), and even suggested I might want to take my own safe

A Painter’s Eye: Botanic Artist Roger Banks ◆ 37

Figure 2.1. A generous splash of vodka has just livened up the sauce.

sandwiches. A short, plump, smiling elderly gentleman, handkerchief in breast pocket, answers the door. ‘You must be Griet. Come in, did you have a long trip, would you like to use the toilet?’ Apart from being an instant icebreaker, this inquiry introduces Roger for who he is: considerate, straightforward and mainly practical. How to describe him? I am at a loss for the right words to do justice to his jovial, cheerful, enthusiastic self; if ever there was ‘a character’, he is it. We go through to the kitchen part of the downstairs floor where Roger is in the midst of cooking lunch. To my immediate relief I spot a bowl of salad, though containing novel types of leaves; greens do not scare me. A quick glance in the sizzling pan shows scallops in a deep yellow mustard sauce, to go with the pasta, which we test by throwing against the wall (my usual way, which Roger is happy to try). I quickly calculate this is a full meal and thus stop fearing a leg of fox or a whole squirrel stewing in the oven. Throughout lunch Roger will regale me with his tall tales of how he tackled an entire conger eel. ‘The fishermen had left the eel in a plastic bag on my doorstep, as they always do when they catch something no one will want to buy. First of course I had to kill it; twenty four hours in the bath in fresh water did the trick.’ Then he experimented with preparing the different parts of the long animal, glands were made into a pâté, served to two visiting French chefs who savoured this novel taste. Letting nothing go to waste, from dead deer and other roadkill to any wild plant and animal life, Roger is an original recycler.

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Throughout our meetings Roger will prove a fascinating conversation partner. In response to my questions, he may veer off in any direction, it never being clear whether he did not understand or hear the question or whether he was distracted. Most probably he prefers to continue his own trail of thought. He says he is profoundly deaf, which I think is true. However, he may conveniently not hear certain things. He also says he is senile, which I do not think he is, though again, it may come in handy. Talking to Roger is taking a rollercoaster ride, his conversation rife with metaphors: we shoot off in many directions, to other places and times, even another universe once, usually to find ourselves back at food and cooking.

Painting and (Unavoidably) Cooking We sit down for lunch at a small round dinner table, joined by the pet pug on his own chair with pillow, in between the open kitchen and living room, with a view to the harbour outside. I tell Roger I am interested in the relationship between himself as painter and what he observes and paints, his environment or however small a part of it that he selects. What happens as he paints and draws, how does it work? He must have talked about this topic often before, for he starts on a monologue. Over the course of our talks he will come up with similar phrasings or say things I’ll later read almost verbatim in his books, written thirty years previously. I appreciate this, as it weaves a strong thread through his life, as if he has simplified life and his thoughts about it to its core and there are only so many ways of saying these things. In the end, it comes down to a few basic convictions and things one feels strongly about. The passing of years facilitates discarding ballast; to retain only what really matters. No beating about the bush, something Roger has never been prone to, instead things come out straight and brash, as they are, or at least as he sees them. Imagine sipping triple-distilled single malt: rich, full flavoured with surprising twists, where a little goes a long way and leaves you feeling warm and satisfied. That is what it is like listening to Roger. But back to my question: what does it mean for him to paint, why does he do it? Roger takes this as his cue: What does one do as a painter? One has a triangle between the object, the artist and the observer. One tries to convey what one thinks to the observer, a shared emotion. This is the artwork: the thing in the middle of the triangle. Being mainly a flower painter, I have noticed that people like what they know, and they want to be familiar with what they see. I had a lovely exhibition of Himalayan flowers, but people don’t know them, and they don’t buy them, whereas people do relate to my paintings of English garden flowers. I am interested in painting wild flowers in their natural habitat, if people can relate to the habitat, such as a meadow or a hedgerow, they like it. The placemats I did for the

A Painter’s Eye: Botanic Artist Roger Banks ◆ 39

National Trust [he points to the cork circle under our plates] with dandelions and nettles were a success because people recognize the plants, they grow everywhere, but people know them as weeds. I can’t stand things going to waste, so I wrote recipes on them, such as dandelion soup.

I am happy to go with Roger wherever he takes the conversation. With only a few sentences he has brought us from the rather highbrow ‘what one does when one paints’ to his passion: weeds and cooking and eating them. This will be the usual pattern. He continues: ‘Painting and cooking go very much together. Their language is almost interchangeable. Like when a sauce needs a squeeze of lemon, a painting may need something to sharpen it up a bit. I like to read cooking books, but I forget them. In Sicily – where I’ve been many times, it’s wild, everything, very interesting botanically – they say, “Who needs books? You just cook.”’ This resembles Roger’s take on painting. With this I do not mean he is so self-assured that he does not need training; rather, the training he can get at school would never be enough. He learns by doing and observing others and from his mistakes − reminiscent of Beckett’s ‘Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’ Learning how to paint is an on-going process. He never thought of going to an art school, his father ‘would have hit the roof’ he says. ‘I am very glad I didn’t, I would have had to learn all sorts of silly things, I wouldn’t have lasted a day there. If, like me, you are only a little fish, with minor talent, it’s good if you can stay in a little puddle.’ In everything, it seems, Roger is an experiential learner – he starts from his own interest in the world, then will set out to investigate. ‘At school they tried to teach me maths, French, they tried to teach me Latin for years, I hated it, I had the wrong sort of mind. Yet, I would look up the different types of beetles I saw and they all had these long Latin names.’ I recall how all his flower paintings have the Latin names painted on them. Why does he need to know? ‘It is very important, the Latin names, for example in the Alps, the same flower can have three different names depending on the site it grows on. Latin is universal.’

From the Unrelenting Ice to a Scottish Wild Garden Wax crayons in a gloved hand. You draw on cartridge paper. Your breath freezes and covers it with a little snow storm. – Roger Banks

I ask Roger how he became a botanic artist, as he started in the Antarctic: no flowers, trees or anything growing, for that matter. ‘It was precisely the Antarctic that led me to flower painting.’ Roger describes his two-year sojourn in Antarctica in his book The Unrelenting Ice (Banks 1962). A young history graduate of St Andrews University with a keen interest in climbing, nature and travel, he was re-

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cruited as a weatherman on the Falkland Islands Dependency Survey in the Antarctic. Previously he had travelled to Iceland where he had seen the arctic light. This led him to decide he wanted to paint the Antarctic. Roger portrays his struggle to identify himself as an artist in that ‘unearthly’ place: how to paint it? Initially he launched himself into impressionist techniques to record ‘the impact of ice and polar sky’, an effort that in Britain, he writes, would have been described as ‘a bold approach to landscape which reflects the artist’s vigorous personality’ (Banks 1962: 96). However, in the Antarctic, the landscape ‘was simply not there. Ice was surrealist before one began and its fantastic shapes were the only solid forms to hang on to in an almost featureless expanse of snow and sky’ (Banks 1962: 97). With the light coming from the ice rather than the sky Roger realises his painting was inadequate, producing mere cheap poster designs. ‘I had yet to find out how to paint even a fraction of what I saw all about me’ (Banks 1962: 98). Through trial and error, he found his way. In the introduction to his wildflower book Living in a Wild Garden (1980), Roger describes how two years living in a world devoid of plant life ‘taught [him] to look at each leaf as if on the day of creation’ (7). He adds how ‘even the smell of the land and things growing is unbelievably strong if you have lived without it’. In the same paradoxical way, he continues, painting the Antarctic made him a flower painter: ‘If you are used to recording sunlit glaciers, you find that the tumbled complexity of pinky silver petals at the heart of a rose present exactly the same technical problems of transparent form, high tones, and reflected light’ (1980: 7). In the Antarctic he not only acquired the technique of recording transparency but he learned to work with speed. The need to work quickly in sub-zero Antarctic conditions taught him to go for the essential line, to capture the ‘rhythmic spirit’ of the scene or object. This speed is similarly vital in flower painting. Flowers in the morning dew will have changed appearance in less than an hour. A fluent technique is crucial for Roger, not only in painting but also in cooking, talking and writing. It fits his impulsive temperament. ‘I have usually got better results by working against time; I am not tempted to weaken a convincing statement of essentials with qualifying second thoughts’ (Banks 1962: 128). Before coffee, when the pug gets his own little saucer with extra sugar and milk as it is his birthday, we stretch our legs and go around the paintings in the living room. I recognise a big canvas depicting glaciers and sea ice as the cover of his Antarctic book. Eager to go into the technicalities of his painting I inquire how he painted this one. I couldn’t paint, outdoors I would wear gloves, the only thing you can hold with those is thick crayons: so I used gloves, with white wax crayons. Wax crayons are very good. You can keep your gloves on, you draw on cartridge paper. Your breath freezes and covers it with a little snow storm. You wipe it

A Painter’s Eye: Botanic Artist Roger Banks ◆ 41

off, it smudges things a bit. Then you have white on white, you hold the paper up in the air to see what you’ve done. Then in the warmth of the hut you put on the paint. Where there’s wax it won’t hold.

When Roger ventures into the practical aspects of painting (material, skilled moves, techniques) he immediately refers to cooking. ‘If you try to paint an iceberg and are heavy handed, it looks like flint. It comes back to cooking, if you are making pastry and are heavy handed, it turns into dough.’ Heavy handed? He sways his arms around: ‘Humpty dumpty. Temperamentally, I am a bread maker, my icebergs looked like flint. But I am also light, a happy person. I don’t like muddy pictures.’ I ask, ‘Muddy?’ He explains, ‘When you overwork it’ – they are bad for the soul.’ ‘When you do watercolour, you have to keep it very light like a soufflé; if you are heavy, you kill it.’ In his sketchbook he shows me a watercolour of a thistle. ‘In Turkey, on the roadside I came across this thistle, it took me a whole day to try and get it right.’ Could he draw it with a pencil first and then make the watercolour later, fill it in? Roger is vehemently against this: ‘No, you never draw it with a pencil first, it loses the line. You paint it straight with the brush.’ Does he ever paint in oil? ‘Oil is lovely, but different. You need to know the limitations of the medium. If you paint a mountain in watercolour, they are too light, they float away. But in the Himalayas, the skies are very strong. There you want the power of oil, you squeeze it out like toothpaste.’ Out of where? ‘The white.’ So how does the act of painting work, what happens? There is another triangle, between the thing you are painting, the eye and the hand. You look at it, you paint it, make brushstrokes, you get going, like driving on the motorway, slow when you first start, as you get in the swing of it you just drive – then you get a speeding ticket. It’s like skiing. It’s like cooking: if there is no flow, you’re not hungry enough. You learn.

How? I have always learned from seeing people. For example how to gut an animal, you just open it up, and you learn where to cut. I go to the fishmonger’s and there’s this new fish, tilapia and it does not get sold. The fishmonger begs me ‘if you don’t take it Mr Banks, nobody else will.’ I had never seen this fish before, but I gutted it, you have to find its wind pipe. It has very thick skin, if you don’t know how to start, put it in the microwave, let it stand. One finds out by trial and error, if too tough, you marinade it.

Again the same holds for his painting: I like my mistakes, they interest me. If something succeeds I’m not interested. I sell it, I turn it into dinner. I can’t learn from it. I make endless drawings. If I were a better painter I would observe, and then paint. A painter like Picasso

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draws in one line, like Zen Buddhism, with one brush stroke, I would love to achieve that. But I am just an ordinary person, I observe by drawing.

Roger guides me along his paintings on the staircase walls and in the rooms upstairs. We find our way through his cottage, negotiating the richest possible array of ‘things’: the walls covered with his works, drawings, watercolours, big oil paintings, more canvasses stacked against the wall, needlepoint cushions. The house explodes with keepsakes, local and from much further afield, pieces of wood, tree roots, stones, beach combings, shells, dried flower seed pods, stained glass, Nepalese rugs.

‘You Have to Work Quickly’ We pause before a small painting of a butterfly. ‘That was like’ – he swiftly moves his hand – ‘in one second. You get the line. Done. Afterwards you look up the exact amount of spots on the wings.’ He continues: ‘I love grasses, they’re so linear; this one I painted by the bus stop in Torcello. One bus passed, I took the next one. These butterflies, I painted them on the West Coast of Scotland. The wind blowing, it was hell.’ Painting it, for you? ‘The weather; for the butterflies and me. I was lucky I was in the Antarctic, there you have to work quickly.’ Why? ‘Cause you get cold. That’s why I hate cameras, all that fiddling about.’ Looking at a painting of the Himalayas, portraying majestic snow-covered mountains, and two tiny blue triangles in the foreground he explains: ‘I had to work quickly, the tents were going down’. So how do you do it? ‘You just do it.’ Roger explains he wanted to paint it because of the weather system; he’d be painting one weather system, spring snow, looked up from his canvas to see another weather system had moved in, leaden skies. ‘These fungi: I painted them at dawn. I had only twenty minutes before the sun would melt away the dew. A real painting – it was immediate.’

But ‘It Has to Be Right’ Contemplating a large painting of orchids Roger explains: ‘This is the opposite. Here I was just trying to find my way. It was in Sicily, ideal conditions; I was sitting on a terrace, like sitting in a London café watching the people traffic. But I spent three hours on the one to the left.’ Why? ‘It had to be right.’ Why does it have to be right? What is right? I think I am probing into what makes a painting work for him, as an artist, though he sets me straight. ‘It is very particular that one. I am a botanic scientist, it has to be right’. It seems now absurd that this has not occurred to me before. I suddenly realise that all his flower paintings I have seen over the years, these colourful if somewhat watery pictures in a certain

A Painter’s Eye: Botanic Artist Roger Banks ◆ 43

friendly-childish style, with Latin names, were not merely decorations, beautiful images. Rather, they were ‘correct’. They showed the flowers as fully functioning. Reflecting on this as I write, I wonder whether all the conversations we had had so far, about the icebergs needing to float and not sink like flint, trying to get the Turkish thistle ‘right’, strong Himalayan skies demanding oil, had merely been about physical accuracy, rather than Roger’s personal aesthetics. I might have been led astray by Roger’s maverick and casual approach to everything – his chaotic house where everything is mixed up and on top of everything else, the joking writings on the walls, his jovial manner, jocular speech, experimental cooking, all done with a broad brush. ‘Photographs are no good.’ Why? Do they not record in an exact way? ‘They go out of focus, while you want to see what is happening’. I need more convincing. You want to see what is happening behind, where the stalks are coming from. You take a photograph, they will be obscured, there will be a leaf hiding it, there will be a shadow on it. Any drawing, even a bad drawing, is better than a photograph. A photograph holds no emotion, it is stiff, not a living thing. I want to see a leaf waving in the wind. From a drawing I understand far more about its growth, its strength, than from a photograph. A leaf form is structured matter; it comes close to engineering drawing. An engineering draftsman makes a drawing of a shelf: this shows how the shelf fits, it needs a bracket. Similarly the growth point of the base stalk of a leaf, there is a discernible thickening. How the leaf joins on, the growth points: that is how they work. From observations you get the strength of it, and it lets you identify with the emotional content of the drawing.

I must look nonplussed, for he continues, ‘Especially if you are a man. Perhaps men always subconsciously draw phallic drawings. Perhaps women feel more for receptive drawings of flowers.’ I raise my eyebrows even more. ‘The flower is unimportant, just a bit of sex. The business of the plant is to get fertilized. At first we need the masculine input to concentrate on the phallic growth of the bud, the fertilization of the bee. Then there is this transfer to more feminine aspects of the plant: receptive to get fertilised and ripen in the seedpod.’ ‘I am a recorder, one wants to record. For example, there was this old house in Cupar [a mid-sized market town in Fife, Scotland], they were pulling it down, yet there was no record of it. So I went there and sat outside for one and a half hours. I just sat there and took it all down on paper.’ If the aim is to record, why not just take a photograph? ‘Oh no, photographs, they’re not sensitive, I don’t like them, they don’t work.’ What do you mean, they don’t work? ‘I wanted all the people in it, the life going on.’ Roger sat there for one and a half hours, observing the scene, and then painted a picture that combined those hours of activity in one scene. That is how he records, it needs to show what is happening, but

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not in one snapshot moment, as a photograph would do, but as it is experienced, as it hangs together. Thus his painting of the demolishing of the house shows the men working at the demolition, shows a child skipping along, and records all passers-by, onlookers and usual daily activities in the one scene. It reminds me of those large-format children’s books by Richard Scarry with colourful plates bustling with activity. You can study them for hours seeing who is doing what, how and where, to understand how things work, such as ‘on the farm’ or ‘at the airport’. Roger shows life in his pictures, maybe another reason why I was not aware of the exactness, the ‘rightness’ of the flowers: there is always a bee buzzing about, a butterfly resting on a leaf, a worm or two crawling in the grass. In his wider scenes, such as a watercolour he made of Crail harbour, which was printed by the tourist board, it is a bustling harbour, with more people in there doing things than there would be at any one moment. The scenes are not a backdrop, we don’t just look at them; rather, things are at work. A harbour is only a harbour because there are fishing boats with working fishermen unloading and gutting their fish in it, not some picturesque scene with an old stone pier and quaint houses.

‘You Must Be Part of It’ I ask Roger whether he needs to be at a distance from what he paints, so he can portray it correctly. ‘No, you must be part of it. Think of music. Strauss could not have written his Alpine Symphony unless he knew what it felt like to climb a high mountain. Experience is essential.’ How do you become part of it? You eat it, swim in it, climb it, you get to feel it. I used to run a watercolour painting school in Malta. Lots of nice English ladies in hats attend the course, and I show them the landscape, the hills, the nice village square, the church, all things they like to paint. Then they ask [he puts on a frail voice] and what will you paint Mr Banks? I say: I’ll draw the beetles. I love insects; they are an important part of the landscape.

‘How do you connect with a beetle’, I ask, ‘wait, you eat it?’ Roger laughs: ‘You get down on their level, spend a few hours on the ground with them.’

‘Emotion Recollected in Tranquillity’ When I quiz him on what happens in him − why he paints, what it does to him, is it to record, or to convey the experience − he says emotion is everywhere. The motivation to paint, to draw, is emotion. He quotes Wordsworth: art is ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’.

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Consider his painting of the Himalayas, which is not about the summits portrayed, but about the weather, the changing light and the life that goes on. In contrast to his botanic flower paintings, in the bigger scenes Roger does not seem preoccupied with exactness. This leads me to inquire whether it is the view he paints? ‘No, the experience. You want to communicate, it’s like music. What interests me is the thing in its setting.’ But there is more to it, and I now feel less uncomfortable about my ignorance at the importance of ‘getting it right’. It has just as much to do with feeling, the character, the consistency of what he paints, not merely the botanic segments. How could it be any different? Otherwise his paintings would feel clinical and dead; and they are nothing of the sort. I am alerted to that when he describes an almost transparent watercolour of a white, slightly pink rose. ‘It is like ballet’, he says, ‘I have to get it right, if I miss I fall over. All the way the painting goes on painting; the character is in the leaves.’ It is so important to get it right, to make us feel the texture, to give us the experience and emotion he feels when he sees what he paints. The same goes for his rendition of icebergs. Some weeks later I put to him his two answers to my question why he paints: to record, or to convey the experience (not the view): how do these two things combine? He explains it is about finding the balance between the two. Referring back to the first triangle he mentioned (between observer, object and artist, with the artwork in the middle) I ask whether the observers are there from the start. ‘In the Antarctic, the audience isn’t there. But because one is one with nature, one wants to share it with other people. If you do so, you feel good. If you don’t do it, you feel uncomfortable.’ Maybe that’s also why after two years it was high time to leave Antarctica. The mountains in the Antarctic and the sea ice, they get almost Chinese-like, you become detached. After two years in the Antarctic, all emotional context had evaporated. One had to go back to the world, to the hurly-burly, Sturmund-Drang of the world. To reach, to begin to live emotionally again, otherwise one would have ended up a hermit in a desert. Two thousand years ago people lived on columns in the desert; after two years in the Antarctic, it felt the same. People say you find yourself there, as you are confronted with your inner self, nothing else to distract you.

And did you find yourself? As usual I quick-fired this question, having learnt not to wait for natural pauses in his talk, which would not arrive. Roger could happily sustain a prolonged monologue. For the first time, quite unexpectedly, the tone of our conversation has changed. There is a pause, Roger’s eyes are damp, a longer pause, then, when I am ready for yet another twist in the tale, he says: Perhaps. It’s a process that goes on. I think of Dante’s hell: a great voyage of exploration. The interesting bit is that he put his inferno frozen in the darkness.

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Not in a hot place. Instinctively he portrayed hell as a place of frozen dark and cold. The bottom circle in a series of descending circles, for the worst sin: the sinners of compound fraud, the sinners against the Holy Ghost.

‘I Like to Help People to See’ Did he see the Antarctic differently from his expedition fellows who did not paint? Roger states how lucky he is to have this means of interpreting the world. Quizzed what he means by ‘interpreting’, he clarifies: Just seeing it. For example in Crail harbour, I sit here; I love it, gathering food, firewood. I live here, enjoying the weather, I am part of it, as harbourmaster I understand how it works. Tourists get out of their car; they look, but see nothing. I don’t know what they’re looking for. I say, ‘Aren’t we lucky to have such a beautiful day?’ They’ll say, ‘It’s awfully cold.’ They sit on a bench and get back in the car. They look but they don’t see. A child discovers heaven in a grain of sand. Sit a child on the beach; it’ll be absorbed for hours. It is about having this sense of wonder, of context. People grow up and they lose this, very sad. Blake didn’t lose it; poets keep the sense of wonder. I try to show the tourists the birds, their habits of nesting, the wild cabbage growing on the beach, wild flowers, the beauty of the light on the water, the archaeology of the pier – a crafty bit of engineering – the more you look the more you see. I like to help people to see. That’s why I did the work for the National Trust [edible weeds, with handwritten recipes on placemats]. I want to share pleasure in the world with people. One can’t teach by laying down the law; one can only share enthusiasm, share pleasure. Like Crail harbour: I don’t want to paint it, it’s boring. But at dawn and dusk, with horizontal light, it’s exciting, or in winter, in a storm, covered in fog. What I paint is the light, the weather. That’s what’s exciting.

A Departure From seeing in painting, then, we come to perception and experience. Philosopher Merleau-Ponty, who wrote three essays on painting, considered Cézanne a phenomenologist working with paint rather than words. Cézanne struggles to express what exists. He is fascinated with the realm where the self and the world fuse in an embodied encounter. For example his famous Mont Sainte Victoire: he recaptures the same landscape under so many different circumstances to try and find out how the world makes itself visible to us. He explored how the mountain shows itself as a mountain, through light, reflection, colour, shadow and so on. The question, he says, is not to show space and light, but to ‘make space and light, which are there, speak to us’. Merleau-Ponty called it an ‘urgency’ – the desire to capture that ‘instant when the painter’s vision becomes gesture’, or when, in Cézanne’s words, he ‘thinks in painting’ (Merleau-Ponty 1964: 178). That is also where ‘Cézanne’s doubt’ lies: it was an impossible task, as

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Cézanne was not just painting nature, rather he was ‘attempting’ nature. Merleau-Ponty sees a strong similarity between phenomenology and art: both attempt to convey the vibrancy of the world as immediately experienced. Both involve the same kind of awareness and wonder. Thus, by seeing how painting works, we may see how the world makes itself visible to us. As he states, ‘any theory of painting is also a metaphysics.’ The end of my last visit to Roger finds us talking about cooking again. Roger elaborates on the very restful and therapeutic character of the slow, rhythmic acts of cooking. We discuss his recipe for marmalade, and he gives me a pot to take home. On no occasion do I manage to leave his house empty handed, dragging home a bounty of wild cabbage, sea kelp and other weeds to be discovered. Leaving with more than one arrived with is familiar to Roger, always coming home with books bought, plants found, pheasants given and so on. However he surprised even himself when he managed to do so after two years in the Antarctic: there were not only his paintings and drawings to take home, but also souvenirs such as penguin skins, seal skulls, and chunks of jasper. Fifty years later, on his final departure from this world, in a man-sized woven willow casket decorated with woodland plants (moss, snowdrops, autumn leaves and flowers) he finally leaves it all behind. On my kitchen shelf remains the jar of glow-in-the-dark green lime marmalade. It has leaked throughout two house moves and is now reduced to a dried out paste, but I can’t bring myself to throw it away. The home-made label has ‘The Harbourmaster’s own properly hand cut marmalade from Crail’ stamped on it with, as usual, Roger’s pencil scribbles below: ‘Sorry, I upset the green colour.’

Envoy In an ironic twist, the final setting in which Roger is immortalized could be considered a landscape, as it is an artificial scene. I cannot call it an environment or habitat, for there is no life in this world of plastic: Legoland in Denmark now holds a miniature scene of Crail harbour. When the Legoland scouts asked Roger’s permission to include him in the scene,

Figure 2.2. The ‘real’ Roger Banks with pet pug in front of Lobster Cottage, Crail.

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he conceded on condition that his companion pug would feature too. So there they are now, the pug made of three bricks, held by Roger, seven bricks against the backdrop of a picturesque walled harbour. The antinomy of what he stood for in life makes who he was even more poignant.

References Andrews, M. 1999. Landscape and Western Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Banks, R. 1962. The Unrelenting Ice. London: Constable. ———. 1980. Living in a Wild Garden. Tadworth, Surrey: Windmill Press. Berleant, A. 1993. ‘The Aesthetics of Art and Nature’, in S. Kemal and J. Gaskell (eds), Landscape, Natural Beauty and the Arts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 228–43. ———. 1997. Living in the Landscape. Towards an Aesthetics of Environment. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. ——— (ed.). 2002. Environment and the Arts: Perspectives on Environmental Aesthetics. Aldershot: Ashgate. Carlson, A. 1993. ‘Appreciating Art and Appreciating Nature’, in S. Kemal and J. Gaskell (eds), Landscape, Natural Beauty and the Arts. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, pp. 199–227. ———. 2001. ‘Environmental Aesthetics’, in B. Gaut and D. McIver Lopes (eds), The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics. London: Routledge, pp. 541–55. Cosgrove, D. 2008. Geography and Vision: Seeing, Imagining and Representing the World. London: I. B. Tauris. Cresswell, T. 2004. Place: A Short Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Hirsch, E. 1995. ‘Introduction’, in E. Hirsch and M. O’Hanlon (eds), The Anthropology of Landscape: Perspectives on Place. Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 1–30. Ingold, T. 2000. The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London: Routledge. Jones, E. 1989. Reading the Book of Nature. A Phenomenological Study of Creative Expression in Science and Painting. Athens: Ohio University Press. Lorimer, H. 2005. ‘Cultural Geography: The Busyness of Being ‘More-ThanRepresentational’, Progress in Human Geography 29(1): 83–94. Merleau-Ponty, M. 1964. ‘Eye and Mind’, trans. C. Dallery, in J. M. Edie (ed.), The Primacy of Perception, and Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, pp. 159–92. Sontag, S. 1990. ‘Against Interpretation’, in S. Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays. London: Anchor Books Doubleday, pp. 3–14. Wylie, J. 2009. ‘Landscape, Absence and the Geographies of Love’, Transactions 34(3): 275–89.

3 Encountering Glaciers Two Centuries of Stories from the Saint Elias Mountains, Northwestern North America Julie Cruikshank

My fascination with glaciers is rooted in a puzzle from my ethnographic research in northwestern Canada. During the 1970s and early 1980s I lived in the Yukon Territory and worked with senior indigenous women eager to record life experiences for younger generations (Cruikshank et al. 1990). Surprisingly, some of their accounts chronicled unorthodox behaviour of glaciers flowing from the Saint Elias Mountains where Canada and the United States now meet at their least known border. These narratives depict glaciers as sentient actors that respond to their surroundings. They are sensitive to smells and sounds. They make moral judgments and punish infractions. Elders described them sometimes as animate (endowed with life) and sometimes as animating (giving life to) the landscapes they inhabit. At the time I was struck by the narrators’ insistence that we record these accounts, but wondered why such distant and difficult places loomed large in life stories. The women I knew lived well inland from these icefields, so the connections to their own lives seemed obscure. Rather than speaking for themselves in any unproblematic way these narratives seemed to head into blind canyons of incommensurability. When I later immersed myself in climate histories and colonial records, I learned that two processes, usually discussed independently, coincided in these icefields: geophysical changes (the turf of physical sciences) and European colonial incursions (the sphere of humanities and social sciences). During the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, indigenous residents and early European visitors all encountered dynamic and startling landscape changes here. But resident peoples and North Atlantic visitors were

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also encountering one another as European expeditions reached coastal shores and then crossed mountains and glaciers to reach the interior. My readings challenged me to return to narratives I had heard previously with new questions. What happens during colonial encounters when matters of locality confront practices of exploration? What are the epistemological consequences of such encounters? Where do oral and written accounts of such encounters travel and what do they accomplish? Which stories take root and which ones sink from view? I approach this as a problem in the anthropology of encounter that can be retrospectively investigated through narrative traces that accumulate from such meetings. The idea of encounter seems especially useful because of what it reveals about scale and subjectivity. Initially, the actors in this region were relatively few and their motives, intentions and imaginings can be traced partially in diaries and reports, but also in orally narrated stories still told. Such encounters provide a methodological opportunity for understanding the travel of concepts and the transformations they bring about. I begin with a brief introduction to the Saint Elias Icefields during late stages of a period some scientists call the Little Ice Age. I then summarise human encounters of two kinds: those with risky landscapes and those among strangers. We frequently attend to the radical differences revealed by oral and written accounts, but I will argue that looking for historical connections between diverging worldviews is illuminating. Two final sections address encounters of a different kind: between accounts of events and their successive readers and listeners and between old concerns and contemporary debates about the place of landscape in human affairs.

Cryospheric Landscapes: The Saint Elias Icefields Some of North America’s highest peaks provide scaffolding for the Saint Elias Icefields, the earth’s largest after the Antarctic and Greenland. These glaciers were created by ice ages, maintained by climate and have been in place for thousands of years. Ancestors of coastal Tlingit mariners and inland subarctic hunters coexisted for millennia with an unpredictable cryosphere that was still undergoing climate-induced changes within memory. The narratives I discuss come from late stages of the Little Ice Age, a period characterised by cooler and more variable temperatures over much of the globe with pronounced consequences at high latitude. In the Pacific Northwest, the dates 1550 to 1900 are commonly cited to bracket this time when glaciers were both larger and more advanced than they are today (Grove 1988; Fagan 2000). The location may initially appear ‘remote’ and out of the way, but this is deceptive. By the late 1700s, when icefields were especially active, so was global commerce in furs transported from America’s far northwest to

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London, Paris and Moscow. A century later, surveyors located peaks that formalised the much-disputed international boundary between Canada and the United States. Since the 1970s, this region has provided sites for scientific research on global climate change. It has recently been designated the first transborder UNESCO World Heritage Site, attracting international attention. This is indeed a landscape layered with stories. Significantly, these icefield ranges include glaciers that surge, of particular interest to geophysical sciences. Surging glaciers may advance without warning after years of stability, sometimes by several kilometres, and they frequently create ice-dammed lakes that build up and burst out when the ice thins and the dam fractures. Scientists now think that surges are triggered by subsurface deformation – processes involving water and subglacial deposits under high pressure. Surging glaciers also occur in polar regions, but issues of scale and accessibility make them easier for scientists to study in the Saint Elias Icefields. Of some four thousand glaciers in these icefields a relatively large number – at least two hundred – have this characteristic. Oral accounts convey terrifying consequences for downstream residents when glacier dams fractured under pressure from rising upstream waters.

Sentient Glaciers My introduction to glaciers and their stories came from three women: Kitty Smith, Annie Ned and Angela Sidney, all born just prior to or just following the 1896–98 Klondike gold rush. All were raised by mothers or grandmothers born in the mid-1800s who relayed accounts of nineteenthcentury life to daughters and granddaughters born on the brink of a new century. Kitty Smith was born in approximately 1890 near the mouth of the Alsek River and became familiar with its tributaries as a child. She recalled once making a trip down the Tatshenshini River in a dugout canoe and chronicled stories of outburst floods that she heard as a youngster. Annie Ned, a few years younger, was born further inland but her maternal uncle was based in the Alsek-Tatshenshini watershed and taught her about the behaviour of glaciers. Angela Sidney, born in 1902, lived further east, near the Tagish Lakes, just inland from the glacier-studded Coast Mountains. The glaciers these women speak of engage all the senses. They are wilful, capricious, easily excited by human intemperance, but equally placated by quick-witted human responses. Proper behaviour is deferential. I was warned, for instance, about firm taboos against ‘cooking with grease’ near glaciers that are offended by such smells. Food should be boiled and never fried, nor should grease be spilt. Cooked food, especially fat, might grow into a glacier overnight if improperly handled. Narrators expressed concerns about hikers who embark on overnight camping trips in mountain

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landscapes and might inadvertently trigger a glacier surge of ear-splitting force and great danger by cooking bacon for breakfast. Travellers should be quiet and circumspect in the presence of glaciers. What most clearly differentiates the stories these women tell from written accounts left by early Euro-American travellers is the way Yukon narrators merge natural histories of landscape with social histories and pursue their analogies in a local human ecology. The Lowell Glacier, for instance, is remembered by the Athapaskan name Nałudí or ‘fish stop’ because its movement across the Alsek River periodically blocked the migration of Pacific salmon to upper tributaries. Kitty Smith explained how Nałudí first surged when a young boy accompanying Tlingit traders from the coast made fun of an Athapaskan shaman because of his balding head. To punish him and his kinsmen for this indiscretion, the shaman called the glacier across the Alsek where it came to rest against a mountain and built an ice dam some two hundred metres high. A lake formed behind the dam, filling the upriver valley for one hundred kilometres until the ice cracked under pressure and the lake drained (de Laguna 1972: 276; McClellan 2001[1975]: 71–72; Cruikshank 2005: 43–45, 104–7). These events are also preserved in the geosciences’ record along with dates of earlier fillings (Clague and Rampton 1982). On the Pacific rim of these same icefields, records left by early visitors give some sense of changes during late stages of the Little Ice Age. In the Gulf of Alaska, melting glaciers were opening up new lands for habitation at the same time that neighbouring glacier advances forced relocations or destroyed villages. In 1794 a member of George Vancouver’s expedition described what is now Icy Bay as ‘choaked with massy ice and frozen snow’ flowing from the Malaspina glacier (Menzies 1993: 145). By 1837, forty-three years later, the ice had expanded. Edward Belcher (1843: 70–81) encountered a thirty-foot ice cliff in this location and no evidence of the trees Vancouver had previously reported. Fifty years on, alpinist Harold Topham heard Tlingit accounts of a recent catastrophic outburst. They reported hearing an advancing glacier before they saw it. It travelled across the bay, struck the opposite shore, then turned and continued, swallowing the village and eventually covering the harbour (de Laguna 1972: 286). Geologists Tarr and Martin (1914: 46–47) later estimated that this flood must have occurred sometime before 1886, when mountain climbers reported their encounter with a twenty-five-mile-wide glacier filling Icy Bay. By the time anthropologist Frederica de Laguna arrived in the 1940s, the ice had receded and Icy Bay had grown to its present dimensions – a good six miles deep and five miles wide. She recorded a Tlingit account that attributed the outburst to flamboyant behaviour by young men who taunted the glacier by inviting it to come down and share a meal of salmon they were cooking. She also summarised two further accounts of glacierrelated outburst floods just south of Icy Bay, both blamed on disrespectful treatment of seagulls (de Laguna 1972: 276, 286–87).

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Similar stories come from the southern rim of these icefields, near Glacier Bay and Cross Sound. According to an account John Swanton recorded in 1904, the daughter of an inland chief who had relocated to the coast as a result of successful trade called out to the glacier above her village her wish that it might belong to her father: ‘and during that night, it began to grow out over their new house. It extended itself far out over the town, and the people fled from it’ (Swanton 1909: 337–38).1 Glaciers that listen respond to human intemperance with devastating consequences. These accounts differ sharply from observations by early European visitors in that humans do not just observe external ‘nature’; they are part of social processes that constitute landscapes. Human carelessness is identified as the cause for glacier advances but also for glacier melting. The Malaspina glacier reportedly began to waste after a Tsimshian shaman died and his kinsmen accidentally left his remains on the glacier after they embalmed his body for the journey home (de Laguna 1972: 97). The glacier once filling Yakutat Bay only began to waste after someone killed a dog and carelessly threw its carcass into a crevasse. Oral traditions attribute the Taku Glacier’s retreat to the spilling of blood on the glacier following a violent death (Nyman and Leer 1993: 43). Accounts of human travel across glaciers come from both coast and interior. One well-known story concerns a trip made by trading partners, one from the interior and the other from the coast. The coastal Tlingit partner accidentally slips into a crevasse and his inland Athapaskan companion, terrified of being blamed, nevertheless travels on to report the tragedy. Grief-stricken relatives hold a potlatch and then journey back to recover the body, but rejoice to find their kinsman alive, miraculously sustained both by provisions he carried and by food his relatives offered the fire at his potlatch. The story underscores the perils of glacier travel but also the mutual responsibilities of partners and the shifting and uncertain ethnic boundaries differentiating them. Other narratives dramatise how strangers, the colourless ‘cloud people’ or k’och’en first travelled inland from the coast, traversing glaciers, and the transformations their arrival heralded. Travel across ‘through glaciers,’ a term early geologists coined for highway-like expanses, seems to have been common – between the Copper River and Yakutat, between Yakutat and Alsek River, or from Glacier Bay to Alsek River. An equal number of stories chronicle travels downriver through tunnels beneath glaciers that once crossed major rivers draining the interior: the Copper, Alsek, Taku and Stikine. Before such a journey, people reportedly donned their best clothes and ritually prepared for possible death. Speaking to John Swanton in 1904, a Tlingit man named Deikinaak’w noted: ‘In one place, the Alsek River runs under a glacier. People can pass beneath in their canoes, but, if any one speaks while they are under it, the glacier comes down on them. They say that in those

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times this glacier was like an animal, and could hear what was said to it’ (Swanton 1909: 67). Contemporary elders also identify glacier caves as homes to giant animals – copper-clawed owls in one story and a giant snake in another – that are likely to emerge from such dwellings if they take offence.2

Practices of Exploration Meet Matters of Locality For generations of visitors, too, glaciers provided one striking location where imagination could lodge and nourish inspirational or troubling impressions. Expedition accounts provide a genre of field notes that reveal diverse perspectives on glaciers. In this section, I briefly consider three accounts by visitors to this region – Jean-François de La Pérouse in 1786, John Muir in 1879 and 1880 and Frederick Schwatka in 1891, each an exemplar of a kind – to show how nature and culture were conceptualized at specific times and places in a ‘field’ of surprising events. My objective is to take their accounts as seriously as the stories I recorded with senior women, to see how social imagination contributes to all accounts of glacier landscapes.

Jean-Françoise de La Pérouse: Defining ‘The Field’ Lituya Bay, a glacier-scoured tidal inlet in the Gulf of Alaska, was fully open by 1786 when Jean-François de La Pérouse arrived from France with 195 men in two well-provisioned ships ready to map, measure and classify the natural world. His voyage provides a classic story from ‘the field’, at a time when Enlightenment science was formulating categories of nature and culture in New World contexts. The bay’s mouth is both narrow and shallow, creating a bottleneck through which notorious tides race at high velocity. La Pérouse’s ships were nearly lost as they entered the bay, and he expressed initial relief at their arrival ‘at the verge of the world’. Optimistically, he hoped that he had found the entrance to the Northwest Passage but rapidly discovered that it soon terminated in glaciers. Lituya Bay was far from deserted though, with some three hundred to four hundred Tlingits in residence, and many more arriving and leaving daily. La Pérouse’s relations with resident peoples, while guided by what he called ‘the usual formalities’, were notably constrained by his inability to grasp local conventions concerning ownership and exchange. His journals tell us about defining moments when social and sentient places central to Tlingit narratives encountered French Enlightenment conceptions of technological progress and a nature deemed to be subject to empirical investigation and measurement. His ships emptied and his crew began collecting water, firewood and food from the sea. Equipped with the latest scientific instruments, he positioned his observatory on a small island but

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became frustrated when Tlingits pressed forward and ‘stole’ some notebooks full of measurements. When a well-dressed man approached and offered to sell the island on which they were camped (possibly to avoid an altercation), La Pérouse expressed misgivings about the legality of such a purchase but nevertheless proceeded, exchanging trade goods and burying a bottle enclosing a document that claimed title for France. A key point of dissonance was La Pérouse’s assumption that land could be purchased but that fresh water, fish and firewood were common property when, in fact, these resources were subject to strict rules of clan ownership. If La Pérouse described glaciers as manifestations of the sublime – great yet terrible, wondrous yet fearsome – he took comfort in the technology he transported to measure nature’s dimensions: sextants, a portable observatory, dipping needles, chronometers and more. But he suffered catastrophic losses when twenty-one members of his crew, including his nephew, were swept into a riptide and drowned. Crucially, he learned that several boats filled with Tlingit mariners had recently capsized in the same location and documented a moment of genuine empathy: ‘The Indians appeared to participate in our grief which is extreme … Reader, Whoever thou Art, Mingle thy Tears with Ours,’ he recorded. Devastated, La Pérouse delayed departure, initially with faint hope of finding survivors, then to reassign responsibilities and later because of foul weather. On two occasions during this period, he documented his decision to ignore official instructions. First, he briefly considered, then refused to collect the sole frame boat that survived the Tlingit disaster, noting that ‘a religious respect for the asylums of the dead is universal, and I was willing that this should remain inviolate’ (Milet-Mureau 1799: 391). Second, the Academy of Sciences urged him to acquire skeletal remains (Milet-Mureau 1799: 125). Again, La Pérouse demurred. When some crew members came upon a tomb, they initially opened a package wrapped in several layers of hide. Learning from the Tlingit that bodies were customarily cremated but that heads were preserved and wrapped, they ‘replaced everything with scrupulous exactness’ (Milet-Mureau 1799: 390). His choice differs notably from those made by museum collectors like Franz Boas and George Emmons who collected extensively from graves a century later, when science had more firmly established its authority (Emmons 1991: 376–82). As his stay dragged on, La Pérouse’s impatience grew. Landscape began to bleed into his interpretations of human behaviour and notions of ‘primitivism’ came into play: For a country so frightful, nature provides inhabitants differing as widely from civilized nations, as the land I have described from our cultivated plains. Rude and barbarous, their soil is wild and rugged, they inhabit the country only to extirpate every thing that lives and moves upon it. At war with every animal, they despise the vegetables that spring up around them. (Milet-Mureau 1799: 396)

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Here, then, the connection between landscape and civilization is articulated. Culture and nature emerge as conceptually separate entities, with nature determining what culture is destined to become.

John Muir: The Work of Moving Ice A century later, in 1879, John Muir visited Glacier Bay, fuelled by an intense interest in landscape origins. Agassiz’s theory that the earth had once been covered by ice and Lyell’s radical ideas about gradual geological change stoked his imagination. Enlightenment values interested him less than the notion of a purposeful world and he set the bar somewhat differently from La Pérouse, with spirit rather than science as his axis. A lapsed Calvinist, he nevertheless came to interpret North American landscapes as shaped both by glacial action and by God’s master plan – a source of religious revelation he referred to as his ‘glacier gospel’. We know now that during the Little Ice Age, while glaciers in the rest of the world advanced only several hundred meters, those in the Glacier Bay Icefield system experienced at least eighty kilometres of terminus advance (Powell 1995). When George Vancouver navigated Icy Strait in 1794, the ice was already receding, yet he reported ‘compact and solid mountains of ice, rising perpendicularly from the water’s edge’ at the mouth of Glacier Bay (Menzies 1993: 162–63). His observation continues to be cited as a benchmark attesting to startling and rapid glacier retreat. In 1879, eightyfive years after Vancouver’s visit, Muir’s companion, Samuel Hall Young, observed that, ‘where Vancouver saw only one great crystal wall across the sea, we were to paddle for days up a long and sinuous fiord, and, where he saw one glacier, we were to find a dozen’ (Young 1915: 66). Muir travelled north from Fort Wrangell in October 1879, and again in 1880, each time in solid cedar canoes (Muir 1993: 4, 103–6). In 1879, only one of the Tlingit crew members had previously been this far north, and even he was so disoriented by the changes that he insisted on engaging a local guide from a sealers’ camp as they approached the bay’s mouth. At Glacier Bay, Muir distressed his hosts by clambering over glaciers in a state of high excitement while they contended with drifting ice jams and grew increasingly anxious about the dangers lurking in geological formations at the bay’s mouth. Yet, what distinguishes encounters between Muir and his Tlingit hosts from so many others of this period were attempts the parties made to find common ground, specifically through the telling of stories. These exchanges were especially striking given the U.S. military’s role in Alaska at the time.3 Conversations came on long evenings as they camped. Muir, much intrigued by matters of ‘spirit’, found that his travelling companions had thoughtful ideas on the subject. On one occasion he wrote: ‘When our talk was interrupted by the howling of a wolf on the opposite side of

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the strait, Kadachan [asked] the question, “Have wolves souls?” … The Indians believe that they have’ (Muir 1998 [1915]: 123–24). Muir, in turn, spoke a language of sentience that must have surprised his Tlingit hosts. He described glaciers as ‘travelling animals that make their own tracks’ and as ‘crawling through gorge and valley like monster glittering serpents’. He spoke of glaciers ‘in labor’ giving birth to mountains and of falling icebergs emitting ‘the outcry of a newborn berg’ (Muir 1915: 59, 94, 110, 151). Yet he failed to grasp local conventions associated with glaciers and repeatedly disappeared for hours into ‘ice-mountains’ with no apparent concern for his fellow travellers, causing them to speculate about whether the man they began to call ‘Ice Chief’ might be a witch, or merely mad. Distinctive notions of ‘spirit’ became a point of tension in Muir’s encounters much as ‘science’ had a century earlier. Muir’s nature writings demonstrate that he took as foundational the separation of natural and social worlds, viewing nature as primary, with humans as mere fellow travellers in this world. If Tlingit stories stressed reciprocity between humans and animals, Muir continued to focus on their separation, giving preference to animals. Famously, he insisted on rocking the boat when they hunted. The incredulous crew came to refer to him ironically as ‘duck’s friend’ because ‘when we want to shoot, Mr. Muir always shakes the canoe’ (Muir 1915: 150, 186). An interpretation that they almost surely made among themselves was that Muir was offending animals who were offering themselves to hunters. Already we see hints of the conceptual differences that would pit environmentalists and Native North Americans against one another in debates about hunting a century later (see for instance Nadasdy 2005).

Frederick Schwatka: ‘Geography Militant’ When strangers began crossing the mountains to the Yukon interior in the late nineteenth century, they were eager to tell stories about travels on ice. One brief account returns us to the stories that opened this paper. Frederick Schwatka, a veteran of the U.S. Army who took up exploration, passed through this region in the summer of 1891. His journals typify a kind of exploration that geographer Felix Driver (2001) has called ‘Geography Militant’, characterized by aggressive naming practices, crude census taking, detailed mapping and extravagant military metaphor. This was Schwatka’s second trip to the Yukon River, this time with a young geologist named Willard Hayes who later assumed the position of Chief Geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey (Harris 1996: 24). They travelled inland from Juneau up the Taku River, through the southern lakes and down the Yukon River, then overland toward the Copper River. With difficulty, they found local guides who agreed to take them through glacier country. As they prepared to cross the Klutlan Glacier,

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Schwatka reported that their guides insisted, ‘We must not fry grease in our pans … or the ice of the glaciers will tumble in as we cross and kill us all’. He noted dismissively, ‘We easily catered to this and told them we would forbear oleaginous condiments rather than have a ton of ice tumble upon us’. During a glacier crossing that he describes as ‘simply frightful’, he noted that the guides ‘besought us to make no noise while on the ice or the crevasses would open wider and swallow us up … They firmly resented even our whispering, so fearful were they of the consequences’. His conclusion conveys both his relief after their safe crossing and a sense of how ideas were now being differentiated hierarchically. ‘Before crossing, they all “made medicine” and no doubt it saved many valuable lives. Their fear of glacial ice is too pronounced and manifest to be based on any general physical reasons, and must be accounted for wholly by superstition’ (Harris 1996: 168, 169). Despite his utter dependence on local guides, Schwatka could casually dismiss local knowledge as irrelevant by 1891.

Interlude: Sentient Landscapes and Social Imagination In the two previous sections, I have used stories from oral tradition and from written documents as counterparts that provide different perspectives on similar events. The notion that the land listens and responds, so central to local ontology, appears quite distinct from ideas that North Atlantic visitors transported here in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Yet viewed as coexisting practices, they may not have been so divergent. Indeed, we may learn more from an approach that recognises our historical connections with past concepts than from one that asserts our historical distance. For indigenous residents involved in these meetings, conventions associated with kinship and personhood extended to relations with nonhuman entities, including a sentient landscape that listens and responds to human indiscretion. This concept translates poorly into European languages, especially English, where any word that may be used to capture such views is heavily laden with connotations of science and religion. Words like natural, supernatural, spiritual, animate, or inanimate all carry specific connotations that their Tlingit and Athapaskan counterparts do not. Tlingit language draws some lines very differently, and blurs other distinctions that are embedded in English. Tlingit, for instance, reflects subtle differences between ordinary and extraordinary, commonplace and mysterious, safe and dangerous (de Laguna 1972: 808; Kan 1999: 10). Moreover, the language is rich in verbs and emphasizes activity and motion, making no distinction between animate and inanimate. Hence mountains, glaciers, bodies of water, rocks and manufactured objects all have qualities of sentience. Different though they may at first seem, ideas of landscape in Europe at the time scientific expeditions first set out were in some

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ways similar. Writing about Little Ice Age France, historian Emanuel Ladurie documents that tithes went unpaid and lawsuits were launched as glaciers advanced at Chamonix, crushing hamlets and burying farms and gold mines. Desperate citizens responded by drawing swords as they confronted glacial caves, lit candles, and placed crosses at the edge of advancing moraines in efforts to halt the onslaught of ice (Ladurie 1971: 170, 209). Mary Shelley drew on these images in 1816, often remembered as the ‘year without a summer’ when she chose the expanding Mer de Glace as the setting for chapter ten of Frankenstein. Elizabeth Povinelli (1993) traces how conceptions of sentience persisting from medieval Europe were suppressed during subsequent centuries. A ‘country that listens’, she notes, had to be rejected as concerns about manufacturing and imperialism took hold. Industrialists were not about to stand for objects that act wilfully, for how could manufacturing proceed under such circumstances? The new sciences came to see alchemy as too animistic and wilful objects as too troublesome and opted instead for mechanical models. Enlightenment models posited a ‘natural’ mechanical order, liable to human manipulation. Inevitably the archetypal construction of the hunter-gatherer emerged, a category of humans deemed merely to respond rather than to act upon nature, whose knowledge was redefined as ‘superstition.’ We saw this very assessment in Schwatka’s 1891 journals. Previous sections compared two kinds of historical encounters – first with ecological risks posed by the landscape and second with strangers. These final sections examine the third and fourth kinds of encounters: the third between various stories and their editors, readers and listeners as they are subsequently taken up in different knowledge traditions; and finally, current encounters between age-old concerns and contemporary struggles.

Narrative Legacies As already noted, sequential tragedies that occurred at Lituya Bay in 1786 are recorded in La Pérouse’s north Pacific expedition journals. They are also sedimented in Tlingit oral tradition and song. After La Pérouse departed Lituya Bay, he travelled to the south Pacific where he, his crew, his boats and collections disappeared in a Pacific storm in 1788. First, though, he managed to send logbooks and drawings back to France with couriers who travelled to Versailles. His journals were published in France in 1798, then subsequently in two English translations – one appearing within a year and a second almost two hundred years later (Milet-Mureau 1799; Dunmore 1994). Tlingit accounts, by contrast, live on in stories and songs composed to mourn the deaths of their own men. Overlooking Lituya Bay, Mount Fairweather rises 4,663 metres above sea level and now anchors one cor-

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ner of the mountainous border separating Canada from Alaska. Tlingit mariners knew this mountain as Tsalxaan, and considered it a navigational guide that also provided warning of volatile weather conditions. Shortly before La Pérouse arrived in 1786, several large frame boats carrying Tlingit traders, reportedly all members of the L’uknax.ádi clan, capsized at the mouth of the bay. Either Tsalxaan had failed to give a sign, or the travellers had failed to heed it – interpretations are ambiguous in oral accounts passed down.4 One boat escaped and its members survived. Because of their devastating losses, this clan claimed Tsalxaan as a crest that they say was paid for by the lives of their ancestors. Wooshkika, a clan sister of the victims, composed a commemorative song for brothers and uncles who perished, still sung on ceremonial occasions. Legacies of written accounts are equally fraught. Historian John Dunmore located La Pérouse’s original journals in a Paris archive almost two centuries after the journey. Working with La Pérouse’s marginal notations, he prepared an updated and meticulously footnoted translation of the journals. But this translation strengthens scientific detail at the expense of ethno-historical scholarship that was widely available when Dunmore was writing. His footnotes provide Latin names for every plant, animal and fish mentioned by La Pérouse (Dunmore 1994: 123–31). His account is attentive to shifts in scientific language occurring even as La Pérouse wrote (Dunmore 1994: 132, n1). Yet he replicates errors made by most early visitors, conveying La Pérouse’s eighteenth-century misunderstandings into late-twentieth-century commonsense truths. Dunmore sympathizes with La Pérouse’s complaints about ‘theft’ of his notebooks (Dunmore 1994: 108, n2) and with his concerns about the ‘chief’s’ right to sell the island in Lituya Bay, opining that any Tlingit claim to the island was dubious because the bay was used only as a ‘summer village’ (Dunmore 1994: 110–11, n2). When La Pérouse laments that Tlingit society is in its ‘infancy’ and would undoubtedly benefit from the civilizing influence of agriculture, Dunmore agrees (Dunmore 1994: 132, n2). If Dunmore selects the trope of first contact as his main story, the primary emphasis in Tlingit accounts is ecological disaster and clan losses, with the French connection a minor footnote. Some of John Muir’s original notes met a similar fate. Historian Ronald Limbaugh (1996) has worked extensively with Muir’s voluminous correspondence, manuscripts, journals and notes. He is particularly interested in discrepancies between Muir’s unpublished and published writings and in how editorial interventions by Robert Underwood Johnson, Muir’s influential editor at Century Magazine in the1890s, shaped versions widely disseminated during Muir’s lifetime.5 Limbaugh was not especially interested in Muir’s Tlingit encounters, but he shows how Tlingit perspectives became an editorial casualty once Muir’s editor identified them as ‘philosophical digressions’ and purged them from published versions (Limbaugh 1996: 130). Limbaugh notes that

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Muir was attracted to the emerging animal rights movement and became preoccupied by questions about animal sentience and whether animals had souls. It would seem that the conversations Muir had with Tlingits in 1879 were more than idle chatter. He questioned them about the transmigration of souls, specifically the souls of wolves, and reported their observations. Reading Darwin had convinced Muir that animals and humans were related, and he struggled with questions about the equivalence of species and the implications of what he perceived as the near-human, moral and intellectual qualities of animals. If animal sentience could be demonstrated, Muir pondered, should human rights be extended to animals and perhaps even to women and children? Editor Robert Underwood Johnson apparently deemed such ideas too radical for readers of Century and expurgated those passages from Muir’s submissions. Johnson undoubtedly found even more inflammatory Muir’s account of the meeting with the Hoonah chief who, following prescriptions noted earlier about causes of glacier melting, sacrificed slaves in an effort to halt the advance of Brady glacier as it blocked a salmon stream: The Indians regard glaciers as living creatures, & are careful not to offend them as they crawl on their way devouring the woods & rocks. The Hoona tribe, as we afterwards learned, know very well that this [glacier] had recently advanced about a mile, for it flows across the mouth of a stream from which for [sic] time immemorial a branch of the tribe had obtained their yearly supplies of salmon. This disastrous advance was supposed to be a punishment & being anxious to appease the wrath of the gods & get them to withdraw the damming glacier, they consulted their Shamans, who advised them to kill and offer in sacrifice a number of their best slaves. This was done; but the precious salmon-stream is still dammed, & the sacrificial blood was shed in vain. (Muir, cited in Limbaugh 1996: 110)

Johnson deleted this passage. Muir was by now being groomed for iconic national status and agreed to temper his public views.6 As Muir’s streamlined and sanitised nature stories gradually became reworked as ‘America’s story’, both the specificity of Tlingit local ecological knowledge as well as Muir’s attention to Tlingit perspectives slid from the published record of those encounters. Muir’s Travels in Alaska appeared in 1915, a year after his death, with some passages reinserted but not the one cited above. Tlingit uneasiness about Muir’s attitudes to glaciers seems prescient given the subsequent impact of his ideas on their lives once his conservation movement took root and their territories were transformed into a national park. Pressures have only intensified for their descendents. If Muir’s early visits have slid from the oral record, some of the stories he heard in 1879 live on. In the late 1980s the Portland Museum of Art invited Tlingit elders to visit and discuss ceremonial objects held at that museum. James Clifford (1989) describes how an octopus headdress evoked memories about a devilfish (octopus) that once blocked a bay. By the end of the story, he reports, the octopus had become the state and federal agencies

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regulating the rights of Tlingits to use Glacier Bay, lending the story precise meanings in terms of contemporary struggles. Returning to the ethnographic puzzle with which this paper began – the appearance of sentient glaciers in orally narrated life stories – recall Frederick Schwatka’s dismissive comments about his guides’ request that he observe respectful behaviour when crossing glaciers. Schwatka’s 1891 journals were misplaced, then found and republished in 1996, and the contemporary editor, Arland Harris, adds a footnote at this point, indicating that Schwatka’s amusement about ‘superstition’ can be taken as quite understandable. ‘The origin of the Pelly River Natives’ unreasonable or superstitious fear of glacier ice and the connection with frying with grease is not known’ (Harris 1996: 169, n62) and hence of no interest. What is notable is how speedily new landscape stories took root and gained authority as official ‘common sense’. We know that certain frameworks of translation acquire durability and robustness by attachment to and circulation within prestigious networks. What sinks into history and what floats away is not random. Dunmore’s annotations reiterate old clichés, referring to La Pérouse as ‘the first visitor to this lonely part of the world’ (Dunmore 1994: 139, n3). John Muir is credited with ‘discovering’ Glacier Bay, an attribution that would surely have surprised the Tlingit seamen who transported him there. Schwatka’s published cranky humour leaves Victorian prejudices intact, relegating indigenous philosophical frameworks uncritically to ‘superstition’. Narratives of L’uknax.ádi clan losses, by contrast, are more difficult for outsiders to understand than familiar narratives of first contact and also more likely to disappear in conventional Western histories. So are stories about the hazards of cooking with grease. If there is an answer to the ethnographic puzzle I posed initially, it is at least partly elders’ determination to provide a record of memory for young people excluded from the Saint Elias Mountains. A century after Schwatka’s visit, Yukon elders still considered prescriptions about glacier landscapes important to include in their life stories.

Entangled Narratives A fourth encounter concerns the current meeting between age-old narratives and contemporary struggles. Saint Elias landscapes provide an ideal location to think about this. Scientists have been able to map and to measure its dimensions, extract ice cores from its highest summits and determine the depths of its frozen rivers using satellite imagery. Environmentalists and ecotourists reconstruct it as one of the world’s few remaining ‘natural’ spaces, a redeemable object to be ‘saved’. International parks increasingly resemble artistic productions where representations of nature as ‘aesthetic landscape’, ‘endangered/ pristine wilderness’ or even as

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a giant jungle-gym for ecotourists now compete with conceptions held by Aboriginal residents who once lived and hunted here. The mountains and glaciers are again being reinvented for new purposes – this time as a hybrid composed of management techniques and measurement practices. Global environmental narratives now normalise practices that bring primordial wilderness under the protection of international committees (see Anderson 2004). What is usually missing from this picture is the story of radical ‘purification’ of landscapes, assisted by the physical eviction of inhabitants from officially protected areas. Following overhunting by military and civilian personnel during the construction of the Alaska Highway in 1942–43, the Yukon’s first game sanctuary was set aside. New regulations prohibited all hunting – including subsistence hunting – within the sanctuary, and indigenous residents were relocated outside its boundaries and east of the highway. Four parks – two in the United States and two in Canada – now encompass the Saint Elias Icefields. Mount Saint Elias serves as linchpin for the two parks originally accorded this status in 1979 – Kluane National Park (Yukon Territory) and Wrangell-Saint Elias National Park (Alaska). Mount Fairweather (the weather-beacon Tsalxaan) secures both Glacier Bay National Park (Alaska) and Tatshenshini-Alsek Park (British Columbia) added in 1992 and 1994, respectively. These four parks, in turn, are formally enveloped within a World Heritage Site. If natural and cultural history were enmeshed here in the past, this is equally the case today. Notably, UNESCO’s World Heritage List assigns sites given this status to one of three categories: ‘natural’, ‘cultural’ or ‘mixed properties’, reasserting modernist opposition between nature and culture. As of 13 August 2008, the 878 properties inscribed on the World Heritage List included 679 sites deemed cultural, 174 classified as natural, and twenty-five of mixed properties. This particular site, the first to cross an international boundary, has been allocated to the ‘natural’ World Heritage Site category, to the consternation of local First Nations. Breaking the bond between people and place along lines as arbitrary as one imagined between cultural heritage and natural environment marks a decisive rift. The nature we are most likely to hear about in the early twenty-first century is increasingly represented as marvellous but endangered, pristine or biodiverse. Such depictions make it more difficult to hear or appreciate unfamiliar points of view. Environmental politics and what Descola (1992) calls ‘scientific naturalism’ have so normalized our understandings of what ‘nature’ means that we can no longer imagine how other stories might be significant. As claims and counterclaims made in nature’s name proliferate, local knowledge shifts its shape, with sentient and social spaces transformed to measurable commodities called ‘lands’ and ‘resources’. Indigenous peoples then face double exclusion, initially by colonial processes that expropriate land and now by neocolonial discourses that reformulate their ideas.

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In the narratives senior Yukon told, encounters with landscape or with strangers occur as transactions among human and nonhuman beings involved in social relations. Sometimes these transactions succeed and sometimes they fail. Transformations of glaciers from one state to another are consistently attributed to a breach in social relations. In such situations social responsibility must be assigned and interpretations centre on social relations rather than on physical processes. These local visions seem important because they place nature and culture in a single social field and graft colonial and environmental histories onto older stories.7 Always in motion even when they appear static, glaciers encompass both the materiality of the biophysical world and the agency of the nonhuman, drawing on traditions of thought quite different from those of academic materialism. They are certainly grounded in material circumstances but also carry a multitude of historical, cultural, and social values that are missed when they are relegated uncritically to ‘nature’. As Stuart Kirsch has argued, ‘When the scope of inquiry is limited to the natural sciences, problems that are hybrid in composition, combining persons, things, and ideas into a single set of relationships, cannot be adequately analysed’. (2006: 129). His view that indigenous modes of analysis challenge the disenchantment of the world on which modernity is predicated is a hopeful, and probably necessary, one.

Notes 1. More recently, linguists Nora and Richard Dauenhauer (1987: 244–91, 407–33) recorded versions of this story with elders Susie James and Amy Martin. 2. These narratives, told by Kitty Smith, Annie Ned and Angela Sidney appear in Cruikshank (2005: chapter three). 3. The U.S. Army destroyed one village in 1869 and the navy shelled Angoon in 1882 – each following a disagreement between Tlingit leaders and military officers (de Laguna 1960; Dauenhauer and Dauenhauer 1994: 38). 4. Oral traditions were recorded a century after the events in 1886 and 1888 (Emmons 1911: 295–96), in the late 1940s and early 1950s (de Laguna 1972: 258–59, 273–74, 1159–60), and by Dauenhauer and Dauenhauer in the 1960s and 1980s (1987: 293–309). 5. Johnson, a former editor with Scribner’s, came to Century Magazine as associate editor in 1889, about the time he first met Muir. 6. Muir was elected president at the founding meeting of the Sierra Club, in 1892, and held that position for the rest of his life. 7. Works from such diverse historical settings as Africa, the Amazon, and the Arctic suggest that traditions from land-based economies on many continents have their own consistent, globally distributed themes. See, for example, Ingold and Kurttila (2000); Giles-Vernick (2002); Raffles (2002).

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References Anderson, D. G. 2004. ‘Reindeer, Caribou and “Fairy Stories” of State Power’, in D. G. Anderson and M. Nuttall (eds), Cultivating Arctic Landscapes: Knowing and Managing Animals in the Circumpolar North. Oxford: Berghahn, pp. 1–16. Belcher, E. 1843. Narrative of a Voyage Round the World Performed in Her Majesty’s Ship Sulphur During the Years 1836–1842. London: Henry Colburn. Clague, J. J. and V. N. Rampton. 1982. ‘Neoglacial Lake Alsek’, Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences 19: 94–117. Clifford, J. 1989. ‘Interview with Brian Wallis’, Art in America (July): 86–87, 152–53. Cruikshank, J. 2005. Do Glaciers Listen? Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters and Social Imagination. Vancouver: UBC Press. Cruikshank, J. in collaboration with A. Sidney, K. Smith and A. Ned. 1990. Life Lived Like a Story: Life Stories of Three Yukon Elders. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press and Vancouver: UBC Press. Dauenhauer, N. M. and R. Dauenhauer. 1987. Haa Shuká, Our Ancestors: Tlingit Oral Narratives. Seattle: University of Washington Press and Juneau: Sealaska Heritage Foundation. Dauenhauer, R. and N. M. Dauenhauer. 1994. Haa Kusteeyí, Our Culture: Tlingit Life Stories. Seattle: University of Washington Press and Juneau: Sealaska Heritage Foundation. De Laguna, F. 1960. The Story of a Tlingit Community: A Problem in the Relationship between Archeological, Ethnological and Historical Methods. Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 172. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. ———. 1972. Under Mount Saint Elias: The History and Culture of the Yakutat Tlingit. 3 vols, Smithsonian Contributions to Anthropology 7. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Descola, P. 1992. ‘Societies of Nature and the Nature of Society’, in A. Kuper (ed.), Conceptualizing Society. Routledge: London and New York, pp. 107–26. Driver, F. 2001. Geography Militant: Cultures of Exploration and Empire. Oxford: Blackwell. Dunmore, J. 1994. The Journal of Jean-François de La Pérouse, 1785–1788, vol. 1. London: Hakluyt Society. Emmons, G. T. 1911. ‘Native Account of the Meeting Between La Pérouse and the Tlingit’, American Anthropologist 13: 294–98. ———. 1991. The Tlingit Indians. Edited with additions by F. de Laguna. New York: American Museum of Natural History and Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre. Fagan, B. 2000. The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300–1850. New York: Basic Books. Giles-Vernick, T. 2002. Cutting the Vines of the Past: Environmental Histories of the Central African Rain Forest. Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia. Glave, E. J. 1892. ‘Pioneer Packhorses in Alaska 2: The Return to the Coast’, Century Magazine 44(6): 869–81. Grove, J. 1988. The Little Ice Age. London: Methuen.

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Harris, A. S. (ed.). 1996. Schwatka’s Last Search: The New York Ledger Expedition through Unknown Alaska and British America. Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press. Ingold, T. and T. Kurttila. 2000. ‘Perceiving the Environment in Finnish Lapland’, Body and Society 6(3–4): 183–96. Kan, S. 1999. Memory Eternal: Tlingit Culture and Russian Orthodox Christianity through Two Centuries. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Kirsch, S. 2006. Reverse Anthropology: Indigenous Analysis and Environmental Relations in New Guinea. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Ladurie, E. L. 1971. Times of Feast, Times of Famine: A History of Climate Since the Year 1000. New York: Doubleday. Limbaugh, R. 1996. John Muir’s ‘Stickeen’ and the Lessons of Nature. Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press. McClellan, C. 2001[1975]. My Old People Say: An Ethnographic Survey of Southern Yukon Territory. 2 vols, Mercury Series, Canadian Ethnology Service Paper 137. Ottawa: Canadian Museum of Civilization. Menzies, A. 1993. The Alaska Travel Journal of Archibald Menzies, 1793–1794, ed. W. M. Olson. Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press. Milet-Mureau, L. A. (ed.). 1799. A Voyage Round the World, Performed in the Years 1785, 1786, 1787 and 1788 by the Boussole and Astrolabe Under the Command of J.F.G. de La Pérouse. London: G. G. and J. Robinson. Muir J. 1998 [1915]. Travels in Alaska. Introduction by Edward Way Teale. Forward by David Rains Wallace. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. ———. 1993. Letters From Alaska, ed. R. Engberg and B. Merrell. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Nadasdy, P. 2005. ‘Transcending the Debate over the Ecologically Noble Indian: Indigenous Peoples and Environmentalism’, Ethnohistory 52(2): 291–331. Nyman, E. and J. J. Leer. 1993. ‘Gágiwdul.àt’: Brought Forth to Reconfirm: The Legacy of a Taku River Tlingit Clan. Whitehorse: Yukon Native Language Center, and Fairbanks: Alaska Native Language Center. Povinelli, E. 1993. Labor’s Lot: The Power, History and Culture of Aboriginal Action. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Powell, R. D. 1995. ‘Role of Physical Sciences in Global Change Research at Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve’, in D. R. Engstrom (ed.), Proceedings of the Third Glacier Bay Science Symposium, 1993. Anchorage: National Park Service, pp. 1–4. Raffles, H. 2002, In Amazonia: A Natural History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Schwatka, F. 1885. Report of a Military Reconnaissance in Alaska Made in 1883. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. Swanton, J. R. 1909. Tlingit Myths and Texts. Washington, DC: Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 39. Tarr, R. and L. Martin. 1914. Alaska Glacier Studies. Washington, DC: National Geographical Society. Young, S. H. 1915. Alaska Days with John Muir. New York: Fleming H. Revell. ———. 1927. Hall Young of Alaska: ‘The Mushing Parson’. New York: Fleming H. Revell.

4 Fences, Pathways and a Peripatetic Sense of Community Kinship and Residence amongst the Nivaclé of the Paraguayan Chaco Suzanne Grant

Introduction Derived from the Quechua term for ‘hunting ground’, the Gran Chaco is an almost entirely flat alluvial plain situated in the interior of lowland South America that extends into Paraguayan, Argentine and Bolivian national territories. The second largest ecosystem of Lowland South America, the Chaco has an indigenous hunter-gatherer population of over 260,000 (Miller 1999). Since the late nineteenth century, the territorial control exercised by the Paraguayan, Argentinean and Bolivian nation-states through successive wars and the selling of land to foreign investors has had a significant impact on the indigenous population of the region, with the majority becoming increasingly settled in worker villages and agricultural settlements. During this period, a wide range of Christian missions including Anglicans, Roman Catholics, Mennonites, New Tribes Mission and Pentecostals have also established close relations with the indigenous population, frequently assuming the role of mediator between indigenous communities and the wider society. Recent writers have argued that landscape should be conceptualised as a ‘cultural’ (Hirsch and O’Hanlon 1995) or ‘temporal’ (Ingold 2000) process that is created through human agency as a medium or ‘capacity’ of meaning (Corsín-Jiménez 2003). The aim of this chapter is to explore these concepts ethnographically through an examination of the impact of the Mennonite colonisation of the Paraguayan Central Chaco region on the Nivaclé indigenous people through the routes and boundaries that

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pervade the postcolonial Chaco landscape. Based on twenty-four months’ fieldwork amongst the Nivaclé of Campo Loa between July 2001 and July 2003, the chapter begins with a description of the pre-colonial Chaco landscape before going on to describe the Mennonite colonisation process and its impact on the availability of land for the indigenous population. The chapter then examines Nivaclé understandings of this new bounded landscape in terms of non-places and activated spaces, the role of pathways in the creation of knowledge, the moral and aesthetic significance of ‘straightness’, and the significance of journeying in the creation of kinship. In conclusion, boundaries, routes and journeys are described as integral components of Nivaclé kinship and agency, with the Nivaclé landscape the result of a dynamic process of human interaction with the Chaco environment.

Ordering the Landscape The Chaco forms the entire western half of the Paraguayan nation state and is characterised by a continental climate, with cool, dry winters and hot, humid summers. Becoming progressively drier from east to west, rainfall is highly unpredictable and droughts are not uncommon. The vegetation changes dramatically from east to west, as the dense palm forests, wetlands, and seasonally flooded savannahs of the Lower Chaco gradually transform into savannah grasslands interspersed with the dense thorny forest of the Central and Upper Chaco regions. Early accounts of the Paraguayan Chaco depicted an inhospitable, impenetrable landscape of thorny scrubland, wild animals, and an indigenous population that possessed ‘not the most shadowy resemblance of humanity, save in the upright form’ (Hutchinson 1865: 324). Zoologist Gerald Durrell, for example, travelled to the region in 1954 and wrote: The whole landscape did look as though nature had organised an enormous bottle party, inviting the weird mixture of temperate, sub-tropical, and tropical plants to it. Everywhere the palms leaned tiredly, the professional bar loungers with their too long heads of hair; the thorn-bushes grappled in an inebriated brawl; the well-dressed flowers and the unshaven cacti side by side; and everywhere, the palo borrachos (‘drunken bottle trees’) stood with their bulging beer-drinkers’ stomachs, tilted at unbalanced angles; and everywhere amongst this floral throng hurried the widow tyrants, like small, slick waiters with incredibly immaculate shirt-fronts. (1956: 58)

Durrell’s description of the impenetrable Chaco forest contrasts sharply with later accounts following the Mennonite colonisation of the region in 1927, which dramatically altered the social, economic and political landscape of the Central Chaco region. The Mennonites are followers of a pacifist Anabaptist religion who claim spiritual and theological descent

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from the Dutch reformer Menno Simons who was martyred in the midsixteenth century. The main Mennonite consideration, to remain free from contamination from the outside world, has always led to uneasiness in their relation to temporal power. They initially migrated from Switzerland to Germany and Russia, with many eventually migrating from Russia to Canada in the late nineteenth century. The more conservative Mennonites then migrated to the Paraguayan Chaco from Canada and Russia in 1927– 31 and 1946–7 respectively in order to escape increased pressure to conform by the Canadian and Russian nation states. Their main concern was to retain their pacific, simple, communitarian and unworldly ‘New Testament way of life’ (Redekop 1980) and they were attracted by the Paraguayan law 514 of 1921, which offered them a significant degree of political, economic, social, legal and educational autonomy. Described by Paraguayan novelist Augusto Roa Bastos as ‘an island surrounded on all sides by land’ because of its landlocked geographical position and economic, social and political insularity, the Mennonites were attracted to the Paraguayan Chaco because of its reportedly ‘uninhabited’ (Redekop 1980) state where they hoped to create a ‘Church-state within a state’ that stressed the ‘simple life’ and a ‘separation from the world’ (Redekop 1980: 118–19). When the Mennonites first settled in Paraguay, they initially purchased some 150,370 hectares of land to build their colonies and develop their economic base, which was heavily grounded in livestock rearing and agriculture. Further improvements to the infrastructure of the Paraguayan Chaco as well as a ready supply of cheap indigenous labour expanded the Mennonites’ initially small-scale farming endeavours into large-scale commercial ventures based on cattle ranching, dairy farming, commercial agriculture and small-scale industry. There are currently over 14,000 Mennonites residing in the Paraguayan Chaco and they constitute one of the most prosperous groups in the country, owning more than 1,500,000 hectares of land. They are also the largest employers of indigenous peoples in Central Chaco, with approximately 60 percent of the Paraguayan indigenous population currently inhabiting their colonies (Miller 1999: 17). Mennonite descriptions of the postcolonial Chaco as a landscape of realised opportunities proudly reflect upon a new-found order that they claimed they had brought to this savage, almost unholy, ‘Green Hell’ (Duguid 1931). Mennonite sociologist Calvin Redekop writes: A plane ride over the Chaco impresses the observer with the vastness of the area and the degree to which it is forested and undisturbed. But suddenly the sweep of the eye over the flat topography is broken by a man-made ordering of the environment. Abruptly the campo/forest gives way to cleanly cleared fields, geometrically laid pastures and roads, orchards, standardised farmyards, villages, and towns. (Redekop 1980: 117)

While a dualistic ‘before and after’ imagery has pervaded Mennonite descriptions of a landscape inhabited by ‘unhomely’ (Bhabha 1994; Rapport

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and Overing 2000) Mennonite migrants colonising indigenous lands, both the Mennonites and the indigenous people have been equally active in the creation of the current socioeconomic landscape of the Central Chaco. Prior to the Mennonite colonisation of the Chaco, the Nivaclé indigenous people were semi-nomadic, living on hunting, gathering, fishing and small-scale horticulture and moving extensively around their territories to the south and west of the colonies (Métraux 1946: 250). During the early 1900s, they would migrate annually to the sugar cane factories in northern Argentina where they would work as labourers during the harvest season (Métraux 1946: 269). When work possibilities in Argentina began to diminish during the late 1930s, they began migrating north to the Mennonite Colonies of the Central Chaco to work for the Mennonite farmers. The Nivaclé would initially camp on the land of the Mennonite family that employed them during the planting and harvesting seasons. However, as their annual migrations became increasingly long term, the Mennonites began to develop agricultural colonies for the indigenous population to settle on to encourage them to become full-time self-sufficient agriculturalists on their own private land (Klassen 2002). The Nivaclé colony of Campo Loa is one of twenty-four indigenous agricultural colonies situated within the Mennonite Colonies. The colony was established in 1981 following the fusion of residents from four geographically disparate worker villages from the Fernheim Colony. The worker villages were located on the periphery of the main Mennonite villages within a thirty-kilometre radius on plots of approximately twenty hectares. Campo Loa is situated on 11,198 hectares of land and was purchased as a ‘joint venture’ between the Catholic development organisation Land Project for Indigenous Communities of the National Team of Missions (Proyecto Tierras para Comunidades Indigenas del Equipo Nacional de Misiones [ENM]) and the Mennonite-Indigenous Settlement Board (Asociación de Servícios de Cooperación Indígena y Mennonita [ASCIM]). The land purchase was combined with a four-year sustainable development project called the Campo Loa Project that was based on the concept of ‘self-determination’ (autogestión). The main objective of the project was to allow the Nivaclé to establish a new livelihood through subsistence agriculture and the rearing of goats and sheep. During the period of my fieldwork, the total population of Campo Loa was some 1,106 residents which were divided across six communities. All six of the communities were based on a ‘linear grouping’ model (Stahl 1974: 120) that the Mennonites had developed during their time in the Russian Steppe (Regehr 1994) that included a straight central pathway with dwelling houses situated on either side at regular intervals. The central plaza of the indigenous colonies was usually located at the mid-point of the path and would typically include a schoolhouse, a church, a communal kitchen, a football pitch and a volleyball court. My fieldwork was conducted in the community of Jotoicha, the largest of the six communities with a popu-

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lation of approximately 460 inhabitants. The following section examines Nivaclé understandings of this bounded postcolonial landscape.

Fences, Non-places and Activated Spaces The Mennonite colonisation of the Central Chaco has had a significant impact on Nivaclé understandings of the landscape of the region. What had previously been a vast territory of open grasslands, thorny scrubland and forest has gradually become an ordered landscape of fields, roads and fences underpinned by new laws regarding land ownership and private property. A Nivaclé leader and shaman from Campo Loa described their new relationship with the Chaco landscape in terms of fences that demarcated the boundary between their past and present culture. He said: At a meeting that I attended in Asunción I heard an Ava-Guaraní talk about how he would never lose his culture. I listened to him and then I asked him if he would allow me to reply to what he had just said. I said to him: ‘I’m an indígena as well. I am a Nivaclé. As much as I understand what you’re saying regarding not wanting to lose your culture, I would say: how can we not lose it? Gone are the parts that are no use any more. We were hunters and gatherers of fruits and honey. How can we go out hunting and looking for fruits and honey when all our hunting grounds are lined with fences? How can we? That’s just dangerous, isn’t it? Haven’t you seen the fences out there in the Chaco? Before, there were no fences. None whatsoever. Now our culture – that which our elders knew – is that which lies beyond these fences. Where the fences start marks the boundary of where our culture ends. We can’t get in any more, only look over at parts of it. But we’ll never really know it again.

Ingold (2007) writes that lines can act as dividers, and in the national political arena, the wire fences surrounding the Mennonite ranches were representative of what the Nivaclé had formerly been and also what they had lost. The land on which Campo Loa is situated was purchased during a period of intense national political activity regarding indigenous land rights (see Maybury-Lewis and Howe 1980) that resulted in the subsequent introduction of Paraguayan Law 904/81 in 1981. This law was created in order to provide land and land titles to Paraguayan indigenous communities so that they could maintain their traditional ways of life based on hunting, gathering, fishing and subsistence agriculture and run their everyday political affairs according to their traditional values (see Kidd 1999: 122ff). During this period, new national discourses were emerging regarding indigenous people’s right to land, and a formal political connection was made between land, economic activity and indigenous culture. Despite Law 904/81 stipulating that the indigenous peoples of Paraguay should be allocated a minimum of 150 hectares per family, this has proved insuf-

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ficient, and in most cases, has not been achieved.1 The majority of Nivaclé people continued to work for their Mennonite bosses on their ranches on a short-term, piece-rate basis clearing forests, ploughing, harvesting and working as ranch-hands. Ingold writes that meaning ‘does not cover the world but is immanent in the context of people’s pragmatic engagements with its constituents’ (2000: 154), with landscape being temporal and therefore intrinsically connected to the ‘taskscape’ or pattern of dwelling activities. De Certeau (1984) similarly describes space as a series of ‘activated places’, whilst Corsín-Jiménez (2003) extends this connection between space and human agency, describing space as a ‘form of agency, a capacity’ (see also Munn 1990). Such descriptions closely resemble Nivaclé understandings of kinship, agency and space. For the Nivaclé, work is a highly social activity that is not associated with tedium and drudgery, but with relational activity between kin, affines and co-residents (see also Oliveira 2003; Overing 1989b; Passes 2000; Sahlins 1987). Like the Piro (Gow 1995), Nivaclé space is intrinsically connected to intersubjective engagement, with kinship and the land being mutually implicated in the creation of Nivaclé agency. Thus, a well-maintained garden plot, a clear path or a strong house all exist as inhabited, intersubjective and productive spaces, while an abandoned garden, path or house are considered unrelational non-places. The Nivaclé connection between work, kinship and space was crystallised for me during a conversation that I had with my host family about a visit that I was planning with the schoolteacher of the community to the work camps near Filadelfia where the Campo Loa residents had previously lived. I explained that I was interested in tracing the colony’s migration from the worker villages of Filadelfia to their current location, and that I would like to visit Filadelfia with him so that he could describe the layout of the village and what life there was like there in situ. However, my host’s immediate response was to ask why I wanted to visit that place as there were no people living there any more who were actively engaging with the landscape. The worker village had become a place where only the dead were buried and cattle roamed and so to remember the worker villages was also to remember the dead who now inhabited these spaces. The Nivaclé typically abandon or redesign houses following the death of close kin in order to confuse them, as their presence is considered dangerous. Thus, while visiting, feeding and sharing are an integral aspect of the creation and maintenance of kinship, remembering abandoned places where the dead once lived fills a person with the ‘ugly’ emotions of loneliness and neglect. Thus, to remember and revisit the worker villages would have been to reactivate the asocial emotions that permeated these spaces (or nonplaces) and it is for this reason that my host did not want to return there. The following section examines the role of pathways in the creation of knowledge and kinship.

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Of Seeing and Being Seen Paths and roads are an important feature of the Mennonite Colony landscape, allowing a constant flow of people and things through the towns and villages via an extensive transport network that criss-crosses the Chaco landscape. The Mennonite villages were laid out in straight, gridlike roads and pavements, while the indigenous villages and surrounding garden plots and forest were interconnected by a vast entanglement of narrow dirt footpaths. The only road in the Chaco made of tarmac is the Trans-Chaco Highway that links the Mennonite colonies with the Paraguayan capital of Asunción. Every day, refrigerated lorries carrying dairy products and livestock trucks carrying beef cattle rattle their way down the highway towards Asunción, while buses make their way up and down on an hourly basis picking up passengers at ranches and service stations along the way. For the Nivaclé, paths are significant in two key ways. First, they are an important source of visual knowledge, with ‘seeing’ ([-]van[-]) being synonymous with ‘knowing’ and knowledge. Visual knowledge, as with all other kinds of knowledge acquisition, begins during childhood and accumulates in a metaphysical organ located in the stomach known as the cachi, or ‘centre’, as well as in other parts of the body, during a person’s lifetime. The action of ‘seeing’ establishes a person’s knowledge of the existence of a particular person or thing, and through this, the reliability of their testimony. The grammatical construction of nouns reflects this epistemological hierarchy, with the article prefix of a noun changing depending on the ocular knowledge of the subject at that particular point in time, and also whether the object still exists to the (ocular or auricular) knowledge of the speaker. Thus, a person or thing that the speaker had seen and that was present during the conversation is prefixed with the articles na[-] (M) or lha[-] (F), depending on the gender of the subject. A person or thing that existed and that the speaker had seen but that was not present during the conversation is referred to as ja[-] (M) or lhja[-] (F). A person or thing that the speaker had not seen but that to their knowledge still existed is referred to as pa[-] (M) or lhpa[-] (F). Finally, a person, thing or place that the speaker may or may not have seen and that to their knowledge no longer exists is referred to as ca[-] (M) or lhca[-] (F). People would emphasise the reliability of their testimony by saying that they ‘saw’ a particular event and would likewise emphasise any doubt that they had regarding their own testimony through not seeing something by ending their statement with t’e (‘I don’t know’) or lhon (‘So they say’). Like the Piro (Gow 1991: 168), Nivaclé ‘knowledge’ is individual knowledge. In everyday conversation, a person’s grammatical universe and the potentiality of their speech and knowledge are dependent both on their visual experience and on the state of affairs in the world dur-

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ing that particular moment. Visual knowledge is linked to the creation and maintenance of one’s own personal kindred, with pathways constituting an important tool for ‘seeing’ and therefore ‘knowing’ kin in distant communities. The linear layout of modern Nivaclé communities allowed the simultaneous processes of ‘seeing’ and ‘knowing’ to occur primarily via the central pathways of the community. People would enter and leave the community along the central pathway and spend large parts of their day sitting in their gardens watching and commenting on who has passed by their house, who these people were visiting, and what they were giving and receiving as gifts. During their journey, those travelling would also see people, places and things and it is this constant exposure to new knowledge that is a vital component of being a knowledgeable person: a person who stays in the one place all the time cannot be, or become, knowledgeable. The maintenance of clean (is) paths is a further integral aspect of Nivaclé morality. Overing writes that the Piaroa concept of the moral good incorporates ‘the clean, the beautiful, the restrained’ (1985: 254). For the Nivaclé, beauty is not an abstract concept referring to something idealistic or ‘out there’ (see also Guss 1989), but is instead part of a virtue-centred ethical view of the world (MacIntyre 1980; Overing 1989a, 1989b) that is central to being a moral person. It is the ‘knowledge’ (tôi) and embodied skill that each individual develops within their cachi from childhood that determines their capacity to carry out everyday tasks and thus live ‘beautiful’ (is) and ‘tranquil’ (cano) lives within a community (see Overing 1985: 248 and Overing and Passes 2000: 21). Like the Matsigenka of Peru, who Rosengren describes as ‘atomistic and outspokenly individualistic in nature’ (1996: 4), these individually acquired skills for social living are linked to the strong emphasis that the Nivaclé place on egalitarianism and personal autonomy (see also Goldman 1963; Renshaw 2002; Thomas 1982). As human creations and the expression of a person’s knowledge and skill, paths must be regularly maintained. Paths are also aesthetic places in and of themselves as they require continuous maintenance that reflects the knowledge and skill of the owner. The aesthetics of the landscape within a community can also be employed metaphorically to describe knowledgeable and unknowledgeable behaviour and thus the morality of the people there. A clean path was therefore said to be is-ch’e (‘beautiful within’/ ‘beautiful on’) and every day, Nivaclé women would sweep the paths around the outside of their houses to ensure that they remained ‘beautiful’. Whilst the cleanliness of an individual household was the responsibility of the woman or women who lived there, the central pathway was the responsibility of the entire community and women would regularly organise work parties to ensure that it remained clear of weeds. The central pathway was also typically straight and as the community expanded, new houses would continue being built at either end. The adjective for

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‘straightness’ ([-]tsotajesh[-]) is synonymous with the morally correct behaviour of a person (yi-tsotajesh: literally ‘it makes them straight’) and a good leader was often described as being ‘very straight’, meaning that he or she was knowledgeable and could be trusted. The maintenance of a clean, straight central pathway is thus both derived from and reflective of knowledgeable behaviour. As routes that link one place with another, paths are also generative of knowledge as they enable individuals to see each other. The following section explores the peripatetic nature of Nivaclé kinship as a process that requires continual movement across the bounded landscape of the Central Chaco.

A Peripatetic Sense of Community Nivaclé kinship is based on notions of similarity and difference that can be conceived of as a sliding scale ranging from ‘close kin’ to ‘other’. On this sliding scale, people differentiate between ‘kin’, ‘affines’, ‘nonkin’ and ‘others’. Rivière (1984: 71, 1993: 511) and Lepri (2003: 145) adopted the notion of ‘concentric dualisms’ to express the way in which Amazonian relationships are conceptualised. Visually, these ‘concentric dualisms’ take the form of a series of ever-decreasing circles. The smallest circle in the middle indicates the closest relationship, which is that of ‘close’ kin, whilst the largest outer circle denotes the most distant relationship, which is between people considered to be ‘other’. These circles operate as a reciprocal chain through which different forms of relatedness emerge. Each part is interlinked and relationships move between these spheres as they become closer or more distant. Similarity and difference are therefore not fixed or absolute categories, but a dynamic series of degrees of difference. The Nivaclé concept of the kindred is encapsulated in the term yivelhavot, which means ‘me and others like me’ and is reckoned bilaterally from the perspective of ego. The term for kindred should be envisaged as a network of relationships that ego has created and nurtured over a period of time through behaving in ‘beautiful’ and ‘knowledgeable’ ways, incorporating a sense of similarity between ego and those that he or she considers to be kin. Yi-velhavot is also derived from the suffix [-]elh, meaning ‘the others’ and so also suggests a sense of similarity whose intensity diminishes as one moves from ‘close’ kin, ‘distant’ kin, affines, and nonkin through to the category of ‘other’. Those categorised as ‘others’ are humans who are not Nivaclé, however an integral aspect of ‘otherness’ is the idea that those others are also in a process of becoming like ego through caring for each other. The Nivaclé kindred therefore comprises specific individuals who are in the process of becoming ‘similar’ to each other, yet not ‘the same’. This is a process that constantly creates and transforms relationships as old ones fade and new ones emerge and flourish.

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A person with a lot of kin is said to be ‘strong’ (t’un-in), a term that can also be used to refer to a sturdy fence post or a person who is plump and healthy. A kinsperson is someone who is trustworthy, who always remembers their kin, and who shows their love by being a kind, caring and nurturing ‘beautiful person’ (is-sha’ne). Someone who behaves in a particularly warm and generous manner can also be said to be ‘behaving like kin’, whilst the opposite is someone who is individualistic, uncooperative and ‘not co-resident-like’ (vatvenchat.). However, Nivaclé kin terms are not absolute, and whether a person is said to be one’s ‘close’ kin or ‘distant’ kin is a matter of opinion and reflects the current state of the relationship, as well as how one aspires that relationship to be. During the course of their lifetime, individuals develop their own unique field of relationships that intersect and overlap with those of other individuals, much like Ingold’s depiction of the rhizomaic nature of relatedness (Ingold 2000). The diachronic variations that characterise settlements as individuals visit kin, hunt, gather, work for their Mennonite boss, marry, have children, divorce or become old occur because relationships are constantly emerging and evolving. The composition of individual households also change over time depending on the stage of the residents’ lifecycle, and it is to this that I now turn. Many anthropologists working within modern settlements in lowland South America have found that ‘clusters’ (Renshaw 2002: 189; Forrest 1987: 32; Harris 2000: 84; Lorrain 1994: 130ff; Ellis 1996: 91), ‘residential sections’ (Viveiros de Castro 1992: 100f) and ‘residence groups’ (Rosengren 1987: 148) had gradually emerged following the amalgamation of what had previously been dispersed villages. A link is often made between kinship and residential proximity, with ‘residential clusters’ being said to develop within larger nucleated settlements. These residential ‘clusters’ are typically said to comprise uxorilocally extended families, where a mature couple will live with their unmarried children in one of the houses, and their married daughters, sons-in-law and grandchildren will live close by in the others. Amongst the Nivaclé, however, whilst members of the same household and those nearby were usually ‘close’ kin or affines, it would have been very difficult to divide the whole community into distinct ‘clusters’ of houses, as an individual’s kindred was invariably spread across several parts of any given community as well as further afield in other communities (Grant 2006). Given the spatial complexity of individual kindred formation, defining particular residential arrangements as ‘residential groups’ is therefore not appropriate. Rather than being based on daily interaction within the community, Nivaclé kinship might be better understood as premised on opportunity and investment in maintaining relationships through visiting and providing hospitality (see also Henley 1982; Kidd 1999; Renshaw 2002: 183; Rosengren 1987; Storrie 1999). It is to the practice of visiting that I now turn.

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Visiting is known as jôchi-ei, a verb that always includes the adverbial suffix [-]ei, meaning ‘to, towards, of’ and essentially refers to place. Jôchi means, ‘to go to see, to go for a wander, to observe’ and denotes the highly informal nature of visiting amongst the Nivaclé. Visits can last for any period from as short as five minutes to as long as a year, depending on the reason for the visit, and can be carried out by individuals, small groups or entire communities. Men and adolescents usually make their visits on bicycles either alone or in groups, whereas women would always travel by foot in groups. During the weekend, communities would usually organise football and volleyball matches with neighbouring villages. If the match was to take place in another community, one of the younger men would occasionally ask his Mennonite boss if he could borrow his tractor for the weekend so that he could transport his village there in the tractor. Communities would usually announce their forthcoming visits to one another via the local Catholic or Mennonite radio stations during a slot dedicated to Nivaclé messages, and hosts would ensure that the central plaza of their community as well as their households were clean for their visitors. Gifts were an important aspect of visits, and visitors would usually bring food from their gardens, clothes or handicrafts to those who provided hospitality. On their arrival, hosts would greet their guests with a customary handshake before offering them a seat and a drink of tereré (a herbal tea that is prepared with cold water and consumed communally using a single receptacle called a guampa by small groups of people). Depending on the time of day and the length of the visit, hosts would also offer their guests cooked food such as rice, meat, pumpkin, sweet potato or tortillas, or snacks such as watermelon, grapefruit and fruits gathered from the nearby forest. Activities for the rest of the afternoon would usually be divided according to gender, with the men sitting together playing cards or watching football, drinking beer or tereré and smoking cigarettes, and the women sitting together watching volleyball, looking after the small children, eating snacks and drinking tereré. For the residents of Jotoicha, a great deal of weekend visiting would take place within the Campo Loa colony, with most of them having ‘close kin’ in the neighbouring communities of San Miguel, San Pio X and Primavera. During weekdays when most of the men were working for the Mennonites, the women would often organise volleyball matches with women from these other communities. During match days, the women and children would leave the community after sunrise and visit the households of their ‘close kin’ to eat their main meal of the day. Most would also take the opportunity to visit the households of other more distant kinspeople during their visit and this would be reciprocated on the days when their ‘close kin’ paid a visit to Jotoicha. Rather than being a series of geographically bounded ‘residential clusters’ that form part of a continuum of sociality ranging from ‘safe inside’

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and ‘dangerous outside’ (see Descola 1994; Rivière 1969, 1984), Nivaclé kinship and residence is best understood in terms of the spatial distribution of the ego-centred kindred. Here, an individual’s kindred network extends from the individual outwards in a series of criss-crossing routes via an intricate mesh of forest paths and roads through the Central Chaco landscape. Visiting is a key instrument in the creation of social pathways, as constant journeying is required for kinship relations to be maintained. At the same time, as well as being a way to ‘see’ others, visiting is also a way to ‘not see’ others in one’s own community if tension arise. Journeying across the Chaco landscape to visit kin is therefore a key way in which both kinship and community are created, as it is only through regular excursions out of the community to visit ‘close kin’ that conviviality within it can be sustained.

Conclusion This chapter has examined boundaries and journeys within the context of the Mennonite Colonies of the Paraguayan Central Chaco and their role in the creation of kinship and residence amongst the Nivaclé indigenous people. The Gran Chaco has undergone a process of rapid colonization since the early nineteenth century, which has resulted in a highly bounded landscape of fences and pathways that has created both opportunities and threats for Nivaclé sociality. Whilst the introduction of private land ownership has radically transformed the Nivaclé internal economy from one of subsistence to one of dependence on wage labour, the creation of indigenous settlements has not resulted in the straightforward spatial solidification of previously dispersed villages into agglomerated ‘clustered’ communities. Instead, the processual nature of Nivaclé kinship and the relational pathways that are created through the personal kindred of each individual are sustained through physical routes and pathways that enable the process of kinship to take place. The dispersed nature of the Nivaclé kindred is one of the key ways in which the agglomerated settlements have sustained themselves over the years, with the transitory nature of wage labour another key factor in this process. Paths are an integral component of the Mennonite colony landscape and are necessary for the creation of both Nivaclé and Mennonite social life. Both the Nivaclé and the Mennonites are knowledgeable in the skills that are required to create and maintain pathways. However, for the Nivaclé, the beauty of a pathway is also considered to be an extension of the beauty of a person, with this beauty being intricately linked to the knowledge that that person has incorporated into their body through living in community with others. In a figurative sense, to walk on a clean, straight path is to walk in community with others, with straightness in the land-

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scape being synonymous with moral straightness. Cleanness and straightness are also significant in a literal sense due to the peripatetic nature of Nivaclé epistemology. Journeying along the numerous pathways of the Central Chaco is also about ensuring that the many dispersed tendrils of one’s kindred are maintained, and this is carried out on an everyday basis through the ongoing process of visiting. Visiting is therefore one way in which the Nivaclé are able to ‘look over the fence’ at their previous culture. By constantly re-establishing relationships with close kin through working together productively on the land and seeing one another via the roads and pathways of the colonies, Nivaclé kinship is revealed as a process that transforms past relationships into active present ones and establishes future relationships in a way that is ultimately constitutive of community and Nivaclé sociality itself.

Acknowledgements Research for this paper was financed by the Economic and Social Research Council (Award Number R42200034161) and the Emslie Horniman/Sutasoma Trust Fund of the Royal Anthropological Institute.

Note 1. For example, the average area of land per family in Campo Loa in 2002 was 40 hectares.

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Durrell, G. 1956. The Drunken Forest. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Ellis, R. 1996. ‘A Taste for Movement: An Exploration of the Social Ethics of the Tsimanes of Lowland Bolivia’, Ph.D. dissertation, University of St Andrews. Forrest, L. A. 1987. ‘Economics and the Social Organization of Labour: A Case Study of a Coastal Carib Community in Surinam’, Ph.D. dissertation, University of London. Goldman, I. 1963. The Cubeo: Indians of the Northwest Amazon. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Gow. P. 1991. Of Mixed Blood: Kinship and History in Peruvian Amazonia. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ———. 1995. ‘Land, People, and Paper in Western Amazonia’, in E. Hirsch and M. O’Hanlon (eds), The Anthropology of Landscape. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 43–62. Grant, S. 2006. ‘Becoming Similar: Knowledge, Sociality and the Aesthetics of Relatedness amongst the Nivaclé of the Paraguayan Chaco’, Ph.D. dissertation, University of St. Andrews. Guss, D. M. 1989. To Weave and To Sing: Art, Symbol, and Narrative in the South American Rainforest. Berkeley: University of California Press. Harris, M. 2000. Life on the Amazon: The Anthropology of a Brazilian Peasant Village. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Henley, P. 1982. The Panare: Tradition and Change on the Amazonian Frontier. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Hirsch, E. and M. O’Hanlon (eds). 1995. The Anthropology of Landscape: Perspectives on Place and Space. New York: Oxford University Press. Hutchinson, T. J. 1865. ‘On the Chaco and Other Indians of South America’, in Transactions of the Ethnological Society of London 3: 321–34. Ingold, T. 2000. The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Perception and Skill. London and New York: Routledge. ———. 2007. Lines: A Brief History. London: Routledge. Kidd, S. W. 1999. ‘Love and Hate among the People without Things: The Social and Economic Relations of the Enxet People of Paraguay’, Ph.D. dissertation, University of St Andrews. Klassen, P. P. 2002. The Mennonites in Paraguay, vol. 2, Encounter with Indians and Paraguayans. Ontario: Pandora Press. Lepri, I. 2003. ‘We Are Not the True People’: Notions of Identity and Otherness among the Ese Ejja of Northern Bolivia’, Ph.D. dissertation, University of London. Lorrain, C. 1994. ‘Making Ancestors: The Symbolism, Economics and Politics of Gender amongst the Kulina of Southwest Amazonia (Brazil)’, Ph.D. dissertation, University of London. MacIntyre, A. 1980. After Virtue. Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press. Maybury-Lewis, D. and J. Howe. 1980. The Indian Peoples of Paraguay: Their Plight and Their Prospects. Cultural Survival Special Reports No. 2. Cambridge, MA: Cultural Survival. Métraux, A. 1946. ‘Ethnography of the Chaco’, in J. H. Steward (ed.), Handbook of the South American Indians, vol. 1, The Marginal Tribes. New York: Cooper Square Publishers, pp. 197–370.

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Miller, E. S. (ed.) 1999. Peoples of the Gran Chaco. Westport, CT: Bergin and Garvey. Munn, N. 1990. ‘Constructing Regional Worlds in Experience: Kula Exchange, Witchcraft and Gawan Local Events’, Man (N.S.) 25: 1–17. Oliveira, A. de. 2003. ‘Of Life and Happiness: Morality, Aesthetics and Social Life among the Southeastern Amazonian Mebengokré (Kayapó), as Seen from the Margins of Ritual’, Ph.D. dissertation, University of St. Andrews. Overing, J. 1985. ‘Today I Shall Call Him “Mummy”: Multiple Worlds and Classificatory Confusion’, in J. Overing (ed.), Reason and Morality. London and New York: Tavistock Publications, pp. 150–78. ———. 1989a. ‘Styles of Manhood: An Amazonian Contrast in Tranquillity and Violence’, in S. Howell and R. Willis (eds), Societies at Peace. London: Tavistock Publications, pp. 79–99. ———. 1989b. ‘The Aesthetics of Production: The Sense of Community among the Cubeo and Piaroa’, in Dialectical Anthropology 14: 159–75. Overing, J. and A. Passes (eds). 2000. The Anthropology of Love and Anger: The Aesthetics of Conviviality in Native Amazonia. London: Routledge. Passes, A. 2000. ‘The Value of Working and Speaking Together: A Facet of Pa’ikwené (Palikur) Conviviality’, in J. Overing and A. Passes (eds), The Anthropology of Love and Anger: The Aesthetics of Conviviality in Native Amazonia. London: Routledge, pp. 97–113. Proyecto Campo Loa. Plan de Asentamiento de los Nivaclé de las Colonias 8/6/10/22 en el Lugar Provisoriamente Denominado “Campo Loa.” Rapport, N. and J. Overing. 2000. ‘The Unhomely’, in N. Rapport and J. Overing (eds), Social and Cultural Anthropology: The Key Concepts. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 363–74. Redekop, C. 1980. Strangers Become Neighbors: Mennonite and Indigenous Relations in the Paraguayan Chaco. Scottdale, PA: Herald Press. Regehr, W. 1994. ‘Mennonite Economic Life and the Paraguayan Experience’, in C. Redekop, V. Krahn and S. J. Steinder (eds), Anabaptist/Mennonite Faith and Economics. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, pp. 127–52. Renshaw, J. 2002. The Indians of the Paraguayan Chaco: Identity and Economy. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. Rivière, P. 1969. Marriage among the Trio. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 1984. Individual and Society in Guiana: A Comparative Study of Amerindian Social Organization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1993. ‘The Amerindianisation of Descent and Affinity’, in L’homme 33: 507–16. Rosengren, D. 1987. In the Eyes of the Beholder: Leadership and the Social Construction of Power and Dominance among the Matsigenka of the Peruvian Amazon. Etnologiska Studier 39. Göteborgs Etnografiska Museum. ———. 1996. ‘Matsigenka Myth and Morality: Notions of the Social and the Asocial’. Unpublished article, Göteborg University. Sahlins, M. 1987. Islands of History. London: Tavistock. Stahl, W. 1974. ‘Cinco Establicimientos Agrícolas Indígenas en el Chaco Central’, in Suplemento Antropologico (1–2): 111–52. Storrie, R. D. 1999. ‘Being Human: Personhood, Cosmology and Subsistence for the Hoti of Venezuelan Guiana’, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Manchester.

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Thomas, D. 1982. Order without Government: The Society of the Pemon Indians of Venezuela. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Viveiros de Castro, E. 1992. From the Enemy’s Point of View: Humanity and Divinity in an Amazonian Society, trans. C. V. Howard. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

5 Elements of an Amerindian Landscape The Arizona Hopi Patrick Pérez

Over the last ten years, the United States’ Southwest has boasted strong regional development especially around Phoenix, Flagstaff and Albuquerque, requiring the construction of roads and canals, the digging of sand and gravel quarries and the clearing of trees off surrounding hills. All of this work is being carried out on land that is strongly imprinted by an Amerindian presence. It has thus called for multiple impact studies that mobilise various specialists: engineers, naturalists, archaeologists and anthropologists, either for the federal government, the state governments or the governments of the Amerindian communities. These studies at times strengthen and at other times weaken native territorial legitimacy, for the battle is fierce between those who stand for a brutal, modern amnesia and those who have inherited a world whose roots reach back several thousands years. At the heart of the conceptual arsenal used by the Pueblos and their advocates to defend precious territory is the notion of cultural landscape (see for example Anyon and Ferguson 2001; ColwellChanthaphonh, Ferguson, and Anyon 2003; Darling 2006; Ferguson et al. 2004; Kuwanwisiwma and Ferguson 2004). The theoretical framework on which this notion is based is rather flimsy. This flimsiness is particularly prejudicial to efforts to obtain recognition of the existence of Amerindian landscapes. This is the reason this chapter proposes to proceed with a clarification while aiming for two goals: to contribute to an anthropology of landscape founded on solid ground, and to reassess in light of this the landscape of the Arizona Hopi. After a short section on the central role of framed viewing for landscape theory, the chapter focuses on three major domains of Hopi landscape: the phenomenological domain (the role of deep seeing and colour; scale shifts;

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the inclination for spontaneous objects standing for artefacts); the social domain (moral interpretation of the footsteps of ancestors; landscape as a social unity; observation of the landscape as the foundation of a common ritual time); and the cognitive domain (readings of territories as a contemplated history; modes of transmission and remembering).

‘Cultural Landscape’ or the Landscape as Incantation Originally conceived in the German school of geography around 1870 with Bastian’s Kulturlandschaft, opposed to Umlandschaft, the notion of cultural landscape was developed in the United States by the physical geographer Carl Sauer in 1925. The notion was again taken up by a number of British authors in the 1960s and finally became a UNESCO ‘label’ in 1992. While the concept is thus widely used and influential, its definition remains rather vague and confusing. The term implies that a landscape, with no adjective, is ‘natural’ before it is cultural, that it is at first a product of ‘Nature’. Cultural landscape, by contrast, is then understood to be characterised by the vestiges of human settlements and activities: ruins, paths, walls, fields. These are thus understood as artefacts, opposed to and different from the ‘natural’ surroundings. At the heart of the concept of cultural landscape lies then the fundamental assumption, arguably religious in origin, that there is an ontological opposition between humanity and ‘Nature’, an assumption that is of course not universal. Adding to what I would say is this questionable origin, is the problem that the notion of cultural landscape is sometimes extended to describe any collective representation projected onto physical space (see the UNESCO World Heritage Convention (Article 1); Hirsch and O’Hanlon 1995; Jackson 1984: 156; Sauer 1963). This adds to the vacuity of the notion. The distinction between humanity and nature and the concept of cultural landscape may be helpful in processes of territorial colonisation. They may help to foster the idea of an empty terrain. But the concept sits uneasily within anthropology. For one thing, one of the reported advantages of the idea of landscape is precisely that it brings together the cultural and the natural, the ideal and the material. The major inconvenience, however, is that it removes the landscape from any anthropological investigation. Bereft of precise characteristics, the myriad works around this notion published since 1960 do not explain why the majority of world cultures ignores landscape concepts; they do not investigate how certain places are selected or recognized as landscapes; they do not look into why certain elements and configurations are culturally marked as bearers of meaning; they do not see that portions of the territory are perceived as landscapes whereas the rest of the territory is, as Ingold points out, only appreciated as a homogeneous, mostly undifferentiated,

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continuous and quantifiable area (2000: 190–93). They push aside the question of the framing and viewing devices that are at the heart of any landscape practice and constitute an essential element in understanding the process of transmitting landscape culture. Finally those studies often confuse landscape with land or territory, and milieu (the physicality of the world) with environment (a set of relations between the subject and their milieu). There exists, however, another definition of landscape, older and less marked by biogeography, a definition that is probably much more suited to anthropology. It is the definition used by philosophers, philologists, art historians and cultural geographers. What does it teach us? That a landscape is above all else a visible thing, with an observer, a point of view, a direction in which to gaze, a frame and a beautiful piece of land to contemplate. This obvious fact, too often forgotten, has serious repercussions, for there is no landscape if there are no facilities and devices deliberately placed from which to view it (in this way, notice that the vernacular architecture of the great majority of societies may have arrow slits or spiracles, but very rarely do they have windows opening out, framing the view in order to create a landscape). This definition implies also an aesthetic gaze, in visu or in situ, always developed outside of the perceived scene by an oral or written literature describing landscapes, by architectures shaping landscapes (urbanism, large scale landscaping, art of ornamental gardens) and finally by the recurrence of ‘landscape types’ that preserve the heritage of a landscape culture (see Augoyard 1991; Berque 1994, 1999; Roger 1997, 1999; Schama 1999). Such a definition, historically centred on the West, would seem to apply only to European societies. However, even though rare, landscape culture is not a Western specificity. Landscapes appeared late in the West during the first Renaissance (circa 1450), having appeared much earlier (300 BC) with very similar characteristics in Asia: first in China, then Korea, Japan, the urban cultures of Indochina and the scholarly culture of Tibet (see Stein 2001). Given this, it is reasonable to ask whether landscape is present elsewhere, for example in African or American societies, and if so, with what differences? Is it coined by specific representations of the environment, of the milieu, of ‘nature’ concepts, or is it free from them? Is it unique to certain forms of social organisation (see Cosgrove and Daniels 1988), i.e., societies with writing systems and a state structure with large, powerful social bodies, freed from the immediate dependence on the milieu, capable of mastering and transforming their territory? Must we then accept yet another Great Divide asserting that even though all cultures transform the earth into memory, confiding the burden of their myths to the physical world (via the process of ‘cosmophany’ in Berque’s terminology [2006]), only ‘landscape societies’ look at the earth as a mirror of culturally built representations? These are the questions we will now follow through the ‘Hopi case’.

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Landscape and the Hopi The Arizona Hopi do not paint landscape pictures, do not practice the art of ornamental gardens and have few words to describe or qualify landscapes. Why then should we invoke the landscape concept for this culture? Since 1992, I have carried out research with the Hopi on architecture, urbanism, agriculture and a wide span of spatial concepts. A careful observation of the relationship they have with their territory unveils the presence of a landscape developed along aesthetic lines as well as those of memory and imagination. This landscape is expressed concretely by a visual culture, by specific architectural practices, by landscape stories in myths and by pilgrimages framing the viewing and retracing of the paths of their ancestors. The forebears of the Hopi, the Old Pueblos (Anasazi in archaeological literature), developed from the ninth to the fifteenth century a spectacular urbanism, creating complex principles of geometry and spatial orientation, elegant manners of conceiving sites, large networks of pedestrian communication, techniques to observe the celestial bodies and elaborate irrigation systems (Lekson 1984, 2000; Morrow and Price 1997; Stuart 2000). It is with this wonderful heritage, refined for over a thousand years, that the Pueblos developed significant viewing structures from within their dwellings. They invented techniques to discover the pathways of subsurface water in the immense desert plains and to read the ritual and agricultural horizon calendars. They developed a bird’s-eye view of their territory. And they invented rituals that establish a clear break between the observers and the scene observed. Their range of visual techniques, backed by a religious philosophy very attentive to spatial classification, allowed landscape practices and representations to emerge (for detailed examples see Anyon and Ferguson 2001; Anyon and Colwell-Chanthaphonh 2005; Kuwanwisiwma and Ferguson 2004; Pérez 1998, 2005). The two last Hopi generations have added to these traits landscape cinema, photography and poetry (for example the films of V. Masayesva Jr.; the photography of O. Seumptewa, F. HonHongva and M. Kooyahoema and the poetry of W. Rose and R. Lomatewama). Three different theoretical foci derived from anthropology proved to be particularly helpful in approaching Hopi landscape: phenomenology, social meaning and modes of transmission. Investigating the phenomenology of Hopi landscape was an attempt for me to understand how the Hopi perceive the environment and how they sometimes perceive it as landscape. Second, I sought to investigate the meanings and the values present in the environment perceived as landscape. Finally, I have tried to understand how this landscape is remembered and how ways to perceive it and the meanings and values inherent in it are transmitted in the absence of writing or landscape painting. The second part of the chapter presents some results around these themes.

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A Phenomenology of Colour and Trace The Hopi, as any culture involved with landscaping, do not construct landscapes with all their surroundings. For the purposes of constructing landscape, within the continuum of what the world and the senses offer up for perception, the Hopi choose as certain objects (boulders, big stones, cinder cones and so on), properties (form, elevation and colour) and configurations (a dominant view from above, visual framing, shifting scales) according to their cultural sensitivity. The first factor contributing to a scenic landscape tradition is location of dwelling places and the dominant view across the desert that it allows, that is, the immense vista that stretches across more than 150 km in the winter. The old Hopi villages are built at the summit of mesas, abutted against escarpments rising 100 to 150 meters above the level of the desert. Tuuwa, Tutskwa, the immense earth towards the south offers a view that very often spans more than 180 degrees and is deemed beautiful by the Hopi, beautiful to contemplate. House windows, breaches in between village houses, panoramic viewpoints and small plazas of Mashongnovi, Shipawlavi or Walpi villages, all open out towards the vast desert. Tourists are invited to picnic or park at the edge of the mesa, facing Oraïbi or Antelope Mesa, or to admire the exceptional panorama from First Mesa. At the end of the afternoon, after field- or housework is done, Hopi men and women stand at the edge of the mesa. They do not look at anything in particular; it is customary to meditate and gaze across the coloured earth. Here too, they sometimes pray: morning prayers, naming ceremonies, feather offerings to the winter solstice. It is always facing this open immensity spread out at their feet that the Hopi meet with the sun when ‘dawn paints [the earth]’ (in Hopi, talavahi). From the height and the plunging view over the valleys and the interior of canyons, the Hopi, as all the modern or ancient Pueblos, derive their habit of describing and representing space from ‘up above’. This modality is most evident in the geometry of their architecture but it is also present in the tales and myths describing territories from atop a flying shield (see for example Lomatuway’ma and Malotki 1987 and 1993). It is also evidenced in the territorial geography embroidered on ceremonial kilts (Wade 1973), in the capacity to conceive village plans and paint them on pottery (Stephen and Patterson 1994) in the optical correction of urban geometry1 and in the choice of establishing a bird’s eye view over the kiva2 or the plaza when the deities dance. This type of spatial representation is particular to only very few cultures in the world and greatly contributes to the creation of a break between the observer and the observed scene. The Pueblo and their ancestors often lived within the shelter of the canyons, under immense natural porches, gripping the dizzyingly steep slopes. Many authors have underlined the defensive advantages of such

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habitats although the key advantage is the exceptional climatic comfort. Because of their location and conformation, these villages had running water, protection from the sun and natural air conditioning in the summer (due to the evaporation of running water), a temperate climate in the winter thanks to the thermal inertia of the rock and the penetration of the sun’s rays. This highly protected, almost uterine, layout can easily turn a village into a microcosmic theatre with its proscenium, its background and its figures (this characteristic emerges so easily from all observers that the famous artist Charles Simonds has made it his favourite theme of research). The Hopi maintain this theatricality of ‘a little world’ through numerous practices: mythical scenes of minuscule people (such as the Lamevas, Nequatewa 1994), with miniature scenery and pottery (Nequatewa 1939, 1994); multiple rites where microcosms can be seen (such as the spring puppet theatre with its little scenes and miniature artefacts (see Geertz 1982); architectural structures such as the plaza for dancing or the kiva that visually frames a stage that is always below the observer, always more complex and colourful than its environment, and also more religiously marked. Amidst the immense, stony and unforgiving stretches of land – its magnitude crushing the large-scale view into monotony, yet rich details hidden away in the canyons abound at the local scale – colour is what first attracts attention. Local toponymy, be it Hopi or English, reflects colour’s importance: the Black Mesa, the Red House, the White House, the Blue Spring, the Painted Desert. The range, saturation and glow of the Colorado Plateau’s colours, especially in the morning or the evening, are indeed exceptional. The colours play an important role in structuring the Pueblo’s classificatory thought. Colours are the foundation of a wellknown system of correspondences between directions, brotherhoods, gender, ages, minerals, flora and fauna, meronymy (the relation between body and body parts) and even sicknesses (Cushing 1992; Geertz 1986, Lévi-Strauss 1962; Ortiz 1969; Pérez 1998). This chromatic conception, rife with analogies, offers in different contexts the means to penetrate the order of the world beneath. An immaterial and mysterious phenomenon, as fleeting as it is intangible, colour is an attribute of the world beneath, the world inside the earth, the world of origins and of all futures; a world that all the Uto-Aztec cultures name by metonymy the ‘world of flowers’ (Hill 1992). And it is truly within the lower strata of the earth, in its yawning openings, in the collapse of canyons that the colours unveil their mysterious organization. When the sun bursts forth, the colours of the surface world are born – a world whose nature is reputed to be black. When the Water Masters honour the earth, a rainbow bursts forth. Finally, when the deities of below, dressed in brilliant colours, come to dance in the hollow of plazas, the village loses its sad monochrome colouring. As the Hopi identify parts of the physical world destined to ‘make landscapes’, they choose objects they name the itaakuku ang kuktota, the

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footprints of their ancestors (Kuwanwisiwma 2002; Kuwanwisiwma and Ferguson 2004; Ferguson, Berlin, and Kuwanwisiwma 2004). These are memorial objects or places, always framed by a specific and ritual path (here, the viewing device), that have been revealed or handed down. They can be divided into two categories. First, places where the ancestors lived and that are covered in human traces: ruined dwellings, mounds with pottery shards, boulders engraved with petroglyphs. The built dimension of these places confirms their role, and clan memory links these traces to clan history (the cognitive process involved here is explored a little later). The second category is concerned with objects or ‘natural’ places that trouble the senses or perception (what the Byzantines named akeiropoetai [Goody 2003: 232]): objects such as strange and fanciful boulders, volcanic necks seemingly placed in the middle of the plain, a gash of stupefying proportions such as the Grand Canyon, snow-capped summits in the summer, a fairy chimney whose geological strata display all colours, the location of a never-ending echo, a bottomless source from which bubbles swim up to the surface. A comparison of these sites shows that each time the chosen objects are either too regular (almost idealized, abstract), or too different from their surroundings (an environmental discrepancy). These characteristics refer back to a Hopi ‘theory of signatures’ where intentional marks are left by deities, cultural heroes and ancestors to guide the Hopi throughout their existence, their land and their memory. The deities and ancestors left traces in certain places and to regain vital and spiritual energy, the traces, the paths and the people must be reunited. This ligature of signs allows first and foremost the territory to possess a common meaning. But this meaning is linked with a visual framing in order to produce a landscape. Here the role of paths, clan ‘roads’, directions in which to gaze, is central.

Contemplating Order and Disorder Landscape, wherever it appears as a vernacular instance, functions as an identity machine that ensures social cohesion around a memory. It renders visible the values of communal harmony and the risks of social disorder. There are landscapes of happiness and of suffering; landscapes of wealth, justice and balance and of misery, cruelty and folly. For the Hopi, each story of social advancement or misfortune is there, in the objects of the landscape and in the relationships these objects weave with each other. I will explore three themes of this social dimension. First the moral stories of the different clans’ wanderings throughout successive settlements, stories that are recorded in the landscape. Second, the importance of the rituals around the deities Katsinam, centred on the San Francisco peaks. Third is the reading of ritual and agricultural time on the sacred horizon.

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Hopi society is made up of clans, currently numbering between twenty and thirty, that have each lived in different areas of the Colorado Plateau and beyond. Each clan maintains and hands down to its members the history of its peregrinations and the conditions of its displacements. The reunion of the clans on the mesas is interpreted as the final realisation of a prophecy offered to the Hopi People at the dawn of their emergence on this earth. Because of this, all of the Colorado plateau and its history seem to surround and tightly encircle the Hopi villages. Examining the justifications for the clans’ successive displacements, every step unveils a past marked by community imbalance: jealousy, concupiscence and competition; desire for material goods, a thirst for power or a penchant for gambling. So many ‘sins’ invariably lead to witchcraft, then to social dissension and finally to a general collapse or state of kooyangqatsi, literally a life of madness. This distress forces the deities to abandon the Hopi and deny them fertility and rain, leading to the community’s destruction (for clan stories of destruction, see Lomatuway’ma and Malotki 1993). A handful of survivors, deemed honest and fair, then leave in search of a settled site with water and abundant land. This exploration of the Hopi social axiology is projected onto the surroundings, from the far-off ruins (Anasazi Indian Village, Chaco Canyon, Mesa Verde, San Pedro Valley) up to the boulders that encircle the village. And with it a warning: certain archaeological signs (crumbling walls, burnt kivas, broken metate [grinding stones], petroglyphs of centipedes) or geomorphological ones (gaps in the mesas, landslide cones, lava beds) create the traces of the worst social misfortune and particularly forbid the return to such places. Hopi ruins are thus thought of as a living and demanding social memory in which all moral breaches have been tested, forcing the Hopi to abandon these soiled places one after the other. How can one thus be surprised by the local idea of the permanent quest for a ‘balanced’ life in these villages that are bordered by precipices, gaps and unstable boulders, surrounded by such daunting memories? As such, the landscape is a constant reminder of the importance of moral conduct. Moreover, this landscape is of course dramatic and painful. If there is an ‘archaeological heritage’ here, it is not that of a golden age. There is no Arcadia in the Hopi plains and ruins; the landscape of happiness, filled with flowers and light, with feathers and colours, corn and melons, honey and pollen, leaves and clear waters, is elsewhere. That landscape is to be found in the ‘world of flowers’, underground, under the lakes and the sources, at the top of mountains or in the hollow of the village plazas when the deities visit the humans. Happily, the peaks of the Nuvatokya’ovi (the San Francisco peaks to the north of Flagstaff) stretch out on the far off southwestern horizon, visible from all the mesas. Within this majestic and serene view the unity of the Hopi people crystallizes. For, not only are they beautiful, covered in snow for most of the year and often surrounded by heavy clouds; the peaks are also home to the Katsinam. If there is one common denominator

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at the heart of the complex Hopi religion, it is the cult of the Katsinam. These Beings live underground five months out of the year in the territories of the beyond and come to earth the rest of the year to celebrate life. Since the time when the Hopi lived on the slopes of the Nuvatokya’ovi and received a learning there (the pasiwina), a sacred pact exists between them and the Katsinam: as long as the Hopi worship the Katsinam, the latter will give back rain, fertility and fecundity to all the living (Kennard 1972; Kuwanwisiwma and Ferguson 2004). Despite the fact that not all the Katsinam live exclusively at Nuvatokya’ovi, it is towards these mountains that the farmer turns his gaze when his land needs water. Gazing at these summits always brings hope and joy. Moreover, when the Hopi gaze at these mountains, they are contemplating the world below, an image of the Great Beyond along the axis mundi. Indeed one notion and one word, atkya (literally ‘the place underneath’), designates both the earth underneath and the Katsinam’s resting place atop the San Francisco peaks (Glowacka and Sekaquaptewa 1999). Finally, the Nuvatokya’ovi peaks carry within their geography the ritual and agricultural calendar tied to the Katsinam. From December to July, the position of the setting sun over the peaks marks off the dates of religious ceremonies, initiations and crop plantations (corns, beans, squash). This landscape calendar, no longer practised much except on the Second Mesa, could only be read with precision by designated and initiated officials, responsible for maintaining rituals and planting dates and therefore responsible for the well-being and prosperity of the community (Malotki 1983: 428–31; McCluskey 1985). Within the framework of a landscape analysis, it should be noted that the names of temporal markers, identified on the ritual horizon, are often independent of the toponyms of the places indicated by the passing of the sun (see Titiev 1938). There is therefore a true separation between the observed horizon and the naming of these places as they are indicated from the mesas. It should be added that this astonishing system is entirely determined by the position of the beholder. The landscape calendar is thus a product of a purely sedentary way of life since its displacement demands the transfer of temporal identifications onto new landmarks on a new horizon. Here is a landscape that dictates the entire life of a society, from its agriculture, to its ceremonies, its rains and the afterlife destiny of its members.

Learning and Transmitting As we travelled on four or five miles, I recognized some of the scenery which I had seen on my death journey and surprised my companions with a detailed description of future points along the way. When I minutely described a particular bush from which the Hopi made arrows in the old days, my

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companions opened their eyes and said that it was full proof of my death and visit to the House of the Dead. – Don Talayesva, in Simmons (1970: 236).

When it is unfolded in situ, landscape becomes a living memory; it crystallizes time in order to relive the presence of the past, to plunge the body into the same sensory bath as that experienced by one’s ancestors. In this way, it is a teaching, a way of learning about the world that the Hopi translate through notions of navoti (tradition) and wiimi (ritual knowledge) (Kuwanwisiwma and Ferguson 2004). There is more to it, however, for, as Simon Schama so brilliantly proved, all landscapes are known before they are seen (1999: 73). In other words, we always recognize a landscape, we never discover it. Why? Because landscape prototypes within a culture are handed down since our earliest childhood as matrices or groups of aesthetic relationships between well-known and valued elements. These elements, ‘engrammed’ (to appropriate Richard Semon’s term reconstructed by Warburg [see Gombrich 1970]) in myths, images, stories and practices, hold meaning for all. By linking them to a landscape, a sort of discourse is created centring on social axiology and cultural identity. However, sight and speech are accompanied by volatile and imprecise individual memories if they are not supported by special techniques. Without the material possibility of faithfully reproducing images and speech, which is the case for cultures lacking or forbidding systems of writing and drawing in a traditional context, there is no surer means of memorising landscapes than by appropriating them corporally. As Simonides of Ceos, the mythic inventor of the arts of memory, stated, we never forget what has been corporally spatialised (see Quintilianus 1865: 414–11[2], and a superb analysis in Yates 1975). Here pilgrimage plays a particularly effective role as it allows for a definitive incorporation of landscapes and their associated myths. Through various practices, always visually framed by and along the followed path, all senses must be mobilised to construct this memory: walking, suffering, smelling scents, listening to the wind, tasting salts, drinking from different sources, eating the animals and the plants of the landscape, dressing in its colours and so on. Song is another form of incorporation, much more efficient than speech alone, for it associates breath, rhythm and melody, all means of repeating the information to be retained.3 Pilgrimage and songs are commonly associated in Pueblo cultures. Can toponymy also play this role? For the Hopi, toponymy contains limited information, especially when compared to that of their former neighbours, the seminomadic Apaches and Navajos (see Basso 1996; Kelley and Francis 1994). Here, amongst a very sedentary population, the landscape, as a closed system of relationships between places, is what allows people to inhabit and conceive of their territory. In contrast, for the Apaches and Navajos, toponymy offers landmarks, history and resources without presenting a landscape unity, leaving the territory open for further exploration. This is

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why the Pueblo, and the Hopi in particular, entrust the reading and the transmission of their landscapes to practices such as song and pilgrimage. The Nuvatokya’ovi landscape calendar was contained in a song that was used not only to memorise it but also to prepare its achievement through a ritual of anticipation (Kennard 1972). Long ago, the initiated members of the Wuwtsim society of the Third Mesa had to embark on a ‘salt trip’ (as did all other Pueblo People). It was a long and perilous pilgrimage, punctuated by thirty-seven sanctuaries (Ferguson, Berlin, and Kuwanwisiwma 2004), during which an entire topography of the edges of the world of the dead was revealed. A person came back transformed, wiser, but above all, the landscapes crystallizing the Hopi mythology and cosmology were permanently incorporated during this pilgrimage. The pilgrim was thereafter entitled to lead in turn other young initiates through these daunting lands and to transmit the orthodox landscape interpretation. This is why living in a landscape, walking in the steps of ancestors or deities, examining, commenting on, chanting and retelling landscapes allows one not only to construct but also to render more vivid a cultural identity. These operations on mind and body are possible only because landscapes possess another characteristic briefly mentioned earlier and which will conclude our brief analysis: we want to point out the permanent shifting of landscape between different scales (in French, the jeu d’échelle). Be it the result of a natural or constructed perspective (as along paths of pilgrimage), a device to fold space in the background – at the back of the stage for viewing (as in a theatre), or an intentional miniaturisation of the world (as in landscape painting, garden art, collections and inventories) – the shifting of scales creates a metonymic relationship between the territory and what we want to show and therefore think of it. This practice around ‘little worlds’ (Stein 2001) is a fundamental character of landscape making. It results from a property discovered by Lévi-Strauss: miniaturisation, or reduction, renders the world intelligible and this intelligibility is also an aesthetic pleasure: As opposed to what happens when we try to understand a life-size thing or a being, a small scale version offers an understanding of the whole before that of its parts. Even if this is illusory, the reason behind such behaviour is to create or maintain the illusion, which gratifies our intelligence and sensibilities with a pleasure that, on this sole basis, can already be qualified as aesthetic [...] The intrinsic virtue of a reduced model is that it compensates the renunciation of sensible dimensions in order to obtain intelligible ones. (1962: 38–39)

The Hopi are particularly fond of ‘littling’ procedures: miniature scenes in the spring puppet theatre, symbolic geography on ceremonial kilts, ritual concentrations of the country on the village kivas,4 isomorphic and ‘isoqualitative’ projections between the earth, territory, village, the village plaza and the kiva.5 In religious rituals, these manipulations of scales lead in fine to the floor of the kivas, around the sipapu (a hole in the ground

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figuring the cosmic omphalos, i.e., a metaphor for the place from which beings emerged), concentrating around this altar all of space and time with their essential attributes. This ad infinitum reproduction at different scales or mise-en-abyme, of which the landscape is a powerful expression, makes sense of the world, gives it an order, an aesthetic regularity, a meaningful structure that can sometimes be intellectually and ritually controlled.

Conclusion European studies have been criticised for confining the landscape category within ethnocentric fields stemming from the West’s particular history, which thus prevents its transposition towards other cultures (Lévi-Strauss 1991: 152), except to dilute the category’s characteristics with a weak universalism that leads to ‘seeing landscapes everywhere’ (Galinier 1997). However, this chapter has demonstrated the existence of an Amerindian landscape that complies to a strict epistemological framework. It is not what is generally seen on our road maps, our museums, our parks or at the turn of a street corner. Certainly Hopi society has not developed a widespread taste for landscape painting or photography. However, elements such as architectural structures, calendars or social axiology are brilliantly represented in landscape practices and the general yet precise characteristics that anchor the landscape are truly there: a culture of perceptions and aesthetic appreciation of the territory; distancing, framing and viewing devices; a mastering of geomorphology and hydrography; scale shifts and miniature worlds; methods and practices for remembering and transmitting landscapes. These are all fundamental elements in the invention of landscapes.

Notes 1. As at Pueblo Bonito where the deformation of the village’s semicircle envelope is optically rectified by the parallax error when this village is seen from atop of the mesa, probably because it was from there that the village geometry was perfected during construction. 2. The kiva is a partially or fully buried room, often located in the middle of the village or near its central plaza. It is here that the Hopi (and all Pueblos) hold their rituals of mostly esoteric nature. 3. The O’odham (Hohokam descendants, very close to the northern Pueblos), entrusted their religious memory of the great landscapes to a double practice: the songs were used on a local scale for the characteristics of each location, while the pilgrimage (a physical one within the landscape itself, and then the recitation of it) was used to tie together a large number of songs (see for ex-

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ample the Oriole Songs in Darling 2006). Songs in this example were what the Romans named as memoria rerum (‘memory of things or parts’), while the pilgrimage occupied the role of the memoria verbum (‘memory of pathways or “composites”’). 4. For example, to prepare for the antelope/snake ceremonies, a runner delimits Hopi territory and every day covers concentric circles until the fourth day, when he circles the kiva itself (Fewkes 1892, 1906). 5. Fractal projections and symbolic permutations in which the kiva is to the plaza what the plaza is to the village, what the village is to Hopi territory and what this territory is to the expanse of the world. The walls of the kiva represent the walls of the houses that encircle the village plaza, which in turn recall the exterior houses protecting the village, then the cliffs of the village, out towards the limits of the territory itself (Pérez 1998; Mindeleff 1989: 117).

References Anyon, R. and Ferguson, T. J. 2001. ‘Hopi and Zuni Cultural Landscapes: Implications of History and Scale for Cultural Resources Management’, in Laurie Weinstein (ed.), Native Peoples of the Southwest: Negotiating Land, Water, and Ethnicities, Westport, CT.: Bergin & Garvey, pp. 99–122. Anyon, R., Ferguson, T. J. and Colwell-Chanthaphonh, C. 2005. ‘Natural Setting as Cultural Landscapes: The Power of Place and Tradition’, USDA Forest Service Proceedings RMRS 36: 273–76. Augoyard, J.-F. 1991. ‘La vue est-elle souveraine dans l’esthétique paysagère?’ in Le Débat 65, spécial Au delà du paysage moderne: 51–59. Basso, K. 1996. Wisdom Sits in Place: Landscape and Language among the Western Apache. Albuquerque: University of Albuquerque Press. Berque, A. (ed.). 1994. Cinq propositions pour une théorie du paysage. Seyssel: Champ Vallon. ———. 1999. La mouvance, cinquante concepts de paysage. Paris: Editions de la Villette. ———. 2006. ‘Paysage’, in Jean-François Dortier (ed.), Dictionnaire des Sciences Humaines. Paris: P.U.F. Colwell-Chanthaphonh, C., Ferguson, T. J. and Anyon, R. 2003. ‘Conceptualizing Landscapes in the San Pedro Valley of Arizona: American Indian Interpretations of Reeve Ruin and Davis Ruin’, Fifth World Archaeological Congress, Washington DC, 21–26 June. Cosgrove, D. and Daniels, S. (eds). 1988. The Iconography of Landscape. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cushing, F. H. 1992. Zuni Folk-Tales. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Darling, J. A. 2006. ‘Pima Song and the Archaeology of Space’, Landscapes of Movement, University of Pennsylvania Museum, 29–31 May. Ferguson, T. J., Berlin, G. L. and Kuwanwisiwma, L. J. 2004. ‘Kukhepya: Searching for Hopi Trails’, Landscapes of Movement: Trails and Paths in Anthropological Perspective, 103rd Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, San Francisco.

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Fewkes, J.-W. 1892. ‘The Ceremonial Circuit among the Village Indians of Northeastern Arizona’, Journal of American Folk-lore (16): 33–42. ———. 1906, ‘Hopi Shrines near the East Mesa, Arizona’, American Anthropologist 8: 346–75. Galinier, J. 1997. ‘Paysage et espace corporel: une doctrine mésoaméricaine’, in Les Enjeux Du Paysage. Bruxelles: Ousia, pp. 269–80. Geertz, A. 1982, ‘The Sa’lakwmanawyat, Sacred Puppet Ceremonial among the Hopi Indians of Arizona’, Anthropos 77(1): 163–90. ———. 1986. ‘A Reed Pierced the Sky: Hopi Indian Cosmography on Third Mesa, Arizona’, Numen 31(2): 216–41. Glowacka, M. and Sekaquaptewa, E. 1999. ‘Breath of Life: The Concept of Hikwsi in Traditional Hopi Philosophy’, American Indian Culture and Research Journal 23(2): 137–43. Gombrich, E. 1970. Aby Warburg, an Intellectual Biography. London: Warburg Institute. Goody J. 2003. La peur des représentations. Paris: La Découverte. Hill, J. 1992. ‘The Flower World of Old Uto-Aztecan’, Journal of Anthropological Research 48: 117–44. Hirsch, E. and O’Hanlon M. (eds). 1995. The Anthropology of Landscape: Perspectives on Place and Space. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Ingold, T. 2000. The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London: Routledge. Jackson, J. 1984. Discovering the Vernacular Landscape. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Kelley, K. B. and Francis, H. 1994. Navajo Sacred Places. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Kennard, E. 1972. ‘Metaphor and Magic: Key Concepts in Hopi Culture and Their Linguistic Forms’, in Studies in Linguistics (in Honour of Georg L. Trager). The Hague and Paris: Mouton. Kuwanwisiwma, L. 2002. ‘Hopit Navotiat. Hopi Knowledge of History: Hopi Presence on Black Mesa’, in S. Powell and F. E. Smiley (eds), Prehistoric Culture Change on the Colorado Plateau: Ten Thousand Years on Black Mesa. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, pp. 161–63. Kuwanwisiwma, L. J. and Ferguson, T. J. 2004. ‘Ang Kuktota: Hopi Ancestral Sites and Cultural Landscapes’, Expedition 46(2): 24–29. Lekson, S. 1984. Great Pueblo Architecture of Chaco Canyon, Publications in Archaeology. Albuquerque: National Park Service. ———. 2000. The Chaco Meridian: Centers of Political Power in the Ancient Southwest. Walnut Creek, CA: Alta Mira Press. Lévi-Strauss C. 1962. La pensée sauvage. Paris: Plon. ———. 1991. ‘Les sociétés exotiques ont-elles des paysages?’ in De l’agricole au paysage, n° spécial de Etudes Rurales n° 121/122/123/124. Lomatuway’ma, M. and Malotki, E. 1987. Earth Fire, a Hopi Legend of the Sunset Crater Eruption. Flagstaff: Northland Press. ———. 1993. Hopi Ruin Legends Kiqötutuwutsi. Flagstaff: Northern Arizona University Press. Malotki, E. 1983. Hopi Time. Berlin and New York: Werner Winter (Mouton). McCluskey, S. 1985. ‘Calendars and Symbolism: Function of Observation in Hopi Astronomy’, XVIIIth International Congress of History of Sciences, Berkeley, August.

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Mindeleff, V. 1989 [1892]. Study of Pueblo Architecture in Tusayan and Cibola. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Morrow, B. H. and Price, V. B. (eds). 1997. Anasazi Architecture and American Design. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico. Nequatewa, E. 1939. ‘Miniature Pottery’, Plateau 12(1). ———. 1994. Truth of a Hopi. Flagstaff: Northland Publishing and the Museum of Northern Arizona. Ortiz, A. 1969. The Tewa World: Space, Time, Being and Becoming in a Pueblo Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pérez, P. 1998. ‘Le monde au-delà du bambou; Analyse de quelques représentations de l’espace chez les Hopi d’Arizona’, Ph.D. dissertation. EHESS, Toulouse et Paris. ———. 2005. Les Indiens Hopi d’Arizona; six études anthropologiques. Paris: L’Harmattan. Quintilianus, F.1865. De l’institution oratoire. Paris: Firmin Didot. Roger, A. 1997. Court traité du paysage. Paris: Gallimard. ———. 1999. La théorie du paysage en France, 1974–1994. Seyssel: Champ Vallon. Sauer, C. 1963. ‘The Morphology of Landscape’, in J. Leighly (ed.), Land and Life: A Selection from the Writings of Carl Ortwin Sauer. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 315–50. Schama, S. 1999. Le paysage et la mémoire. Paris: Le Seuil. Simmons, L. (ed.). 1970. Sun Chief. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Stein, R. 2001. Le monde en petit: jardins en miniature et habitations dans la pensée religieuse d’Extrême-Orient. Paris: Flammarion. Stephen, A. and Patterson, A. 1994. Hopi Pottery Symbols. Boulder, CO: Johnson Books. Stuart, D. 2000. Anasazi America. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico. Titiev, M. 1938. ‘Dates of Planting at the Hopi Indian Pueblo of Oraibi’, Plateau 11(5): 39–42. Wade, E. 1973. ‘The Kachina Sash: A Native Model of the Hopi World’, Western Folklore 32(1): 1–18. Yates, F. 1975. Les arts de la mémoire. Paris: NRF/Gallimard.

6 Thalloo My Vea Narrating the Landscapes of Life in the Isle of Man Sue Lewis

Figure 6.1. Green hills by the sea; looking towards the Stacks from Stroin Vuigh. © Peter Killey. Reprinted with permission. When the summer day is over, and its busy cares have flown, I sit beneath the starlight, with a heavy heart, alone. Then rises like a vision, sparkling bright in nature’s glee, My own dear Ellan Vannin with its green hills by the sea. – Eliza Craven Green

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Glance at any tourist brochure for the Isle of Man, or publicity aimed at attracting further global business, and you will be bombarded with photographs demonstrating its scenic beauty. For an island of such relatively small size (just 227 square miles), it boasts an intriguing range of different landscapes, including heather-clad mountains, willow-edged wetlands and an often dramatic coastline. As advertised to the tourist, the Island offers a place to ‘dispose of your worries’,1 somewhere ‘spatially, temporally and symbolically distanced from the everyday way of life’ (Hopkins 1998: 65). Promoted to businesses that might be attracted to Mann’s shores, the ‘beautiful environment’2 is pledged to contribute to that rare and contemporaneously desirable thing, a ‘work-life balance’, for their employees. Such images are founded on a conceptualisation of landscape as an object, as something external to us. Landscape is there to be observed or utilised, consumed, framed and fixed in a manner that ‘taken to its ultimate conclusion … reduces landscape to a “flickering” iconographic text displayed on a screen’ (Olwig 1996: 630). But Keith Basso suggests (1988: 100) that for those native to a landscape there exists another level of involvement – a level of communication about it (and I would add, with it) that encompasses (amongst others) the material, the historical, the social and the poetic. It is an involvement founded in dwelling and so, drawing on Tim Ingold’s arguments on landscape (1993, 2000, 2007), this paper offers an ethnographic glimpse into the ‘dwelling perspective’ (Ingold 2000: 185ff) of native Manx people. The starting point is a poem by Manxwoman Cathy Clucas. In Manx Gaelic, her landscape is thalloo my vea, a possible translation of which is ‘land of my life’. But the word thalloo goes beyond land. The narratives presented here – narratives of personal, social and practical experiences of the places in which my interlocutors dwell, and poetic interpretations of those experiences – therefore aim towards a more satisfactory understanding of thalloo my vea and show how, for Manx men and women, landscape is not something ‘out there’ and external, but rather is incorporated into their selves and their social world (Basso 1988: 122). In turn, that social world is constantly made and remade with words. Poems about the Manx landscape are numerous and are often recited at public gatherings. Examples punctuate this exploration. Individual contributors to this ethnography describe a close attachment to the land forged through personal exploration of their surroundings. A farmer speaks of the names of places and of how, through those names, he learns the characteristics of the land itself. Others recount the endless telling of stories about the land by their elders, and how those stories conflate people and place. They recall tales that pass on knowledge of generations of familial presence and a sense of ownership of particular places that remain in some sense inalienable, regardless of any title deed. The last point works to realign this introduction toward more formal interactions with the landscape. Defining landscape as ‘a nexus of com-

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munity, justice, nature, and environmental equity, a contested territory’ (1996: 630), Ken Olwig takes us back to the independent and autonomous districts of northern Europe known as Landskaber, Landschaften or Land, in order to understand the history and meaning of the word and restore landscape’s ‘substantive content’ (1996: 631). He describes what distinguished such districts from their neighbours, and in so doing reveals similarities – in features that can still be observed today – with the stubbornly independent Isle of Man that may assist in understanding the narratives that follow, especially where these relate to contemporary contestations of territory. A selection of three will serve to illustrate the point. First, Landskaber had their own ‘orally transmitted customary law’. Second, Landschaft referred not to a territory but rather to the estates represented in a land’s parliament, and third, a Land such as Jutland was so defined because it had ‘its own legal system and (lands)ting or representative council’ (Olwig 1996: 632–33). The Isle of Man’s legal, land and parliamentary systems are similarly and jointly implicated in the Manx ‘landscape’. The Island is divided into north and south districts for legal purposes, each headed by a Deemster, who historically would have maintained the oral, or breast, law. North and south are then each divided into three sheadings, which once had their own court (Davies 1956: 100). In tune with the second point drawn from Olwig, sheadings are ‘not physical units’ (Davies 1956: 100) and are reflected still in today’s parliamentary constituencies. The parliament of the Isle of Man, Tynwald, is indeed a ting (of Norse origin). Each sheading is further divided into three parishes (in one case, just two, making seventeen in all). Each parish still has a ‘captain’, which today is a ceremonial post but which, in the past, was responsible for the district’s militia. For landholding purposes, parishes are then divided into treens, which are subdivided into quarterlands. And, importantly, ‘Manx customary law provided that inheritance lands, or “quarterlands of descent”, could not be alienated without the lord’s licence’ (Davies 1956: 113), a system that Farrant suggested held ‘traces of the old Norse land tenure’ (1945: 19). Finally, those quarterlands would often have been named after the families that held them. This nominal connection to and inalienability from place is a theme that will be repeated throughout this ethnography. These complex interconnections are referenced in a vast range of Manx social interactions, but perhaps most vividly on Tynwald Day, the annual open-air sitting of the Manx parliament. On 5 July each year (Old Midsummer’s Day) the people of the Island gather around the grassy, tiered and circular hill (on which all their parliamentary representatives sit) to listen to the laws enacted that year being read aloud by the senior Deemster. They come also to meet one another and to celebrate this symbol of self-determination and perhaps to repeat the well-known jest – that the Tynwald Hill is constituted from a ‘sod from every parish’ − the ambiguity being, of course, an intentional confusion between the soil and the social.

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Tynwald Day celebrations, it is said, have continued largely unchanged for over a thousand years (see Lewis 2002), but they have increased in size and significance over the last few decades. This is just one response to the Isle of Man’s experience of significant demographic shift due to economic in-migration, the consequences of which include a native population now in the minority and questions on what it means to be Manx. Customs, traditions and stories have all been considered at risk, and at times relations between native and incomer have been tense. These tensions have also been revealed in debates on the Manx environment, and such differences will also emerge in the following narratives. But because they entail a raising of self-awareness of one’s own positions, much in the way that Fredrik Barth (1969) described for culture, what results is a rich autoethnographic vein waiting to be mined by the anthropologist interested in the landscape that lies beyond the observable surface.

The Landscape Beyond Narratives on Time and Space The Isle of Man is replete with the archaeological evidence of a lengthy ‘chronicle of life and dwelling’ (Ingold 2000: 189). Stories – some true, some mythical – are attached to many of the visible sites and stones. For example, a Neolithic chamber grave is misnamed ‘King Orry’s Grave’, perhaps to ensure that this favourite of Norse rulers remains in Mann.3 The pre-Christian god, Manannan, and his usurper, St Patrick, are both honoured with a ‘Chair’.4 And along the road between Douglas and Peel stands what remains of St Trinian’s Chapel. Grey stoned, roofless and desolate, tradition has it that the building was never finished. Each time the roof was nearing completion the buggane5 – a malicious spirit of ogre-like appearance – would come at night and throw it to the ground. Eventually the builders gave up. Jenny repeats the story of the buggane to her children each time they pass the chapel, just as she tells them again and again about the Tynwald Hill, or the Moddey Dhoo (the Black Dog) that haunts the old castle in Peel. In Peel, she also retells the story of her own family links to the city, such as why a particular alley is ‘their alley’, named after the family many generations before. ‘There’s a photo in the Peel Exhibition in the House of Manannan’, she said, ‘with a girl walking down Christian Street. Now my grandmother would have been eighteen, and she lived in that sort of Edwardian house. She was born there … So I tell the kids and I pass that on’. ‘It was like a litany’, said another Manxwoman as she described how her grandfather would recite the names of the places they passed as the family travelled around the Island. As they drove from the north to the south, along familiar routes, his narrative would be intoned without change. Of

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habit, she claims, she repeats the ritual with her own children, if only partially. Walking the dramatic cliff paths near her home, as her family have done for generations, another young Manxwoman worries over the prospect of the erection of heritage interpretation panels; she does not need help to appreciate what this landscape means to her. These tales and litanies are more than just a simple mapping of places. Likewise, the place names are themselves more than markers on a map. As Basso observes, ‘because of their inseparable connection to specific localities, [place names] may be used to summon forth an enormous range of mental and emotional associations – associations of time and space, of history and events, of persons and social activities, of oneself and stages in one’s life’ (1988: 103). For these Manx men and women the associations are communicated and reiterated through the tales told in the car or around the table, involving movement between places, or the physical sensations associated with being in places. Jamys tells of other litanies, repeated over and over again in the farmhouse kitchens of his family and their neighbours. His father would take him around to the neighbouring farms on a Sunday, when the farmers would take a rare break and share a yarn or two. Listening intently to his elders, smelling the Sunday dinner cooking, he would hear stories that often began with a fresh tale of such-and-such a person and of an incident near so-and-so’s farm gate. A new chapter in the subject’s life would then be woven into a well-rehearsed list of genealogical connections and stories of what grandfathers or great-grandmothers did, of social networks and associations with particular places.

Poetic Narratives Scattered across the uplands lie the mouldering remains of mundane ‘chronicles of dwelling’. Known locally as tholtans, they were once occupied by Manx crofters and hill farmers, but now they are used in poetry and prose to symbolise the state of Manx culture. They have been said to mark ‘the history of an area’,6 but for Maddrell the tholtan ‘does not represent a point in time, but almost a kind of temporal collapse’ (2006: 135) and so they might also be considered as the Manx cairn (see Basu this volume). For in all such considerations and interpretations, the tholtan appears not as a dead pile of stones, but as an evocative, rather poetic reminder of life’s processes. It was a poem that inspired this study, and it is to a poem that our first narrator turns to help describe how he feels about his landscape. As he thumbed through the pages of his well-used copy of T. E. Brown’s7 poems, seeking the passage he wanted, Charles explained: I was born up on the slopes of South Barrule. A little tholtan now. Gone. Well, it’s still there. It’s just below the heather line of South Barrule. I was up there ’til I was five, and those five years had an enormous … I realise now, an enormous effect on me. I love the hills, I love the keen, thin air. And what I remem-

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Figure 6.2. A Manx tholtan, near Cashtal yn Ard. © Peter Killey. Reprinted with permission. ber of that is what Brown, when he talks about the people of the mountain … And this was poetry written at8 him. Aye; for the air is thin And fine up there, and they sucks it in Very strong, Very long, And mixes it with the moul’ Of all their body and all their sowl.9 – T. E. Brown, Kitty of the Sherragh Vane10

Sensing that the poetic extract was insufficient still to enlighten me, he patiently added: Moul’ is soil. When we go to plough, I’ll tell Paul ‘make sure you clean the moul’ boards’ of the plough. And when [Brown] talks about the mixing of all the moul’ and all the sowl, we put … When this weather dries,11 we’ll go to put manure on the land, and we’ll plough it in. And next year, when you plough it again, you’ll see the last remnants of that just disappearing into the body of the soil. Mixes with all the moul’ of all their sowl. And that’s what the man is saying, that says so much to me. It becomes, it becomes that keen, thin air. The smells, the sound … that becomes you. It’s become me. We are the landscape.

Charles’ explanation has much in common with the evocative image of the tholtan. Just as the ruined cottages contain a temporal collapse, so the turning of the soil symbolises a collapsing together of human effort and natural resource. And he raises other important issues. First, the poem –

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and his interpretation of it – takes our concept of landscape above ground level. It is as much the air as the soil that fertilises the Manx sowl here. For Charles, both are part of his landscape – as he is part of it. Second, Brown’s words and Charles’s interpretation of them provide the first indication that the body of the land and the body social can be spoken of as one. Furthermore, Charles has acknowledged what Ingold suggests must be attended to if we are to understand how people inhabit this world: that is, ‘the dynamic processes of world-formation’ (2007: S28). It is a view of the world available only ‘from the open’ (Ingold 2007: S32), a point with which my respondents would likely concur, for all those narrators whose stories follow chose to explain their relationship with the open Manx landscape.

Narratives on Experience Let us return to ground level for a moment, for there is more there than meets the eye. Experience has shown generations of Manx farmers what their land is like, and they have shared that knowledge in the Manx Gaelic names they gave the fields. Charles explains: Like the Cam Ard.12 ‘High field’ or ‘high curve’ … And the moaney, which is the wet, the boggy. And the lhurgy; field on the slope. The Nhie Ghenny, or the ‘sandy close’. Now the Nhie Ghenny,13 that puzzled me for a long time.

Figure 6.3. A tractor at work on a farm near St John’s. © Peter Killey. Reprinted with permission.

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I thought, why on earth did they call it the Nhie Ghenny? Because ghenny is sandy. Every farm’s got a nhie.14 Nhie is the field next to the yard. [A]nd I thought, hey, they were wrong here, there’s not a bucketful of sand in it. And one day [I] was ploughing in the field above it, and that field is entirely sand. And then it struck me. The road didn’t go through there, it went above the field I was ploughing in, and the field I was ploughing in was part of the one below, which was the Nhie Ghenny.

Charles has been a farmer all his life. I first heard him tell his stories to a gathering in Peel, many years ago. That evening, he held his audience enthralled for two hours with tales of the harvest, of ploughing and of keeping an eye on the agricultural goings on in the farm across the valley. Now, as we talked in the kitchen of his farmhouse he listed the fieldnames for me, but again they were more than a mapping, even of his personal connections to places. They were both direct messages from his predecessors about the characteristics of the fields he must plough and an affirmation that he was working the same fields as those other family members and therefore intimately involved in shaping and reshaping the same landscape. For as Charles told me, his family has moved no more than two and a half miles in six or seven generations. Fred Myers writes that ‘people do not simply “experience” the world; they are taught – indeed, disciplined – to signify their experiences in distinctive ways’ (2002: 103). Charles’s experience has indeed been disciplined by the memoranda left in the field names by his ancestors: he has, in Myers terms, been instructed ‘what to find’ (2002: 104). We have also heard about the tales and litanies told to children whilst driving in the car or overheard whilst sitting in a farmhouse kitchen: these, too, must play a part in disciplining young expectations of what or who to find in their landscape. Yet simply experiencing their world, whilst children, emerged as an important element for Charles and those whose narratives now follow. All, including Charles, offered a description of their own childhood explorations around their villages when attempting to explain their relationship with the landscape. All recounted in detail the wonders they had found in the meadows or streams, some several decades before. Robert has no connection with farming. His father ran the village store, and Robert has spent his working life in administration in the Island’s capital. When I asked him if he, too, mapped his world through names handed down, he said not. Exploring, he said: Wasn’t something we did by interaction with adults. In fact, we avoided them. It was play, adventure style of exploration, but also … at that level above ground … you find these abandoned bits of ground, the old millrace across the river, long overgrown. You make dens underneath the railway bridge, you’re aware of the vegetation and the birds and any animals you might come across.

As for names, well, they would invent an applicable name for a feature, if practicality required. Robert is in his forties, and has lived the whole of his

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life in the same village. He jokes that, in his youth, a trip to Ramsey (some eight miles away) was a relative rarity, and visiting the south of the Island was almost unheard of. But there is no sense that this was experienced as a small world, or that his part of it was somehow separate or disconnected from the rest. On foot, he ranged across the fields around the village and got to know the sights, smells and sounds, the flora and fauna. When he and his fellow explorers acquired pushbikes, they extended their discoveries to the shore and then, as a young adult on his first scooter, he set out to ride along every road, lane and track indicated on his Ordnance Survey map. What he describes is a detailed, intimate and gradually expanding knowledge of his landscape, a knowledge that also changed as child became adult and his ‘level above ground’ changed. As with Charles, then, there is an acknowledged temporal and spatial depth to Robert’s relationship with the landscape. The same is true of Dan. Of a similar age to Robert and from a neighbouring village, Dan left the Island at eighteen but returned to the same area some twenty years later. The habits of a childhood spent exploring seem never to have left him. He still keeps a diary and still makes a note of when he sees the first celandine, or when the swallows take to the barns. His habit of fine observation began when he wandered across the cliffs and shoreline as a young teenager. Then, he would sit for hours to find where a bird went to roost and he kept a record of the different nests in the area. Once, he said, he found a partridge nest and realised that once hatched, the hen places one half of the egg inside the other. He has concerns, though, about his own son’s relationship with this landscape and thus with the Island. To his self-confessed shame, he has never introduced his son to the cliffs between Glen Mooar and the Lhinnag and, in contrast to his own experiences, his son has not shown any desire to wander and explore for himself. Are today’s teenagers more focused on global matters, than he and his generation had been, he wondered. ‘We were locally focused’, he said, stressing a currency and constancy in his own perspective, and added, ‘the younger generation don’t know what’s around them’. Charles reiterates Dan’s point with another story. His farm having played host to a group of young schoolchildren, he asked ‘What have you seen today? What did you like?’ He mimicked the children’s responses. ‘We saw the lambs, we saw the cows, and then one of the girls said “I’ve stood on soil”.’ He laughed, still somewhat bemused, and added ‘I’ve grown up out of the soil. She would be eight, nine. And I realised then that an awful lot of people are living in a make-believe world.’

Narrating roots Returning to names, according to Basso ‘[t]he idea persists in many quarters that proper names, including toponyms, serve as referential vehicles

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whose only purpose is to denote, or “pick out”, objects in the world’ (1988: 103). In contrast, he demonstrates their ability to evoke personal or communal stories or to stand for the whole of a cultural or historical narrative. It is in this vein that Manx names have served, conceptually, to collapse people, places and the stories connecting them. On today’s maps, Creg-ny-neenyn or Giau-ny-spyrryd may appear only to denote, but the former translates as ‘Rock of the Girls’ and, according to J. J. Kneen, recalls the story of two drowned girls. ‘When the tide had ebbed’, he reported, ‘they were found tied to each other by their hair.’ The latter, the ‘Cave of the Spirit, was another of those places said to be haunted by one of the buggane species’.15 In the names of farms, however, the conflation of people and place is still very apparent. Contributing to an internet discussion about the traditional Manx folk song Ny Kirree Fo Niaghtey, or ‘The Sheep under the Snow’, one Manxman wrote: ‘It was the custom to call farmers by the name of their farm. My grandfather, Thomas Alfred Corteen, farmed the ancestral homestead of Ballacorteen … He was known as “The Ballacorteen”, or Alfie Ballacorteen.’16 The song under discussion tells of Nicholas Qualtrough, whose sheep died in the winter snows. In the song he is called Nicholas Raby, after his farm. Yet a farm name may itself have derived from a family name. Balley (shortened to Balla in place names) means ‘town, home, farmstead, base’17 and so Ballacorteen may originally have meant simply ‘the home of the Corteens’. Particular parts of the Island have come to be recognised as the ‘homes’ of particular families. A book on Manx crosses (Costain Richards 1988) contains an appendix of Manx surnames, parish by parish. One contributor to this ethnography, referring to this list, recalled that the book showed his family name was clustered in three areas – three ‘tribes’, as he called them. It raised questions for him. Were the various branches connected, where did they originate from and where might they have spread to? When Manx people meet for the first time, they very quickly set about trying to answer such questions, or to discover their mutual positions in this social or genealogical web. Surnames offer the opening clue – a clue to basic ‘belonging’ – and may indicate which part of the Island is likely to be home. However, the accuracy of this is checked and possible familial connections – or connections with close friends – are tested. ‘It’s important for them to know who they’re dealing with, and where your connections are going and who you’re associated with’, said Robert. Another Manxman described it thus: ‘People often ask, what is Manx? Anybody happy here, has some roots here. But that may be, can be, only superficial. People with family history for generations, they have deeper roots. You’re part of it, part of the Island. Like a root system – you can’t cut yourself off.’ He is not talking here about being rooted to a particular spot, of fixity – despite the apparent localness of our various narrators’ descriptions – but rather of being linked into a system that if separated from it, would

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damage both himself and the rest of the organism. More than that, he is talking about a system that links him to someone, somewhere, sometime, who has experienced this Manx landscape in the same way as he has. Considered thus, each place at any time ‘embodies the whole as a particular nexus within it’ (Ingold 1993: 155).

The Political Landscape Narratives of Change Over the past few decades, the Isle of Man has experienced a significant level of social and cultural change. Between the mid-census years of 1976 and 2006, the resident population rose by 32 per cent.18 Perhaps more significantly, however, the census of 1991 showed that, for the first time, the Manx-born were outnumbered by ‘comeovers’.19 The stimulus for this fast and furious change was, first, the ‘New Residents Policy’ aimed at attracting financially independent retirees by establishing and maintaining tax differentials between the Isle of Man and its neighbours. This was followed by the creation of a fiscal environment attractive to offshore financial institutions. Given that the population was neither large enough nor (in the beginning) sufficiently skilled to meet the staffing demands of the latter, that demand was fulfilled by in-migration. Some of these economic migrants came for a short time, but others brought their families and have settled in the Island. It is now more generally acknowledged that the changes were vital to the Island’s continued economic viability and independence, but such rapid growth was understandably controversial. Early on, waves of protest from all sections of the Manx community highlighted the rise of unchecked development and property speculation, land and rental prices beyond the reach of local people and the apparent inability of the Manx government to exercise any control over the situation. As more and more of the Manx countryside disappeared under the rows of ugly bungalows and identical chalets, letters of bitter complaint were sent to the Manx newspapers and poets and songwriters recorded their concerns. At times, the protestors resorted to more direct action, including arson directed at partially built luxury developments. If the rest of the island-born population felt the manner of protest was extreme, there was widespread sympathy for the reasons behind it. In February 1989, the Manx Independent newspaper reported that the rector of Ballaugh had told his congregation that ‘the Isle of Man has improved its standard of living at the cost of its quality of life’ (Manx Independent, 22 February 1989). More cardboard boxes that look alike, (And out of place) And blow down when Mannin’s fierce breath

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Figure 6.4. The Mount Murray development, Santon. © Peter Killey. Reprinted with permission. Sweeps across the land, Devouring, the cancerous growths that eat away our Island outside – in, Turning green to grey, And land to cash. – From The Plight of Modern Mann, Simon Callister

Social pressures and loss of quality of life were understood as reason enough for widespread concern, but Charles points to another and perhaps more fundamental reason for such a response: Whether you owned the place or not didn’t matter. It didn’t matter. What mattered was ‘this is my area’. And it has been, and it was my father’s, and my grandfather’s. Our families have been here, and all of a sudden there was a digger over the hedge. They’d punched a hole in a hedge that nobody had ever … and that was … a lot of people found that very difficult … You have to say, I suppose, that that was inevitable … for the security of the future of the Isle of Man, it was essential. I think it had to happen … But I do wish we had been strong enough to develop the Island in true Manx vernacular and style and tradition … and we haven’t been.

There is a sense both of temporality and of inalienability in Charles’s words, and a sense, too, of Olwig’s characteristics of Landschaft resonating still in native Manx conceptions of the landscape. It is a feeling re-

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peated by a number of my informants. ‘Whether you owned the place or not didn’t matter’, he said. Manxwoman Jean said much the same to me about her ‘family land’ in the north, now occupied by a stranger but still and always somehow ‘theirs’. Others told me of going off to find places that were mentioned in family stories, so that the relationship between story and place could be maintained. In the face of such performances of connectedness, of being in the landscape, strong responses against its destruction and alienation are all too understandable. In the following extract from one of his many works, Manxman Paul Lebiedzinski evokes the Manx farmer fiercely resisting pressure from developers to sell his family’s land. Written at a time of strong protest but minimal government intervention, it should be read with a touch of bitter irony. In reality, the pressure was often too much to resist and acres of Manx farmland disappeared under estates to house the comeovers. Y’see those healthy livestock, Grazing ‘neath my noble tree, Beside the singing river, Ever rushing old and free, Y’see those upland meadows, Lowland fields of waving corn, That bloody swine thinks money buys My land of glory born. Because him an’ his cronies Have talked my oul’ friends roun’ They’re sellin’ up oul’ Cowin’s place Goin’ hundred thousan’ poun’. Before I’m six foot under, I won’t let one acre go Until I’m six foot under, They won’t build one bungalow. – From Six Foot Under, Paul Lebiedzinski, c. 1973

As some of the foregoing narratives have indicated, some fear that links to the Manx landscape are becoming harder to maintain. Children no longer seem to explore, and farmers no longer sit around and narrate the long genealogies connected with local incidents: ‘There was an accident at the bottom of the hill there … someone from the new estate’, and there the story ends. As Manx farms are taken over by non-Manx farmers, the fieldnames are changing. Perhaps the old Manx Gaelic names are difficult to pronounce, or hold no meaning because there is no understanding of their linguistic derivation and so the new ‘dweller’ will begin their own practical relationship with the landscape. The changes are not overtly political, like the toponymic conquering of Ireland so eloquently described by Brian Friel (1981) and so, in their ‘use value’ and practical application, such alterations to their landscape can ultimately be understood and appreciated. More worrying for Charles at the time of our conversation were proposals to change the way farmers worked the land. New subsidies would be

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related to ‘high quality countryside management’, or ‘Countryside Care’ (DAFF 2006: 5), rather than for produce or stock. The countryside as they look at it now, that they admire so much and want to preserve, it was me, my father, my grandfather and generations away back into the mists of time created … and that’s how it will continue. It will continue by what we’re doing now. And the green fields, and the green hills of Ellan Vannin they so proudly advertise, they’re there because we never stop grazing them. Take the stock away, and you’ll have a wilderness.

Acutely aware that it is the process of dwelling in the landscape that has produced the landscape that people now look at, he fears too that to end that dwelling (signified in taking the stock away, and thus, the farmers) may damage irrevocably a relationship with the land and landscape that he earlier described himself being part of. And with his words, he returns us to where we began, to the advertisements for tourists and new businesses. The landscape offered is misleadingly presented as existing out of time and independent of those that live in and with it, and for this farmer is another symbol of the change that has come so swiftly and is felt so keenly.

Conclusion: Translating Thalloo My Vea It was not the intention of this study to consider the symbolic role of the Manx landscape, to analyse its markers of meaning, but rather to understand the relationship between people and place and how this might poetically be described as thalloo my vea. We have been introduced to places in the landscape – the mythical church of St Trinian’s, the timecollapsing tholtan, the Tynwald Hill – that are meaning full, but the narrators have also drawn on personal experiences in order to explain how, for them, their landscape goes beyond land. One drew on the idea of a root system, of which he felt a part. For Charles it was the air and the soil. The ploughing of the moul’ into the soil was a reminder of the nonlinearity of time, the reiteration of the activities with which his forebears had shaped the same land – and soil returned later in his explanations, as he insisted he ‘came from the soil’. The corporeality of the land was there when, in The Plight of Modern Mann, the poet likened Mann’s winds to breath and the rapid development to a cancer, or when Charles’s reminiscence of the digger over the hedge sounded much like a story of physical violence. I suggest, then, that in the thoughts of these Manx men and women, ‘like organism and environment, body and landscape are complementary terms: each implies the other, alternatively as figure and ground’ (Ingold 1993: 156). All of which brings us to the poem that inspired the title of this chapter, Cathy Clucas’s Thalloo my Vea. As Basso observes, when discussing the Apache landscape, ‘poets and songwriters have long understood that economy of expression may enhance the quality and force of aesthetic

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discourse’ (1988: 108). While lyrical poetry declaiming the beauty of the perceived landscape is as common to the Island as in any other place of scenic splendour, the examples punctuating this exploration have shown how poetic talents have been used to support a critical discourse that goes beyond the surface. But before we meet our final poet’s landscape, some words of preparation. Ortiz, schooled in the expectations of linguistics, was seeking to understand the etymology of words in his native tongue by breaking down the words into their constituent parts. His father told him that ‘a word does not break down into separate elements. A word is complete’ (1983: 400). This encourages Ortiz to acknowledge that for a speaker, singer of songs or poet, too, there is no breaking down: ‘[A word] is part of the complete voice of a person.’ I risk doing a similar disservice to this next poem, first, by offering a translation of it, and second, by attempting to explain it. It was, however, the translation and explanation of the phrase thalloo my vea in the introduction that inspired this exploration. Having now heard their narratives, it may still be possible for this poem to stand as the poet’s ‘complete voice’ on her relationship with the Manx landscape. Cathy Clucas writes in Manx Gaelic. The translation is her own20 and retains the Manx idiomatic structure, which places an object ‘at you’ in place of the possessive ‘your’. It begins like a poem to a lover, and it is only in the last line that we realise that the poet is speaking to the Island itself. But no straightforward reading is possible. This is figure and ground. It is the Island that has eyes and hair – and a body – and these are likened to features in the surrounding environment. Now confirmed as corporeal and human, the ‘people and the landscape are virtually as one’ (Basso 1988: 122). It speaks of a flowing together of activities, stories, social connections, vital experiences, the soil, shore, air. It speaks, that is, of a landscape beyond land, or indeed, land beyond landscape. ELLAN Cathy Clucas Gollrish puill argid er y cheayn ny sooilyn gial ayds

Like silver pools on the sea the bright eyes at you

Gollrish strooan roie tappee ny folt bog ayds

Like a fast running stream the soft hair at you

Gollrish geay feayr er y traie ny ennal millish ayds

Like a cold wind on the shore the sweet breath at you

Gollrish creggan baney drillinagh fo’n ghrian ny craueyn lajer ayds

Like sparkling white rocks under the sun the strong bones at you

Gollrish thalloo rea harrish ny sleityn ny corp cruillagh ayds

Like smooth land over the mountains the curvy body at you

Ellan aalin as glen thalloo my vea.

Island pure and beautiful land of my life.

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Acknowledgements I would like to thank the Manx men and women who gave their time to this project, the poets – particularly Cathy Clucas – whose work has inspired this and other works, and also colleagues at the Centre for Manx Studies who have long helped and supported my research in the Island. Thanks also to Peter Killey, who gave kind permission to use his photographs. To enjoy more wonderful images, see http://www.manxscenes.com. Gura mie mooar ayd.

Notes 1. See http://www.gov.im/tourism/ [Accessed 31 July 2008]. Where used as shorthand for “Isle of Man”, following convention Island is capitalised and Mann is spelt with double n. 2. Manx Department of Trade and Industry advertisement aimed at attracting new business, in Set Yourself Free (2008), a free ‘holiday and lifestyle’ magazine from the Department of Tourism. See http://www.visitisleofman.com/ guide/iom.swf [Accessed 2 August 2008]. 3. The Norse king Godred Crovan (King Orry) ruled the Island in the eleventh century. 4. The first of these, Manannan’s Chair, is the site of a possible roundhouse at Cronk-y-Voddy. St Patrick’s Chair, in Marown, consists of slabs marked with a plain cross. 5. A buggane is a malicious spirit, and in the story of one Timothy the Tailor’s valiant attempt to challenge the creature, it describes itself as having a great head, large eyes, long teeth, large and long nails (Moore 1994[1891]: 60). 6. Clare Christian, Manx minister for social security, speaking on the Building Control Act of 1991. See www.tynwald.org.im/papers/hansards/1999–2000/ cho01022000.pdf. [Accessed 14 June 2007]. 7. T. E. Brown (1830–1897), author of the poem, is publicly recognised as the Manx national poet. Brown wrote lyrical poetry, but he also wrote in the Anglo-Manx dialect and it is to one of the latter poems that Charles had turned to explain what he felt. 8. My respondent is here using dialectical sentence construction. The Island’s dialect (use of which is becoming increasingly rare) takes much of its grammatical form from Manx Gaelic, the language spoken by the general population until the mid-nineteenth century. 9. Anglo-Manx dialect, meaning soul. 10. In The Collected Poems of T. E. Brown, p. 447. 11. The interview took place in early March. 12. Cam comes from cammid, a Manx Gaelic word meaning curvature. Ard means high. 13. In Manx Gaelic, gheinnee means sandy. 14. Also a Manx Gaelic word, meaning ‘next to’ or ‘close’. 15. Both stories are taken from a paper read at the Annual Meeting of the Manx Society in 1914, by Manxman and scholar J. J. Kneen. See http://www.project-

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16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

iona.co.uk/landscape/placenames_etymology/rushen_place_names_isle_of_ man [Accessed 6 August 2008]. See http://www.mudcat.org/thread.cfm?threadid=792 [Accessed 2 August 2008]. Translation from P. Kelly’s online Manx-English dictionary at http://www .gaelg.iofm.net/DICTIONARY/dict2/B.html. [Accessed 3 October 2007]. Equating to 19,562: Isle of Man Government Treasury Census Report 2006. The local term for an immigrant, the majority of whom came from the rest of the British Isles. Sincere thanks to Manx poet Cathy Clucas for allowing the inclusion of her poetry. With this poem Cathy was a finalist at the Strokestown International poetry competition, 2006. The translation was provided by the poet especially for this paper, and again uses the grammatical structure of the Anglo-Manx dialect.

References Barth, F. 1969. Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organisation of Culture Difference. London: Allen and Unwin. Basso, K. 1988. ‘Speaking with Names: Language and Landscape among the Western Apache’, in Cultural Anthropology 3(2): 99–130. Brown T. E. 1909. The Collected Poems of T. E. Brown. London: Macmillan. Costain Richards, M. 1988. The Manx Crosses Illuminated. Isle of Man: Crosshag Publications. DAFF (Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry). 2006. Consultation on Proposed Countryside Care Scheme. Isle of Man Government Publications. Davies E. 1956. ‘Treens and Quarterlands: A Study of the Land System of the Isle of Man’, Transactions and Papers (Institute of British Geographers) 22: 97–116. Farrant, R. D. 1945. ‘The Isle of Man’, Journal of Comparative Legislation and International Law, 3rd series, 27(3/4): 17–21. Friel, B. 1981. Translations. London: Faber and Faber. Hopkins, J. 1998. ‘Signs of the Post-Rural: Marketing Myths of a Symbolic Countryside’, Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography 80(2): 65–81. Ingold, T. 1993. ‘The Temporality of the Landscape,’ World Archaeology 25(2): 52–174. ———. 2000. The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London: Routledge. ———. 2007. ‘Earth, Sky, Wind and Weather’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 13: S19–S38. Kinvig, R. H. 1975. The Isle of Man: A Social, Cultural and Political History. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Lewis S. 2002. ‘National Day: Achieving Collective Identity in the Isle of Man’ in N. Rapport (ed.), British Subjects: An Anthropology of Britain. Oxford: Berg, pp. 29–66. ———. 2004. ‘Roots Of/Routes To: Practice and Performance of Identity in the Isle of Man’. Ph.D. dissertation, University of St Andrews.

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———. 2006. ‘The Story of Mann and All That, or How Heritage Became History Again’, Celtic Cultural Studies Issue 5, Contemporary Issues in Manx Culture (http://www.celtic-cultural-studies.com/papers/05/lewis-01.html). Maddrell, B. 2006. ‘Of Demolition and Reconstruction: a Comparative Reading of Manx Cultural Revivals,’ E-Keltoi: Journal if Interdisciplinary Celtic Studies 2 (Cultural Survival): 133–63. Moore, A. W. (1994[1891]) The Folk-lore of the Isle of Man. Felinfach: Lllanerch Publishers. Myers, F. R. 2002. ‘Ways of Place-Making’, Le Ricerca Folklorica 45: 101–19. Olwig, K. R. 1996. ‘Recovering the Substantive Nature of Landscape’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 86(4): 630–53. Ortiz, S. J. 1983. ‘Song/Poetry and Language: Expression and Perception’, in J. Rothenberg and D. Rothenberg (eds), Symposium of the Whole: A Range of Discourse Toward an Ethnopoetics. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 399–407.

7 Cairns in the Landscape Migrant Stones and Migrant Stories in Scotland and its Diaspora Paul Basu

Fall indeed I may: But raise my tomb, Crimora. Some stones, a mound of earth, shall keep my memory. – James Macpherson, Fragments of Ancient Poetry, 1760

There can be few landscapes as thoroughly interfused with narrative as those of the Scottish Highlands and Islands. As a nineteenth-century antiquarian once remarked, Scotland is a place where ‘every stone’ has its history, and where ‘there is no mouldering castle, nor heap of ruined stones, which had formed a few cottages, that is not memorable for some story of war or piety, some gleam of long past love, or dark with tale of revenge’ (Ord 1930). ‘Occasionally’, note Bruner and Gorfain, ‘a story becomes so prominent in the consciousness of an entire society, that its recurrent tellings … help to constitute and reshape [that] society’ (1988: 56). Here, I am concerned with one such story and with the manner in which it is materialised, presenced and thereby recurrently told in the landscape through a particular monumental form. It is a narrative that continues to shape Scottish society both within its homeland and in diaspora: an ambivalent history of migration and depopulation, sometimes celebrated as triumph over adversity, but more often experienced as tragic defeat and exile. Among many Scots, and particularly among those North Americans, Australians and New Zealanders who claim Scottish descent and who constitute a transnational Scottish heritage community, the story of Scottish emigration is often conflated with that of the so-called Highland Clearances. Rather than being driven by colonial opportunism and emigrants’ desires to better their fortune in the New World, popular perceptions of

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the forces behind eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Scottish emigration are dominated by a victimological narrative in which members of an impoverished but noble peasantry are portrayed as being violently driven out of their ancestral homes and forced onto waiting emigrant ships: an unwanted population coerced into exile overseas (Basu 2005a). Despite the weight of historical research, which muddies the ‘vivid simplicities’ and moral certitudes of this appalling narrative, the Highland Clearances are widely understood to be the traumatic series of events that dispersed Scotland’s people and caused the Scottish diaspora to come into being. This is a narrative that shapes not only a society’s perception of itself, but also the continued perception of the depopulated landscapes over which such atrocities were supposedly perpetrated. ‘The bare hills tell their own story of unfinished business’, remarks Rob Gibson, a prominent Scottish nationalist and author of The Highland Clearances Trail (1996: 2). As Gibson’s guide book attests, these bare hills and the traces of the deserted settlements that may still be found on them have become destinations in a kind of ‘dark tourism’. They have become ‘sites of memory’ visited by members of a heritage-hungry Scottish diaspora, as they seek to learn about and experience their sometimes newly discovered Highland family histories, and ‘work through’ a dislocating trauma they have often only recently come to identify with. Like the ‘Stations of the Cross’ in Christian traditions, such sites become key nodes incorporated into these heritage tourists’ secular pilgrimage practices: sites that organise itineraries, that themselves narrate different stages in this migrant’s tale, and which, through their form and context, have an emotional and provocative effect on their visitors. At these sites a dialectical interaction unfolds between the stories visitors bring with them (stories usually learned in popular history books, websites and heritage centres), and the stories the sites themselves appear to tell (sometimes through the explicit narrations of interpretive signage, but more often through an affective capacity constituted in a broader discursive ‘habitus’: the unconsciously inhabited conventions of Romanticism, the sublime, the picturesque). Through the acts of visiting – of walking, searching, touching, photographing, sensing – person, place and narrative become fused, co-constitutive of a pervading sense of identity (Basu 2007). Elsewhere I have explored a range of intentional and unintentional monuments that serve to presence the narrative of the Highland Clearances in the Highland landscape (Basu 1997, 1999). Here, my interest is both narrower and broader. Narrower in the sense that I focus on a specific monumental form, that of the cairn. Broader, since I am not exclusively concerned with the Highland Clearance narrative but with the wider context of Highland emigration: a context that, as I have argued, is dominated by the Clearance narrative, but that also permits alternative ‘tellings’ that reflect the truer ambivalence of migratory experience (including diasporic successes that run contrary to the prevailing discourses of absence, loss

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and nostalgia). The commemorative cairn is ubiquitous throughout the Scottish Highlands and Islands, and is sometimes regarded as a uniquely Scottish monumental form. Acknowledging that cairns are actually far more widespread in different regions and cultural contexts throughout the world, my objective is, nevertheless, to ‘place’ the cairn within the Scottish Highland landscape, and to observe how the form itself migrates in the wake of population movements (and, for that matter, in the wake of ethnic revitalisation movements), colonising memoryscapes as well as landscapes in the New World (see Bunn 2002). When considering the relationship between landscape and narrative in Scotland, it should be remembered that perceptions of the Scottish landscape have been shaped for two and a half centuries by the Romantic imagination. Thus, to consider the place of the cairn in the Scottish landscape is also to consider its place in the Romantic aesthetic, and, more particularly, in what I refer to as an ‘Ossianic’ landscape tradition. James Macpherson’s contested translations of The Works of Ossian in the mid-eighteenth century were precursors of the Romantic movement and were immensely popular, spawning a literary tourist boom in the Western Highlands and feeding a growing interest in antiquarianism (Andrews 1989; Gold and Gold 1995). Here, I am interested in exploring the continuing influence of this tradition on contemporary perceptions of the Scottish Highlands and Scottish emigration: in particular, how it contributes to an affective transformation of a depopulated region into a landscape haunted by the memory of loss. I suggest that the monumental form of the cairn embodies and invokes this tradition, and that the continued erection of new memorial cairns – as well as the continued incorporation of old cairns into new commemorative practices – perpetuates this tradition in the present. In Gaelic, the word carn or cairn refers equally to natural and cultural landscape features, meaning both a ‘rocky hill or mountain’ and a ‘heap of stones’ (MacLennan 1979: 73). As a cultural form, cairns have been raised up in Scotland as boundary markers, way markers, summit markers and, notably, as grave markers, burial places and memorials for millennia. Formed from the most durable of materials, they seem to have the ability to fix memories in stone and in place. Thus the Gaelic phrase, Cuiridh mi clach air do charn (‘I will put a stone on your cairn’), has the deeper sense of a pledge of lasting remembrance: to ‘never forget’. And yet cairns are also ‘living’ monuments that grow and reduce over time as people contribute additional stones or carry away existing ones; sometimes – as one of my examples will show – they may also ‘die’ and become mere memories themselves. Indeed, cairns are ‘material metaphors’ par excellence: conglomerate forms that combine fragments into greater wholes, but where their parts do not lose their fragmentary character. Thus the individual stones of a cairn may each have their own migratory biographies, carrying with them particular essences or associations, reflecting, for instance, where the stones were sourced or who placed them and why.

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Another objective of this essay is therefore to explore in more detail some of these formal qualities of the cairn. In order to do this, the essay is conceived, in the spirit of Beresford (1957), as a ‘journey among monuments’: an itinerary that links various cairns in the Highland landscape (and beyond), where each ‘station’ provides an opportunity to reflect both on the form of a particular monument and on particular aspects of the more general form. Such an approach enables us to examine how the formal qualities of monuments generate different ‘textures’ of remembrance, and how ‘every “memorial text” generates a different meaning in memory’ (Young 1993: viii). It also reveals, however, that such differentiation can be appropriated into the aesthetic of a dominant narrative, reducing the capacity of these monuments to narrate alternative versions of the past.

Graves of the Martyrs, Homes of the Silent Vanished Races1 A great deal has been written on James Macpherson’s supposed ‘translations’ of the poems of the third-century Celtic bard, Ossian; works comprising Fragments of Ancient Poetry Collected in the Highlands of Scotland (1760) and the epics Fingal (1762) and Temora (1763) (see Sher 2004). Much of this commentary has addressed the so-called fraudulence issue associated with Samuel Johnson, which brought into question the authenticity of the translations and did lasting damage to Macpherson’s reputation as a scholarly collector and editor. More recent research has, however, demonstrated that, while Macpherson’s Ossianic works were not what they purported to be (i.e., literal translations of Gaelic poems that had survived unaltered in oral tradition since the third century), neither were they ‘the work of a confidence trickster, bent on achieving fame and fortune through a clever hoax’ (Stafford 1988: 4). Although it seems that Macpherson had more than an editorial role, his Ossianic compositions were nevertheless based on his thorough knowledge of Highland storytelling conventions, and they incorporated traditional plots and passages of accurate translation from Gaelic originals (Thomson 1952). And yet the claim that these ‘fragments’ were collected and not composed is, of course, highly significant, since they are thereby given the aura of relics. Indeed, it is this aspiration to antiquity, argues Fiona Stafford, that makes Macpherson’s Ossian ‘very much a product of the mid-eighteenth century’ (1988: 148). Its evocation of the lost, heroic world of the Celts may not have been ‘constructed with the accuracy of an archaeologist’, but its imaginative re-creation of the ancient world appealed to the contemporary interest in the antique, and also conveyed a ‘sense of the modern inferiority to that world’ (Stafford 1988: 148). Born in 1736, Macpherson grew up in Badenoch in the Central Highlands of Scotland in what was still essentially a martial society. Living in

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the shadow of Ruthven Barracks, he would have known the district in the aftermath of the failed Jacobite Uprising of 1745–46 – a period in which the British Government, under the 1747 Act of Proscription, attempted to systematically dismantle the structures of traditional Highland society and pacify it once and for all. Pro-Jacobite regions of the Highlands, such as Badenoch, suffered severe reprisals after the defeat of the Jacobite army at Culloden, and as Jacobite leaders went into hiding or fled into exile overseas, so their escapades became mythologised in popular story and song. Published a mere fifteen years after the rebellion, Macpherson’s Ossianic verse is replete with motifs of exile and loss, nostalgia for the passing of a noble warrior race and lamentations for ‘the fallen in war’. The use of such tropes has led to a dominant interpretation of Macpherson’s poetry as a thinly disguised elegy for the lost Jacobite cause, albeit one located in the remote ‘Celtic’ past (see Moore 2006 for discussion). In the present context, what is interesting to note is the way in which this elegiac narrative was fused with the contemporary cult of the sublime and projected onto the Highland landscape, such that the Highlands become a ruined landscape from which life had ebbed, but where the memory of the past is ever present. As William Hazlitt wrote in 1818 of Macpherson’s mythical bard: ‘[Ossian] lives only in the recollection and regret of the past. There is one impression which he conveys more entirely than all other poets, namely, the sense of privation, the loss of all things, of friends, of good name, of country … He converses only with the spirits of the departed’ (quoted by Stafford 1988: 149). The sites where this communion between the solitary, wandering poet – himself, ‘the last of the race of Fingal’ – and the departed warriors of old takes place is typically at their graves, ‘the dwellings of the ghosts’, which usually take the form of cairns. Thus the stones of the burial cairn are said to ‘speak of other years’, and are described as keeping the fame of past heroes alive for future generations, presencing their memory in the landscape, as the following excerpt from Fingal illustrates: Let thy bards mourn those who fell. Let Erin give the sons of Lochlin to earth; and raise the mossy stones of their fame. That the children of the north hereafter may behold the place where their fathers fought. And some hunter may say, when he leans on a mossy tomb, here Fingal and Swaran fought, the heroes of other years. Thus hereafter shall he say, and our fame shall last for ever. (Macpherson 1996: 101)

My argument is that, along with his incantations of dark, stormy hills; bending oaks; grey mists and blasted heaths, Macpherson’s reiterative references to these heaps of ‘mossy stone’, raised ‘in memory of the past’ (1996: 327), continue to be invoked, not only in Scottish literary traditions, but also in multiple visual and material forms, and in the landscape itself. As Colin McArthur has recently noted: ‘Wherever one looks within discourse relating to Scotland … one is confronted by the same restricted

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Figure 7.1. ‘The moon looks abroad from her cloud. The grey-skirted mist is near; the dwelling of the ghosts!’ J. S. Cotman, ‘Moonlight’, 1803, inspired by Ossian’s Temora. © Trustees of the British Museum.

range of images, tones, rhetorical tropes, and ideological tendencies, often within utterances promulgated decades (sometimes even a century or more) apart’ (2005: 340). Many of these predispositions can be traced to Macpherson and his sources, and this ‘Ossianic legacy’ can thus be placed at the heart of what McArthur terms the ‘Scottish Discursive Unconscious’ (2005: 340): its influence visited both upon the perception of Scottish landscapes and upon what might be regarded as the landscaping of perceptions of Scottishness at home and in diaspora.

Torr-an-riachaidh, Kildonan, Sutherland, Scotland Neolithic and Bronze Age burial cairns are populous in many regions of the Highlands and Islands (see for example Henshall 1963, 1972; Hingley 1996; Bradley 2000). Long associated with fairy lore and therefore often left untampered with, these sites began to attract the curiosity of antiquarians in the mid-eighteenth century and were subsequently subjected to their quasi-scientific investigations (Mitchell 1982). Indeed, Macpherson’s Ossianic writings were both influenced by British antiquarianism and themselves further popularised this movement, seemingly confirming the association of such burial mounds with what were thought to be Britain’s aboriginal population: the Celts (Mitchell 1982: 13, 68; see also Sweet 2004). Whereas stone circles and henges were imagined as the temples of

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a Druidic order, burial cairns and barrows were perceived as the graves of warrior chiefs killed in ancient battles. Evidence of the popularity of such impressions among literate classes may be found in the journals and local history works compiled by antiquarians and amateur archaeologists (often members of the clergy) well into the nineteenth century. To provide just one example, an Ossianic influence is clearly evident in the memoirs of the Church of Scotland minister, Rev. Donald Sage (1789–1869), published posthumously in 1889. In a chapter recalling his childhood growing up at Kildonan in Sutherland, Sage provides a telling account of the ‘heath covered knolls’ in the vicinity of his father’s manse, which, he notes, ‘lacked nothing to make them like an Arcadia but a clothing of oak or weeping birch’. The greater number of these knolls, Sage explains, ‘were tumuli, or ancient sepulchres, wherein reposed the ashes of those mighty men of renown who fought and bustled in the world about seven or eight centuries ago’. Each tumulus, he elaborates, ‘had its separate interest and particular tradition’, and he goes on to describe that known as Torr-an-riachaidh, the ‘scratching knowe’. This was a recent toponym, Sage suggests, derived from the whin bushes that grow on it; its ‘ancient name’, he adds, ‘is lost’. He continues: A few years ago, the top was laid open, when it was found to consist of a huge pile of stones. The only key to its history is a standing stone, about a hundred yards to the west of it, on a small eminence, having a rude cross cut on one side of it. This is called ‘clach-an-éig’ (or the ‘stone of death’). According to tradition, a bloody battle was here fought between the aborigines of the country

Figure 7.2. Clach-an-éig in the foreground, with Torr-an-riachaidh to the right in the middle distance. Kildonan, Sutherland. © Paul Basu.

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and the Norwegians, in which the latter were defeated, and their leader killed. On the spot where he fell this rude slab was erected, and his remains were buried on the battlefield, and ‘Torr-an-riachaidh’ reared over them. (Sage 1889: 76–77)

Although associated with the burial of a Norse warrior, and not a Celt, the ghost of Ossian is apparent in the very vocabulary Sage employs: the ‘heath covered knolls’, a hankering after Arcadia, reference to those ‘mighty men of renown’, cairns reared over the bodies of the vanquished. While other nineteenth-century ‘authorities’ also considered the mound to be an ancient burial-cairn (e.g., Scott 1906), it is interesting to note that more recent archaeological investigations have identified Torr-an-riachaidh as a conical moraine: a natural glacial feature, and not a burial mound at all. This reinforces a point I alluded to earlier regarding the cairn’s ambiguous position in relation to the nature-culture divide. The cairn can be both a cultural form that appears as a natural emanation of the landscape, and a natural form that attracts cultural associations and contributes to the perception of the Highlands as a monumental landscape in which memory is everywhere immanent.

The Culloden Memorial, Culloden, Inverness-shire, Scotland If Torr-an-riachaidh provides an example of how an Ossianic legacy influences cultural perceptions of natural features of the Scottish Highland landscape, rousing the antiquarian imagination and populating glacial deposits with the memory of vanquished heroes, the periodic ‘landscaping’ of Culloden Moor reminds us that this Ossianic aesthetic, with its powerfully affective aura, has also been subject to contrivance. Culloden is, of course, the site of the battle at which, on 16 April 1746, Charles Edward Stuart’s army was routed and the Jacobite cause finally lost. It is now one of the most iconic sites of memory in Scotland, and yet, as McArthur has argued, ‘the process whereby Culloden Moor became constituted as a memorial is a classic case of … “the invention of tradition”’ (1994: 102), paralleling the way in which Jacobitism was transformed from a political threat into a benign icon of Romantic nationalism. Whereas the site of the battlefield elicited little interest in the decades following the Jacobite defeat, by the 1820s Culloden had begun to draw the attentions of scholarly travellers, and the inflections of Ossian are abundant in their published accounts. Thus, Robert Chambers, in his 1827 volume The Picture of Scotland, describes a scene ‘as desolate and blasted in appearance as if it suffered under a curse, or were conscious of the blood which it had drunk’ (1827: 301). Meanwhile Beriah Botfield writes of ‘a grim and shelterless’ waste, on which the ‘shallow graves of the slain’ are still evident

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(1830: 174). In a literary flourish, he continues: ‘The snows of upwards of seventy winters have, since the hurried entombment of the gallant dead, fallen and melted upon Culloden’ (1830: 175). Proposals to erect a ‘tumulus or obelisk’ to memorialize Culloden were first put forward in the mid-1830s (Gold and Gold 2007: 23), and they were revived again amid the celebrations that accompanied the centenary of the battle in 1846. At this time a debate seems to have taken place regarding the most appropriate form for such a monument. In contrast to the tower raised at Glenfinnan in 1815 to mark the place where Charles Stuart raised the Jacobite standard and began his campaign, the idea of a ‘Cockney cenotaph or pillar’ at Culloden was rejected in favour of ‘a simple, but massive, cairn’, which was regarded as ‘the most touching and the most noble memorial of the nation’s admiration and respect’ for those killed in the battle (Inverness Courier, 1846, quoted in McArthur 1994: 107). Attempts to raise the monument failed in 1849 and 1858 through lack of public support and it was not until 1881 that the landscaping of Culloden as a memorial site was finally begun by the local landowner, Duncan Forbes. As well as the twenty-foot-high cairn, Forbes set up a series of stones marking the supposed mass grave sites of the Jacobite clansmen who fell in the battle. Dedicated to ‘the gallant Highlanders who fought for Scot-

Figure 7.3. ‘Culloden Field’ c. 1890, showing the clan grave markers and memorial cairn prior to the felling of the conifer plantation and rerouting of the B9006 road. © Francis Frith Collection.

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land and for Bonnie Prince Charlie’, the memorial cairn commemorates a mythic version of history, in which ‘the Stuart dead’ were appropriated ‘for the cause of Scotland and Scottish national identity’ (Gold and Gold 2007: 23). After 135 years of Ossianic Romanticism, this dynastic conflict was thus reimagined as a heroic struggle for the survival of a nation, and done so in the full cognisance of its eventual failure. The cairn is thus a monument of defeat, its stones memorials to a lost cause. The ‘Culloden Memorials’, as they became known, were scheduled as Ancient Monuments in 1925, and, between 1937 and 1989, in piecemeal fashion, the battlefield gradually passed from private hands into the ownership of the National Trust for Scotland. Throughout this period the site has undergone considerable transformation as buildings have been razed, a forestry plantation cut down, a main road rerouted and other monuments erected, all in an attempt to transform what was originally an undifferentiated stretch of moorland into that ‘battle darkened’ ‘blasted heath’ in which the memory of tragedy is palpable. The continuing metamorphosis of Culloden Moor, with its cairn and ‘field of graves’, thus not only commemorates a mythic version of history but it re-creates a mythic landscape – one that accords with the Ossianic aesthetic as befits this site of national pilgrimage.

The Croft Ruin as Cairn According to John Prebble (1963) and other popular historians of the Highlands, the defeat and expulsion of the Highland people begun at Culloden was only completed with the aforementioned Highland Clearances and the associated mass emigrations of the nineteenth century. In the name of social and agricultural improvement, these events emptied vast swathes of northern Scotland and replaced its settled communities first with sheep and then deer, as landowners sought to refashion their estates according to the Ossianic tenets of the picturesque and the sublime (Womack 1989). The struggle for security of tenure of the Highlands’ rural population is one of the dominant themes in nineteenth-century Scottish history, culminating in the so-called Land Wars of the 1870s and 1880s. Whilst there are many local monuments – the majority in the form of cairns – commemorating particular evictions or acts of resistance (see Withers 1996; Basu 1997, 1999; Robertson and Hall 2007), the absence of a single commemorative site to focus the ‘recollection’ of this struggle has the effect of charging the whole Highland landscape with the ‘memory’ of its desertion. Indeed, it is particularly interesting to see how the ruins of croft houses and earlier settlement remains left in the wake of these events become powerfully evocative ‘unintentional monuments’, which presence the absence of their erstwhile occupants. The abandoned home comes to stand

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Figure 7.4. Stone-clad panels interpreting the cairn-like settlement remains at Rosal, Strathnaver. The township was ‘cleared’ between 1814 and 1819. © Paul Basu.

for the emigrant’s lost homeland. ‘It is the croft that’s exiled’, writes Arthur Ball, ‘time is showing’ (1994: 82). Other Scottish writers have noted how, over time, the tumbled stone walls of such ruins become cairn-like in appearance. Thus, in his bitter poem, ‘gleann fadamach’ (‘glen remote’), Aonghas Macneacail writes, ‘’sa bhaile seo | chan eileas a’ siubhal ach an aon uair | ’s na clachan a rinn ballaichean | a’ dol ’nan càirn’ (in this village | people only travel once | and the stones that made walls | become cairns) (Dunn 1992: 315–16). The novelist Neil Gunn similarly observes how the ‘old lichened stones of the ruin at last become a cairn’ and how the cairn – a grave marker, no less – replaces the hearthstone at the heart of the Highland home (1991: 148). The echo of Ossian is evident in the intonations of these twentieth-century writers, though the defeated heroes of their narratives are no longer ‘the mighty men of renown’, but the ordinary Highland folk driven from their homes by rapacious landlords or else tempted to seek their fortunes elsewhere. Their departure marked the passing of a way of life, and the memory of this tragedy continues to be evoked through the very visibility of the cairn-like ruins of deserted townships and crofts throughout the Highlands and Islands. It is an implicit narrative that is sometimes made explicit when such settlement remains are transformed into heritage sites and furnished with interpretation boards and other paraphernalia of display: plaques and panels, themselves often clad in stone – cairns, it might be said, commemorating cairns (Basu 1997, 1999).

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The Duke of Gordon Cairn, Kingussie, Inverness-shire, Scotland I remarked earlier that cairns have their own life histories and may themselves disappear. The next cairn on our itinerary exists only as a single fragment in the storeroom of the Highland Folk Museum in Kingussie, and in a passing reference in Rev. Thomas Sinton’s account of the popular folk song, ‘Guma slàn do na fearaibh thèid thairis a’ chuan’ (Farewell to the fellows who’ll cross over the sea). This song was written to mark the departure of a large number of emigrants from Badenoch in the Central Highlands who had gathered at Kingussie on the day of St Columba’s Fair in 1838, before heading to Oban to embark on a ship bound for New South Wales, Australia. Sinton’s account, published in 1906, was based on the recollections of several of his close relatives who were present at the leave taking, and it includes reference to a cairn erected to commemorate Alexander, the Fourth Duke of Gordon (1743–1827), which once stood at the summit of Creag Bheag, a hill that rises above Kingussie. Whilst the cairn can no longer be identified, a fragment of its dedication stone, marked ‘… by the youths of Kingussie – To the memory of Alx Duke of Gordon – 1828’, survives. The significance of this mnemonic can be discerned in Sinton’s narrative of the emigrants’ farewell: A band of strolling musicians … readily entered into the situation and temper of their assembled patrons at the fair. Playing airs suited to the occasion, and followed by crowds of people, they made their way to the top of the Little Rock [Creag Bheag], which commands a view of the whole of Badenoch downwards from Glen Truim. From that height, where a few years before, ‘the young men of Kingussie’ had erected a cairn in memory of Duke Alexander, many eyes were turned wistfully to take a last farewell of much-loved haunts and homes. One strain of song touched every heart, and snatches of it were ever associated with recollections of the affecting events of the day: Let Fortune use me as it may I will think on Scotland far away After descending from the Creag Bheag, the emigrants set out on their westward journey, accompanied as far as the old stage-house of Pitmain by relatives and friends. Here, those who were departing for the ‘New World’ and those who were remaining behind took leave of each other as persons who would never meet again on this side of the grave. (Sinton 1906: 34–5)

This fragment of a cairn, juxtaposed with this fragment of a story, succeeds in evoking all the heartache of emigration: the loss of home and family, the relinquishing of one’s destiny to fortune, the correlation between death and departure. The cairn erected to mark the death of a duke evidently soon came to mark the departure of a people, and it has now become absent itself save for this fragment. From this fragment of the past,

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Figure 7.5. The surviving fragment of the Duke of Gordon cairn, which recalls the emigrants’ farewell on St Columba’s Day, 1838. Kingussie, Inverness-shire. © Paul Basu.

we reconstruct the cairn. From the cairn we reconstruct the story. And so it becomes a material metaphor for the machinations of the work of memory.

The Memorial Cairns at Badbae, Caithness, and Dalmore, Sutherland The next two cairns on our itinerary follow the emigrants’ journeys and reach out to two different regions of the Scottish diaspora – New Zealand and Canada – but they also share a common feature insofar as they were both constructed from the remains of ruined houses. The ‘stones that made walls’ of Macneacail’s poem are thus quite literally transformed into cairns and the powerful symbolism of the deserted home is rearticulated and embodied in the very substance of the monuments. And yet, paradoxically, both of these cairns are as celebratory in character as they are nostalgic. They speak, therefore, of the ambiguities of migration and, in a Highland context, ought to challenge the dominant assumption that emigration was necessarily exile. At Badbae, near Ousdale in Caithness, a cairn of remembrance was raised in 1911 on the site of – and from the stones of – the house of one Al-

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exander Sutherland. The cairn stands among the ruins of the other houses and enclosures that made up this cliff-top settlement. A few years ago, Badbae featured in a Scotland on Sunday supplement entitled ‘The Story of a Nation: 300 Years of Scottish History’, illustrating an article about the Highland Clearances. The caption to the photograph reads: ‘Empty stones: Badbae in Sutherland was cleared of its people in 1839 to make way for more economically viable sheep. Many more communities were to suffer similar fates’ (Devine n.d.: 28–29). This caption is inaccurate in two respects: not only is Badbae not in Sutherland – a county made notorious through its associations with the Clearances – but it was not cleared of people to make way for sheep. Rather it was established during the Clearances by people displaced from the nearby Langwell estate. Indeed, it was still partly inhabited at the beginning of the twentieth century. To quibble over a caption may seem like splitting hairs, but this erroneous narrative is frequently repeated: Badbae has come to stand for something it does not in fact represent. The story – the victimological orthodoxy of forced emigration and exile – has usurped the place. And whilst the interpretive plaques set up at Badbae describe the many hardships of eking out a living from the poor ground where the township was located, its ‘cairn of remembrance’ was actually erected as a celebration of the township’s community. It was raised by Alexander Sutherland’s son,

Figure 7.6 . Unveiling of the ‘cairn of remembrance’ at Badbae, Caithness, November 1912. © Highland Council.

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David Sutherland, a New Zealander by birth, to commemorate his father’s old home. And, indeed, far from being forcibly removed from Badbae, Alexander Sutherland answered an advertisement in the local John O’Groat Journal and, in 1839, chose to emigrate to New Zealand, where he settled and prospered as a dairy farmer. This more celebratory version of the story of Scottish migration and settlement overseas is articulated more forcefully in a little-visited cairn erected in 1968 at Dalmore, near Rogart in Sutherland. The cairn marks the site of the family home of Sir John Alexander Macdonald, the first prime minister of Canada, the so-called father of its confederation and advocate of such ambitious colonial enterprises as the world’s first transcontinental railway. Macdonald was himself born in Glasgow in 1815 and was taken to Canada as a child by his parents when they emigrated in 1820. The cairn was built from the stones of his paternal grandparents’ deserted house and unveiled by another former Canadian prime minister, John Diefenbaker. The cairn reminds us that many of the great empire builders, not only of Canada, but also the United States, Australia and New Zealand, were Scots or of Scottish descent. As the dedication plaque at Dalmore proudly extols, Macdonald’s true ‘Monument is a Nation … this cairn is but a footnote to his greatness’. In an era of postcolonial unsettling of settler societies, the triumphalist narrative of the ‘Enterprising Scot’ has, however, become downplayed. Confronted with the devastating impact of their emigrant ancestors on the indigenous populations whose lands they appropriated, it is more comforting for members of the Scottish diaspora to regard their predecessors as the victims and not perpetrators of displacement, to identify with an Ossianic heritage of noble defeat rather than ignoble colonial expansionism and to seek refuge in fantasies of the Celtic past as an antidote to the disenchanting realities of late modernity (see Basu 2007 for an extended discussion of these themes).

The Scotland Australia Cairn, Mosman, New South Wales, Australia, and the Grandfather Mountain Memorial Cairn, Linville, North Carolina, United States If the cairns at Badbae and Dalmore embody the symbolism of the deserted home through the incorporation of their stones into the fabric of the monument, the next two cairns on our itinerary may be said to embody the symbolism of the deserted home writ large: the symbolism, that is, of the lost homeland. These cairns reach out to another two corners of the Scottish diaspora: to Australia and the United States. Indeed, they are to be found respectively in Mosman in New South Wales, and Linville in North Carolina. In this case, the common feature they share is being

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at least partly constructed from stones carried from Scotland itself. Fragments, as it were, of the old country translated, as with the sacred relics of saints, to the New World (Basu and Coleman 2008). The Scotland Australia Cairn at Mosman, which contains stones collected from every parish in Scotland, was raised as part of Australia’s bicentenary celebrations in 1988. In somewhat dubious Scots, the epigraph on the cairn’s dedication plaque alludes to the metaphorical resonance of the cairn’s form for a diasporic population: ‘Here Frai A’ The Airts, Stane Upon Stane Haud The Gither Thru Wind And Rain Minders O’ Scotland That Aince Was Hame’ (Here from all the parts, stone upon stone held together through wind and rain. Reminders of Scotland that once was home). A local government website provides the following summary of the cairn’s origins and significance: The Scotland Australia Cairn was built in 1988 to celebrate the landing of Captain Arthur Phillip in Australia in 1788. The Scottish Australian Bicentennial Committee conceived the idea of a memorial cairn with a stone from every Parish in Scotland … In the Highlands of Scotland, cairns have always been built to commemorate great events or tragedies which happened there, or as a memorial to someone connected with the area. The cairn in Mosman is a fine example built by Duncan Mathieson from Wester Ross, a distinguished craftsman and Gaelic tradition bearer. There are 1,750 stones in all, collected by Sunday school children, and Ministers … Some stones are engraved with their origins. Most are richly coloured, reflecting the geological tapestry of Scotland. Embedded in the top of the Cairn lies a stone originating from the hillside of Ulva, birthplace of Lachlan Macquarie, fifth governor of Australia. The stone is engraved with a Celtic cross and Macquarie’s personal motto: An t’Arm breac dearg – the red tartaned army. (Mosman Municipal Council n.d.)

Note particularly how, in this explanation, the building of a cairn is itself understood as a traditional act. Indeed, elsewhere the cairn is described as being ‘of traditional Scottish form’ (Aussie Heritage n.d.). Aside from stereotypical ‘Celticisms’, such as the inclusion of Macquarie’s clan slogan, the building of the Scotland Australia cairn thus represents an assertion of continuity in this mnemonic practice: an assertion of the continuation, rather than reinvention, of tradition in the diaspora. Furthermore, by commissioning a native Scot – a ‘Gaelic tradition bearer’, no less – to build the cairn, the Scottish Australian Bicentennial Committee thereby guarantee the authenticity of their memorial form and bestow upon it the capacity to hold the memory of a distant country that once was home. MacRae Meadows at Linville, North Carolina, is the venue for the annual Grandfather Mountain Highland Games, which typically draws over

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30,000 spectators and is the oldest and best known such gathering in the United States (Ray 2001). In 1980, the games celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary and one of the highlights of that year’s programme was the dedication of the games’ own memorial cairn. The cairn has subsequently become a key site of pilgrimage for the North American Scottish heritage community, and a focus for various ‘clan’ ceremonials. Set into the sides of the cairn are four panels containing, in total, seventy-four polished stones. Each of these stones was contributed by a different clan association, the majority being sourced in Scotland from those territories that, according to the romantic ideology of Highland clanship, represent each clan’s ancient and inalienable home (Basu 2005b). In this respect, it is important to remember the centrality of ‘clanship’ in the performance of Scottishness in the United States. The clan represents not only an assertion of kinship, providing many Scottish Americans with a sense of belonging to an extended family, but each clan also represents a particular ‘community of memory’, with its own genealogy, its own body of folklore and its own historical associations with these supposedly inalienable clanlands – lands from which, through generations of emigration, the diasporic clansfolk have indeed become alienated. The polished stones of the Grandfather Mountain cairn thus stand as metonyms for the clan territories of which they are fragments, represenc-

Figure 7.7. The Grandfather Mountain Memorial Cairn, MacRae Meadows, Linville, North Carolina. © Grandfather Mountain Highland Games.

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ing in the landscape of the American South not only the clanlands of the old country but also the collective clan ‘memories’ imagined to be sedimented in those lands.

Cluny Macpherson Memorial Cairn, Glentruim, Inverness-shire, Scotland The last cairn on our itinerary takes us back to Badenoch in the Central Highlands of Scotland. It was raised at Glentruim in 1996 as part of the Clan Macpherson Association’s fiftieth anniversary celebrations. Ostensibly, the cairn was erected to commemorate one of the clan’s great heroes: Cluny Macpherson of the ’45, who led his men in support of Charles Stuart during the 1745–46 Jacobite Uprising. After years in hiding in the aftermath of Culloden, Macpherson died in exile in France in 1764 and his actual burial place is now unknown. In contrast to the memorial cairns at Mosman and Linville, in which stones from the homeland were incorporated into monuments raised in the diaspora, the cairn at Glentruim – at the heart of the Macpherson homeland – is constructed from stones sent from the diaspora; indeed, sent from no fewer than twenty-six differ-

Figure 7.8. Members of the International Clan Macpherson Association gathered around the memorial cairn dedicated to Cluny Macpherson of the ’45. Glentruim, Badenoch, Inverness-shire. © Jerome LeRoy Lewis.

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ent countries throughout the world in which Macpherson migrants have settled. Whilst most of the stones are anonymous within the fabric of the cairn, the Clan Association kept records of every stone donated, detailing where they were sourced and the migrant stories each represents. As the architect of the monument explained at the unveiling ceremony, in contributing these stones, the ‘clansmen and women have donated part of their country, culture and personal history’ and within the form of the cairn, the ‘layers of meaning’ embodied in the individual stones intricately overlap with one another. Collected from old homesteads and farms, historic forts, mountains, rivers, mines and other sites from throughout the world where the migrants settled, each stone thus materialises the memory of a migration. Each tells a particular migrant’s narrative, but each particular narrative is also a fragment of a wider story: that of the Macpherson diaspora, which is, in turn, a fragment of the story of the Scottish diaspora as a whole. Just as the fragments of rock are conglomerated into one in the cairn, so the personal histories they each embody are fused in the cement of a shared heritage into the collective history of a people. It seems, therefore, that Cluny Macpherson’s cairn is not merely a memorial to a Jacobite hero. It is, rather, the clan’s memorial to the clan itself: on the one hand, an acknowledgement of its essentially dispersed nature, on the other, an emphatic assertion of the resilience of its attachment to the place it still identifies as home. Despite its continued absence, the monument succeeds in represencing the clan in its erstwhile clanlands. As such, the cairn completes the circle of migration, symbolising most eloquently the diaspora’s return.

Conclusion One could, of course, tarry longer at each of these cairns to tease out their nuances, or else extend the itinerary to include further examples, of which there are many. What, however, can we learn from this brief journey among monuments? What do these few cairns tell us about the relationship between landscape and narrative in Scotland and its diaspora? We might be struck by the dull repetition of this memorial form across time and space (nothing more imaginative than a heap of stones). We might note how the form is appropriated as an icon of Scottish national identity: an embodiment of tradition, a distinctive form to be defended against invasive counterparts such as the ‘cenotaph or pillar’ and yet a form steeped in what I have described as an Ossianic legacy. As such, the cairn embeds dominant cultural narratives of defeat and exile in the Scottish landscape, and provides a material manifestation of that ‘restricted range of images, tones, rhetorical tropes, and ideological tendencies’ that continue to

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characterise the representation of Scotland and Scottishness at home and abroad (McArthur 2005). Often raised to remember the event of an emigration, the cairn has itself emigrated; it resurfaces throughout the world. Through this nationalised memorial form, a Scottish presence is thus asserted in countries where Scots have historically settled, and the cairn becomes a means of publicly marking and distinguishing a ‘Scottish space’ in settler society landscapes: a space where ‘Scottishness’ is narrated, performed and reinvented, both through the monument itself and through the ‘ceremonials’ that take place around it. And yet there is more to it than this. The cairn carries a deeper ‘memory’ in the antiquity of its form. In the Scottish Highlands one might describe the cairn as an autochthonous monument, arising from the ground of which it is made. As noted above, it is a form that carries an Ossianic legacy, which ‘speaks of other years’ and haunts the present with memories of the lost, heroic past – the past before Culloden, before the Clearances, before emigration. And in the diaspora, too, the cairn carries over these associations, sometimes literally through the incorporation of stones that have also been carried over from lost clanlands and homelands. Such cairns commemorate more than the recent history of Scottish settlement in the New World: they invoke an ‘ancestral presence’ in landscapes where the Scots can claim no such ancestral connections. Empty burial mounds, these cairns nevertheless seed the memory of ancient Celtic heroes in the ancestral lands of others and in this way may be said to colonise memoryscapes as well as landscapes. Despite the conservativism of the form, however, the cairn also invites innovation. Whilst the Ossianic aesthetic of absence, loss and nostalgia continues to dominate, we have seen that cairns can also be raised to tell other migrant stories: triumphalist narratives of imperial expansion, celebratory narratives of the resilience of displaced communities and ambiguous narratives that evoke both rupture and continuity. The ‘memory’ of the Scots seems safeguarded by the durability of the stones of the cairn, yet the echoes of Shelley’s Ozymandias may outlast those of Macpherson’s Ossian (one need only think of the Duke of Gordon’s cairn). No, the affective power of this particular monumental form lies not in its rigidity, but in its adaptability. A material metonym par excellence, like people, like stories, the stones of the cairn may be continually reconfigured as they gather, coalesce and are dispersed again.

Notes 1. The section heading is from Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘To S. R. Crockett’ (1895). Although alluding to the graves of the Covenanters killed at the Battle of Rullion Green in 1666, the imagery of the poem is unquestionably Ossianic:

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‘Grey recumbent tombs of the dead in desert places, | Standing stones on the vacant wine-red moor, | Hills of sheep, and the howes of the silent vanished races, | And winds, austere and pure.’

References Andrews, M. 1989. The Search for the Picturesque: Landscape Aesthetics and Tourism in Britain, 1760–1800. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. Aussie Heritage. n.d. ‘The Scotland Australia Cairn’. http://www.aussieheritage .com.au/listings/nsw/Mosman/TheScotlandAustraliaCairn/7859 [accessed 25 August 2008]. Ball, A. 1994. Valley of Wild Birches. Wick: North of Scotland Newspapers. Basu, P. 1997. ‘Narratives in a Landscape: Monuments and Memories of the Sutherland Clearances’, M.Sc. dissertation, University College London. ———. 1999. ‘Sites of Memory – Sources of Identity: Landscape-Narratives of the Sutherland Clearances’, in J. A. Atkinson, I. Banks and G. MacGregor (eds), Townships to Farmsteads: Rural Settlement Studies in Scotland, England and Wales. Oxford: BAR British series 293, pp. 225–36. ———. 2005a. ‘Roots-Tourism as Return Movement: Semantics and the Scottish Diaspora’, in M. Harper (ed.), Emigrant Homecomings: The Return Movement of Emigrants, 1600–2000. Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 131–50. ———. 2005b. ‘Macpherson Country: Genealogical Identities, Spatial Histories and the Scottish Diasporic Clanscape’, Cultural Geographies 12(2): 123–50. ———. 2007. Highland Homecomings: Genealogy and Heritage-Tourism in the Scottish Diaspora. London: Routledge. Basu, P. and Coleman, S. M. 2008. ‘Migrant Worlds, Material Cultures’, Mobilities 3(3): 313–29. Beresford, M. 1957. History on the Ground: Six Studies in Maps and Landscapes. London: Lutterworth. Botfield, B. 1830. Journal of a Tour Through the Highlands of Scotland, During the Summer of 1829. Edinburgh: Norton Hall. Bradley, R. 2000. The Good Stones: A New Investigation of the Clava Cairns. Edinburgh: Society of Antiquaries of Scotland. Bruner, E. M. and Gorfain, P. 1988. ‘Dialogic Narration and the Paradoxes of Masada’, in E. M. Bruner (ed.), Text, Play and Story: The Construction and Reconstruction of Self and Society. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland, pp. 56–79. Bunn, D. 2002. ‘The Sleep of the Brave: Graves as Sites and Signs in the Colonial Eastern Cape’, in P. S. Landau and D. D. Kaspin (eds), Images and Empires: Visuality in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 56–89. Chambers, R. 1827. The Picture of Scotland. Edinburgh: William Tait. Devine, T. n.d. [c.1999] ‘Clearing the Highlands’, in Scotland on Sunday: The Story of a Nation. Part 3: Progress and Poverty 1850–1914. Edinburgh: Scotland on Sunday, 26–29.

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Dunn, D. (ed.). 1992. The Faber Book of Twentieth-Century Scottish Poetry. London: Faber and Faber. Gibson, R. 1996. The Highland Clearances Trail. Evanton: Highland Heritage Books. Gold, J. R. and Gold, M. M. 1995. Imagining Scotland: Tradition, Representation and Promotion in Scottish Tourism since 1750. Aldershot: Scholar Press. ———. 2007. ‘“The Graves of the Gallant Highlanders”: Memory, Interpretation and Narratives of Culloden’, History and Memory 19(1): 5–38. Gunn, N. M. 1991. The Man Who Came Back: Short Stories and Essays, edited by M. McCulloch. Edinburgh: Polygon. Henshall, A. S. 1963. The Chambered Tombs of Scotland. Volume 1. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. ———. 1972. The Chambered Tombs of Scotland. Volume 2. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Hingley, R. 1996 ‘Ancestors and Identity in the Later Prehistory of Atlantic Scotland: The Reuse and Reinvention of Neolithic Monuments and Material Culture’, World Archaeology 28: 231–43. MacLennan, M. 1979. A Pronouncing and Etymological Dictionary of the Gaelic Language. Stornoway: Acair; Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press. Macpherson, J. 1996. The Poems of Ossian and Related Works, ed. H. Gaskill. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. McArthur, C. 1994. ‘Culloden: A Pre-Emptive Strike’, Scottish Affairs 9: 97–126. ———. 2005. ‘Transatlantic Scots, Their Interlocutors, and the Scottish Discursive Unconscious’, in C. Ray (ed.), Transatlantic Scots. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, pp. 339–56. Mitchell, J. F. 1982. Megalithomania: Artists, Antiquaries and Archaeologists at the Old Stone Monuments. London: Thames & Hudson. Moore, D. 2006. ‘James Macpherson and “Celtic Whiggism”’, EighteenthCentury Life 30(1): 1–24. Mosman Municipal Council. n.d. ‘Scotland Australia Cairn’. http://www .mosman.nsw.gov.au/mosman/history/cairn [accessed 25 August 2008]. Ord, J. 1930. Bothy Songs and Ballads. Paisley: Gardner. Prebble, J. 1963. The Highland Clearances. London: Secker & Warburg. Ray, C. 2001. Highland Heritage: Scottish Americans in the American South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Robertson, I. and Hall, T. 2007. ‘Memory, Identity and the Memorialization of Conflict in the Scottish Highlands’, in N. Moore and Y. Whelan (eds), Heritage, Memory and the Politics of Identity. Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 19–36. Sage, D. 1889. Memorabilia Domestica: or Parish Life in the North of Scotland. Wick: W. Rae. Scott, A. B. 1906. ‘St Donnan the Great, and his Muinntir’, in Transactions of the Scottish Ecclesiological Society, vol. 1, part 3. Aberdeen. Sher, R. B. 2004. Selected Bibliography: James Macpherson and Ossian. http:// andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/C18/biblio/macpherson.html [accessed 24 May 2007]. Sinton, T. 1906. The Poetry of Badenoch. Inverness: Northern Counties Publishing. Stafford, F. 1988. The Sublime Savage: A Study of James Macpherson and the Poems of Ossian. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

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Sweet, R. 2004. Antiquaries: The Discovery of the Past in Eighteenth-Century Britain. London: Hambledon & London. Thomson, D. S. 1952. The Gaelic Sources of Macpherson’s ‘Ossian’. Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd. Withers, C. W. J. 1996. ‘Place, Memory, Monument: Memorializing the Past in Contemporary Highland Scotland’, Ecumene 3(3): 325–44 Womack, P. 1989. Improvement and Romance: Constructing the Myth of the Highlands. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Young, J. E. 1993. The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

8 Beholding the Speckled Salmon Folk Liturgies and Narratives of Ireland’s Holy Wells Celeste Ray

Praised be the seas and rivers Praised be the fountains and springs of water, Praised be all creatures that loom in the water. – From the Antiphonary of Bangor (c. 680)

Landscapes’ myriad social dimensions may make them representative of national, ethnic or community identities, or significant idiosyncratically to individuals or families. Land may become landscape in relation to mundane subsistence activities or travel routes, by signifying ideology and power relations, or when primarily apprehended as sacred. Sacred landscapes are perhaps those whose meanings are both most widely shared and most contested. Irish holy wells, their contexts and associated natural features, are such landscapes. A holy well is a water source, most often a spring (but sometimes a lake, or a hollow in a rock or tree where dew and rain collects). These sites of religious devotion are commonly, but not always, dedicated to a saint and may possess miraculous healing qualities. While such sites of natural sacrality can be found around the globe, Ireland is unusual in Europe in retaining holy well visitation as a regular part of parish life. Wells remain sites of daily individual devotions and of annual ‘patterns’, or Patron days, when communities gather wellside to honour the associated saint and affirm group membership and identity. Through what Tilley has called ‘a sociospatial dialectic’ (1994: 17), landscape, liturgy and identity (personal, familial and community) are all mutually constitutive in the ritual space of the holy well. Sites and Monuments Records for the Republic of Ireland and for Northern Ireland document over 3000 holy wells that once existed across

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the island of Ireland. That number is far diminished today as, among other things, sheep farming, forestry and EU-required road widening has lead to the destruction of many wells. Land owners occasionally risk community censure (and supernatural retribution) by eradicating a well to avoid the intrusion of pilgrims on their property.1 Nevertheless, Catholics fostered an upsurge of well devotion in the 1980s and beyond the millennium and Neopagans and New Agers have joined them with their own wellside liturgies. Although each group of well devotees perceives their beliefs and practices as ‘Celtic’, their different modes of emplacing these, and the increasing presence of international tourists, can contest the sacrality and community ownership of these numinous and charismatic landscapes. Analyzing both historical and contemporary narratives about well sites allows us to chart the continual renegotiation of their significance in the broader context of also evolving social, political and economic structures over la longue durée. A focus on narrative enables a phenomenological approach that can also explain particular landscapes, particular places, particular histories and particular cultural views through time (Tilley 2004: 31; Low and Lawrence-Zúñiga 2003: 17–18; Champion and Cooney 1999: 204). Through the lens of wells, one can appreciate the multiple lives of places. Well narratives, observed diachronically, reveal the many layers of cognitive mapping and place naming and how places both retain memory and shape identity. Understanding the endurance of local sites of natural sacrality, though new languages and religious views have regularly reconfigured them through the millennia, is perhaps particularly important now when globalising forces put so many at risk.

The Holy Well Holy wells specialise in healing particular ailments. For example, certain wells are associated with headaches, others with stomach ache, warts, whooping cough or mental illness. One of the most common types of blessed wells in Ireland is the tobar na sul (eye well). Súil in Old Irish is ‘eye’ or ‘gap’, so that toponym etymologies suggest a ‘sul’ well might have been perceived as an eye or orifice of a deity, or even an entrance to the otherworld. The most famous site with this association is of course at Bath, England, which the Romans called Aquae Sulis (the waters of Sulis) and then, twinning what they perceived as the name of a goddess with one of their own, they renamed the deus loci ‘Sulis Minerva’. Hydrolatry is panhuman and sacred wells and springs of some sort can be found around the globe. Eliade’s often-quoted aphorism explains why ‘water symbolises the whole of potentiality; it is fons et origo, the source of all possible existence’ (Eliade 1958: 188). As such, water was surely venerated by the first people to reach Ireland in Mesolithic times. Christina Fredengren argues that Mesolithic human remains and lithic

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materials found in lakes might have been votive deposits (2002). Sacred places, recognisable through monuments, burials and offerings, punctuated Neolithic landscapes and Gabriel Cooney has remarked that the deliberate and votive deposition of human remains, pottery and stone axes found in bogs, coastal wetlands and rivers in Ireland may be associated with a veneration of the ancestral spirits (2000: 189, 130). As in Celtic Europe, Irish rivers and lakes have yielded fine Iron Age metalwork, and pre-Christian votives have been found at St Anne’s well in Randalstown, County Meath (Rafferty 1994: 182–83, 213; Mytum 1992: 58, Warner 1976). Early Christian missionaries preached where people already worshiped. They syncretically folded pagan places of pilgrimage, including holy wells and trees, into the new faith so that sacred sites and peoples’ desire to access their supernatural power through votive gifts continued in perpetuity although the definition of the supernatural evolved. Sacred sites remained numinous places, only the presiding spirit of the place became an intercessor with the ultimate divine rather than being divine.

The Landscapes of Holy Wells Holy wells are often part of larger sacred landscapes. Some holy wells are along pre-Christian trackways that became Christian pilgrimage roads.2 The longest of the remaining medieval pilgrimage paths is the Tóchar Phádraig in County Mayo, which runs twenty-two miles from St Patrick’s Well at Ballintubber Abbey to the pilgrimage site of Croagh Patrick (the mountain where the saint was said to have fasted against God for forty days).3 The tóchar may have begun as a Bronze Age ritual trackway (Mulveen 1999: 174) that, by the Iron Age, linked the sacred mountain to Cruachan, the royal seat of Connacht (Hughes 2005: 44). Holy well sites are also themselves landscapes in that there are relational places (stations) visited in conjunction with the wells. One visits each station and recites a set number of prayers in a prescribed order. This process of moving through the landscape is called ‘doing the rounds’ or ‘the pattern’,4 and the course one follows between stations is called in Irish ‘an Turas’, which means ‘the journey’ or ‘pilgrimage’ (Herity 1993: 17) so that even those praying the rounds at their local holy well refer to their actions as pilgrimage. Visiting stations in a holy well’s precincts is most often preliminary and preparatory to visiting the well itself. Sometimes these stations include monuments and features from pre-Christian periods as at Gleanncholmcille, County Donegal, where a 5,000-year-old megalithic court tomb is a station in St Colmcille’s four-hour-long turas. Stations in a well landscape may also include other natural features such as unusually shaped stones where the early Christian saints are said to have prayed, or ‘Mass Rocks’, stone altars where mass was said secretly in Penal times.5 In

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many places, bullauns (stone querns dating from the Bronze Age to medieval times) serve as stations and are often called wells themselves since they hold rainwater and dew. They sometimes retain their grinders, which are ritually moved and variously called curing stones, cursing stones or swearing stones, depending on the ritualist’s intentions. Be they oddly shaped boulders, prehistoric archaeological sites or bullauns, stations have come into the cultural orbit of the holy well and derive their current significance as part of the well landscape and its unique liturgy.

Folk Liturgies and Votive Offerings Wellside rituals are syncretic folk liturgies. Some well sites are quite simple, lack built structures and may be hard to find without guidance from a local or the presence of votives. Others have developed into elaborate complexes incorporating several acres and offering optional shorter and longer rounds where one may, for example, follow markers to reflect on each of the twenty Mysteries of the Rosary, or one may stay to say one decade or of course offer one’s own prayer. At some wells, completing the full turas (visiting every station and performing the set prayers for each) can take hours. At many wells, pilgrims use posted charts that indicate the sequence of prayers and the direction in which rounds are to be performed. Stations must remain on one’s right-hand side as one circumambulates a well space in a sun-wise or clockwise direction called the deiseal. To go the other way (tuathal) is unlucky and might invoke a curse rather than a blessing. The classical writers Posidonius and Athenaeus, for example, described the ancient Celts as following this directional taboo and the deiseal also appears in the Irish Iron Age sagas recorded by early Christian monks.6 These syncretic folk liturgies culminate in a stop at the well where people may immerse the portion of their body for which they need healing and drink from the well. If, after you have performed the rounds, you see a fish (a trout in some, a speckled salmon in others, or occasionally an eel) you are assured you will be healed. Before leaving the well site, one deposits some type of votive. As may be found around the globe from Ireland to Turkey to Tibet, votives often take the form of strips of cloth or rags that are tied to nearby trees and bushes. Also common are rosary beads and formerly pins, but a label ripped spontaneously from one’s clothing, a shoelace or anything that has been in touch with one’s person is appropriate. Votives may also be peculiar to one’s prayer request (a lighter if one is trying to stop smoking, a pencil if nervous about exams, a teether if coping with a fussy infant). To combat mental illness, people put nails or coins into a wellside tree. Because the practice eventually kills the tree, some holy well sites now have wooden crosses to receive the coins instead, as at St Finn Barr’s hermitage on the island of Gougane Barra in County Cork.

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Two main perspectives on these offerings emerge from devotees’ narratives and they correlate with other environmental views. One interpretation is that the suppliant must leave a gift for the spirit/saint of the well to ensure the outcome of a petition or in thanksgiving that prayers will be or have been answered. To take away a gift and leave nothing in return is considered an offensive act and doing so means a blessing ‘might not stick’. The other view (though these are sometimes conflated or offered as alternatives by the same narrator) is thought to be more recent, that one actually deposits one’s anxiety or ailment into the votive and leaves it behind for the well or tree to bear or absolve (an anthropocentric type of animism, but one that perceives the landscape alone, rather than the person, as having power). These views relate to Bird-David’s distinction between giving and reciprocating environments—an idea elaborated by Kay Milton (BirdDavid 1990; Milton 1996: 116–26). Those leaving worry and diseaseinfected votives on trees or by a well perceive a ‘giving environment’ in which the power of the place provides unconditionally. In contrast, those leaving a votive as a gift for the genius loci would seem to see themselves in more of a reciprocating relationship with the environment in which the environment (in this case the spirit of the place) will answer one’s needs if one fulfils obligations to respect and steward the site. This is perhaps especially evident with the leaving of votives such as saints’ scapulars, souvenirs or bottles of water from other pilgrimage sites in Ireland or from places abroad such as Lourdes, as if the mana from those sites could be thus transported to increase that at the site of the deposit. When I first began interviewing about holy well practices in 2000, I wondered if reverence for these particular natural sites would correlate with well devotees’ general environmental views and if those would really vary from non–well goers. However, regular visitors to the same wells could express quite contrasting views on whether well landscapes were ‘giving’ places or if humans owed them reciprocity for their benevolence. Many paths to wells in towns are littered with sweets wrappers and some roadside wells contain floating rubbish, yet several narrators did not perceive this as diminishing ‘the strength’ of a well. While stories abound about offended wells withholding their blessing, some visitors nevertheless clearly hold a strictly ‘giving’ view of these sites where one deposits troubles. Narrators with this perspective tend to visit wells less as an offering of their time for devotions and more for a purpose (to solve a problem) and be somewhat less involved in community pattern days in these landscapes. Although they express gratitude, they do not communicate a sense of obligation to the well or an idea that they can ‘repay’ it. However, those who describe votives as gifts often comment on stewardship concerns. Neopagan and New Age visitors may employ phrases such as ‘reverencing the earth’ and Catholics may mention their desire to ‘protect’ the well from development, disrespect or contamination from new farming

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practices and fertilizer runoff. Those who articulate solely a reciprocating view regularly visit their wells, participate in parish gatherings and are most involved in stewarding roles. In Scotland, people still visit healing wells in the Hebrides, but in many places in the northern Highlands and even Moray and Aberdeenshire, wells have become known as ‘wishing wells’ or ‘rag wells’ and visitors would seem to have a conception of an entirely giving environment. The most common votives are ‘clooties’, strips of cloth or rags tied to nearby trees and bushes. At Munlochy on the Black Isle, trees surrounding a healing spring have become a clootie forest with some people leaving entire sets of clothing or shirts with their wishes written on them. Locals find the ongoing expansion of the area a nuisance, but the belief that deposited items are infected with another’s trouble or illness means that few are willing to touch and clear them away. In both Ireland and Scotland, stories abound of people injured or becoming ill after removing votive deposits. In Ireland, people who do the work may go for a blessing both before and after collecting and binning offerings. That contrasting perspectives exist about votives, being such a basic element of contemporary wellside folk liturgies, highlights the variety of ways of engaging sacred landscapes even within shared local traditions. Historical narratives can reveal patterns of well beliefs and practices through time.

Historical Narratives A full literature review on holy wells in Ireland would span almost 1,400 years. When early Christian missionaries rededicated pagan Irish wells they ‘sained’ them. The first historical narratives of these conversions exist in the form of the Lives of the Saints (written in both Irish and Latin). The stories of pagan sites were thus overwritten with stories of Christian saints. The Tripartite Life of St Patrick, dating to at least the tenth century, relates several instances where Patrick created new wells (Ó Cuív 1989–90: 97–99; Stokes 1887). Adomnán’s seventh-century Life of Saint Columba provides stories about Colmcille purifying springs of ‘demons’ and blessing and creating new wells (1939: 88, 114, 115). The Irish dindshenchas7 (lore about places and their names) is preserved in multiple manuscripts in both metrical and prose forms including the twelfth-century Book of Leinster and relates naming legends for places associated with wells and miraculous events involving them. Giraldus Cambrensis commented on Irish wellside practices in the twelfth century. In 1992, Arthur Gribben published a lengthy (179 pages) annotated bibliography of sources on holy wells and sacred waters in Britain and Ireland and since then there has been a plethora of material appearing on wells. Yet, still there is much to be said. Most sources and references are site specific without analysis of the regional or chronological patterning of saints’ cults, of miraculous

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cures or of the style of well shrine constructions and the manipulation of well landscapes. Publications on Irish holy wells in the last century and the last decade, with notable exceptions, are descriptive gazetteer-style works with little or no ethnographic data.8 While local traditions often associate holy wells and their related landscape features with early missionizing ‘Celtic’ saints and the period of Christian conversion, some recent publications categorically deny (with deconstructionist fervour) any ‘Celtic’ influences on contemporary practices. In the 1990s, debunking notions of a Celtic identity for Iron Age and contemporary Irish and Britons became something of a cottage industry. Established scholars recanted their older works just as Celtomania took over the general public. Whether or not scholars decide Iron Age Islanders were Celts, devotees at wells perceive them as such. They describe their ancestors as Celts and their wellside rituals as a ‘Celtic spiritual inheritance’, and this perception is an important part of how they experience well sites. Sociologist Michael Carroll and, citing him, folklorist Diarmuid Ó Giolláin suggest that distinct aspects of Irish popular religiosity such as doing the rounds at holy wells did not exist prior to the Reformation (Carroll 1999; Ó Giolláin 2005: 35-39). Both ignore the archaeological evidence and narratives found in early Christian hagiographies that provide insights into the mentalité of Early Christian Ireland. Some ‘lives’ record details on the topographical location of a saint’s church or other foundation. The Book of Lismore (compiled in the second half of the fifteenth century) contains a much earlier Irish-language Life of St Finnian and notes activities at his well and flagstone at Achonry in Connaught (now in County Sligo). Kathleen Hughes provides a translation: ‘Whatsoever sick man shall go into the well, he will come from it whole. Whatever troublesome party shall come to the erenagh, his honour (viz. the erenagh’s) will not be taken away provided he repeat his pater at that flagstone’ (Hughes 1987: 355, 357, 362).9 This is a clear indication of a station at a well before the Reformation. Martin Robinson notes that by the time Manus O’Donnell wrote his Life of St Columcille in 1532, doing the rounds was a wellestablished idea and that hagiographers such as O’Donnell detailed how the early saints performed them and how they reattributed ancient tombs to Christian saints (1997: 117–18). Archaeologist Michael Herity has also suggested that cross-inscribed stones at many of the stations of the Turas Cholmcille in County Donegal date to AD 500–700 and represent a local variant of similar stones found at like pilgrimage sites along Ireland’s west coast—indicating that stations are ancient indeed (Herity 1993: 9). Peter Harbison also dates the pattern there to the eighth century (1991: 106). Carroll suggests that rounding was a lay response to the Reformation and the type of devotions he notes were becoming popular in Catholic Europe in the late fifteenth century such as the Stations of the Cross. The fourteen stations of the Way of the Cross were formalised in the fifteenth century; however, stations of the cross originated in Bologna, Italy, in the fifth cen-

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tury at the monastery of San Stefano. Many new traditions and pilgrimage sites did develop after the Reformation,10 but documentation of rounding practices pre-dates that period. Also the emphatic insistence on rounding by the Celtic deiseal should caution those of us intellectually raised on the ‘invention of tradition’ not to dismiss possible threads of continuity from the past without study of the early Christian narratives. Irish pilgrimage is atypical of pilgrimage in Europe because, as Mary Lee Nolan has noted, pilgrimage to topographic features and places is more important in Ireland than that to view movable objects (relics and images), which is the main focus of European pilgrimage (1983: 422). Many relics were lost in Viking raids and in the dissolution of the monasteries that Henry VIII perpetrated in Ireland as well as in England. Nearly half of Ireland’s monasteries closed in the decade following 1536. The vast majority of Irish shrines are natural sites, or archaeological sites with Christian reattribution, in the open air. Analysis of historical narratives about both these types of sites and about Irish folk liturgies is essential to understanding wells now. Renato Rosaldo has described rituals as ‘busy intersections’ where life’s different roles and paths converge, and he notes that they shape what precedes them and what follows them (1989: 20). Exactly a century before Rosaldo and well before the Annales championed social and cultural history, William Butler Yeats perceptively observed, ‘The History of a Nation [is] not in parliaments and battlefields but in what the people say to each other on fair-days and high days, and in how they farm and quarrel, and go on pilgrimage’ (1889: xvi).11 I do not claim that the history of Ireland is in the turas at its holy wells, but these natural sites and their precincts have been significant landscapes through the longue durée and do tell parts of Ireland’s story. The Iron Age sagas explain population migrations in terms of supernatural wells flooding particular areas and contests for kingships lost because one candidate could not overcome and seal a remarkable well (Ó Cróinín 1995: 46–47; Charles-Edwards 2000: 64). The origin of the sacred River Boyne was in an offence to a well. Visiting an Tobar Segais (the Well of Knowledge) was tabooed to all but its guardian Nechtan and his three cupbearers. His wife, the Celtic goddess Boand, outraged the well by approaching it and circling it tuathal so that it surged up to drown and dismember her and formed the eponymous Boyne (Ó Duinn 2000: 272). Peter Harbison notes that the earliest monasteries were intentionally located next to already venerated wells – meaning well distribution shaped the development of Ireland as ‘the land of saints and scholars’. Harbison offers the County Limerick well of St Molua (my Lua) as one obvious example where well dedications reveal the ‘transfer from pagan to Christian worship’ at a site (Harbison 1991: 229). The well was associated with a pagan warrior Lugaid (Lua is the nickname for Lugaid) and when well waters were visited for Christian purposes, Lugaid became a saint.

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One of the biggest well visiting days of the year is Garland Sunday (or Lammas), which coincides with the Celtic god Lugh’s 1 August oénach (festival). Lughnasa (which became Lammas) was one of the most important of four annual Celtic festivals. Today, Garland Sunday is the pattern day for many wells such as Tobernalt in County Sligo, which is not dedicated to any particular saint.12 The weekend closest to 1 August involves wellside confessionals and healing services and climaxes with a wellside mass. As with all wells, the waters are thought to be most powerful at midnight on the eve of the pattern day (in this case Garland Sunday). The Celtic calendar seems to have been a lunar one and the main Celtic festivals were celebrated on the eve prior. Máire MacNeill documented many wells ‘sained’ from associations to Lugh and also the links between the annual Croagh Patrick pilgrimage in County Mayo and the timing of an ancient oénach at the same site in Lugh’s honour (1962). Only in the 1960s did the Tuam Diocese officially discontinue the traditional night trek in favour of a daylight one for safety reasons, although many pilgrims still ascend the mountain on the eve.

The Landscapes of Female Saint Cults My particular research interest is in regional and local patterns in the distribution of wells associated with female saint cults, particularly local saints who do not appear on the Irish National Calendar of Saints, but who still have regularly visited wells. Mary has not traditionally been a predominant figure in Irish pilgrimage; in fact, Mary Lee Nolan estimates that in contrast with other European pilgrimage and shrine traditions, only about 10 per cent of all Irish shrines are dedicated to her (1983) and relatively few wells. Ireland’s chief pilgrimage point (attracting 1.5 million pilgrims each year) is, in fact, the National Marian Shrine at Knock in County Mayo where in 1879, fifteen people saw an apparition of Mary, St Joseph and St John on the south gable of Knock Parish Church. The site now has a long row of holy-water-dispensing spigots, but no holy well. The first holy wells associated with Mary were perhaps those of Irish female saints that were reallocated following the Anglo-Norman invasion. Harbison suggests that ‘well dedications to the Virgin may not be much earlier than about the twelfth century’ (1991: 233). Raymond Gillespie suggests that though Mary’s cult was well established in Ireland in the sixteenth century, it grew most dramatically in the seventeenth-century Counter-reformation efforts (1997: 70–71). Many wells dedicated to other female saints were rededicated to Mary in Tridentine reforms and also through subsequent centuries. More recently, Mary acquired many wells of Irish saints in the International Marian year of 1954. Ireland’s comparatively few female saints did something of merit besides save their virginity: they founded an abbey or church, missionised,

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performed miracles, converted tribal chiefs and educated future male saints. Because Irish male saints exponentially outnumber female saints, female saints are overrepresented in surviving well dedications. This is perhaps not so surprising as springs were more commonly connected to female deities in pagan times.13 Wells are associated with fertility generally, and those linked to saints Brigid and Gobnait (both thinly veiled fertility goddesses)14 are especially connected to conception. Consultants in Munster and Leinster claimed they had a sibling or friend who became pregnant at a Brigid or Gobnait well. Couples apparently visit wells together after confession, sometimes after mass, in a state of spiritual purity, to drink the well water and procreate in the vicinity (see also Healy 2001: 111). Saint Gobnait’s feast day, 11 February, is also close to St Valentine’s eve when, I was told, couples used to discreetly visit the site and drink the water together. In her saintly incarnation, Gobnait (Gobnet or Abigail) is associated with honeybees and is posed as a contemporary of Brigid (Walsh and Bradley 2003: 91–92) – appropriate as they, or at least some of their attributes, may derive from an Iron Age pantheon. One of the triad of heroic Irish saints along with Patrick and Colmcille, Brigid has wells across the nation, but her main shrines are in Leinster and well dedications for other female saints remain regionally patterned today: Gobnait and Íte (Ita) in Munster, Monenna in Ulster, Attracta in Connaught.15 Memory of these local holy women and sites and rituals associated with their veneration survived the Anglo-Norman invasion and Roman Catholicisation of Ireland, the Protestant Reformation, the Tridentine Reforms of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,16 the late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Penal Codes, the famine, nineteenth-century clerical attempts to stifle folk liturgies and Pope Paul VI’s suppression of unapproved saints following Vatican II.17 Holy wells’ dedications, rituals, survival and visitation reflect political, historical, legal and economic structures over the course of a millennia and a half (which is not lost on well devotees). These structures, from both the present and perceived pasts, regularly emerge in practitioners’ narrations as they ritually move through well landscapes.

A Home in the World Contemporary well visitors tell the history of their townlands, their parishes and their families with references to wellside gatherings and recall particular community and biographical happenings by association with features in these sacred landscapes (‘We brought Áine here after her first communion and took her picture alone there by the well’; ‘Malachi met his wife here on a pattern day’; ‘Geraldine came here on her eighty-eighth birthday and did all the rounds’; ‘One of the last masses I heard from Father Fahan was at the well.’) Moving through the sacred landscape of

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the well site involves what Tilley calls ‘a continuous presencing of previous experiences’ (1994: 28) and since landscapes tell stories, as Tim Ingold notes, ‘To perceive the landscape is therefore to carry out an act of remembrance’ (2000: 189). Rites of passage and events of the community become wound up in stories about a sacred gathering place and associated with the presiding saint’s benevolence. Wells are generative of health, identity, even offspring, and a sense of home in the world. Returning to natal areas after a long absence (for education or career), many Irish visit a well alone as a personal act of devotion, to experience their spirituality in an unguarded space and to reconnect with place. They also go with family members so that the visit becomes a kin-religious gathering. Dispersed natives of County Carlow plan their annual vacations to travel home for the pattern day at St Moling’s Well and their always-coinciding family reunions. Doing the turas then takes on a new meaning and revises some conventional anthropological insights on pilgrimage. Distinguishing Roman Catholic from Protestant pilgrimages, Gwen Kennedy Neville has described Protestant pilgrims as individuals ‘returning home’, ‘seeking to travel back into sets of ritual relationships’ with kin and place and Catholic pilgrims as going out into the world, leaving kin and place, to seek ‘greater spirituality’ (1987: 15, 26). Irish pilgrimage has always atypically focused on local spiritual experiences, but those removed from kin-religious networks increasingly return to those places that cognitively evoke home when they are away in the world. Pilgrimage for Catholics can also be ‘returning home’. Alan Morinis has argued that there are two overarching patterns to pilgrims’ quests: (1) to become more like the supernatural or (2) to tap into the power of the supernatural at sacred places (1992: 90). To these we can add a drive to reengage with the habitus of kinreligious groups and to physically be in the landscapes whose memory and associated tales remind one of that habitus. At St Dahillan’s Well in County Kerry, I met Claire Murray who had brought two ‘visitors from England’ to see the site. A middle-aged sister and brother, the pair had heard about the well from their parents who grew up in the area and had always wanted to visit and ‘get in touch with their roots’. Their guide, a distant cousin, was quite pleased they had ‘made the journey all that way’. For those who cannot physically travel to a well site, community members in some areas volunteer to do the rounds as a kind of proxy. At St Brigid’s well in Faughart, County Louth, volunteers armed with pages of notes regularly ‘do the pilgrimage’ for people who have written their parish with prayer requests. These requests may come from across the country or from Irish abroad. Some people who have moved from their natal areas and are no longer able to return may have lost contact with, or outlived, their local friends and having a link to a proxy pilgrim and being prayed for at the site is a great comfort. At the Ogulla Shrine in Tulsk, County Roscommon, Maeve, a university student explained that she came to the well when ‘home from Uni …

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it’s like going to a friend’s place, you wouldn’t come home and not visit your friends’. Saints were, through the centuries, and remain, one’s friends and several consultants echoed Maeve’s perspective on visiting these wellknown landscapes where they feel welcome and in company. One woman told me of taking a friend to visit a well she herself had visited since childhood, because her friend was going through a hard time and did not ‘have a well’. Explaining the sense of home and calm that being wellside can instil, consultants describe a very particular state of ‘well-being’. Across Ireland, some families have been stewards of particular wells for generations (some claim for centuries). When Irish Catholics were forbidden from buying land or passing their holdings intact to the next generation during Penal times, they retained a sense of ownership of sacred sites that they visited secretly – an act of resistance to both the Protestant government (eighteenth-century Penal Legislation forbade pilgrimages) and also to the Tridentine clergy educated in Europe who discouraged folk liturgy. Some lore connects contemporary stewards to Penal times and familial stewards express a sense of pride and profound responsibility so that they make a point of always having a family member at home to greet visitors to the well and provide guidance in doing the rounds. The Doon Well in County Donegal is located right outside the Gallaghers’ front door but well guardians’ proximity to a site is not usually so obvious. In County Galway, I visited an eye well dedicated to St MacCoille. Anthony Dolan’s family has stewarded the site for generations. He appeared as I approached the wooded site and greeted me, emphatically explaining that I must follow the deiseal. At the site there are two wells, each encircled by low stone walls. In some interpretations, one well is for the left eye and one for the right. However, the powerful water has moved outside one of the well enclosures to two small indentions in the ground and one bathes the eyes with water from the corresponding pool. Family stewards are so vigilant in greeting unknown newcomers as they worry that ‘inappropriate’ visitation and rituals may cause wells to lose their thaumaturgical power.

Contested Liturgies and Moving Wells For Catholic well devotees, the ‘suspect’ and ‘inappropriate’ wellside activities of British, European and North American Neopagans and New Agers ‘endanger’ the sanctity of well sites. While Neopagans and New Agers are quite distinct (see Prince and Riches 2000: 6),18 they share some foci, and both go in search of powerful Irish landscapes to become a home in the world. These well visitors invent their own landscape narratives that are devoid of genealogical links to place or historical associations, but instead hang on the degree to which seekers experience ‘power’ at these sites. New Agers and Neopagans also look for fish in wells and follow

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the deiseal but do not stop at every station and have their own rituals that they do not generally undertake when Christians are praying. While a few Neopagans are proselytisers, many are reluctant to explain their rituals as they say ‘revealing them to the uninitiated would void [their] work’. Neopagan and New Age use of well sites increased in the years around the Millennium, and continues on the Dingle Peninsula, but generally remains an oddity in Ireland perhaps because so many of these landscapes are still in regular use by Catholics. The wellside presence of Neopagans and New Agers is comparatively more common in Scotland and particularly so in Cornwall, where many locals now view well sites with topophobia ‘because of the Cornish Druids’. In Ireland, while some Catholics express amusement, others relate annoyance with those who ‘walk ley lines instead of the rounds’, mostly because they worry their ‘antics’ might offend a well and it would ‘move away’. Thus, the actions of those seeking an omphalos for their contested spirituality can potentially endanger sacred landscapes for locals. Wells can get up and go. Empowered to cure or curse, wells are sentient. They have wills, can take offense and may desert their precincts. Lawrence Taylor nicely described wells as active agents that resist disenchantment and strike back ‘at that those who seek to alter’ them or deny their inherent power (1995: 63). St Anne’s well in Killanne in County Wexford is said to have moved in the 1600s when the landowner tried to prevent pilgrims from coming. Patricia Lysaght has written on St Joseph’s Well in Dough/Annagh Parish in County Clare and local lore that the well changed locations overnight after someone washed potatoes with its water (2001: 83). An offended well associated with St Brendan’s Clonfert Cathedral ‘moved’ to a hollow in a horse-chestnut tree where moisture and dew collects. (Protestant landlords planted horse-chestnut trees, so this Protestant tree is now home to a ‘Celtic’ Catholic holy well.19) Watering animals at a holy well, letting a dog jump in the well or using well water for domestic purposes are the most commonly reported motives for a well to move, though people do regularly take well water for home use. Dermott Kelly in Dungarvan County Waterford, reported that his family ‘drew our drinking water from St Gobnait’s well in the summer when other sources had dried up’. Although holy well water is often claimed to resist boiling, some older women reported bringing home jugs of water because it ‘makes the best tea’ (see also Healy 2001). Lore about moving wells may explain why a well has dried up or why its waters no longer cure and blame the demise of the healing site not on the giving environment, but on human folly. Most often when a well moves, surrounding stations also cease to have thaumaturgical powers and the landscape loses its benevolence, but not necessarily its sentience. Sometimes a well may not move far so that it continues to sanctify the same area. When a well disappears or moves some distance, the landscape it made holy acquires different narratives of

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abandonment and even danger. If a station or other feature of the deserted landscape remains curative, a new narrative emerges. For example, the surviving stone base of a former high cross near a holy well may have always collected rainwater, but only when the adjacent holy well disappeared did that water become effective in healing warts. Perhaps the stone cross had originally been erected beside a holy well in the tenth century, or perhaps a spring had emerged later near the cross site and become a holy well. If historical narratives of the site can be found, we might unfold the renegotiation of sacrality through time. However, in current narratives of just such sites, the well came first and though it proved fickle and departed, it nonetheless sanctified surrounding features of its landscape, which still retains its aura and the power to bless. For Catholics, some former well sites remain graceful places, while others are avoided. More than once, I was warned off visiting former well sites by locals who called them ‘bad places’. The offence to a once blessed site still permeates narrators’ perception of an area even when the details are beyond recall. At least one such transition was, however, of recent and specific origin. Dingle Peninsula locals attributed the drying of a saint’s well and the arrival of a ‘bad feeling’ about the place to Neopagan practices at the site including ‘dancing’, ‘invocations of gods’ and leaving cut apples that attracted rodents. Whether one goes to a well to ‘meet the goddess’ or talk to a saint, one area in which Catholics, Neopagan and New Age narratives did agree was in a focus on the immanence of the supernatural at well sites rather than its transcendence. The supernatural is not ‘supra’, but surrounds one and dwells in the natural features of the landscape. More worrying to Catholic consultants than Neopagans and New Agers visiting sites is the increasing presence of tourists. For those in search of the ‘hidden Ireland’, popular religiosity is one of the few areas they or their tour guides may perceive as ‘traditional culture from peasant Ireland’ after the dramatic changes brought by the Celtic Tiger. Ireland’s ever-burgeoning heritage industry has worn out thatched cottages and Aran sweaters and in the 1990s turned to marketing Celtic Christianity. Tour groups now stop at holy wells for a five-minute glimpse of ‘an Irish curiosity’. Viewing well sites mostly through camera lenses, tourists climb back on their tour buses with little idea of the meaning of a site, its history or how it relates to local culture. So many come to St Brigid’s well at Liscannor, County Clare, on the main road to the Cliffs of Moher that locals go less frequently in the summer for fear of being photographed at prayer by thirty people simultaneously. Also at wells like Tobernault in County Sligo, signs carved in stone now note ‘Do not toss coins in the well’. (Nevertheless, after one Canadian and American group left, I reentered the site to see at least six coins gleaming in the water.) Contested access to and use of holy well sites yields insights about conceptions of sacred lands and global patterns of ‘outsiders’ claiming spiritual entitlement to sites hallowed and stewarded locally.

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Conclusion As Mikhail Bakhtin argued that all utterances are heteroglossic and can never mean exactly the same thing as in their original context, Barbara Bender and Christopher Tilley have noted that the meaning of contexts too can be fleeting and nonrepeatable (Bender 1993: 2; Tilley 1994). Tilley comments, ‘Memories continually provide modifications to a sense of place which can never be exactly the same place twice, although there may be ideological attempts to provide “stability” or perceptual and cognitive fixity to a place, to reproduce sets of dominant meanings’ (1994: 27–28). This is in many ways true (even the well devotee who visits daily will be somewhat different for the experiences she has had between visits and therefore have a slightly altered state of being at the well). The power and significance of a well site can change or vanish and the meaning of its surrounding landscape alters relationally. Some well visitors perceive the site as a ‘giving environment’, and others see themselves in a reciprocal relationship with it. Historical and current narratives of sacred sites do, however, yield patterns, both in surprising continuities, and in the renegotiation of landscapes through time to ‘keep’ them holy. Pilgrims visit the same site repeatedly for the purpose of finding one unchanging place; to have rootedness; to find a fixed home in the world and get a fix on their spiritual state; to have a rock, or rather, a well. Folk liturgies (such as rounding the stations in sequence) are an attempt to repeat a state of being in which to better engage the supernatural, feel connected and not alone and be reminded of the lessons for good living. One complaint about nonlocal Neopagans or New Agers, and of course tourists, visiting well sites is that ‘they do not know the well’ (they do not know how the space links to the bigger picture of the townland, much less local, regional or national history). As one man expressed: ‘New Agers imagine what they want to, but we know the place. Tourists do not even know who our saints are’. While Neopagans search for powerful places to experience, these places ‘stalk’ Irish Catholics ‘with stories’ as Keith Basso described places and their names working on the Apache (1996). Holy well sites and the stories involving them (of healing, of retribution, of cursing, of curing) remind people how to live. Just passing a well site evokes a story one’s grandmother told them about how someone was punished for mistreating the well (which was violating the community’s good). Recalling such narratives, many people cross themselves when driving past a well site. Such places serve as what Basso called ‘mnemonic pegs’ on which to hang community values and beliefs. Narratives may even ‘fix’ ways to ritually move through a sacred space in the very description of landforms. People describe County Wexford’s most famous pilgrimage site, ‘Our Lady’s Island’, metaphorically as having the shape of a rosary: the church being the crucifix at the end, the causeway to the island being where one says the creed and the required circuit

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of prayerfully walking around the island being the rosary’s traditional fifteen decades (see also Forde 1999: 122). Lay consensus about practices integrating the five new ‘luminous mysteries’ to the rosary (announced by Pope John Paul II in 2002) have yet to develop, but most consultants say you can contemplate all twenty; ‘just walk slower’. This metaphorical narrative also sets the multisensory experience of the pilgrimage (Tilley 2004: 28): the work of praying the rosary on the island is poignantly completed while inhaling the salty air and contrasts with imbibing the fresh, sweet water from Mary’s well.20 Many consultants told me their parents or grandparents had names for each station of a holy well, but they do not remember them and now just say ‘the flagstone’, ‘the bullaun’, ‘the saint’s grave’. They describe their grandparents’ accounts as more descriptive and employing ‘more flowery names’. Perhaps such names were more metonymic and reflective of both a pre–Vatican II absolute belief in the folkloric details of the life of a saint, and a perhaps less-critical acceptance of past generations’ narratives about miracles and punishments meted out through the justice of the genius loci. Jane Hill has argued that when place names and names for flora or fauna are lost from a language or replaced by another language, ‘people may experience weakened access to elements of their very own life stories’ (2003: 178). Some Catholics did relate sadness that they could not pass on the names that shaped their grandparents’ ways of knowing well sites and felt they had let future generations down. New Agers and Neopagans also expressed regret over ‘lost wisdom of the old ones’, but in contrast, they either claimed essential bits ‘secretly survived’ the ages or embraced creative invention to meaningfully engage and interpret well landscapes. Sacred places are perhaps the most polysemous spaces even for individuals, and certainly through time, but comparing narratives diachronically allows us to see why they remain significant even when the mentalité and societal structures evolve. Competing, contested, contemporary and past tense, narratives reveal the multiple layers of meaning well sites have acquired through time. Their examination offers a phenomenological hermeneutics of landscape and insights about the reenchantment with the local in a globalising age.

Notes 1. Stories of landowners destroying wells (and also what befell them) date back to at least the 1600s. 2. Among the remaining medieval pilgrimage roads in Ireland is St Colmcille’s Way (Turas Cholmcille) in the west of County Donegal used in an annual turas (pattern), St Kevin’s Way (Slí Chaoimhín) in County Wicklow and the Saint’s Road on the Dingle Peninsula in County Kerry (associated with St Brendan).

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3.

4.

5.

6.

7. 8.

9.

10.

The shortest of these remaining ‘ensouled pathways’ is the Pilgrim’s Way at Clonmacnoise in County Offaly running between buildings of the monastic centre and the grave of St Ciaran. This story of St Patrick evokes the Celtic tradition of fasting against someone of a higher honour status than oneself as the only recourse to protest their actions. Also Patrun, Patron, Pardon and deriving from the events in honour of the well’s patron – the entire community traditionally gathered on the saints’ feast day to do the rounds. In the reigns of William and Mary, William III, Anne and George I and II (1691–1760), Penal legislation limited Catholic civil and religious rights. Penal codes were differentially enforced across rural and urban areas and began to crumble by the reign of George III. The Catholic Relief Acts of 1770s and 1780s allowed Catholics more access to the professions and to purchase freehold land (which meant they could also then vote). In April 1829, the Catholic Emancipation Act was passed to allow Daniel O’Connell (‘The Liberator’) to take his elected seat in Parliament. This favoured direction is hardly unique to the Celts, as the Navajo also emphasise a ‘sun-wise’ flow and ‘when it is appropriate to do so, human motion can reverently mimic the sun’s path’ (Suzuki and Knudtson 1992: 155). Yi-Fu Tuan has pointed out that while the Chinese are ‘an exception to the rule’, most cultures conceive of the left side as profane and the right and front as sacred (2005 [1977]: 35, 42). Also dinnshenchas or dindsenchas. Some recent publications on holy wells include Walter Brenneman and Mary Brenneman’s nicely illustrated Crossing the Circle at the Holy Wells of Ireland (1995); Stiofán Ó Cadhla’s fine volume The Holy Well Tradition: The Pattern of St. Declan, Ardmore, County Waterford, 1800–2000 (2002); Lawrence Taylor’s chapter on holy wells in southwest County Donegal from his book Occasions of Faith (1995) and Elizabeth Healy’s well-illustrated and well-themed In Search of the Ireland’s Holy Wells (2001) which considers a selection of wells. A photo essay book entitled Fish Stone Water: Holy Wells of Ireland by Anna Rackard and Liam O’Callaghan (2001) also offers some nice documentation of the appearance of current sites and both contemporary and past ritual practices, and is beautifully introduced by Angela Bourke. Susan Connolly and Anne-Marie Moroney document 45 wells in County Louth in their volume Stone and Tree Sheltering Water (1998). A lay person holding the office of erenagh in medieval Ireland collected parish revenues and maintained church properties. The role of erenagh might pass down through generations of particular families in a parish. For example, Knock. Also new wells did continue to be discovered by revelation, such as miraculous wells in honour of Archangel Michael: one discovered in County Clare in the 1630s and another in Galway in 1654 (Gillespie 1997: 92, 135, 159). These new sites were in line with Tridentine Reforms and new wells connected to older, local saints did not emerge. Despite these examples, Mary Lee Nolan argues that while European pilgrimage cult formation on the continent was at a height in the late 1400s and experienced a mid-1600s spike with the Counter-reformation, ‘Most places of pilgrimage in Ireland were established prior to the eleventh century’ (1983: 424).

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11. Also quoted in Harbison (1991: 235). 12. By some traditions, St Patrick sained the well. 13. Across Celtic areas of Europe, rivers are also predominantly eponymous for goddesses: the Marne for Matrona, the Danube for Danu (or Anu), the Seine for Sequanna, the Dee for Deva, the Mersey for Belisama, the Aisne for Axona, the Boyne for Boand (Bóinn) and the Shannon for Sinann, the granddaughter of the sea god Lir. 14. Ó Cadhla repeats the caution of earlier writers that there were at least a dozen Brigids and almost as many Gobnaits (2002: 12). Women of that name who founded settlements or hermitages coalesced in folk memory over the centuries and may have acquired properties of former female pagan powers (MacNeill 1962: 274). 15. Until the works of Dorothy Ann Bray (1992, 1999), Lisa Bitel (1996), Christina Harrington (2002), Elva Johnston (2000, 2002), and Catherine McKenna (2001, 2002), very little scholarship has explicitly addressed Irish female saints beyond St Brigid. Explanation for the enduring patterning in their well dedications is to be found in the differing monastic traditions, inheritance practices and dynastic histories of the provinces. 16. Tridentine refers to the Council of Trent (1545–1563), which defined church doctrines in answer to Protestants and stressed conformity of belief and practice. 17. Vatican II was the Second Ecumenical Council of the Vatican which Pope John XXIII opened in 1962 and Pope Paul VI concluded three years later. 18. Many New Age well visitors fit Deana Weibel’s description of ‘religious creatives’, those with ‘mystical, eclectic, intentionally syncretic, highly personalized and experiential’ belief systems (2005: 111; see also Bowman 2000). Her concept may nicely apply to those who blend New Age thinking and experimentation with lingering commitment to mainstream faiths – the fervour of which varies according to time of life and situation. 19. Thanks to Jim Higgins for this insight. 20. Two wells dedicated to Mary are in the vicinity, one on the prayer path circling the island and one, considered older, down the road from the parish church.

References Adamnan, 1939. The Life of Saint Columba. Translated from the Latin by Wentworth Huyshe London: George Routlege & Sons. Basso, K. 1996. Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language among the Western Apache. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Bender, B. 1993. ‘Introduction’, in B. Bender (ed.), Landscape, Politics and Perspectives. Oxford: Berg, pp. 1–17. Bird-David, N. 1990. ‘The Giving Environment: Another Perspective on the Economic System of Gatherer-hunters’, Current Anthropology 31(2): 189–96. Bitel, L. M. 1996. Land of Women: Tales of Sex and Gender from Early Ireland. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

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Bowman, M. 2000. ‘Contemporary Celtic Spirituality’, in A. Hale and P. Payton (eds), New Directions in Celtic Studies. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, pp. 69–94. Bray, D. A. 1992. ‘Secunda Brigida: Saint Ita of Killeedy and Brigidine Tradition’, in C. J. Byrne, M. Harry and P. Ó Siadhail (eds), Celtic Languages and Celtic Peoples: Proceedings of the Second North American Congress of Celtic Studies. Halifax, Nova Scotia: D’Arcy McGee Chair of Irish Studies, Saint Mary’s University, pp. 27–38. ———. 1999. ‘The Manly Spirit of St. Monenna’, in R. Black, W. Gillies and R. Ó Maolalaigh (eds), Celtic Connections. Edinburgh: Tuckwell Press, pp. 172–81. Brenneman, W. and M. Brenneman. 1995. Crossing the Circle at the Holy Wells of Ireland. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Carroll, M. 1999. Irish Pilgrimage: Holy Wells and Popular Catholic Devotion. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Champion, S. and G. Cooney. 1999. ‘Naming the Places, Naming the Stones,’ in A. Gazin-Schwarts and C. Holtorf (eds), Archaeology and Folklore. London: Routledge, pp. 196–213. Charles-Edwards, T. M. 2000. Early Christian Ireland. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Connolly, S. and A. Moroney. 1998. Stone and Tree Sheltering Water: An Exploration of Sacred and Secular Wells in County Louth. Drogheda: Flax Mill Publications. Cooney, G. 2000. Landscapes of Neolithic Ireland. London: Routledge. Eliade, M. 1958. Patterns in Comparative Religion, trans. R. Sheed. London: Sheed & Ward. Forde, W., ed. 1999. Memory & Mission: Christianity in Wexford 600 to 2000 A.D. Castlebridge, Co. Wexford: Diocese of Ferns, History & Archive Committee. Fredengren, C. 2002. Crannogs: A Study of People’s Interaction with Lakes, with Particular Reference to Lough Gara in the North-west of Ireland. Bray, Ireland: Wordwell. Gillespie, R. 1997. Devoted People: Belief and Religion in Early Modern Ireland. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. Gribben, A. 1992. Holy Wells and Sacred Water Sources in Britain and Ireland: An Annotated Bibliography. New York: Garland Publishing. Harbison, P. 1991. Pilgrimage in Ireland: The Monuments and the People. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Harrington, C. 2002. Women in a Celtic Church: Ireland 450-1150. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Healy, E. 2001. In Search of Ireland’s Holy Wells. Dublin: Wolfhound Press. Herity, M. 1993. Gleanncholmcille. Dublin: Na Clocha Breaca. Hill, J. 2003. ‘What Is Lost When Names Are Forgotten?’ in G. Sanga and G. Ortalli (eds), Nature Knowledge: Ethnoscience, Cognition, and Utility. London: Berghahn, pp. 161–84. Hughes, H., ed. 2005. Croagh Patrick: Ireland’s Holy Mountain. Westport, Co.Mayo: Croagh Patrick Archaeological Committee. Hughes, K. 1987. Edited by David Dumville. Church and Society in Ireland, A.D. 400-1200. London: Variorum Reprints.

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Ingold, T. 2000. The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London: Routledge. Johnston, E. 2002. ‘The “Pagan”’ and “Christian” Identities of the Irish Female Saint’, in M. Atherton (ed.), Celts and Christians: New Approaches to the Religious Traditions of Britain and Ireland. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, pp. 60–78. ———. 2000. ‘Íte: Patron of her People?’, Peritia 14: 421–28. Low, S. and D. Lawrence-Zúñiga. 2003. The Anthropology of Space and Place: Locating Culture. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Lysaght, P. 2001. ‘St Joseph’s Well, Couogh/Annagh, Parish of Kilmurry Ibrickane, County Clare: A Photographic and Oral Documentation’, Béaloideas: the Journal of the Folklore of Ireland Society 69: 83–106. MacNeill, M. 1962. The Festival of Lughnasa: A Study of the Survival of the Celtic Festival of the Beginning of Harvest. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McKenna, C. 2001. ‘Apotheosis and Evanescence: The Fortunes of Saint Brigit in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries’, in J. F. Nagy (ed.), The Individual in Celtic Literatures. Dublin: Four Courts Press, pp. 74–108. ———. 2002. ‘Between Two Worlds: Saint Brigit and Pre-Christian Religion in the Vita Prima’, in J. F. Nagy (ed.), Identifying the ‘Celtic’. Dublin: Four Courts Press, pp. 66–74. Milton, K. 1996. Environmentalism and Cultural Theory: Exploring the Role of Anthropology in Environmental Discourse. London: Routledge. Morinis, A. (ed.). 1992. Sacred Journeys: The Anthropology of Pilgrimage. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Mulveen, J. 1999. ‘Tóchar Phádraic: Mayo’s Penitential and Sculptured Highway’, Journal of the Galway Archaeological and Historical Society 51: 167-81. Mytum, H. 1992. The Origins of Early Christian Ireland. London: Routledge. Neville, G. K. 1987. Kinship and Pilgrimage: Rituals of Reunion in American Protestant Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nolan, M. L. 1983. ‘Irish Pilgrimage: The Different Tradition’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 73(3): 421–38. Ó Cadhla, S. 2002. The Holy Well Tradition: The Pattern of St. Declan, Ardmore, County Waterford, 1800–2000. Dublin: Four Courts Press. Ó Cróinín, D. 1995. Early Medieval Ireland 400–1200. London: Longman. Ó Cuív, B. 1989–90. ‘Dinnshenchas—the Literary Exploitation of Irish Placenames’, Ainm: Bulletin of the Ulster Place-Name Society 4: 90–106. Ó Duinn, S. 2000. Where Three Streams Meet: Celtic Spirituality. Blackrock, Co Dublin: Columba Press. Ó Giolláin, D. 2005. ‘Revisiting the Holy Well’, Éire-Ireland 40(1&2): 11–41. Prince, R. and D. Riches. 2000. The New Age in Glastonbury: The Construction of Religious Movements. New York: Berghahn Books. Rackard, A. and L. O’Callaghan. 2001. Fish Stone Water: Holy Wells of Ireland. Cork: Atrium. Rafferty, B. 1994. Pagan Celtic Ireland: The Enigma of the Irish Iron Age. London: Thames and Hudson. Robinson, M. 1997. Sacred Places, Pilgrim Paths: An Anthology of Pilgrimage. London: Fount. Rosaldo, R. 1989. Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis. Boston: Beacon Press.

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Stokes, W. 1887. The Tripartite Life of Patrick, With Other Documents Relating to That Saint. London: H. M. Stationery Off. Suzuki, D. and P. Knudtson. 1992. Wisdom of the Elders: Sacred Native Stories of Nature. New York: Bantam Books. Taylor, L. 1995. Occasions of Faith: An Anthropology of Irish Catholics. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Tilley, C. 1994. A Phenomenology of Landscape: Places, Paths and Monuments. Oxford: Berg. ———. 2004. The Materiality of Stone: Explorations in Landscape Phenomenology. Oxford: Berg. Tuan, Y.-F. 2005 [1977]. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Walsh, J. R. and T. Bradley. 2003 [1991]. A History of the Irish Church, 400–700 AD, 3rd ed. Blackrock, Co Dublin: Columba Press. Warner, R. 1976. ‘Some observations on the context and importation of exotic material in Ireland, from the first century BC to the second century AD’. Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy 76C: 267–92. Weibel, D. L. 2005. ‘Of Consciousness Changes and Fortified Faith: Creativist and Catholic Pilgrimage at French Catholic Shrines’, in J. Dubish and M. Winkelman (eds), Pilgrimage and Healing. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, pp. 111–34. Yeats, W. B. 1889. ‘William Carleton’, in William Carleton, Stories from Carleton. New York: W. J. Gage, ix–xvii.

9 How the Land Should Be Narrating Progress on Farms in Islay, Scotland Andrew Whitehouse

Archie Baxter was seventy-six years old when I interviewed him at his home in Port Charlotte in 2000. He spoke in a careful and precise way, and with great knowledge of Islay, its history, wildlife, social life and farming. Archie was raised on the mainland and he arrived to take up a tenancy in Islay in the 1940s. I asked Archie how he had been able to acquire the farm: Just there were farms available then. Farms were advertised in Islay and I came up to see it. I came to Howmore, that was 1947, and then Howmore was coming up for let. The estate had it in their own hands at that time and it had been badly run down over a period of years; the previous tenants had got old. They had been in Howmore since 1888 – a family. They were persuaded by the estate to give it up and then the estate took it on, refenced it and each year re-drained and broke in another one of the fields. When I went there they still had two fields to do. What sort of state were they in? Well, the field that was being done the year I went there, at the telephone exchange at this side of the road, was ploughed with a ‘prairie-buster’ plough. And that’s quite a big one? That was a big plough. Completely buried the rushes – it was heavily rushed at that time – completely buried the rushes. And as far as that was concerned it was a complete success. And then of course it went into rotation and eventually was sown out to grass. And then the following year I broke in the last field, which was the one next to the house, right at the far end of the farm; I broke in that. We spent a fortnight clearing the scrub off it. It was that bad?

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Yes. And it was all right once the trees were pulled out; it wasn’t too bad with rushes. And we broke that in and that was really the end of it; that was bringing all the original fields back into cultivation.

Archie’s narrating of how he broke in the fields at Howmore is at once situated in the particular circumstances of its telling and entangled with larger narratives of landscape, of improvement and progress, the practical conditions of a good farm and the relations between landowner and tenant in the Scottish Highlands. He begins by describing how the landscape of Howmore was produced by the efforts, and sometimes the inattention, of the previous tenants and the estate as well as Archie himself. These personal histories emerged in the landscape in the form of rushes, scrub, fences, newly sown grass and cultivated fields. His success at farming thus became visible in the condition of the landscape and entwined with those other personal histories. This chapter, then, considers the personal narratives of progress and landscape that emerged through my interviews with various Islay farmers and their entanglement with other narratives, landscapes and lives.

The Mutual Constitution of Landscapes and Narratives Landscapes beg questions: Why is it like this? How should it be? What can I do here? What does it mean to me? These are questions that concern the past in which the landscape has emerged, the present in which people find themselves and the future, with its possibilities and dangers. The answers to these questions, both speculative and explanatory, are, as often as not, narrated. What, then, is landscape and why is narrative so essential to the ways in which people interact with and understand it? Landscape, as Ingold (2000: 190) notes, is not simply land, although in Scotland ‘land’ is often used to connote something beyond the physical. Nor is it purely conceptual or textual, though as Archie’s story demonstrates it can certainly be read (see also Tilley, this volume). Furthermore, at least if one is to employ landscape as a concept that extends one’s thinking, it is more than just a ‘fine prospect’, even if such a definition resonates in wider uses of the term (Bender 2001). Whilst the pleasant hills, shores and fields of Islay can present a pleasing vista, such a detached rendering of landscape leaves no opportunity to understand the experience of those who dwell there. Finally, if our definitions of landscape bleed into certain understandings of environment or place then this only serves to emphasise landscape as relational, processual and emergent; the locus of our dwelling. Landscapes are as much relational as they are physical and, as Ingold puts it, ‘The landscape becomes a part of us, just as we are a part of it’ (2000: 191). It is within a meshwork of mutual constitution that people view, read, feel and narrate landscape. In this sense I take an approach

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to landscape that ‘privileges the practices through which those who use spaces make them into meaningful places’ (Gray 1999: 443 emphasis in original). The activities that I focus on are the productive labour of farmers and their ongoing action of narrating their relations with the landscape and with others. Glancing first at these narratives from Islay, however, it is the physical that immediately strikes one as being ‘about landscape’: the state of fields and fences, the presence or absence of rushes, scrub or wet ground, the condition and numbers of livestock, the frequency with which crops of silage are taken. But, looking beyond the physical, one also notices that narratives are about other sorts of relations, for example, with other farmers, technology, animals, government, markets and the wider world more generally. Here one sees the movements between micro and macro scales that Bender (2001) notes as characteristic of the experience of landscape. The landscape is narrated as emerging through these relations and the moral and practical ways that they are conducted, perceived and interpreted. Below, I first describe a broader historical ‘grand narrative’ of farming in Islay, before going on to consider how two farmers discussed their farming activities and lives. This is followed by an examination of how narratives of landscape emerge in new attempts to reimagine and rebrand Islay agricultural products. My intention is to explore the ideas these narratives draw on, what they reveal about the ethical, aesthetic and practical concerns of Islay farmers and the relations through which the landscape emerges. I also consider the more general role of narrating as a practice enabling the experience of landscape to be rendered significant, intelligible and communicable.

Farming in Islay: From Diversity to Diversification Appreciating both the particular circumstances of individual farmers and the development of the Islay landscape requires a broader historical narrative of agriculture on the island, particularly during the second half of the twentieth century, one that itself draws together other narratives from books, newspapers and the stories people in Islay told me.1 The personal narratives of farmers that are explored later in the chapter entangle with certain recurring elements that are found within this broader history. The island of Islay is the southernmost of the Inner Hebrides. Travelling there involves a two-hour ferry journey from the west coast of the Scottish mainland. It is a relatively large and fertile island covering around six hundred square kilometres and with a population of approximately 3,500. The economic life of the island is dominated by three industries: livestock farming, tourism and, most famously, whisky distilling. Agriculture in Islay is more diverse than in other parts of the west Highlands and involves both full-time farming and part-time crofting and smallholding.

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Storrie (1965, 1981) attributes this diversity in part to the policies of Walter Frederick Campbell, who was the owner of Islay Estate in the early nineteenth century. Walter Frederick instigated a number of gradual changes to agriculture in response to the combined challenge of a rising population and agricultural recession. People were moved into planned villages to work in fishing or distilling and landholdings were amalgamated with the aim of increasing production and efficiency, a process that has continued into recent times. Those living in villages were provided with crofts nearby, whilst other areas were developed into larger, full-time farming operations. Two other ongoing trends that began in the late nineteenth century were the gradual break-up of Islay into smaller estates and the arrival of farmers from the mainland (Storrie 1988: 14). But despite these developments, agriculture was reported to be stagnant in Islay by Fraser Darling in his West Highland Survey (1955), which was conducted at the time Archie Baxter arrived to farm on the island. Darling, like Archie, noticed problems in the farming landscape and with people’s relations to it: ‘The standard of husbandry is generally low; many stretches of … arable have been let go and the condition of many houses is deplorable. Social life is at a low ebb’ (1955: 67). After the late 1940s, developments in agriculture gathered pace and these had profound effects on the social and ecological relations of the Islay landscape. Farms in Islay normally consist of two different types of land, rough ‘hill ground’ and better-quality arable ground. The system of grants and subsidies developed from the postwar years onwards, together with technological and biotechnological developments, influenced the quality and extent of hill and arable ground, as Archie explained: The tools which we have been given by the plant breeders have altered things dramatically. Yields are so much higher, and the persistence of the species. In that field and the field where the crofts were up here, were sown out about twenty years ago, it is still dominant rye grass and that is S23 rye grass and it’s persistent. Before that, we used to have Ayrshire rye grass, Irish rye grass. The most persistent was the Czech rye grass; that was the most persistent. But three years grazing and they needed to be ploughed up again and this is why you had your seven-course rotation. One year of hay and three years rotation. At that time your sown grasses were dying out and also the clovers were dying out. So did these new plant varieties put an end to the rotation system? Well, to the extent that you didn’t need to replace your grasses and also probably a greater understanding of management.

During the 1950s, Archie began to use these new grass strains and he was also the first farmer in Islay to use tractors in place of horses. Others soon followed and the varied rotational system of cropping that had once been standard practice was gradually replaced in favour of permanent pasture

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Figure 9.1. A typical Islay hill farm, with the rougher hill ground in the distance and improved pastures in the foreground.

for grazing or silage. Drainage of fields and the increased use of more efficient fertilisers and lime meant that arable land was more productive and that more hill land could be converted. The grants and subsidies that became available facilitated these developments, with significant effects on the landscape, as Archie explained to me when I asked him how he had viewed subsidies: Yes it was an extra and was perceived as an extra – a welcome extra – but certainly not as keeping you in business. It was allowing you to do more. In the 1960s there was the regeneration of hill land. For regeneration, for liming, slagging hill ground. I did some ground; I did the hill behind the house in 1962–63. I changed the face of that place completely because it was limed, slagged and rye grass and clover was put into and then it was harrowed. And that made a tremendous difference… It gave me a very good quality of rough grazing with a lot of clover in it for the next twenty years with a little bit of topping up here and there.

The changing hill and arable land was thus a measure of economic progress and the further incorporation of farms into a wider capitalist system or production (cf. Gray 1999: 444). Alongside these changes in the land came the introduction of new breeds of livestock, particularly ‘continental’ breeds, which were more productive but required better ground and more care than the hardy Scottish breeds. Farmers increasingly specialised in either beef or dairy cattle and farms became larger as economies of scale became more significant. ‘Islay was traditionally a dairy farming island’ (Cunninghame 1995: 1),

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according to a publication by an Islay farmer’s wife, but dairying was faring badly by the late 1990s. During my fieldwork, the creamery closed for the second and final time and with it went most farmers’ dairy herds. This crisis, together with the BSE crisis of the 1990s, made the economics of farming in Islay much more problematic. Many farmers’ wives took up jobs off the farm and farmers increasingly turned to diversification, particularly to tourism, for alternative sources of revenue. Farming people in Islay have long had a variety of backgrounds and there is a history of farmers coming to Islay and bringing with them new ideas and techniques, just as Archie did. In the postwar years, many arrived from the Scottish mainland but from the 1970s onwards most farmers came from England and some did not have any background in farming. A further development during this period was the break-up of Islay Estate, which meant that farmers in some parts of the island were able to buy their farms. They were then more easily able to expand their landholdings. This improved labour efficiency but also meant that many farm labourers lost their jobs, particularly as wage demands increased. The long-established hierarchy of landowner, tenant-farmer and farm worker thus became less prominent. A cause of greater concern was the lack of interest young people showed in farming, particularly after the decline in incomes forced by the BSE crisis. The Islay Young Farmers’ Club was disbanded in 1990 after fifty years of existence and there was genuine uncertainty over where the next generation would come from. Within this necessarily concise narrative there are certain recurring elements that intersect with the narratives explored later. Agriculture in Islay

Figure 9.2. The Islay Creamery after closure.

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is characterised by diversity, particularly in the size and type of agricultural units and the background of farming people. Diversity was significant because it was connected to the adaptation of farming to changes in the demands of the outside world. The theme of change is explicit throughout the above description, which encompasses observations about the sorts of changes that have occurred in the farming landscape, their origins and their effects in Islay. Change was understood to have occurred at varying rates. The gradual changes instigated during Walter Frederick Campbell’s lairdship gave way to the apparent stagnation that Fraser Darling described in the middle of the twentieth century. The modernisation and technologisation that followed were viewed positively in certain moments but also created anxieties about the effects that the wrong sorts of change might have, particularly on the perceived qualities of Islay’s agriculture. For example, it was perceived that new technologies had reduced diversity by enabling the further amalgamation of units at the expense of small farms, crofts and smallholdings (cf. Strathern 1992: 42–43). Farmers also tended to specialise in either beef or dairy cattle. These concerns about changes in the landscape, the relations through which these emerged and the loss of diversity crystallised around the relationship between Islay and the outside world. In much of ethnography on the Scottish Highlands and Islands the particularities of landscapes and the people who inhabit them are defined in opposition to the outside world (Cohen 1985, 1987; Macdonald 1997). What is local is what is different to elsewhere. Whilst Islay is widely perceived as distinctive, the notion of hybridity is central to this. Indeed Storrie (1981: 3) argues that the Islay landscape exhibits an anomalous mixture of Highland and Lowland features (cf. Lee 2007). These admixtures of characteristics that farmers see as creating productive diversity require the careful negotiation and incorporation of change. Change has long been considered to arrive in Islay from the outside but more recently the locus of change had grown ever more distant. Policy decisions shifted from the U.K. to Europe; incoming farmers, with their new ideas and technologies, came from England rather than the Scottish lowlands and some were not even from farming backgrounds; technological advances, promoted through agricultural policy and economic intervention, brought about a shift away from self-sufficient rotational systems and local livestock to more intensive, high-input approaches using continental breeds of livestock and bought-in supplements. Despite this, modernisation was not as pervasive in Islay as elsewhere but, as the personal narratives below suggest, the reliance on decisions, knowledge and values established at such great remove created uncertainty and anxiety. The sort of gradual, carefully negotiated and largely positive innovations that had once characterised farming in Islay had become less plausible, a sensibility exacerbated by the crises over BSE and the closure of the creamery. The qualities of the island, both social and environmental, were harder to reconcile with the

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ever-more-detached demands of markets and policy makers, and innovation, technology and financial support were not always effective in bridging this gap, as they had been able to during the postwar modernisation. Although adaptation to the changing demands of the outside world had always been a vital if complicated process in Islay’s agricultural industry, by the late 1990s these demands seemed ever more capricious and incongruent. The differences and interrelations that had once built dynamism had become more difficult to deal with (cf. Cohen 1987: 201) and the outside world presented a series of threats to the integrity and qualities of the farming landscape (Olwig 2003). The effects of these economic changes were also evident in the fabric of the farming community. The hierarchical system of landowner, tenant and farm worker was eroded, particularly in some parts of the island, because mechanisation took the place of most farm workers and many tenants bought up their farms. Whilst this meant that one set of distinctions was less ubiquitous, it was suggested that the Islay farming community had become more individualistic, with an attitude of ‘every man for himself’. This shift was exemplified in the relationship between diversity and diversification: the diversity of farming in Islay as a system on the one hand and the diversification of individual farms in order to meet ever-more-stringent economic parameters on the other. There were also fears of a loss in continuity and some farmers wondered whether there would be anyone to farm after they retired. Young people on the island lacked enthusiasm for a vocation that seemed to offer little reward for long hours and hard work, an opinion that few blamed them for holding. Even those who were interested were put off by the difficulty in building up an enterprise in an industry that had come to necessitate only large-scale endeavours. Despite these concerns, the farmers whom I spoke to were not lacking in strategies for making a living in the future. Some were still keen to build on the changes that had been revealed and emphasised over the previous few decades. This would mean specialising, expanding their land holdings and improving the quality of their stock. Some looked to niche markets for quality Scottish produce or unusual breeds. Others still were considering novel forms of diversification, seeing tourism and conservation as the most viable sources of income in the future.

Personal Negotiations of Landscape and Its Relations Now I turn to describing how two Islay farmers, Graham and Iain, perceived their circumstances and the farming landscape and the strategies they adopted to negotiate important relations. I begin by describing how they explained their relationship with their farms and their understanding of how their farming lives had changed. Both men also discussed new economic strategies that they had either developed or considered and the

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relationship between farming in Islay and the outside world. My intention is to illustrate how these ideas and strategies about farming, change and the outside world are interrelated. This is followed by a discussion of the efforts of another Islay farmer, Nick, to market his produce. In his publicity material Nick was able to reconfigure some of the contradictions and ambiguities of agriculture in Islay into a positive image of the traditional and the modern and incomers and locals, an image that drew on a particular rendering of the Islay landscape.

Graham and Iain Graham was the tenant of a large hill farm, which he had inherited in the late 1960s from his father who had come to Islay from the mainland. He gave me a quick tour of the farm in his Land Rover and as we went up the track to the farmhouse, Graham said that it had been impossible to drive up there when he and his father had first arrived. The man who had farmed there beforehand had been bankrupted; there was no fencing and the land was in a terrible state. Graham’s father had needed to invest heavily in fencing and drainage in order to make the farm more productive. Later on, I asked Graham if he thought he had ever got the farm into the condition that he wanted: Not really, partly because of the difficulties of being a tenant – the estate won’t help with things. My father fenced and drained the land and he spent a lot of money on improving. In those days there were lots of grants for these sorts of things though and it wasn’t so restrictive as these days. Now the department polices the farmers but in the 50s and 60s they were there to help farmers. The farm is tolerable but it’s not as good as I’d like. Time is the enemy and we don’t have the people working for us anymore. But we try and look after the land as if it’s our own though. One of the biggest compliments we’ve ever had was when a friend of ours passed by the farm and he said to us, ‘I know there’s definitely someone living up there.’

Farmers and crofters in Islay often told me rather similar stories about how they had worked to improve their land and to keep a good farm, and Graham’s description is very similar to Archie’s. Graham mentioned that when his family had taken over the tenancy the farm was in a run-down state and considerable effort was required to improve it. The poor state of these farms was signalled by the presence of rushes, scrub and weeds; broken or absent fences and a lack of drainage. As well as making productive farming more difficult, these were a sign of neglect, either caused by an inability to farm properly or an absence of people working the land. By ploughing, draining, fertilising and liming their land farmers were able to show others that ‘there’s definitely someone living up there’. The land thus allowed for improved production and by keeping the farm ‘in a good condition’ farmers like Graham and Archie were visibly representing their

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own labour. But despite this desire to embody the values of production and labour in their land, Graham admitted that his farm was not in an ideal state. He told me that such deficiencies were because ‘the estate won’t help with things’ and ‘we don’t have people working for us anymore’. The implication in these statements was that if the values of good farming did not emerge in his land then this was not because his aesthetic and practical values had changed but because external factors and relations prevented him from having the opportunity to fully realise these. Graham also asserted that the attitude of the government to farmers had changed. The decades after the war saw the government as facilitators, providing the farmers with assistance when and where it was required. The aims of farmers and government appeared to coincide and grants were easily available to improve land and increase production. But more recently the relationship between farmers and government had changed so that ‘now the department polices the farmers’. Farmers might still be receiving their subsidies – indeed they had become more reliant upon them – but the burden of responsibility on them had multiplied. In the spring of 2000 I interviewed Iain Taylor on the farm in Islay where he, his brother and his father worked. His father came from the mainland and had taken over the farm in the 1960s. Shortly before I interviewed Iain, the family had been forced to sell off their herd of dairy cattle following the closure of the creamery. Although he had specialised in dairy production he had also diversified into other areas, such as cutting and selling peat and a bed-and-breakfast business. Iain explained his economic strategies when I asked him why his family had persisted so long at dairying when many other farmers had converted to beef: Well, we support three families on it and it’s what we were brought up to do … It’s the stone which the whole business has been built round. It’s a lot of income. We were averaging around £70,000 and I think last year we were over a hundred thousand, so divide it up by twelve and that’s the average monthly income. You could bring in a lot of money regular. You have to be dedicated to it and that’s what we were brought up to do; it’s just part of the job.

I asked Iain if the management of the farm had changed over the years he had worked there: I’ve been working for my father for twenty-three years and when I left school we were milking sixty cows and had two hundred–odd ewes.2 And we just worked away. It’s progress, or whatever you want to call it – or maybe just wanting to do better. We used to cut silage at the end of June and then take a second cut in August. As time went on we started shutting off ground and trying to get grass early and getting the cows turned out. We’d be putting fertiliser on in the first week of March if we could and we’d cut silage twenty-first of May – that was the earliest we’ve ever cut silage. I think it might be the earliest silage anywhere. We’d take three cuts of silage. We’re just trying to do well – trying to do our job well and get good-quality silage. So it’s changed a lot

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from there – stock as well. It was always black-faced ewes and black-faced tups – a self-contained flock. But we’ve turned things on its head with a lot of cross ewes and Suffolks; finishing lambs, taking lambs right through till March. In the past they’d be sold in September – you’d be finished – but we don’t start selling lambs till November. So, I would like to think we’ve done not too bad really. Given half a chance we can make a fairly decent job on what isn’t that great a ground. If you had a boy come over here from the mainland and you said, ‘Go up to the Rhinns and have a hundred and fifty milk cows, two hundred–odd ewes and all their followers and all that’, they’d think you’d need a big ranch of a place to run that. This area here: it’s good grass-growing land if it gets a chance.

For Iain, progress is narrated in a way that seems strikingly quantitative. With three families to support they needed to make money from their land and their labour. Iain’s comments emphasised both a strong work ethic and a highly rationalised approach to farming. They worked hard to improve their land and thus the farm developed. This progress was measured quantitatively, in the money coming in from the dairying, the number of silage cuts and the numbers of livestock. Through hard work the Taylors were able to secure a large and regular income from the diversified strands of their business and this emerged through the increasing productivity of the farming business. This, Iain told me, was what he and his brother had ‘been brought up to do’. Progress and doing better might at first seem, in this case, to be a highly practical matter and the landscape a purely functional realisation of quantitative improvements in production, but the landscape is also understood as emerging through the hard work and daily rhythms of the Taylors. They have constituted it just as it has constituted them (Ingold 2000: 191).

Figure 9.3. Freshly cut grass for making into silage.

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When I asked Iain what he liked best about farming he answered: ‘It’s being your own boss. It’s just a way of life.’ But when I asked him if he would work on a farm elsewhere he replied, ‘I couldn’t work for someone else on a farm – easier ways of earning a living.’ For Iain, working hard and giving his farm a chance to produce had brought financial rewards. But independence and ‘being your own boss’ seemed at least as important to him. The rational pursuit of profit was not a constraint on this freedom but working for someone else, at least someone other than his father, would have been. Iain implied that the hard work was worth it if he was in charge but not if somebody else was. The landscape of the farm is thus entangled not just with activities and what these produce but also with the particular sorts of relations required for these practices to emerge in the desired way. When I asked Graham how he thought the relations between farmers had changed, he gave the following response: The biggest change over the years has been the reduction in the number of people employed – it’s mostly just a handful of big farmers. These days with farming, everyone’s out for themselves. It used to be that people would help each other but these days all the money is just ploughed into a few farmers. One other bad thing is that there’re a lot of incomers coming into farming on the island. People in the past like my own father were okay because they were from farming communities themselves but the newer people have no background at all quite often.

Like many of my informants, Graham described how he thought change had happened in the Islay farming community, or in some cases how change arrived there. Whilst incoming farmers, such as Graham’s father, were widely perceived to have brought with them valuable new methods and new technologies, he was concerned about more recent incoming farmers because they lacked farming backgrounds and so might not possess the appropriate skills. Incoming farmers were good so long as ‘they were from farming communities’ and were thus able to bring useful knowledge with them. Graham also considered that the farming community had become more atomised and individualistic, saying that ‘these days with farming, everyone’s out for themselves’. From the many interviews I conducted it was certainly clear that farmers in Islay were ‘doing their own thing’ and adopting individual strategies in response to the prevailing economic conditions and their perception of how these would develop in the future. Whilst Graham was showing me around his farm he explained how he had changed his approach to selling his livestock: I go to Huntly market in Aberdeenshire now and I sell the calves to be brought on by farmers on the mainland. It’s been the best thing I’ve ever done. I wasn’t happy with the price I was getting on Islay so I took a big double-decker trailer

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up to Huntly with about fifty or so calves in. The first year I did it I reckon I made several thousand extra on what I would have made in Islay.

Graham believed that two things were essential for successful livestock farming. Firstly, quality animals needed to be produced. Secondly, the right market had to be sought. Graham was clearly pleased that he had been able to secure the latter since he took the unusual step of selling his cattle on the mainland. His view that quality was essential was widely held amongst Islay farmers, many of whom strived hard to gain a reputation for producing excellent livestock. Unlike Graham, Iain had been forced into considering new strategies by the loss of his dairy herd. I asked him how this would affect the rest of the farm: If we’re replacing a hundred and odd milk cows with beef cows it’ll be farmed the same way because we need to provide the grass, we need to provide the silage and we need to provide the accommodation. If we go to sheep then there’ll be quite big changes. Basically it’ll just be ranched. We won’t be able to spend much money.

Iain’s uncertainty about the future derived from his experience over the previous few years, during which he and his family had ‘lost just about everything’. The best plan Iain could think of was to return to how things had been in the past, but the present circumstances rendered this unlikely. With recent events shaking his certainty in the future, Iain and his family were left with few choices other than a further tightening of belts and a farm that will ‘just be ranched’, suggesting that corners would be cut both financially and perhaps also aesthetically. The only other alternative that he mentioned would be to find more secure sources of employment, perhaps on the mainland where work was easier to find and better rewarded. There are three distinct strands to the strategies and plans for the future adopted by Iain and Graham. The first was to stick with the tried and tested ways of making a living – particularly improving quality and increasing the size of one’s landholding. Iain also thought about reducing his costs. The second was to consider new ways of earning money, such as wage labour. The way that Iain described this was as a necessity and not as something desirable. The third strategy was to look for new markets and new ways of selling produce. Graham had adopted this strategy with some success and evident pleasure. This was a form of individualism in farming that was both appealing and effective.

Nick and the Islay Fine Food Company Nick was an Englishman who farmed beef cattle and sheep in the west of the island. He used promotional literature and a website to advertise his produce under the label of ‘the Islay Fine Food Company’ (IFFC). What

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was most striking about the marketing material of the IFFC was the use of Islay and its particular attributes to sell the meat and emphasise its quality. The website was strewn with scenic photographs of the island and the naturalness and diversity of the landscape was emphasised in the writing (see also Lewis, this volume). The website explains: ‘The story of Islay Fine Food Co. starts with the natural beauty and richness of the island of Islay. The natural resources are the base on which the Islay economy is built. Farming, fishing, distilling and tourism all rely on the raw ingredients the island provides’ (Islay Fine Food Company 2004). Great emphasis was also placed on local people, their diversity, way of life and values: The Islay Fine Food Co. helps to support employment in a fragile island community. As everywhere in the world, it is people who make the difference, nowhere is this more so than on Islay. Where generations of islanders have worked side by side with newcomers to enrich the unspoiled lifestyle that is the Western Isles [sic] of Scotland. It is the rich and diverse persona of the Islay community that adds an extra dimension to the Island and its products. (IFFC 2004)

This quote was illustrated using a photograph of Archie Baxter. Finally, the marketing stressed the quality of the produce and linked this to the island’s whisky industry and particularly to the way that both distilling and farming combined the modern and the traditional: ‘[Islay] is an island where yesterday and today sit comfortably together: where traditional values complement modern technology in the Island’s farming and worldrenowned whisky industries: and where visitors can enjoy the unique experience that is Islay’ (IFFC 2004). What is striking about the marketing strategy of the IFFC is the way that it drew on many of the ideas within the narratives about landscape and social, economic and ecological relations I described earlier, but it did so in ways that contrast with the narratives that farmers gave to me. Whilst in other instances, farmers may have been ambivalent or hostile about the relationships between the modern and the traditional, incomers and locals and nature and culture, the IFFC put a positive spin on these. Islay was portrayed as a place that provided natural resources and traditional wisdom and values but also as somewhere that had successfully and seamlessly introduced the new and the modern to enhance local industries. The narrative of landscape and life in Islay presented by the IFFC to the outside world was not essentially different to the discourse within the Islay farming community. Its contrasting representation stemmed from the different ways in which farmers situated themselves: as struggling financially, as uncertain or disillusioned, as locals, as incomers or, in the case of Nick and the IFFC, as producers of quality foods. This marketing strategy did not so much deny the difficulties and ambiguities of farming in Islay but reinterpreted these same complexities to the outside world as a rural idyll. This is a version of the island that is not entirely out of kilter

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with the perceptions of people who live there, but is aimed clearly at a different, largely urban audience. In the words of Rapport and Overing, ‘“The rural” comes to be a repository for ways of life which are regarded as more natural, holistic and harmonious’ (2000: 315).

Negotiating with the Outside World Within the narratives I have described, three sets of interconnected ideas emerge. First, the morality of the productive relationship that farmers have with the landscape; second, farmers’ perceptions of the influence of the outside world in Islay; third, the ideas that farming people have about the past, the present and the future and the processes of continuity and change that inhabit these. A farmer’s productive relationship with landscape, whilst ostensibly about making a living, was also a way of expressing both continuity and change. Firstly, productive labour was an aspect of the idea of progress. Farmers considered it important to improve their land and to produce a greater number of good-quality livestock. Secondly, productive labour was explained as a way of maintaining self-sufficiency, independence and a link with the past. The unconstrained productive labour of the farmer could be fashioned in the landscape through the aesthetic and moral value of a good farm. The degree to which a farmer was able to attain such an ideal was an expression of their freedom from any external constraints on their ability to farm as they saw fit. For both of these reasons, farmers wished to show that their land was not neglected and that they appreciated the ethics of productivity that previous generations had held. As such, the idealised way of representing one’s labour was to minimise the appearance of any symbols of neglect, such as rushes, poor drainage or broken fences, and instead keep fields tidy and green, convert hill land to arable and produce a good number of high-quality livestock. This ethic of productivity, then, was not only connected with the promotion of change and intensification; it was also associated with the continuity of values that encouraged the maintenance of the appearance of productive land. The modern capacity for improvement, if carried through, would give the landscape an appearance at variance with the past but such an expression of productive values would doubtless have gladdened the hearts of previous generations of farmers, who had sometimes lacked the means to bring forth these values to the desired extent. This ethic of productive labour and its emergence in the landscape was intertwined with perceptions of the outside world and its effects in Islay. Broadly speaking, the outside world was associated with change (cf. Lewis, this volume). If Islay farmers perceived a change, particularly in their economic circumstances, then this could easily be related to something arriving from outside. These changes could take both positive and negative forms – positive in the sense of useful innovation and negative in

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the sense of external constraints. The outside world played an important role in the pursuit of progress through productive labour. Incoming farmers brought with them new ideas and new technologies and the government facilitated development through grants and subsidies. But the ideal of unfettered progress was no longer matched by reality. More recent incoming farmers rarely had the necessary knowledge and background to innovate and the government had become more concerned with using its support system to constrain rather than to facilitate. A farmer’s independence was now channelled into the more individualistic approach of ‘every man for himself’. Change from outside, which once seemed negotiable, had become increasingly detached and unpredictable because it no longer simply came and went on the ferry but emerged more forcibly through the distant machinations of government, the EU and global financial markets (cf. Gray 1999: 444–45). It was not surprising then that the response of some farmers to the capricious geopolitics of the farming economy was somewhat fatalistic. Iain, his family burdened by pressing economic necessities, saw the future as the inevitable continuation of a process of loss that he could only confront as best he could by relying on tried and tested methods or grudgingly diversifying. In his case the growing economic uncertainties gave onto a degree of world-weariness, but in Graham and Nick they provoked a modicum of inspiration. Both men decided to deal with the impersonality of the outside world by taking themselves out into it, attempting to understand its demands and communicating directly the special qualities of their produce. Their novel strategies might not necessarily succeed in the long term but as the outside world and its powerful influence for change became contingent on ever-more-distant circumstances, it appeared that farmers in Islay increasingly saw the need to engage with the wider world and renegotiate their livelihood.

Conclusion Earlier in this chapter, I posed the question of why narrative is so significant in the ways that people interact with and understand landscape. Whilst narrative is ubiquitous in human life (Rapport and Overing 2000: 284), I would argue that its significance to the specific appreciation of landscape can be understood in terms of temporality (Ingold 2000). Ingold presents temporality as an idea of time as immanent in the unfolding of events. Temporality thus emerges from the activity and movement of living beings and their rhythmic interrelations with one another. As such, temporality is not so much an aspect of nature, nor even of culture, but of dwelling: the embedded activities of people, and other organisms, in the world. Narrative has a kind of temporality too. In fact, narrating is both a temporal activity and about temporality. Like music it is rhythmic and,

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as Ingold (following Langer) argues, ‘the essence of rhythm lies in the successive building up and resolution of tension, on the principle that every resolution is itself a preparation for the next building up’ (2000: 197). Narrating, then, is a rhythmic activity through which significance is established by an ongoing sequential flow. As Rapport and Overing put it: ‘Time comes to have a certain texture, a way of its being humanly experienced, due to its being home to and punctuated by a certain flow and development of events’ (2000: 284). Narrating, like journeying, enables the temporality that is integral to the experience of landscape to be made coherent, explicable and comparable. Through its own temporality, narrating also allows for a situated vista that ‘gathers the past and future into itself’ (Ingold 2000: 196) such that speculation on prospects and possibilities emerges alongside an explanation of what has already taken place. Narrating further entangles the narrator within the landscape rather than providing a means of escape from it (see Tilley, this volume). This sort of temporality is evident in the narratives that emerged in my encounters with farmers in Islay and that I retell in this chapter. For example, Archie is able to draw together the development of plant breeds with his own experience of breaking in and improving fields. Iain narrates progress through numbers of livestock and silage cuts, but also through the experience of working the land with his father and brother. In describing his own experience of farming during his working life he speculates on how a visiting farmer from the mainland would react to seeing the farm and the numbers of livestock it holds. Finally Graham explores the changing relations of farming in order to contrast the background and knowledge of his own father with more recent incomers and to contextualise his new strategies for selling his produce. These narratives draw the past and future into the present, enabling the narrator to compare each with the others. The trajectory of change and continuity can be tracked and speculated upon in ways that are at once practical and aesthetic. The landscape and the relations that have given rise to it are assessed in terms of how it should and could be and the possibilities for future developments become the grounded focus for speculation. Landscape, as Ingold notes (2000: 203), is drawn together by movement within it and through this movement it can be understood and changes within it emerge. Whilst the experience of landscape is personal it also brings forth an awareness of how the landscape is influenced by a whole network of relations with others, relations that the ongoing, sequential movements of narrative unfold for further exploration.

Notes 1. For a more complete account, see Whitehouse (2004).

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2. The number of livestock kept by the Taylors had increased to 120 cows and 475 ewes at the time they sold the dairy herd.

References Bender, B. 2001. ‘Introduction’, in B. Bender and M. Winer (eds), Contested Landscapes: Movement, Exile and Place. Oxford: Berg, pp. 1–18. Cohen, A. P. 1985. The Symbolic Construction of Community. London: Routledge. ———. 1987. Whalsay: Symbol, Segment and Boundary in a Shetland Island Community. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Cunninghame, E. 1995. Farming among “The Green Hills of Islay”. Islay: Islay Farm Interpretation Group. Darling, F. F. 1955. West Highland Survey: An Essay in Human Ecology. London: Oxford University Press. Gray, J., 1999. ‘Open Spaces and Dwelling Places: Being at Home on Hill Farms in the Scottish Borders’, American Ethnologist 26(2): 440–60. Ingold, T. 2000. The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London: Routledge. Islay Fine Food Company. 2004. http://www.islayfinefood.com. [Accessed March 26, 2009]. Lee, J. 2007. ‘Experiencing Landscape: Orkney Hill Land and Farming’, Journal of Rural Studies 23(1): 88–100. Macdonald, S. 1997. Reimagining Culture: Histories, Identities and the Gaelic Renaissance. Oxford: Berg. Olwig, K. R. 2003. ‘Natives and Aliens in the National Landscape’, Landscape Research 28(1): 61–74. Rapport, N. and J. Overing. 2000. Social and Cultural Anthropology: The Key Concepts. London: Routledge. Storrie, M. 1965. ‘Landholdings and Settlement Evolution in West Highland Scotland’, Geografiska Annaler 47B: 138–61. ———. 1981. Islay: Biography of an Island. Port Ellen: Oa Press. ———. 1988. Continuity and Change: The Islay, Jura and Colonsay Agricultural Association 1838–1988. Port Ellen: Oa Press. Strathern, M. 1992. After Nature: English Kinship in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Whitehouse, A. 2004. ‘Negotiating Small Differences: Conservation Organisations and Farming in Islay’. Ph.D. dissertation, University of St Andrews.

10 Visible Relations and Invisible Realms Speech, Materiality and Two Manggarai Landscapes Catherine Allerton

Manggarai is the largest and most westerly region of the eastern Indonesian island of Flores, with a culturally and linguistically diverse population of over half a million. To the west of Manggarai lie a series of small, barren islands, whilst to the east the potholed ‘Trans-Flores Highway’ twists and turns through the villages of various ethnic groups. Though east Flores is fairly dry, Manggarai’s intense rainy season contributes to an extremely lush terrain of forested mountains, rice fields and, increasingly, small-scale coffee plantations. The heavy rains frequently wash away the western sections of the Trans-Flores Highway, which need continual rebuilding by teams of young men. As you travel on this bumpy highway, you frequently pass such teams, breaking up stones to patch up disintegrated sections of the road. However, roads and paths are not the only aspect of this terrain that may sometimes be obscured by the workings of time and inclement weather. For hidden in the land are many signs, energies and agents. This chapter takes seriously the significance of speech as an activity that – together with manifold nonverbal activities – constitutes the Manggarai landscape (see Lewis, this volume; Basu, this volume). By ‘landscape’ here I refer to a dynamic and potent matrix of places and pathways that is historically (and continually) constituted by human activity, whilst exercising an agency that shapes such activity. My approach to landscape is inspired by the work of Tim Ingold and Christopher Tilley who, in different ways, reject constructionist or representational arguments that would separate a ‘natural’ landscape from a culturally constructed or symbolic one. For Ingold, the escape from such Western philosophical divisions be-

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tween nature and culture is to be found in an ‘ontology of dwelling’ (2000: 42). Of particular significance to this paper is Ingold’s refusal, in the context of a discussion of hunter-gatherers, to separate ‘practical-technical’ activities from ‘mytho-religious’ ones (2000: 56). Instead, Ingold stresses that both subsistence activities and ‘singing, storytelling and the narration of myth’ are ‘ways of dwelling’ through which the environment ‘enters directly into the constitution of persons’ (2000: 57). Tilley, also inspired by phenomenological perspectives, stresses that places and landscapes should not be regarded ‘as systems of signs, or as texts or discourses’ (2004: 31). The way out of such representational approaches is, theoretically, to think of places and landscapes as agents and, methodologically, to focus on how landscapes are ‘synaesthetically experienced through the body’ (Tilley 2004: 28; see also Tilley, this volume; Scheldeman, this volume). Tilley’s stress on the agency of places and landscapes is extremely relevant to Manggarai, where the land is thought to have an ‘energy’ (ghas) that can occasionally kill. However, his privileging of bodily experience over speech threatens to replace one Western ideology – the separation of nature and culture – with another – the separation of words from things and subjects. To avoid this, it is helpful to consider the notion of ‘semiotic ideology’ developed by Webb Keane to describe ‘basic assumptions about what signs are and how they function in the world’ (2003: 419). Keane’s own recent work (2007) analyses a historical clash between the semiotic ideology of Dutch Calvinism – which saw speech and materiality as utterly distinct – and that of ancestral ritualists on the eastern Indonesian island of Sumba, for whom words and things were not so radically distinct. The semiotic ideology of Manggarai people has much in common with that of their Sumbanese neighbours and talk in Manggarai frequently involves a distinctive materiality. For example, if a person has a serious request to make of another, they may pass that other person a small sum of money as they speak, stressing the weight and significance of their words by intoning ‘scared you will think it is just my mouth’ (rantang le mu’u). This paper will show how, through offerings of betel quids or foodstuffs, talk is emplaced, becoming both an act of acknowledgment of a landscape of historical connections and an element in the ongoing constitution of that landscape. Although influenced by the phenomenological perspectives of Ingold and Tilley, the particular history of Manggarai villages makes me acutely aware of the politics of the landscape (see also Basu, this volume; Cruikshank, this volume; Grant, this volume, Lewis, this volume; Whitehouse, this volume). From the mid-1960s, many highland villages were relocated in the lowlands on the orders of government officials. This included the village where I have worked, Wae Rebo-Kombo, although somewhat unusually this community has managed to retain its highland site whilst moving many of its members near to the lowland church, school and market. Wae Rebo-Kombo residents continue to deal with government

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perceptions of their landscape, whether through projects to attract tourists by rebuilding traditional housing (Allerton 2003) or policies aimed at ‘preserving’ the forest. These political and economic factors may not completely determine the Manggarai landscape as a lived environment, but they do at times structure it in specific ways. This is why I find Barbara Bender’s work on the contested processes involved in landscape an important addition to more finely grained phenomenological perspectives. Bender speaks of ‘tensioned landscapes-in-movement’ that occur at every scale from the macro to the micro (2001: 5). This develops an argument, outlined in her earlier work, that ‘each individual holds many landscapes in tension’ (Bender 1993: 2). In this essay, I draw on Bender’s notion of ‘polysemic’ landscapes, rejecting any sense that there is one, overarching or overly coherent landscape for the people with whom I work. Instead, I outline two different landscapes that emerge in a range of speech genres. The first of these can be broadly categorised as a ‘collective landscape’ of ancestral movements and kinship connections. The second is a ‘personal landscape’ of revelatory dreams and idiosyncratic journeys. These landscapes are not necessarily in conflict, but emerge at different times and under different conditions. In addition, talk about both landscapes reveals a preoccupation with what is seen versus what is hidden in the land. However, before turning to forms of speech concerned with a ‘collective landscape’, I first need to say something regarding narrative and speech genres. Manggarai people themselves recognise a number of different speech genres. Perhaps the most distinctive of these is ritual speech, which accompanies the fairly regular performance of life-cycle and agricultural rituals during which chickens and occasionally animals are sacrificed. In southern Manggarai, ritual speech is known as tura, a word usually combined with that of the sacrificial object, whether a chicken (tura manuk) or buffalo (tura kaba). Such ritual speech, frequently involving the use of paired couplets, is found throughout eastern Indonesia, and is connected with the past times (and words) of the ancestors (Fox 1988). Although ritual speakers are always male, the couplets of ritual speech are well known by women. Since ritual speeches frequently contain spatial metaphors and place names, they are a key genre to consider in untangling the links between speech and landscape. Whilst ritual couplets are not narratives, these speeches as a whole are concerned with recounting a sequence of events befalling ancestral or other spirits, and therefore involve narrative elements. Other speech genres are also significant and are – sometimes very obviously and sometimes more obliquely – concerned with landscape. Gejék adat or ‘adat talk’ refers to any kind of talk that is considered ‘customary’. This includes greetings for guests, apologetic phrases, ways of addressing affines and short speeches addressed to ancestral or other spirits. Bundu refers both to ‘riddles’ used to entertain children and to forms of coded speech employed at times when spirits are thought to be listening, par-

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ticularly in fields following collective rituals. Nunduk are stories, such as those in the Bible, or those told to children, but also including village histories. The latter are also frequently referred to using the Indonesian word for ‘history’, sejarah. In addition to these explicitly recognised Manggarai genres, this essay focuses on two further speech genres: kinship histories and personal life stories. Although these two forms of narrative are not named locally, they are a fairly constant element of talk on buses, at hearth-sides and whilst walking up mountains. Kinship histories are told to explain, claim or emphasise connections between particular individuals and are linked with the formal recounting of connections in ritual speech. Personal life stories may be recounted privately by a friend in their house or garden hut, although the most tragic or exciting of these stories become part of village ‘history’.

Kinship, Ancestors and the Collective Landscape As mentioned, Wae Rebo-Kombo is a dual-sited village whose members move between the highland site of Wae Rebo and the satellite, lowland village of Kombo. My analysis of the connection between various speech genres and what I call the collective landscape begins with the story of the founding of Wae Rebo. I recorded similar versions of this narrative from both the community’s ‘ritual leader’ (tu’a adat) and its ‘village leader’ (tu’a golo). The narrative tells of how the ancestors first arrived in Manggarai from Minangkabau (in Sumatra). They moved from village to village, escaping political intrigue, warfare and ill health before eventually settling in Wae Rebo. There is much to say about this history that for reasons of space must go unsaid here. However, there are two key aspects of this narrative that I want to stress in connection with my main argument here. Firstly, the narrative reveals the historical connection between topographical features and ancestral actions. Thus, the history of Wae Rebo describes how the first ancestors planted the founding stone of Todo, the village whose leaders were appointed to the position of raja (‘king’) of Manggarai in the nineteenth century. The history also focuses on a female ancestor who planted a banyan tree in the village of Modo, in order to have something to tether her pigs to. Whenever people told parts or all of the history of Wae Rebo to me, they stressed that both the Todo stone and the Modo tree were still standing. They thereby made a claim to their ancestral connections with these places. Michael Scott has described how among Arosi in the southeast Solomon Islands even a ‘spontaneous partial illusion’ to a matrilineage narrative ‘performatively reproduces a lineage as inseparably wedded to a particular territory’ (2007: 163–64). Similarly, for Wae Rebo-Kombo residents, speaking of their ancestors’ role in the creation of topographical features in other villages reiterates their claim to ‘precedence’ over these villages.1

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The second key aspect of this narrative is that it reveals how the history of Wae Rebo is essentially the history of an ancestral journey from place to place. For example, after describing how the ancestors had to leave one site in the middle of the night because it was under siege, the tu’a adat’s history continued as follows: That night, the ancestors slept on a mountain-side and stayed there whilst they discussed which path to follow. Then they headed west, arriving in Wae Ntawang, sleeping in the forest and going from Wae Bangka to Besi to Dékét to Pérang. And then they arrived in Liho (Wontong), where they stopped safely for a time. They made shelters to live in and discussed having a lodok [ritual centre] for a field, and made a big house. Empo Maro was born in Liho, where the Wae Rebo ancestors lived for a long time.

Here, the names of sites that the ancestors travelled through or where they ‘stopped safely for a time’ are central. Indeed, during my first weeks of fieldwork, I was given a shortened version of this history, consisting of a list of place names. Both this summarised version and the longer historical narratives that I recorded can be seen as examples of what James Fox has called a topogeny, an ‘ordered succession of place names’ (1997: 91). Fox sees topogenies as prominent means for ordering and transmitting knowledge amongst Austronesian populations and directly compares the recitation of a topogeny with the recitation of a genealogy. Significantly, Fox argues that in eastern Indonesia, topogenies generally assume the form of a journey, whether of an ancestor, an origin group or an object. He stresses that whilst genealogy functions to establish a succession in time, topogeny functions to establish a succession in space (Fox 1997: 101). Topogeny is a particularly apt historical form for southern Manggarai, where there is very little interest in lengthy or elaborate genealogies. Rather, the ancestors tend to be talked of in very general terms and are significant precisely because of their association with place, the fertility of place and protection. Indeed, there is no clear boundary between ancestors (empo) and other spirits sometimes described as ‘ancestors of the land’ (empo de tana). It is noteworthy that in the narrative of the history of Wae Rebo, individual sites are named, even if they were only passed through, whilst the ancestors are spoken of in mostly general terms, with the mention of only Empo Maro, from whom all Wae Rebo-Kombo people claim to be descended. This allows for an undifferentiated, collective group of ancestors connected with the generally undifferentiated, present-day inhabitants of the one-clan village of Wae Rebo-Kombo. This lack of differentiation also resonates with the relative lack of hierarchy in Manggarai, as compared with other areas of eastern Indonesia that distinguish between nobles, commoners and the descendants of slaves (see Keane 1997). The listing of village names is also a significant feature of another genre: ritual speech. For example, at a large ritual in 1999 prior to planting the

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house-posts of a new drum house, the ritual speaker proclaimed the names of all the offshoot villages founded by Wae Rebo descendants: Ai, this Wae Rebo has grown (beka). The farming work that was started in the past. Langgur. The growth from Langgur, because it was crowded in Langgur, Wae Liang. Watu Weri. That’s to the east. To the west! Nandong! Some in Péla. Some in Béa-Raja. They are all in on this. Don’t you say, ancestors, ‘Where are some of those from the past?’ That’s what I’m saying; they are all in on this here.

The reciting of these names is significant since all major events in Wae Rebo, as an origin village, should be witnessed by representatives of these offshoot villages. In proclaiming ‘they are all in on this here’, the ritual speaker is stressing that representatives of all these dispersed descendants are present at the ritual. Indeed, the speaker creates a topogeny that is not about the historical foundation of Wae Rebo, but instead calls forth the past, present and future growth of its descendants. Like the historical narrative analysed above, this speech also constitutes a claim to Wae Rebo’s continuing ‘precedence’, naming numerous surrounding settlements in order to draw them back to the origin village. In Manggarai, names of villages refer both to places and to communities. Similarly, names of key sites within a village not only reference those sites as agents; they also summon associated people and spirits. Indeed, the particular semiotic ideology that underpins ritual speech assumes an intimate connection between names and agents. For example, a ritual speech before the temporary removal of Wae Rebo’s ancestral drums stressed that the speech was for all the places of the village to hear. Moreover, the ritual speaker went on to slowly call the names of all such places – from the named water source to certain stone platforms – as though to call these names was to awaken and summon the spirits of these places, thought to be both ancestors and ‘ancestors of the land’. In both everyday and ritual speech, pronouncing certain couplets – such as ‘hill where we sit, land where we live’ for a village or ‘door in front, corner below’ for a house – similarly refers both to a place and to its various inhabitants. These examples point further to the emergence of a collective landscape in ritual speech. To name sites where the ancestors stopped for a while, or where the descendants of these ancestors built new villages, establishes a landscape of historical connections. To call out place couplets is to speak of and, in a ritual context, to summon the full community (both living and dead) that inhabits that place. What is significant is that the power of speech to call into being a potent, collective landscape in this manner is occasionally at odds with the perspectives of outsiders. I was often told how, at the time of the founding of lowland villages in the 1960s, Wae Rebo residents had faced pressure to abandon their origin site. Informants recounted how one Indonesian civil servant had died shortly after visiting

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Wae Rebo to relay this message. This death was interpreted as either being caused by the general ‘energy of the land’ (ghas de tana), or by the ‘spirit’ (poti) who guards (tokong) the village. The strongest statement that I ever heard about the link between land, place-names and custom was made by the ritual leader (tu’a adat) of Wae Rebo. He described a church meeting in the past at which the priest and various teachers had called for the founding of a ‘Catholic organisation’ that would demand an end to certain ritual practices, such as throwing food for ancestors after a sacrifice. The tu’a adat described his opposition to this move as follows: What I said at that meeting, child, was this, ‘I will agree with a Catholic organisation’, I said, ‘if you change the name of this land of Manggarai, this area of Manggarai. Change the name of this area of Manggarai, change all the villages, change the flat lands, change the names of the rivers, then I’ll agree with a Catholic organisation. But if not, then I will not agree. The reason why it was called Manggarai in the past’, I said, ‘was because of all those customs. That’s why it is called Manggarai. If you cannot change that, teacher’, I said, ‘no, don’t do it.’

Here, the tu’a adat explicitly connects the name of the land of Manggarai, as well as the names of its many villages and rivers, with the practice of ritual sacrifice to the ancestors. Though the tu’a adat had once been a Catholic ‘religious teacher’ (guru agama) for the village, he felt that sacrificial ritual was intimately tied to the land as the container of ancestral and other spirits and energies. Again, it is important not to underestimate the significance here of clashing semiotic ideologies regarding the ‘real’ relationship of words to places and persons. So far, I have described how both historical narrative and ritual speech are examples of talk that calls into being a landscape of ancestral and kinship connections. Kinship stories and brief adat declarations also provide examples of speech as a form of social action that, in apparently acknowledging a collective landscape, also constitutes it. For instance, just as village history involves using named sites as mnemonics for ancestral journeys, so the location of flat stones marking the buried placentas of children acts as a spatial mnemonic when recounting family histories. One grandmother, Iné Sisi, once told me of her family’s movements from house to house in the village, pointing to the places where the placentas of her grandchildren had been buried. In addition to such stone markers, houses and paths may be used as devices to assert the ‘true’ nature of kinship connections. This can be seen particularly clearly in the kinds of procedures that are undertaken to ‘root’ people in their places of origin prior to significant life events or journeys. For example, before a young person leaves to attend high school or university, or before a groom sets out with his friends and kin for his major wedding rite, a ritual meal will often be held called ‘rooting the feet’ (wu’at wa’i). ‘Rooting’ is an extremely profound notion in Manggarai

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and is connected with the kinds of botanical kinship idioms common in eastern Indonesia (Fox 1971). Rooting, like topogeny, is concerned with origins in place and time. Rooting stresses where you come from – or, as Manggarai people put it, ‘not forgetting’ (toé hémong) – in order that you may move forward safely and productively in life. Rooting procedures constitute a claim to how connections between families really are, how the landscape really is, particularly by stressing the paramount importance of women’s natal kin. Thus, before my adoptive sister Teres left Wae Rebo to attend university in Kupang, a rooting ritual was held, not in Wae Rebo, but in Teres’s mother’s natal village of Kakor, the ‘wife-givers’ of Teres’s father. It was felt that Teres’s journey away from Manggarai in search of education should start in the place that was the source of her mother and therefore of herself.2 Rooting a person in an origin-place does not deny movement, since these rituals and meals are most noticeably held before a significant journey. Rather, rooting makes growth away from origins possible, allowing a person to travel safely and freely. One very everyday example of speech that creates this kind of rooted kinship landscape is when a baby or young child visits the house of one of its relatives for the first time. A woman will fetch a glass of water, dabbing some onto the forehead of the child and declaring ‘this is your house’ (ho’o mbaru hau). When a man who had moved to Kupang in West Timor to work visited Kombo with his wife and twin sons for the first time, much fuss was made of performing this miniritual every time that he visited the house of one of his patrilineal kin. This kind of brief adat speech – in which a connection is activated both by words and water – is on a continuum with the more elaborate histories and ritual speeches outlined above. For they all contribute to a sense of the sedimentation of kinship and ancestral linkages in a landscape of movement. In writing about the work of archaeologists as a kind of ‘deep probing’ into the landscape, Ingold has argued that they show how ‘meaning is there to be discovered in the landscape, if only we know how to attend to it’ (2000: 208). Similarly, the kind of talk that I have described here is for Manggarai people an act of acknowledgment, a process of opening one’s eyes to a landscape beyond land. Such talk, of course, does not simply reveal a static identity, but is a creative act in the constitution of a dynamic, collective landscape. One of the key questions to ask about these speech acts is why it is so important to dwell on the names of villages that the ancestors visited, or to tell a baby that the house they are visiting is theirs. To answer this, I need to turn to the connection between kinship places and health and in particular the notion of itang. Remembering and retelling landscape in southern Manggarai connects with the significance of ‘not forgetting’ (toé hémong) past relationships and familial connections. Retelling origins ensures the future flow of life, particularly with regard to marriage, which is surrounded by rules ensuring that the movement of women from one group to another is not reversed. Failing to remember origins and rela-

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tionships might put one at risk of forms of sickness that result from the reversing of marriage connections or the breaking of taboos. Such forms are known in general as itang and are thought to be particularly deadly. For example, when a new bride died shortly after her padong (marriage journey) to a lowland village, many saw this as the responsibility of her family, who had failed to ‘root’ (wu’at) her journey with her mother’s natal kin in Wae Rebo. It is the retelling and remembering of such connections that makes marital and other journeys safe. I was continually told by informants that for a person to ‘just go’ (lako kaut) on an important journey would be extremely unsatisfactory. For journeys, as for many aspects of life, it is only the rooting of a person in place, the acknowledging of origins that guarantees protection. When my informants talked in hushed tones about the relationship of one couple in the village (whose marriage connection was thought to be incestuous) they always dwelt on the fact that when this couple’s relationship was discovered, they fled Wae Rebo at night. To be place-less in this manner, to stumble down the mountain in the dark, is to be detached from house and village, about as far from rooted as it is possible to be.

Speech-offerings and the Material Landscape Before I move on to outline the second kind of landscape with which this essay is concerned, I want to say more about the connection between speech and the materiality of the landscape. During the many rituals that punctuate Manggarai life, speech is always accompanied by the placing of offerings. These usually consist of betel quids and small amounts of rice and cooked meat (known as ‘food for the ancestors’, hang empo), although offerings may also include eggs, wing feathers of chicken or a pig’s foot. In houses, offerings are placed on bamboo langkar platforms that hang from the rafters, and after rituals in fields, they are placed on specially constructed tripods of sticks and stones. Indeed, it is the accumulated evidence of various platforms and offerings that marks out the ritual centre (lodok) of a field. These offerings, and the temporary or stone platforms on which they are placed, are intensely connected with ritual speech. If ritual speech is concerned with revealing a collective landscape of ancestral connections, these platforms plant such speech in the land. I was told that these platforms and offerings provide ‘material evidence’ (barang bukti) to ancestral and other spirits that the correct rituals have been held, the correct speech spoken. Manggarai people may not express a ‘semiotic ideology’ as explicit as that found in Anakalang, Sumba, where people say ritual words must rest on the ‘base’ provided by material objects (Keane 1997). Nevertheless, it would be wrong to see ritual speech as separate from the material offerings it entails. Indeed, before the throwing of ‘food for the ancestors’, the ritual speaker talks whilst mixing up the

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Figure 10.1. An agricultural ritual in a new field, with flat stone and tripods on which to place offerings.

rice and meat mixture with one hand, as though he is literally mixing his words into the food. Just as ritual speech is not the only genre of talk that reveals the collective landscape, so other offerings are connected with less-elaborate speech. Thus, when a party of Manggarai people approach the edge of a village that they will be passing through or visiting, they always take care to stop and ‘offer a betel quid’ (waré sepa) to the ancestors of that place. This is usually done by an older woman in the group, who will place the betel quid on a large stone or rock with a short speech as follows: ‘Oh aunt, don’t call out in surprise! Don’t stroke us! Just look at us.’ This reflects widespread understandings that when a person enters an ancestral domain, certain ancestors (an aunt in this case) may be delighted to see their living relatives and may stroke and caress them. However, since the ancestors are people ‘from the other side’ (ata palé-sina), their salutations and caresses can make the living, particularly children, unwell. The gift of a betel quid in this instance acknowledges both the ancestor’s connection with a place, and their desire to show affection to descendants, but is in essence a request for distance between ancestors and the living. Indeed, these speech-offerings may be considered an attempt by Manggarai people to create barriers protecting them from the longing that the dead feel for the living. Maria, a woman in her forties, once described to me a time when she briefly visited a house in another village. As she sat down, she became aware of a terrible smell of rotting. She called out to the women of the house, ‘Quick, pass me a betel quid!’ and then ‘offered betel’ (waré

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sepa) to the ghost of a woman of that house. Maria told me that she had known this woman fairly well, but had not been able to visit the house to formally offer her ‘tears’ (wae lu’u) after the woman’s death.3 The terrible smell was that of the corpse of the deceased woman, who Maria had not yet formally ‘remembered’ (nuk). Finally remembering the woman by offering betel caused the smell to disappear as the ghost returned to the realm of the ancestors. These examples of ritual and everyday, planned and spontaneous offerings demonstrate how, in Manggarai, certain kinds of talk do not simply evoke a particular landscape but instead actively and materially constitute that landscape. Of course, unlike stone platforms, most offerings are fairly impermanent: betel quids rot or are blown away, ‘ancestral food’ is soon eaten by dogs and cats, bamboo tripods in fields eventually fall apart and platforms hanging in houses must be continually replaced. However, Manggarai people see such speech-offerings as acknowledging and ensuring the continued presence of ancestral and other spirits. Speech-offerings show how speech as an activity constituting the landscape is not only addressed to human ‘interlocutors’. Rather, as Andie Diane Palmer stresses with regard to Secwepemc discourse, the term interlocutor ‘refers to one who is engaged in conversation, as a speaker, a hearer, or both’ and may involve ‘others considered to be Persons, albeit of the non-human sort’ (2005: 17). In Manggarai, ancestral and other spirits are ‘interlocutors’ in this sense, listeners to both formal and informal talk and viewers of emplaced offerings.

Spirits, Dreams and Personal Landscapes So far in this essay, I have analysed the connection between various genres of speech and what can be called a ‘collective landscape’. I have suggested that whilst Manggarai people see such talk as revealing the visible and invisible aspects of this landscape of ancestral and kinship connections, we may also see it as actively constituting this landscape. In addition, I have shown the ways in which such talk may be emplaced by material offerings. By contrast with this collective landscape, the ‘personal landscapes’ to which I now turn emerge in stories that describe idiosyncratic and contingent connections to a hidden realm. These narratives of revelation, power and extraordinary journeys frequently constitute highly individual claims to specific, often medical, knowledge. Rather than attempting to make explicit the history encoded in a place as an act of ‘not forgetting’, these narratives are somewhat surrounded in mystery. The landscape that emerges in these narratives is one of shadows and spirits, where key places offer up spells for healing, but may also cause accidents and death. In addition to ancestors in general and ancestors of the land, Manggarai people also acknowledge a range of categories of ‘spirits’ (poti) or ‘people

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on the other side’ (ata palé-sina). The latter phrase suggests that spirits are thought to occupy a different dimension, the counterpart to human life on this side. Hence, it was continually stressed to me that despite spirits living as close to us in daily life as ‘a maize leaf and a maize cob’, ‘they can see us, but we cannot see them’. Although one may become aware of spirits through sound and smell, they can only be safely seen in dreams, the ‘other side’ of our daily existence (see Scott 2007: 173). Indeed, as I shall show, dreams are a central element in constituting personal landscapes. Whilst ritual speech and adat talk both call forth the ancestors with material offerings, the more ambiguous landscape of nonancestral spirits emerges only very obliquely in forms of speech. During certain phases of the agricultural cycle, it is felt important to use riddles or code-names (bundu) as a sign of respect for the spirit owners of animals and the land. To call the proper name of an animal at such times might be interpreted as arrogance by the spirits and result in negative consequences. This necessitates calling goats ‘on-top-of-a-stone’ (lobo-watu), horses ‘round foot’ (wa’i mongko), pigs ‘unspun rope’ (wahé lebang) and chickens ‘wing’ (lebé) in order to show that one is both humble and ‘polite’ (sopan). This speech demonstrates the speaker’s awareness of a landscape beyond land, of the unseen spirits and agents to whom one is advised to pay respect, and can be compared with avoidance or taboo languages elsewhere in Southeast Asia (Dix Grimes 1997: 126–27). Whilst a person fully knowledgeable of the collective landscape should not be surprised by the presence of ancestors or kinship links, more ambiguous spirits can and do surprise people. One woman described her son being frightened by signs of spirits when walking through the forest. She said that he sat down at the side of the path and instructed the spirits to no longer bother him, saying: ‘You who are going to Wae Rebo, this is your path; you who are going to Kombo, this is your path; and you who are going to the west, this is your path’. I now turn to three examples of the emergence of personal landscapes in individual ‘life story’ narratives. I begin with two rather extraordinary individuals, Fabianus and Paulinus, who were both thought to possess strong ‘magic’ (mbeko), the acquisition of which was connected with their travels. When I first knew him, Fabianus was an imposing man in his forties, the father of six children, an important healer and a very successful coffee farmer. However, a gap of ten years between his second and third oldest children indicated his rather unusual life history: between 1980 and 1990, Fabianus left Wae Rebo and his family to travel throughout Manggarai. In our conversations, Fabianus was intriguingly vague about how he had spent these years of travel, stating philosophically that he went to ‘search for the best way of making a living’ and to ‘gain experience’. Moreover, he indicated that this travel was motivated by some kind of command from a guardian spirit or angel and that he was also looking for healing spells and medicine (known as haung remang, ‘leaves and

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grasses’). It was when he found this, or rather when it was ‘just given’ (muing téing), that he returned to his family in Wae Rebo. This secretive ‘prayer just of my very own’ (ngaji leru kéta muing daku) is now the central element in Fabianus’s healing, acknowledged by all in the village as highly efficacious, the product of his powerful ability to travel through strangers’ lands. What is noteworthy about Fabianus’s stories regarding his past is that, by contrast with the collective histories considered above, they do not reveal anything specific about the landscape. Though he travelled through Manggarai for ten years, very few village names appear in Fabianus’s story. Though he implies that he has a personal connection with many places, he does not say where precisely and in what form he received his healing prayer. Instead, the story of his travels through the Manggarai landscape can be read as an individual claim to power and knowledge that obscures as much as it reveals. When I asked Fabianus why he never came back to the village during his travels he simply said: ‘I just didn’t.’ When I asked him if he forgot his family, he said ‘My schedule wasn’t finished.’ Fabianus’s vague story of his travels is well known in the village and Fabianus himself asserts that his healing powers protect him from harm because ‘God doesn’t agree with me dying’. He stresses that his house, up high in the steep fields above Wae Rebo, is associated with his magic and his protective ‘angel’: This place here, that’s why I made a house here, never mind if there’s a steep ravine above; if I’m here then rocks will not fall. [He describes how in the past a rock fell from the mountainside and should ‘really’ have hit him.] But no, never mind, I’m still on this earth, God forbade the rock to fall here, it was a rock this big! … It just stopped here on this hill … So if I travel, I’m not scared, I don’t have fear.

The second individual I want to describe is Paulinus, an extremely elderly man who had been the first person in the village to attend school and later became its first Catholic ‘religious teacher’ (guru agama). Unlike Fabianus, Paulinus’s life had followed a more regular trajectory of visits to other villages for work or ritual events, rather than a long voyage of discovery. Yet in a different way, Paulinus’s own powers of mbeko (magic) were connected with his personal landscape of unseen and protective forces. Paulinus told me how one night in the lowlands, long before the founding of Kombo, he had a dream in which a deceased grandparent, dressed in the clothes of a Catholic priest, told him to go to Wae Rebo. The next morning, he set off for the highland site. As he walked on the path near to the church, he rested on a stone and took off his shirt. Then, he said, there was a loud noise and he heard a different voice from the one in his dream. He was aware of being bathed in light and a rainbow appeared near to him. Paulinus described how the voice, whose ‘sign’ the rainbow was, told him that if he was far from Wae Rebo he should travel there. From that

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moment on, Paulinus said that whenever he travelled he had a voice that ‘pushes down and affects me’, though he had never seen the person or thing that was this voice and could not say for sure if it was God. Like Fabianus, Paulinus was also seen as a person with powerful healing spells. Moreover, like Fabianus, Paulinus connects this power with a particular voice that spoke to him at an unnamed place. However, Paulinus’s narrative also draws on Catholic imagery and the language of divine revelation and shows the importance of dreams in revealing the hidden power of the landscape. It is only whilst dreaming that most people are able to travel to unknown and mysterious realms, to meet with ‘people on the other side’ or to see spirit homes without endangering themselves. However, the landscape that such dreams reveal is personal and secretive. The bountiful harvest of one woman’s field was credited to the secret rituals she had held there after a particular dream. Healing spells are thought to be dangerous and can only be passed on safely in dreams. The ‘blowing’ (pur) of spells into roots such as ginger or turmeric demonstrates a different aspect of the materiality of speech. These spells only become efficacious when they take the material form of medicine. However, because of their secretive power, the ‘blowing’ is done almost silently by the healer.

Figure 10.2. Katarina sowing corn in a kinswoman’s field.

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Although women are also healers, they do not tend to speak of themselves as having the power to walk freely. One older woman, Katarina – whose narrative is the third that I wish to consider – had received her own protective healing spell from her deceased parents. However, she recounted to me a dream she had once had, when a spirit in the form of a python attempted to give her stronger ‘magic’: I remember a dream; there was a dog barking, down in Kombo, ai at the field on the way to the river. The field that is south from the flat land. The dog was barking to the mountains and to the sea … it was barking at a python. That python, it wasn’t that long … And its little tail was like this, crawling, crawling … I straight away drove him away. I said, ‘I don’t want to take your magic’, I said, ‘from a python; I’m scared. Yes, even if [the magic] is to give to me, I really don’t want to, I really don’t want anything that comes from a poti [spirit].’ It was like this … the python looked dizzy. He danced above the rock. I didn’t see him go down into the pool. It’s called the frightened pool, that field, that’s its name, the field of Junde’s father to the south. I really didn’t want [to receive the magic]. I said, ‘Hai! Ohhh … I don’t want the magic of that poti!’ Yes. Whether it was magic or whatever in the past, I don’t know.

The dream that Katarina describes – one that contains recognisable features such as ‘the field of Junde’s father’ – constitutes a rather fearful landscape beyond land, the mysterious energy and spirits of which are condensed in the figure of the dizzy-looking python. The theme of Katarina’s dream was echoed in another woman’s account of receiving a ‘test’ by a snake in a dream in the past. For Katarina, the magic that the python-spirit seemed to be offering her in the dream had to be rejected; others, though, may accept such offers in order to possess powerful magic. In the course of the narrative in which she described her temptation by this spirit, Katarina also revealed how her personal landscape hides sorrow and death. Katarina’s husband had been killed some years before, after he sustained a head injury from a rock that rolled down a steep hillside whilst he was working in the fields: It was a steep slope like this. Ai, he weeded down below that. That rock rolled down and hit him. Hit him on his gourd hat and made a loud crack. There was blood straight away. Eh. He was stolen, stolen by the poti west above there.

She described how her husband appeared to be relatively unaffected by the accident, until three days afterwards ‘there was a sign’: Eh, well, three days after, that was when it began … there was a sign. Ten’s mother happened to go outside and I heard a stone outside on the village yard make a rolling sound. And it hit Fenti’s father’s coffee trees behind and went ‘crack’! … ‘Eh, father of Ben [her husband]’, I said, ‘that’s the sign of your accident outside.’ I asked Ten’s mother … ‘Eh, Anna, did you throw a rock at a dog?’ ‘No!’ ‘Olé’, I said, ‘What rock was it that went rolling behind the house?’ … But wasn’t it just the ‘crack’ of his gourd hat. He was already gone, it was silent … Ah, that was when he fell unconscious, unconscious and shaking.

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In her narrative, Katarina interprets her husband’s accident as the result of the actions of an unnamed spirit in his field. He died because he was ‘stolen’ by the spirit, in the form of the rolling rock. Moreover, the ominous nature of the rolling rock that hits her husband is echoed by the sound of another stone three days after the accident. These rocks have a certain agency, whether connected with the malevolent intentions of a spirit, or whether they serve as a ‘sign’ of impending death.4 Indeed, people frequently told me of such signs or omens (alamat) that had appeared to them before a tragic event, whether noticing a large tree suddenly beginning to sway violently, or hearing a particular bird in the wrong place at the wrong time. Since these ‘signs’ are normally only seen by one individual, they demonstrate the distinctive agency of personal landscapes that not only reveal power and knowledge (as in the case of Fabianus and Paulinus), but also foretell individual tragedy and death.

Conclusion In writing of the Piro people of Amazonian Peru, Peter Gow (1995) has argued that what the Piro ‘see’ when they look at the land is very different to what observers from temperate climates might see. The Piro do not see dense rain forest, but instead see kinship, in the form of the evidence of current or past habitation. The Manggarai too, like the Piro and the Nivacle (Grant, this volume), see landscapes of kinship. However, people know that the land has many features, forces and energies that cannot easily be seen, but that need to be acknowledged by (and sometimes materialised in) speech. In this essay, rather than arguing for one coherent ‘Manggarai landscape’, I have distinguished between a ‘collective landscape’ constituted by various speech genres and ‘personal landscapes’ that emerge in individual life stories. Bender has argued that individuals may hold a number of landscapes ‘in tension’ (1993: 2–3) and the contrast between the two landscapes I have described is one between a collective matrix of places and paths that should be shared in order not to be ‘forgotten’ and a more idiosyncratic experience of dreams and travel that may be kept secret from others. In acknowledging the collective landscape of ancestral and kinship connection, various speech genres – from ritual speech to historical narrative to ‘customary’ talk – demonstrate the Manggarai concern with ‘not forgetting’, with continuing to reveal and make explicit past journeys or marriages. Such speech aims to reveal how things really are in order to ensure continued growth and health. Thus, a speech at a ritual to ‘root the feet’ (wu’at wa’i) will in effect reroot a traveller in their place of origin. Through remembering and retelling the landscape of kinship, people aim to prevent itang, forms of sickness caused by ignorance of the rules of ‘custom’ (adat) and in particular ignorance of origin-places. However, the

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landscape of kinship is of course not static but ever changing and this is why it is important to stress – despite what Manggarai people themselves might say – that it is not simply revealed but also constituted by speech acts. Talk about kinship may work like a kind of archaeology, scraping away at the land to reveal the sedimentation of children’s births, marriages and ancestral journeys. However, such talk is also always itself an act of landscaping, of accumulation. To call forth the names of villages of Wae Rebo descendants is to make a claim to the ritual precedence of Wae Rebo as an origin village. To interpret a bride’s death as the result of incorrect rooting is to dispute the claims of others to be an origin-source. If speech connected with the collective landscape emphasises the danger of not knowing or remembering connections, personal life stories acknowledge the unseen forces that may be a source of individual power to some, of fear or tragedy to others. Narratives of personal landscapes are frequently elusive, as compared with speech that self-consciously reveals the collective landscape of kinship. Fabianus, for example, is a person who is thought to know a great deal, but who ultimately chooses to reveal virtually nothing about the ten-year journey from which he draws such renown, or the nature of his medicine. By contrast, Katarina is a woman who, when confronted with the possibility of greater knowledge in the form of a dream, deliberately chose to remain ignorant. These narratives, whilst demonstrating the significance of landscapes beyond the visible land, do not focus on revealing the ‘truth’ of history but are about more contingent and personal connections. Indeed, the claims to knowledge that these narratives involve partly depend on a certain mystery regarding the powers of the landscape. Like the Western Apache stories described so eloquently by Keith Basso (1996), Manggarai kinship, ritual and adat speech constitutes a distinctively moral landscape of remembered linkages and correctly rooted journeys. By contrast, the landscapes that emerge from narratives of dreams and spirits have a more ambiguous morality. Fabianus may put his powers to good use in healing (in particular in helping women in childbirth), but ‘magic’ can be used for immoral as well as moral ends. Indeed, it was precisely because of fear of the dangers of sorcery that Katarina chose to reject the magical knowledge offered to her by the spirit-snake in her dream. In concluding, I want to stress again the importance of paying attention to the ‘semiotic ideologies’ (Keane 2003) that lie behind our approaches and that may cause us to misunderstand the connections between words, things and subjects in particular contexts. Phenomenological approaches have set in motion an important critique of ‘constructionist’ accounts of landscape, but in their privileging of multisensory, bodily experience, they may be at risk of assuming a semiotic ideology that separates speech, materiality and subjects. In Manggarai, speech takes a material form in ritual offerings for the ancestors, betel quids for a deceased friend and medicinal roots made efficacious by ‘blown’ spells. Moreover, place-names are

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strongly linked to the customs, people and spirits of such places. Talk in Manggarai does not cover the land in symbolism and metaphor; rather, certain forms of speech materially constitute the landscape, particularly by ensuring the continued presence (and occasional distance) of ancestral spirits. It is the necessity to continually call these landscapes beyond land into being that explains why, after more than seventy years of Catholicism, sacrificial ritual remains a constant feature of southern Manggarai life.

Acknowledgements This essay is dedicated to the memory of Amé Paulinus, who recently died at a ripe old age that remains uncertain but probably exceeded one hundred. Fieldwork in Manggarai was conducted for nineteen months in 1997–1999, for four months in 2001, and with a week’s brief visit in 2005. I am grateful to the editors for organising the original Landscape and Narrative workshop, to fellow workshop participants for a stimulating discussion and to Nicolas Ellison in particular for very helpful comments on my initial essay. I would also like to thank Michael Lambek and Michael Scott, who both read an earlier draft and made characteristically astute comments.

Notes 1. ‘Precedence’ has been seen as a dominant preoccupation of Austronesian societies, and connotes ‘a priority in time but also a priority of position, rank or status’ (Fox 1996: 9). 2. For more on the kinds of journeys that constitute paths of marriage, as well as the gendered nature of travel in Manggarai, see Allerton (2004). 3. ‘Tears’ are small sums of money paid to the bereaved after a death and are both an acknowledgment of loss and a practical means of support used to purchase coffee, sugar and rice for guests. 4. Among the Wamira, stones also have a kind of agency, since they are believed not only to reproduce but also to walk around (Kahn 1990).

References Allerton, C. 2003. ‘Authentic Housing, Authentic Culture? Transforming a Village into a “Tourist Site” in Manggarai, Eastern Indonesia’, Indonesia and the Malay World 31: 119–28. ———. 2004. ‘The Path of Marriage: Journeys and Transformation in Eastern Indonesia’, Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde (BKI) 160(2/3): 339–62.

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Basso, K. H. 1996. ‘Wisdom Sits in Places: Notes on a Western Apache Landscape’, in S. Feld and K. H. Basso (eds), Senses of Place. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, pp. 53–90. Bender, B. (ed.). 1993. Landscape: Politics and Perspectives. Oxford: Berg. ———. 2001. ‘Introduction’, in B. Bender and M. Winer (eds), Contested Landscapes: Movement, Exile and Place. Oxford: Berg, pp. 1–18. Dix Grimes, B. 1997. ‘Knowing your Place: Representing Relations of Precedence and Origin on the Buru Landscape’, in J. J. Fox (ed.), The Poetic Power of Place: Comparative Perspectives on Austronesian Ideas of Locality. Canberra: Department of Anthropology, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University, pp. 116–31. Fox, J. J. 1971. ‘Sister’s Child as Plant – Metaphors in an Idiom of Consanguinity’, in R. Needham (ed.), Rethinking Kinship and Marriage. London: Tavistock, pp. 219–52. ———. (ed.). 1988. To Speak in Pairs: Essays on the Ritual Languages of Eastern Indonesia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1996. ‘Introduction’, in J. J. Fox and C. Sather (eds), Origins, Ancestry and Alliance: Explorations in Austronesian Ethnography. Canberra: Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University, pp. 1–17. ———. 1997. ‘Genealogy and Topogeny: Towards an Ethnography of Rotinese Ritual Place Names’, in J. J. Fox (ed.), The Poetic Power of Place: Comparative Perspectives on Austronesian Ideas of Locality. Canberra: Department of Anthropology, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University, pp. 91–102. Gow, P. 1995. ‘Land, People and Paper in Western Amazonia’, in E. Hirsch and M. O’Hanlon (eds), The Anthropology of Landscape. Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 43–62. Ingold, T. 2000. The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London: Routledge. Kahn, M. 1990. ‘The Stone-faced Ancestors: The Spatial Anchoring of Myth in Wamira, Papua New Guinea’, Ethnology 29: 51–66. Keane, W. 1997. Signs of Recognition: Powers and Hazards of Representation in an Indonesian Society. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 2003. ‘Semiotics and the Social Analysis of Material Things’, in P. Manning (ed.), ‘Words and Beyond: Linguistic and Semiotic Studies of Sociocultural Order’, Special issue, Language and Communication 23: 409–25. ———. 2007. Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter. Berkeley: University of California Press. Palmer, A. D. 2005. Maps of Experience: The Anchoring of Land to Story in Secwepemc Discourse. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Scott, M. 2007. The Severed Snake: Matrilineages, Making Place and a Melanesian Christianity in Southeast Solomon Islands. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press. Tilley, C. 1994. A Phenomenology of Landscape: Places, Paths and Monuments. Oxford: Berg. ———. 2004. The Materiality of Stone: Explorations in Landscape Phenomenology. Oxford: Berg.

11 The Shape of the Land Tim Ingold

Landscape: The Word Over the years, a number of terms have entered the vocabulary of academic anthropology, and even of lay discourse, that have their origins in far-flung regions of the world, among peoples whose ways of speaking, knowing and being could hardly be more different from our own. Thus, native North America gave us ‘totem’, Polynesia ‘taboo’ and Siberia ‘shaman’. In every case, the term has a richness and multivocality in its region of origin that is lost in its co-option as a term of art for a universalising discourse. The same fate, however, has befallen words whose provenance lies much closer to home, yet which are of such historical depth that the contexts of their original usage are as far removed from our contemporary analytical endeavours as are those from which terms like totem, taboo and shaman were drawn. One such word is landscape. The story is often told of how the word was coined by Dutch artists of the seventeenth century to refer to a painterly depiction of natural scenery, or to the scenery itself to the extent that it evoked such a picture in the mind of a viewer (Hirsch 1995: 2). In Dutch, the word was written as landschap, initially Anglicised as landskip. Although it was indeed coopted in this sense to the painterly ends of what Svetlana Alpers (1983) has called the ‘art of describing’, the widely held belief that the notion of landscape has its origins in the practice of this art, and thus that it is irrevocably tainted by the sensory and scopic regime of its practitioners, is wholly mistaken. Indeed it makes no more sense to claim that ‘landscape’ originated with the Dutch painters of the seventeenth century than it does to say that ‘totem’ originated with Scottish anthropologists of the late nineteenth century or ‘taboo’ with Viennese psychoanalysts of the early twentieth. For as landskap (alternatively landscap, landskab or landskapr), the word had been around in what is now northern Europe and the Nordic countries at least since the Middle Ages, if not before. Just as

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anthropologists did with ‘totem’ and psychoanalysts with ‘taboo’, artists simply took it over and used it to serve their own purposes. The key difference between the fate of ‘landscape’ and those of ‘totem’ and ‘taboo’, however, was that it involved a translation across time rather than space. For this reason, its modern usage by scholars, painters and nowadays photographers, especially in European centres of learning and art, takes place against the background of persistent echoes from a premodern past. Etymologically, the suffix -skap, in landskap, is derived from the Old English sceppan or skyppan, meaning ‘to shape’ (Olwig 2008a: 82). Thus a landscape is literally a land shaped. Medieval shapers of the land, however, were not artists or architects but farmers and woodsmen, whose purpose was not to lend ideal form to the material world, or to render it in appearance rather than substance, but to wrest a living from the earth. Shape, for them, was no mere outline or exterior contour, nor was it a phantom of reality. It was as intrinsic to the constitution of the land as is weave to the constitution of cloth. Just as cloth is woven from the intertwined threads of warp and weft, so in medieval times, the land was scaped by the people who, with foot, axe and plough, and with the assistance of their domestic animals, trod, hacked and scratched their lines into the earth and thereby created its ever-evolving texture. This was work done close up, in an immediate, muscular and visceral engagement with wood, grass and soil – the very opposite of the distanced, contemplative and panoramic optic that the word ‘landscape’ conjures up in many minds today. But it was also distinctively agrarian. And this at once qualifies the applicability of the concept of landscape, in its original sense, to peoples whose ways of life are less sedentary, such as nomadic pastoralists and hunter-gatherers.

Landscape and Earth-sky If the agrarian landscape could be compared to a woven fabric, the way the land is worked into nomadic life might better be compared to the making of felt. Indeed, philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari have drawn on precisely this distinction between weaving and felting to substantiate their contrast between the ‘striated’ ground of sedentary farmers and the ‘smooth’ ground of nomadic pastoralists. Felt, they say, is an antifabric. ‘It implies no separation of threads, no intertwining, only an entanglement of fibers’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 524–25). The ground of smooth space, likewise, is comprised of the entangled trajectories of growth and movement of people, animals and plants as they find a way through, following no predetermined direction but responding at every turn to the conditions of the moment and the possibilities they afford to carry on. Compared with the farmed landscape, straked with rigs, furrows and dykes, the ground presents itself to pastoral herdsmen as a patchwork of continuous variation, extending without limit in all directions. To follow the medieval

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precedent, and to identify the scaping of the land strictly with its striation, is clearly to render the concept of landscape inapplicable to such smooth ground. By what alternative concept, then, should we know it? The most exemplary form of smooth space is of course the ocean. The mariner ensconced in his vessel, feeling the waves as they lap the hull and catching the wind in his sails, all the while scanning the sky for the movements of birds by day and of the stars and other celestial bodies by night, is a point of rest in a world in which all around is in movement (Gladwin 1964: 171–72). In striving to rein in or harness the forces of the elements he is the precise opposite of the farmer who bends muscle and sinew to counteract the friction of an immobile and often unyielding earth, dragging himself and his equipment over the hard ground and inscribing tracks and pathways in the process. To describe the mariner’s surroundings from the farmer’s perspective, as a seascape (Cooney 2003), would be to confer on waves and troughs, or on becalmed or turbulent waters, a permanence and solidity that they lack in reality. The Vikings, who knew a thing or two about both farming and seafaring, compared their ships to horses, on which they rode the waves, but only very rarely to ploughs with which to furrow the ocean (Jesch 2008: 2–4). Setting sail, the mariner does not simply relinquish one set of surfaces, of the land, for another, of the sea. Rather he enters a world in which surfaces take second place to the circulations of the media in which they are formed. Here the grounded fixities of landscape give way to the aerial fluxes of wind and weather above, and the aquatic fluxes of tide and current below (Ingold 2006: 10). These fluxes, and not the surface of the sea, absorb the mariner’s effort and attention. The world he inhabits is not, then, a seascape but what we could call an ocean-sky. Let us now invert our customary point of view and, instead of viewing the sea from an agrarian perspective, consider the land from a maritime one. This is to think of the land as smooth space, rather than of the sea as striated. If, in the experience of the mariner, the world is a blend of sky and ocean, then for the nomad it is a blend of sky and earth. Pastoral herdsmen and hunter-gatherers, we could conclude, do not inhabit a landscape so much as an earth-sky world (Ingold 2007a). There are surfaces in this world, of course. But they are surfaces of a different kind. The landscape, carved and striated, has turned against the sky. It is, as Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 530) say, closed off and apportioned. But in the smooth space of the earth-sky world, the surfaces of the land – like those of the sea – open up to the sky and embrace it. In their ever-changing colours, and patterns of illumination and shade, they reflect its light; they resonate in their sounds to the passing winds, and in their feel underfoot or underhoof they respond to the dryness or humidity of the air, depending on heat or rainfall. In smooth space, to continue with Deleuze and Guattari, ‘there is no line separating earth and sky’ (1987: 421). One could not exist without the other.

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Landscape and Dwelling Another way of getting at the same difference, between the striated space of the landscape and the smooth space of the earth-sky world, would be through a comparison of types of dwellings. Among his whimsical reflections on design and the shape of things, Vilém Flusser (1999: 55–57) contrasts the solid walls of buildings with the screen walls of tents. The walls of the farmer’s cottage or outhouses, be they of stone or timber, are held down by the sheer weight of blocks or beams placed atop one another. The force of gravity allows the building to stand, but equally can bring it tumbling down. The walls of the tent, by contrast, are analogous to the sails of a ship. They are ‘wind-walls’. Within the enclosure formed by the four solid walls of the house, Flusser argues, things are possessed – ‘property is defined by walls’. But as a calming of the wind, a locus of rest in a turbulent world, the tent is a place where experiences are assembled, processed and disseminated in a way that precisely parallels the treatment of fibres in fashioning the material, such as felt, from which the screen walls of the tent are made. Indeed the very word screen suggests, to Flusser, a piece of material that is ‘open to experiences (open to the wind, open to the spirit) and that stores this experience’ (1999: 57). The carpet, another invention of nomads, embodies the same principle. But whereas with felt, there is no warp or weft – no entwining, only entanglement – in the carpet, the woollen weft conceals the striations of the stringy warp behind a smooth expanse of knots (Flusser 1999: 96). The difference is still more apparent if we take on the perspective of the resident of the cottage, on the one hand, or of the tent, on the other. The cottage is roofed, while a door and windows are set in the vertical walls. Floorboards provide insulation from direct contact with the earth. Imagining ourselves in such a building and looking out, we see the ground and the sky, separated by the line of the horizon. But now let us take up residence in a conical lodge, a type of nomadic tent dwelling that is widely distributed across northern North America and Eurasia. Squatting or lying on the earth, and looking up to where the light streams in through the smoke-hole at the apex, the feeling of the bare earth and the light of the sky are immediately combined in experience. In the conical lodge, earth and sky are not divided at the horizon, as they are when viewed through the cottage window, but unified at the centre, where the smoke from the hearth rises to meet the sky. In this regard the lodge has much in common with the vessel at sea. We have reports of Micronesian mariners lying on the bottom of their canoes when travelling far out of sight of land, feeling the swell with their bodies while fixing their gaze on the sky (Mack 2007: 12). In Mesolithic and Neolithic Scandinavia, where the sea appears to have been strongly associated with the world of the dead, excavated graves included canoes in which the bodies of the deceased were evidently laid – a tradition that extended to the Bronze Age and beyond (Bradley 2000:

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133–34). Though we may think of these burials as situated in a landscape, from the perspective of the deceased they were evidently laid to rest in an earth-sky world. There they are still, at least until disinterred by archaeologists, buried in the earth, but looking up into the sky. Although I have so far stressed the contrast between earth-sky and landscape, along the lines of the distinction between the smooth and the striated, the differences should not be overplayed. As even Deleuze and Guattari are forced to admit (1987: 525), the nomadic pastoralists of North Africa, unlike those of Inner Asia, make their tents from woven fabric rather than felt. Their attempt to get around this snag by arguing that unlike the weaving of sedentary people, which annexes the body to the interior space of the house, nomadic weaving indexes the body to the open, smooth space of the exterior, looks like a case of special pleading. Conversely, even the sedentary farmer, as he works his fields, ‘participates fully in the space of the wind, the space of tactile and sonorous qualities’ (1987: 531). As much as pastoralists weave cloth into the fabric of the striated, so peasants contend with wind and weather in the atmosphere of the smooth. Likewise the sea, although the archetype of smooth space, was gradually converted through voyages of colonial discovery and conquest into a space to be inscribed, as on the ruled pages of a manuscript. Commenting on the journals of Christopher Columbus, José Rabasa compares writing on the blank page with sailing in uncharted waters: ‘The ship’s rostrum and the pen’s stylus draw patterns on surfaces devoid of earlier traces’, enabling a writer-mariner like Columbus to lay claim to both text and territory (Rabasa 1993: 56). Even the Vikings spoke of carving the sea’s surface with their ships. In the smooth and the striated we are not, then, dealing with an opposition so much as with two ways of being that coexist in a tension that may be constructive or destructive. It is a tension epitomised in the idea of the thing.

Landscape and Thing We have already seen that the medieval landskap was land shaped by agrarian toil in woods and fields. But the term also had a political sense that was just as ancient, and just as rooted in agrarian practice. Landskap, in this sense, encompassed a vaguely delimited portion of land bound into the customary usages and subject to the unwritten laws of those who would meet together and resolve their affairs at a single ting, or place of assembly. Thus from earliest times, there was an intrinsic connection between landscape and thing. On the one hand as a gathering, a knotting together of life-courses and paths of activity, the thing enfolds the landscape. On the other hand as a source of law, the thing unfolds into the landscape – in the practices guided by it, of dwelling and habitation, and of tilling the soil. Yet as historical geographer Kenneth Olwig (2008b) ob-

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serves, in a brilliant account of the political landscape of medieval Jutland (now part of Denmark), the thing is an empty place. The countryside of Jutland is dotted with rounded earthen mounds or barrows, and many of these bear the name Tinghøj (‘Thing Hill’). In the past these were holy places, located along ancient lines of travel. Buried within the mounds are often chambered graves or tombs. They are so inconspicuous, however, that they can scarcely be discerned today. The most extraordinary quality of ting sites, Olwig remarks, lies in ‘their unmarked anonymity and the absence of monumental signs’ (2008b: 33). Olwig compares the paradox of the thing with that of the number zero, signifying in Indo-European cosmology the unknowable nothing from which everything comes. Imagine a traveller, making his way towards a thing-place along one of the tracks that leads there. In his sights, the thing appears as a speck in the landscape: a mere bump on the horizon of an otherwise striated surface. In itself, it is nothing. With its ‘womblike hollowness’ (Olwig 2008b: 33), the ting calls to mind the example of the empty jug in Martin Heidegger’s celebrated meditation on The Thing. The thinginess of the jug, Heidegger argues (1971: 166–74), lies neither in its physical substance nor in its formal appearance but in its capacity to gather, to hold and to give forth. Likewise the thing-place gathers the lives of people who dwell in the land, holds their collective memories and gives forth in the rulings and resolutions of unwritten law. But now let us suppose that the traveller, having come to the place, lays himself down to rest upon the mound. At once, the horizon disappears beyond the periphery of his visual awareness, which merges with the shimmering luminosity of the sky, while his body is wrapped in the embrace of the damp earth. What had been a speck in the landscape opens up from the inside to reveal the unbounded immensity of the earth-sky world. Such would be the experience of the mound itself, were it gifted with sensory awareness, as indeed it would be of the body or bodies buried beneath. As we have already seen in the case of prehistoric boat burials from the same region, the switch in perspective from moving towards a place in the landscape, to merging with it in the world of earth and sky, is associated with the transition from land to sea, and from life to death. In this switch, everything comes from nothing.

Landscape, Mound and Monument The burial mound, however, is not a monument, and the contrast between them bears critically on the question of how the modern sense of landscape differs from its medieval precursor. We generally think of the monument as a structurally coherent edifice, built to the specifications of an architectural design, and set upon solid foundations. But the mound has none of these attributes. In the principles of its formation, the mound is the very

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opposite of the monumental edifice. To construct an edifice, starting from the foundations, each successive piece has carefully and deliberately to be placed upon the last so that static equilibrium is maintained. The mound, however, builds up precisely because the materials of which it is made are continually falling down. Indeed whenever material is heaped up but allowed to settle of its own accord, it generally takes the form of a mound that is roughly circular in plan and bell-shaped in elevation. From molehills to ants’ nests, mounds are among the commonest forms in nature, but they often result from human activities too – think of shell middens, compost heaps, sandcastles and stone cairns. In every case the roundness of the form emerges spontaneously rather than by design, due to the way the pressure of material added from above displaces material already deposited, equally in all directions. Nor is the mound ever complete. One can always carry on adding further material. As it rises in height, the mound also expands at the base. Unlike the edifice, it is not tied to fixed foundations – indeed properly speaking, it has no foundations at all. Although every particle comes to rest on other particles, the mound as a whole does not rest upon the earth. For it is as much of the earth as on it. The mound that confronts us today is the cumulative by-product of all kinds of activities, carried on over long periods of time and not only by human beings. Burrowing animals, from worms to rabbits, have played their part in its evolution. The roots of trees, bushes and grasses, threading through its volume, have helped to fix it. The weather, and above all the rain, has shaped it internally and externally, in the creation of patterns of drainage and runoff. Crucially, these organic and hydrological processes continue in the present as they have always done in the past. To observe the mound today is to witness their going on. The mound, we could say, exists in its mounding. This is to think of it not as a finished object, standing on foundations and set over and against its surroundings, but as a locus of growth and regeneration where materials welling up from the earth mix and mingle with the fluxes of the weather in the ongoing production of life. The mound has not turned its back on us, as we might suppose, hiding secrets within its dark, enclosed interior that we can discover only by tunnelling in. On the contrary, it is open to the world. As the everemergent outcome of the interplay of cosmic forces and vital materials, the mound is not built but grows. Like the growth of the compost heap or ant’s nest, the mound’s mounding is the very process of life becoming earth.

Landscape and Memory Now as Olwig (2008b: 32) makes clear, thing-mounds are places of memory, gathering into themselves the custom and practice of the surrounding landscape. This is not to say, however, that memories are contained

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in them. ‘It is a common mistake’, notes historian Mary Carruthers, ‘to confuse the activity of remembering with the “things” humans may use to locate and cue their memories’ (1998: 40). Carruthers is concerned with the liturgical processions of early medieval pilgrims as they went from site to site. For these pilgrims, it mattered little whether any physical record remained at each site of the personages or events with which it was associated. What was real and authentic about the sites, for them, lay not in the objects to be found there, but in ‘the memory-work, the thinking to which they gave clues’ (1998: 42, original emphasis). Sites of pilgrimage, like things in the landscape, are places where the work of memory is carried on, not depositories in which to store its more durable products. Conversely, of course, the preservation of the past in such products holds no guarantee that it will be remembered. Countless edifices, intended by their architects to seal their immortality, lie buried and forgotten, lost in the mists of time. Others have been given a new lease of life in the modern project of state building, in an idiom that consigns the past to a bygone if heroic age. For example, the great stones of the parish of Jelling, erected by King Harald Bluetooth in the tenth century to the memory of himself and his parents, have been recast in monumental form as the ‘birth certificate’ of the state of Denmark (Olwig 2008b: 19–20). Carved with runic inscriptions, the stones speak, but in a language comprehensible only to antiquarians. What they may have meant to Harald and his contemporaries is strange to visitors today. It belongs to a different conversation. ‘At the Ting’, Olwig writes, ‘law was committed to living memory, whereas the monument literally chisels memory into dead stone’ (2008b: 33). The mound, as we have seen, is a thing, in a landscape of things. So too, writes Heidegger (1971: 182) in his essay on The Thing, are ‘tree and pond, … brook and hill, … each in its own way’. As the mound exists and indeed persists in its mounding, every thing is a going on, or better, a place where several goings on are gathered together. To observe a thing is to be invited in to the gathering – to participate, as Heidegger rather enigmatically put it, in ‘its thinging from out of the worlding world’ (1971: 181). This is just how the mound differs from the monument. For the monument, in Heidegger’s terms, is not a thing at all, but an object. What defines the object is its very ‘over-againstness’ in relation to the setting in which it is placed (1971: 167). It stands before us as a fait accompli, presenting its congealed, outer surfaces to our inspection. Where the mound, as a thing, invites us in, the monument shuts us out. It is closed, finished. Many erstwhile places of memory, of course, have now been designated as ancient monuments, and are assiduously preserved in what are imagined to have been their final forms. For visitors to leave marks or traces of their presence in such places is no longer to contribute to their formation but to threaten their preservation. A cairn, for example, is just a pile of stones that grows as every traveller, passing by a particular place, adds a stone picked up along the way as a memento of the trip. But a cairn that

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has been designated as a monument should remain untouched: to add or remove any stone would be to commit an act of despoliation. It is precisely this shift from mound to monument, or from thing to object, that differentiates the shaping of the land, in its modern sense, from its medieval precursor. In medieval times, the land was shaped by work in fields and forests, according to the law of the ting. The modern sense of shaping the land, by contrast, has its roots not in agrarian practice but in architecture. Since the Renaissance, it has been the conceit of the architectural profession that every built form is the realisation of a design, fully conceived by the intellect in advance of its realisation in the material. The architect would like to think that the building stands as the crystallisation of an original design concept, with all its components fixed in their proper places. Should any components be added, or taken away, the entire structure would be reduced to incoherence. Ideally, once finished the building should hold for all eternity to the form the architect intended for it, a monument to his original conception. ‘The whole idea of architecture’, writes the inventor and designer Stewart Brand, ‘is permanence’ (1994: 2). The same is true of the post-Renaissance idea of landscape, and there is indeed an intrinsic connection between the two ideas. Serving as both stage and scenery, the landscape is taken to furnish the solid foundation on which the architectural monument is erected and the scenic backdrop against which it is displayed or ‘set off’ to best advantage. Together, the monument and its landscape comprise a totality that is understood to be complete and fully formed. Here, land is to scape as material substance is to abstract form, and the land is shaped by their unification. In short, land-scape equals matter-form.

The Sense of Landscape The shape of the land, then, no longer lies in its weave, nor would one find it by following the striations of its texture, as does the ploughman as he cuts the earth of his fields, or the journeyman as he wends his way, most likely by foot, along its tracks and trails. It is found, rather, by a kind of back-projection by which the world is cast as though fully formed, in appearance but not substance – that is, as an image – upon the surface of the mind. This is to set up an optical relation between mind and world, a relation based on distance and detachment, as opposed to the close-range, ‘hands on’ or haptic engagement of a mind that sews itself into the land along the pathways of sensory involvement. This, no doubt, is why the concept of landscape is so often assumed to be tainted by a visualist bias, even though there is nothing in either ‘land’ or ‘scape’, if each be taken on its own, to suggest that this need be so. It is the relation between land as the worldly object of perception and scape as its mental image that is understood as an optical projection. The apparent

206 ◆ Tim Ingold

resemblance between scape and scope tends to bolster this understanding. The resemblance, however, is entirely fortuitous and has no foundation in etymology. ‘Scape’, as we have seen, comes from Old English sceppan, ‘to shape’. But ‘scope’ comes from the Greek skopein, ‘to look’. Skopos, according to Carruthers (1998: 79), ‘is literally the target of the bowman, the mark towards which he gazes as he aims’. It thus combines the sense of aim or goal with that of vision at a distance. For medieval thinkers, the first of these senses was undoubtedly predominant. Wisdom, in their meditative practice, lay in following a trail towards a destination, tracing the lines of the liturgical text as the pilgrim would trace pathways in the land (1998: 116). With the advent of modernity, however, the second sense, of distant vision or the aerial view, gained the upper hand. As Martin Jay (1988) has convincingly shown, there was not one such view or ‘scopic regime’ but several. The Dutch artists of the seventeenth century, who adopted the term landschap to describe their painting, exemplified just one of these, based on the idea of cartographic projection, a scaled mapping of the surface of the world onto the surface of canvas or paper (Jay 1998: 10–15). We should not necessarily assume, however, that the relation between land and scape identified above as ‘optical’ is confined to the sensory modality of vision, nor conversely, that the contrasting relation identified as ‘haptic’ is confined to the modality of touch. As Deleuze and Guattari stress (1987: 543–44), the opposition between the optical and the haptic should not be confused with that between eye and hand. In close-up work, the eye can be as myopically entwined in the fine grain of the world as the hand. Think of the seamstress, peering at her fabric as she draws in the threads, or the medieval scribe whose eye is caught up in the inky traces of his writing (Ingold 2007b: 92). The ears of the ploughman, too, are close to the ground, alert to the sounds of share against earth. In this sense, vision and hearing can be just as ‘haptic’ as touch. Conversely, to the extent that they mediate a relation of projection, the organs of touch and hearing can fulfil optical functions. This is how Descartes thought of blind touch, in his Optics of 1637. The blind, he thought, could use straight sticks to perceive the forms of objects at a distance, just as the sighted use light rays (Descartes 1988: 67). Likewise the gloved hand of the clinician, detective or curator, who handles possibly invisible objects in order to extract their form while ensuring that there should be no contact or exchange of materials across the surface of the skin, exerts an optical touch. In the case of hearing, we might compare the experience of the singer, whose very being is launched on the sound of her own voice, and of the audience whose ears, distributed around the auditorium, are both everywhere and nowhere. For the singer, the sound is her voice, for the audience the sound projects it. In recent years it has become fashionable to multiply sensory scapes. Thus we have soundscapes, touchscapes and smellscapes. We would have

The Shape of the Land ◆ 207

visionscapes too, were the term not rendered effectively redundant by the assumption, noted above, that landscape is already inherently visual. Yet all these neologisms, I would contend, imply an optical relation between mind and world. In every case, the scape is a formal mapping, in the mind, of the material world of sensory experience. I would like to conclude with the suggestion that to grasp the realities of quotidian life, we might do well to return to an earlier understanding of landscape – one that is closer to the ground, more haptic than optical. Though the inspiration for this move comes from Deleuze and Guattari, I have taken considerable liberties with their approach. For them, the opposition between the haptic and the optical corresponds to that between the smooth and the striated. In this, I believe they are fundamentally mistaken. The perception of striated space is just as close-up, if not closer, than that of smooth space: the difference between them lies in the extent to which practitioners’ perceptual engagements are with the surfaces of things or with the surrounding media – of earth, air and water. Are they launched with the winds and currents, or do they follow the lines of track, ridge and furrow along the ground? The inhabitant of striated space, as I have shown, sees, hears and touches the things of which the landscape is comprised and, in so doing, joins with them in their thinging – in their going on. In the smooth space of the earth-sky world, on the other hand, the perception of things is overwhelmed by the experiences of light, sound and feeling to which they open up. The optical ‘scapes’ generated by the scopic regimes of modernity, however, are neither striated nor smooth. In them, light, sound and feeling are reduced to vectors for the projection of final forms, cut out from the processes that give rise to them. These scapes can be viewed, studied, analysed, interpreted. But they cannot be inhabited. In order to regain a sense of what it feels like to inhabit the world, let us then rejoin the farmer, the herdsman and the mariner in following the material grain of the world’s becoming and in harnessing its forces and energies. There is beauty here, in the workshops of life, and not just in a ready-made world framed in the detached optic of aesthetic regard.

References Alpers, S. 1983. The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century. London: Penguin. Bradley, R. 2000. An Archaeology of Natural Places. London: Routledge. Brand, S. 1994. How Buildings Learn: What Happens to Them After They’re Built. London: Penguin. Carruthers, M. 1998. The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric and the Making of Images, 400–1200. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cooney, G. 2003. ‘Introduction: Seeing the Land from the Sea’, World Archaeology 35(3): 323–28.

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Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. B. Massumi. London: Continuum. Descartes, R. 1988. Descartes: Selected Philosophical Writings, trans. J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff and D. Murdoch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Flusser, V. 1999. The Shape of Things: A Philosophy of Design. London: Reaktion. Gladwin, T. 1964. ‘Culture and Logical Process’, in W. H. Goodenough (ed.), Explorations in Cultural Anthropology. New York: McGraw-Hill, pp. 167–77. Heidegger, M. 1971. Poetry, Language, Thought, trans A. Hofstadter. New York: Harper and Row. Hirsch, E. 1995. ‘Landscape: Between Place and Space’, in E. Hirsch and M. O’Hanlon (eds), The Anthropology of Landscape: Perspectives on Place and Space. Oxford: Clarendon, pp. 1–30. Ingold, T. 2006. ‘Rethinking the Animate, Re-animating Thought’, Ethnos 71(1): 9–20. ———. 2007a. ‘Earth, Sky, Wind and Weather’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.)13: S19–S38. ———. 2007b. Lines: A Brief History. London: Routledge. Jay, M. 1988. ‘Scopic Regimes of Modernity’, in H. Foster (ed.), Vision and Visuality (Dia Art Foundation Discussions in Contemporary Culture, no. 2). Seattle: Bay Press, pp. 3–23. Jesch, J. 2008. ‘The Threatening Wave: Norse Poetry and the Scottish Isles’. Paper presented at the conference on Maritime Societies of the Viking and Medieval World, Kirkwall, Orkney, June. Mack, J. 2007. ‘The Land Viewed from the Sea’, Azania: Archaeological Research in Africa 42(1): 1–14. Olwig, K. 2008a. ‘Performing on Landscape versus Doing Landscape: Perambulatory Practice, Sight and the Sense of Belonging’, in T. Ingold and J. Lee Vergunst (eds), Ways of Walking: Ethnography and Practice on Foot. Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 81–91. ———. 2008b. ‘The Jutland Cipher: Unlocking the Meaning and Power of a Contested Landscape’, in M. Jones and K. R. Olwig (eds), Nordic Landscapes: Region and Belonging on the Northern Edge of Europe. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 12–49. Rabasa, J. 1993. Inventing A-M-E-R-I-C-A: Spanish Historiography and the Formation of Eurocentrism. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.

Contributors

Catherine Allerton is a lecturer in anthropology at the London School of Economics. She has conducted fieldwork in rural Flores, eastern Indonesia, since 1997, focusing on the significance of place and landscape, particularly with regard to processes of kinship and social change. A forthcoming book, provisionally entitled Potent Landscapes (University of Hawai’i Press), explores these themes, as do several articles and book chapters. In addition, Catherine has written on woven sarongs as superskins, whether unmarried women are lonely and the substances of hospitality. She is in the planning stages of a new research project with stateless children in Sabah, Malaysia. Arnar Árnason is a senior lecturer in the Department of Anthropology, University of Aberdeen. He has conducted fieldwork in northern England, Japan, Scotland and Iceland. His research interests centre on death, grief and the politics of emotion and subjectivity on the one hand, and landscape, narrative and identity on the other. These interests are brought together in work on death on the road and roadside memorials. Paul Basu is Reader in Material Culture and Museum Studies at University College London. He is a social anthropologist specializing in cultural heritage, landscape and memory, and is particularly interested in how these relate to historical and contemporary migrations of people and things. He is currently writing a book on cultural heritage and national consciousness in Sierra Leone, whilst much of his earlier research explored the mnemonic presence of ruins in the Scottish Highland landscape and the associated practice of genealogical ‘roots tourism’ among people of Scottish Highland descent dispersed throughout the world. He is author of Highland Homecomings: Genealogy and Heritage Tourism in the Scottish Diaspora (Routledge, 2007). Julie Cruikshank is Professor Emerita in the Department of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, where she also held the

210 ◆ Notes on Contributors

McLean Chair in Canadian Studies, 2001–2003. Her work centres on the living traditions of oral literature and storytelling in the Yukon Territory. Her publications trace the interplay between indigenous knowledge and narrative forms with experiences of landscape, colonialism, societal change and especially how differing cultural groups ‘know’ the natural world and their own agency. Her most recent book, Do Glaciers Listen? Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters and Social Imagination, explores these issues in northwestern North America. Nicolas Ellison is Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (campus Toulouse, Centre d’Anthropologie Sociale-LISST) and Research Fellow at the University of Aberdeen. His research interests are in environmental anthropology and how it allows a critical revisiting of economic anthropology, indigeneity and local and scientific knowledge systems. He has developed long-term ethnographic fieldwork in the Totonac region of Mexico and has published on perceptions and representations of the environment, landscape aesthetics and the performance of indigeneity. He was coeditor of the volume Paisaje, espacio y territorio. Reelaboraciones simbólicas y reconstrucciones identitarias en América Latina (Abya Yala, 2009). Suzanne Grant is a Medical Research Council (MRC) population health scientist fellow at the University of Dundee. She has a Ph.D. in social anthropology from the University of St Andrews (2006) based on two years’ ethnographic fieldwork in the Paraguayan Chaco and has since employed ethnographic methods to examine the impact of new public management and financial incentives on team working and professional identity in U.K. general practice. The MRC fellowship (2009–13) extends this work by investigating and synthesising ethnographic, metaethnographic and quantitative survey methods in order to understand, measure and communicate variations in organisational culture in U.K. general practice. Tim Ingold is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen. He has carried out ethnographic fieldwork in Lapland, and has written on environment, technology and social organisation in the circumpolar North; on evolutionary theory in anthropology, biology and history; on the role of animals in human society; on language and tool use and on environmental perception and skilled practice. He is currently exploring issues on the interface between anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture. His latest book, Being Alive, was published by Routledge in 2011. Sue Lewis is currently the Qualitative Research Specialist with the Research Design Service North East and Research Fellow in the School of Medicine and Health, Durham University. Her research interests include

Notes on Contributors ◆ 211

critical approaches to public health (with colleagues of the Smoking Interest Group, Centre for Medical Humanities), young people and risky health behaviour, and health inequalities. Despite this current focus, she maintains an active research interest in her original field, the sociocultural anthropology of the Isle of Man. She has published on the Island’s National Day, and a chapter on the Manx tradition of satirical verse is currently in review. Patrick Pérez is a lecturer in social and human sciences at the National Superior School of Architecture of Toulouse (since 1994). He also teaches at EHESS (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales) in Toulouse. He became a member of the LISST-Centre d’Anthropologie Sociale (CNRS, EHESS, Université de Toulouse) in 2006. Fully trained in both ethnology and architecture, he has conducted fieldwork with the Hopi Indians (Arizona), the Lacandon Mayan Indians (Chiapas, Mexico) and the Saint Georges villagers in French Guiana. His research interests include architecture, cognition of the environment and concepts of landscape and ‘nature’. He has published three books and forty papers in professional journals and edited volumes. Celeste Ray is Professor of Anthropology at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. Her books include Highland Heritage: Scottish Americans in the American South (2001), Signifying Serpents and Mardi Gras Runners (2003), Southern Heritage on Display: Public Ritual and Ethnic Diversity within Southern Regionalism (2003), Transatlantic Scots (2005) and Ethnicity (2007). Her current research interests are in ethnoecology and sacred landscapes. Griet Scheldeman is a research associate in the Lancaster Environment Centre at Lancaster University, U.K. Her research interests centre on perceptive and creative processes at play in the relationships between people and their environments. Since completing her Ph.D. in social anthropology (St Andrews, 2006) Scheldeman has published on adolescents’ lives with insulin pumps and on urban walking and cycling, reflecting on embodiment, everyday experience and sense making. Funded by a postdoctoral scholarship from the Research Council of Norway (2011–12) she is currently investigating creativity and improvisation in Arctic scientists’ field practices. Christopher Tilley is Professor of Archaeology and Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology, University College London. He has written widely on the relationship between social theory and the conceptualization of material forms. Recent books include Interpreting Landscapes (2010), Body and Image (2008) and Handbook of Material Culture (ed. 2006).

212 ◆ Notes on Contributors

Jo Vergunst is a lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen. His research interests are in rural society and landscapes in Scotland and Europe, focusing particularly on environmental governance and outdoor access, and in creativity and environmental art. Amongst his publications are the books Rural Transformations and Rural Policies in the UK and US, coedited with Mark Shucksmith, David Brown, Sally Shortall and Mildred Warner; Comparing Rural Development, coedited with Arnar Árnason and Mark Shucksmith and Ways of Walking, coedited with Tim Ingold. Andrew Whitehouse is a teaching fellow in anthropology at the University of Aberdeen, whose work focuses on environmental anthropology. His research has examined relations between conservation organisations and farmers on the Scottish island of Islay, attitudes towards birds of prey in Scotland and more recently into the ways in which people listen to birds and respond to their sounds.

Index

activated spaces, 68, 71 aesthetic(s), 1–2, 4–7 engagement, 35 environmental, 33 pleasure, 93 agency, 67–68, 72 of places, 179 agricultural improvement, 161, 170, 174 altars, 94 Amerindian communities, 83 Anasazi, 86, 90 Ancestors, 105, 180–89, 194 ancestral sprits, 141 Apaches, 92 architecture, 85–87 Arizona, 83, 86 art, 33–35, 39, 44, 47 Basso, Keith, 99–102, 106, 111–12 Banks, Roger 33, 35–48 Bateson, Gregory, 10 Baudelaire, Charles, 20 Bender, Barbara, 161–62 Benjamin, Walter, 20 Berger, John, 25 Bergson, Henri, 18 Berleant, Arnold, 33–34 Berque, Augustin, 2, 85 bird’s eye view (or plunging view), 87 Boas, Franz, 55 body, 1, 15–21, 25, 27–31, 88, 92–93 boundaries, 5–6, 10, 67–68, 78 Bourdieu, Pierre, 1, 17 Bronze Age, 141–42

Cairn, 117–136, 102, 203–204 calendars, 86, 94 Campo Loa, 68, 70–72, 77, 79n Carlson, Allen, 33 caves, 90, 93 Celts/Celtic, 140–41, 146–47, 151–52, 155n3, 155n6, 156n13 Certeau, Michel de, 21 Cézanne, Paul, 33, 46–47 Chaco Canyon, 90 China, 2, 85 climate histories, 49 cognitive mapping, 140, 152, 153 colonial encounters, 50 colours, 88–90, 92 community, 70, 72, 74–79 continuity and change, 167, 174, 176 Cosgrove, Denis, 2 Culloden (battlefield), 121, 124–26, 134, 136 Daniels, Stephen, 2 dark tourism, 118 de Laguna, Frederica, 52–53, 58 deities, 87–90, 93 Deleuze, Gilles and Guatarri, Félix 24, 201, 206–7 Denmark, 1 Descartes, Rene, 206 diaspora, 117–118, 122, 129, 131–32, 134–36 dwelling, 99, 101–2, 111, 200–201 Earth–sky, 198–202, 207

214 ◆ Index

economic strategies, 167–69, 171–72, 175 Emmons, George, 55 emotion, 1 energy, 179, 184, 192 Enlightenment, 54, 56, 59 ethics, 9 ethnography, 11–12 Europe (European), 85, 94 European colonialism, 49–50, 53, 58 European Union, 175 experience, 100–101, 104–6, 108, 111–12 farming, 105, 160–63, 165–76 subsidies, 163–64, 169, 175 fences, 71, 78 Flagstaff, 83, 90 flânerie, 20 Flores, 178 Flusser, Vilém, 200 folk liturgy, 139, 141, 142–44, 146, 149–51, 153 forgetting, 185, 188, 193 garden(s), 35 art, 85–86, 93 gathering, 16–19, 23–24, 29 Gell, Alfred, 22, 27–28 Germany, 1 giving environments, 143, 151, 153 Glacier Bay, 53, 56, 62–63 globalisation, 140, 154 Gran Chaco, 67, 78 Grand Canyon, 89 grand narratives, 162 Gray, John, 162, 164, 175 Gulf of Alaska, 52, 54 haptic, 205–7 healing, 188–92, 194 Heidegger, Martin, 3, 6, 10, 12, 202, 204 Highland Clearances, 117–18, 126, 130 Hirsch, Eric, 3, 12 homeland, 117, 127, 131, 134, 136 Hopi, 9, 83, 85–94 Huaorani, 23

husbandry, 23–25 hydrolatry, 140 ideal vs. material, 84, 89 incomers, 101 individualism, 172 Indochina, 85 Indonesia, 180, 182, 185 Ingold, Tim, 18–2, 99, 101, 104, 108, 111, 161, 170, 175–76 Ireland, 11 Iron Age, 141–42, 145–46, 148 Islay, 7, 9, 160–69, 171–76 Isle of Man, 8, 98–101, 103, 105, 107–9 Journeys, 5–6, 10, 68, 78 Kinship, 68–73, 75–79 La Pérouse, Jean–François de, 54–56, 59–60 labour, 162, 165, 169, 170, 172, 174 landscape(s), 1–12. See also paysage aesthetics, 174, 176 calendar, 91, 93 collective, 180–81, 183–89, 191, 193–94 cultural, 83–84 definitions and etymology, 15, 84–85, 99–100, 197–98 making, 93 mnemonic, 127, 131 narrative, 17, 20, 28–29, 104, 108, 116–20, 126–27, 129–30, 134–35, 161–62, 165, 173, 175–76 non-representational theory of, 178–79 of life, 98 personal, 180, 188–90, 192–94 politics, of, 179 polysemic, 180 prehistoric, 15, 27 sentient, 58 Landschaften, Germanic political entities, 1–2 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 88, 93–94 life stories, 49, 62

Index ◆ 215

linear grouping model, 70 lines, 198, 201–2, 206–7 longue durée, 140, 144, 146 Macpherson, James, 117–21, 133–35 Manggarai, 6, 178–91, 193–94 Manx Gaelic, 99, 101, 110, 112, 113n materiality, 16, 179, 186, 191, 194 meaning(s)/sense of the world, 84, 86, 89, 92, 94 memory, 19, 26, 33–34, 85–86, 89, 90, 92, 94n, 203–204 Mennonite(s), 67–70, 77–78 colonialisation, 67–68, 70–71, 73, 78 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 46–47 mesolithic, 140 microcosm, 88 migration, 116–118, 125, 127–130, 132, 134–35 mind, 93 miniature, miniaturisation (scales), 88, 93–94 monument, 116–19, 123–25, 128, 130, 133–35, 202, 205–5 moral, 84, 89–90 Morphy, Howard, 7–9 mound, 202–5 mountains, 90–91 Muir, John, 54, 56–57, 60–62 narrative, 10–11. See also landscape and grand narrative Navajos, 92 Neo Pagans New Agers, 140, 143, 150–52, 156n18 Neolithic, 141 Netherlands, 1 Nivaclé, 5–6, 9, 67–79 non–places, 68, 71–72 Olwig, Kenneth, 1–3, 8, 12, 18, 99–100, 109, 198, 201–4 optical, 205–7 order, 85, 88–90, 92–94 Ossian, 130, 134–35 Overing, Joanna, 10–11, 174–176 painting, 86, 93–94

Paraguay, 67–69, 71, 75, 77–78 Paraguayan Chaco, 5 parallax, 94n paths, 18, 22–25, 30, 73–75, 78 patterns (pattern days), 139, 141, 143, 155n4. See also the pattern paysage, French term for landscape, 2, 3, 9, 12 penal times, 141, 148, 150, 155n5 perception (of nature), 34 performance, 12 phenomenology, 4, 9, 11, 86–87 pilgrimage, 86, 92–93, 94n, 140– 43, 145–47, 149, 153, 154n2 pilgrims, 5, 11 place names/toponyms, 91, 140, 144, 154 poetry, 102–3, 112, 113n7, 114n20 pottery, 87–89 productivity, 170, 174 progress, 160–61, 163–65, 167, 169–71, 173–76 Pueblo people/Pueblos, 83, 86–88, 92–93, 94n Rapport, Nigel, 10, 174–176 reciprocating environments, 143, 151 ritual speech, 180–87, 189, 193 Rival, Laura, 23, 27 roads, 69, 71, 73, 78, 79 romantic movement, 19–20 roots, 106–7, 191, 194 routes, 1, 4–7, 10, 67–68, 75, 78 ruins, 125–26, 129 sacred trees, 141–42 saint cults, 144, 147–48, 155n10, 156n14, 156n15 Saint Elias Mountains/Icefields, 49, 62 Sauer, Carl, 84 Schwatka, Frederick, 54, 57–59, 62 Scotland, 116–23, 125, 127, 129–35 Scottish diaspora, 5 Scottish Highlands, 11 sea, 199–202 seeing and knowing, 73–74 semiotic ideology, 179, 183, 186, 194 smooth, 198–201, 207

216 ◆ Index

social knowledge, 21 soil/moul’, 100, 103–4, 106, 111–12 Sontag, Susan, 34 sowl, 103–4 speech, 178–81, 183–89, 191, 193–95 spirits, 180, 182–84, 186, 188–89, 192, 194–95 St Elias Icefields, Yukon, 6 Stein, Rolf, 85, 93 stewardship, 143–44, 150, 152 striated, 207 sublime, 55 Swanton, John, 53, 54 syncretism, 141–42, 144, 146–48

Tlingit, 50, 52–62 topogeny, 182–83, 185 Tsimshian, 53 Tynwald, 100–101, 111 Tynwald Day, Hill, 100–101

tales, as litanies, 102–5 Taskscape, 21–23, 28 temporality, 16 tents, 200–201 thalloo my vea, 99, 111–12 the pattern, 141, 145, 154 thing, 199, 201–4 Ting, 100

walking, 4, 5, 15–30 Warburg, Aby, 92 weaving, 198, 201 well-being, 150 writing, 85–86, 92 Wylie, John, 8

UNESCO, 51, 63, 84 United States, 83–84 Vancouver, George, 52, 56 visual knowledge, 73–74 volleyball, 70, 77 von Uexküll, Jakob, 2 votives, 141–44

Yukon Territory, 49, 63

EASA Series Published in Association with the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) Series Editor: Eeva Berglund, University of Helsinki Social anthropology in Europe is growing, and the variety of work being done is expanding. This series is intended to present the best of the work produced by members of the EASA, both in monographs and in edited collections. The studies in this series describe societies, processes, and institutions around the world and are intended for both scholarly and student readership.

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Current Policies and Practices in European Social Anthropology Education

11. ETHNOGRAPHIC PRACTICE IN THE PRESENT Edited by Marit Melhuus, Jon P. Mitchell and Helena Wulff

12. CULTURE WARS Context, Models and Anthropologists’ Accounts Edited by Deborah James, Evelyn Plaice and Christina Toren

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13. POWER AND MAGIC IN ITALY

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7. GOING FIRST CLASS?

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Claudia Liebelt

Edited by Vered Amit

8. EXPLORING REGIMES OF DISCIPLINE The Dynamics of Restraint Edited by Noel Dyck

9. KNOWING HOW TO KNOW Fieldwork and the Ethnographic Present Edited by Narmala Halstead, Eric Hirsch and Judith Okely

10. POSTSOCIALIST EUROPE Anthropological Perspectives from Home Edited by László Kürti and Peter Skalník

Filipina Domestic Workers in Israel

18. ORDINARY LIVES AND GRAND SCHEMES An Anthropology of Everyday Religion Edited by Samuli Schielke and Liza Debevec

19. LANDSCAPES BEYOND LAND Routes, Aesthetics, Narratives Edited by Arnar Árnason, Nicolas Ellison, Jo Vergunst and Andrew Whitehouse

20. CYBERIDENTITIES AT WAR The Moluccan Conflict on the Internet Birgit Bräuchler

21. FAMILY UPHEAVAL

25. FLEXIBLE CAPITALISM

Generation, Mobility and Relatedness Among Pakistani Migrants in Denmark

Exchange and Ambiguity at Work Edited by Jens Kjaerulff

Mikkel Rytter

22. PERIPHERAL VISION Politics, Technology, and Surveillance Catarina Frois

23. BEING HUMAN, BEING MIGRANT Senses of Self and Well-Being Edited by Anne Sigfrid Grønseth

24. BEING A STATE AND STATES OF BEING IN HIGHLAND GEORGIA Florian Mühlfried

26. CONTEMPORARY PAGAN AND NATIVE FAITH MOVEMENTS IN EUROPE Colonialist and Nationalist Impulses Edited by Kathryn Rountree

27. FIGURATION WORK Student Participation, Democracy and University Reform in a Global Knowledge Economy Gritt B. Nielsen