DAVID CARR'S THEORY OF EXPERIENCING TIMES PAST

This article is a review of David Carr's “Reflections on Temporal Perspective” in which Carr argues that present‐day historians or philosophers can experience the past, given that the past persists into the present and thus has a “presence” in contemporary life that makes it directly accessible to us. On that basis, Carr seeks to craft a phenomenological approach to history that puts experience in the place of representation and memory, rejecting thereby traditional notions of how we come to know and understand the past. Inherent in this approach is a new, and now widely shared, revision of our understanding of historical temporality, for such an experiencing of the past analytically demands a revised understanding of what “past” signifies when it is “present.” In this, Carr participates in a much broader movement in current historiography, which can be seen in the work of Frank Ankersmit, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Dominick LaCapra, Ewa Domanska, Eelco Runia, and others who focus on the persistence of the past in the present, embracing a materialist rather than linguistic or narrativist approach to historical research and writing. But if history signifies change over time, what “past” in the present do we actually experience? How is it logically possible to embrace both a commitment to the notion of historical development—as Carr does—and a notion of historical perseverance so powerful that the past as such survives and can be experienced? Carr's answer to this query is that “the present point of view is somehow permanent and yet always changing, framed at each moment by a different past and future.” What makes this possible, in his view, is the reality of superimposed temporalities, an idea he illustrates in his analysis of Braudel's La Mediterranée and other works. Hence it is precisely his “reflections on temporal perspective” that enable the experience of the past.     

The economics of reconciliation: tracing investment in Indigenous–settler relations

The relationship between Indigenous peoples and the settler state remains fraught due to ongoing violence and mistrust. Numerous attempts have been made to ‘reconcile’ this beleaguered relationship over the past three decades. Indigenous peoples have advocated for the decolonization of the settler state and a suitable land base using the language of public investment. In response, settler governments reframe these requests as opportunities for economic investment that is guaranteed to produce self-esteem and social inclusion for Indigenous peoples. This article documents and problematizes an ideological shift whereby holistic decolonial approaches to reconciliation give way to an investment rationale that is used to bypass demands for Indigenous peoples’ jurisdiction and self-determination. The ramifications of this shift are examined in three ‘eras of reconciliation' (Section 37 Constitutional Talks, Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, reparations for Indian residential school [IRS] Survivors) that also coincide with three types of investment: a) national; b) social; and c) therapeutic.     

Wak’a/shrine making and pilgrimage tourism in Copacabana,Bolivia

Abstract

The cultural landscape of the town of Copacabana and nearby ancient sites on Lake Titicaca, Bolivia, have functioned as magnetic places of pilgrimage from Inka times to the present. They are analyzed as landscape constructions through the eyes of political and religious authorities as well as through those of the common pilgrims in a bottom-up perspective from Inka to Colonial times and to the present. Methodologies used are study of pertaining archaeological data and Colonial documents complemented by ethnographic interviews and participant observation. The data demonstrate how the past is redefined in the present as local heritage in a landscape perceived as Andean as well as Christian. Throughout Andean history, Copacabana has been the land terminal for pilgrims to set over to the Islands of the Sun and Moon to visit empowered shrines (wak’as) viewed as places of emergence of the Sun and the first humans. This pilgrimage was fabricated into state ideology by the Inka from ca. A.D.1450–1550. After the Spanish invasion, Copacabana became the seat of a widely revered Virgin who attracts pilgrims from all over Bolivia and southern Peru. Ethnographic fieldwork was conducted in early August 2015 and 2017 during one of the pilgrimages. Most visitors identify as pilgrim-tourists and many walk to five spatially distinct but thematically related wak’ as at which the past coalesces with the present and the secular with the divine in passionate and colorful performances for family wellbeing. Discussions center on the limited spatial control of the Catholic Church and on the growing practice of making new wak’as in Andean terms to the Virgin at selected landscape features outside of town as a form of popular heritage. Findings demonstrate that local Aymara people are not passive Colonial victims but selectively adopt from their conquerors what they hope may help alleviate poverty.     

Exploring the land development process and its impact on urban form in Hamilton, Ontario

The form of many Canadian cities has dramatically evolved over the past six decades due to urban sprawl. Several patterns can characterize this evolution including unlimited horizontal expansion of the city, leapfrog, and low‐density residential development at the outskirts, and widespread strip commercial and power centre retail development. Hamilton, Ontario is an example of a Canadian city that has experienced suburbanization and sprawled development for several decades. However, the nature of this sprawled development is unclear and its impact on urban form is not entirely understood. In this article, several hypotheses pertaining to sprawled land development and urban form are postulated and tested. The tests rely on point source data of the developed land parcels in Hamilton during the period 1950–2003. A number of spatial statistics techniques, including kernel estimation and complete spatial randomness (CSR) K‐function tests, are employed to examine the emerging nature of urban form. We hypothesize that while the city has been sprawling, the ongoing land development process is leading urban form into multinucleation. To support this assumption, we further hypothesize the existence of an interdependent spatial relationship between residential and commercial land uses at the emerging nuclei. Accordingly, we examine the strength of co‐clustering among these land use activities over time. The findings indicate that while the city has been sprawling, several consequent urban nuclei with mixed land use activities have been emerging and become more visible in recent years. This is an indication that the city's form is progressively becoming multinuclear. Furthermore, the estimates for the 1990s indicate interdependence between the locational patterns of residential and commercial land development. Co‐clustering between these two types of land uses is bi‐directional and occurs at a time lag of three to seven years. These findings affirm the existence of interdependence between land use activities at the observed nuclei, which support the emergence of a multinucleation.     

Spatial pattern of land cover changes across Northeast China over the past 300 years

To accurately model the regional climatic effects of land use/cover change processes, precise reconstructions of historical land cover are essential. Over the past 300 years, the northeastern region has undergone more significant land cover change than any other region in China owing to large numbers of farmer migrants from North China, reflecting the tremendous effects human activities can have on such changes. In this paper, based on official statistical data, documentary records, survey data, and modern remote-sensing data and vegetation and soil maps, land cover changes across Northeast China over the past 300 years have been reconstructed through cropland data calibrations using correlation analysis, potential vegetation reconstructions, urban area estimations, spatial analyses of land cover type changes by K-mean clustering analysis, and consideration of land use driving forces. The results indicate that cropland expanded gradually from south to north through the cities of Shenyang, Jilin, and Ha’erbin as well as out to the margins of the central plain of Northeast China, with a maximum expansion occurring in the 1950s. Pristine forests and grasslands diminished significantly, especially in the early twentieth century, due to this expansion of cropland. The conclusions drawn from these results are, first, that these results provide a scientific understanding of the process by which the original land cover was replaced by cropland in Northeast China over the past 300 years. Second, the results enabled the development of a series of land use/cover changes maps with 50–100 year time resolutions and county-level spatial resolutions. Based on the reconstructed results of these land cover type changes, the dynamics and causes of land cover changes are discussed in their social–historical contexts.     

Viti,the Soil from Eden: On Historical Praxis as a Mode of Connecting in Kadavu

Looking at Fijian Methodism and its role in discourses on identity in Fiji leads to the question of the relationship between Christianity and the vanua, the complex notion of land so crucial for ethnic Fijians' traditionalistic identity constructions. How is it possible to retain important dimensions of the vanua within a Christian worldview? An attempt to understand this relationship using the example of a Fijian meke makes clear that specific ways of constructing the past are crucial here. A concept of history as a symbolic form renders these ways of constructing the past understandable as historical — and it is exactly this historical character which opens the possibility of establishing a relationship to the Christian God while retaining essential dimensions of the vanua, a possibility which can provide one experiential background for the plausibility of an ethnic interpretation of Christianity.     

Making and Mastering Violent Environments: Following the Infrastructures of Accumulation in Coastal Louisiana

Louisiana’s coastal wetlands have been disappearing at an alarming rate over the past several decades, with the greatest harm experienced by vulnerable populations (poor and racialised residents). It was not until 2005 that the state legislature responded with a much-lauded Master Plan tasked with integrating the construction of new flood control infrastructure with wetland restoration. Seeking to unsettle this initiative, we develop a historical-geographical materialist approach to follow the entanglements between infrastructural production and capital accumulation in Louisiana over the past several hundred years. In so doing, we present a two-fold argument: that the making and mastering infrastructural violence has always been part of the historical unfolding of the socio-spatial dynamics of capitalism; and that infrastructural development has played an integral role in this duality at every historical turn. The capitalist state, at both the federal and state levels, has played a vital role in producing and controlling this violence.     

DOCUMENT AND TIME

This article explores what it calls the “documentarist” hypothesis: the belief that the subject matter of history, the past, is structurally absent and thus can be reached only by way of documents, testamentary traces of various sorts (not only written texts, but artifacts, land arrangements, oral witnessing, and so on). The first part of the article works out the documentarist position through interpretations of creative works that embody it and of a variety of reflections on historiography—those of Michel de Certeau and Paul Ricoeur, as well as some “postmodern historiography.” It argues that documentarism ultimately faces an insoluble problem: it presupposes the pastness of the past, yet it cannot give itself the latter by way of the documents to which it believes itself confined. Documentarism assumes as already at hand a historical‐temporal horizon of past, present, and future, for which it itself cannot account. In the second part of the article, accordingly, I turn to the historiographical portion of Faulkner's The Bear to expose the operativity of this always already given temporality. Faulkner's tale gives us access to a more radical historicity than any upon which documentarists reckon; yet this historicity turns out to sit askew from the usual frameworks of history as we know them, especially those of periods and epochs. The tension in Faulkner's own work between periodizing and event‐laden explanations, I conclude, points to questions that fall beyond history as currently conceived.     

Land Rights under Stress in Darfur: A Volatile Dynamic of the Conflict

Abstract

The aggravation of land rights over time in Darfur was a primary factor in the initiation of the conflict, and has emerged as a particularly dif?cult set of issues in the search for viable peace. While the prospect of being able to keep land acquired in course of the conflict was a primary factor in recruitment for the Janjaweed, it came on the heels of a set of changes in the environment, land use and population patterns, institutions, law and governance that produced a highly unwieldy and volatile land rights scenario. This article explores the role of land tenure in the Darfur conflict, examining the aggravation of rights, custom, and law over time, and then focusing on two of the primary war-related tenure problems currently facing Darfur — use of land rights as tools of belligerence, and the land dispossession — secondary occupation problem.     

Human rights politics and scaled performances of memory: conflicts among the Madres de Plaza de Mayo in Argentina

This paper builds on the geographies of commemoration literature extending the scope of inquiry to consider the scaled performances through which the politics of memory unfold. I focus on an analysis of conflicts over the creation of memorial landscapes that emerge from the intricate ways in which representations of the past and the everyday politics of social movements intersect. The paper analyses the competing politics of memory of two groups of Madres de Plaza de Mayo (mothers of people who ‘disappeared’ during Argentina's Dirty War). Their strategies underscore geographic dimensions of the politics of memory as the Madres clash over how to appropriately place memory in the landscape. While one group emphasizes making visible the events of the past to promote transmission of memory and to remember those who disappeared, the other group focuses on re‐interpreting symbols about the past in an attempt to encourage future activism. Such conflicting strategies manifest spatially in a variety of ways, ranging from the creation of physical markers in the built environment to the performance of collective rituals that centre on activists' bodies as sites for either commemoration of the past or future activism. The Madres' conflicts highlight how different spatialities contribute to validate or condemn competing politics of commemoration.     

Renegotiating Barbuda's commons: recent changes in Barbudan open-range cattle herding

Barbuda remains little developed and sparsely populated relative to its neighbors in the Leeward Lesser Antilles, a rather extraordinary and relatively unknown Caribbean place. Much of its distinctiveness derives from the communal land-tenure system, itself rooted in three centuries of open-range cattle herding. Yet, as revealed through interviews, newspaper archives, and landscape observations, open-range cattle herding has declined over the past three decades, with related changes in land tenure. As the new Barbuda Land Act came into effect in 2008, codifying the communal tenure system, the very landscape elements that manifest open-range herding have become obscure. In particular, the rock-walled stockwells have become largely defunct, many of the walls lie in ruins or have been entirely consumed by the crusher that converted them into gravel to surface roads. With the principal land use that had supported communal control largely out of practice, usufruct access to land now largely obsolete, the new act might have little actual impact in preserving Barbuda's uniqueness.     

The afterlife of earthen-core buildings: A taphonomic study of threatened and effaced architecture in Central Belize

Buried architecture poses an interpretive challenge to field archaeologists the world over. The depositional sequence of the site must be reconstructed through excavation and stratigraphic analysis, and the various phases of construction and use that occurred in the past must be inferred. Effaced earthen-core architecture (e.g., architecture that was once faced with a masonry outer layer that is no longer present) constitutes a heightened challenge in this regard, as events and layers are not always clearly distinguishable, an interpretive difficulty that can be compounded when such architecture is threatened and decay accelerated by modern-day land use activities such as bulldozing and plowing. The case study presented here focuses on an ancient Maya E-Group architectural configuration—a triangular arrangement of structures that served to commemorate astronomical events, among other functions—that is being degraded through repetitive plowing. The significance of this site in regard to Maya archaeology is undeniable, as it was used and reused over a period of at least eight centuries. The site warranted a salvage-based approach designed to gather maximal quantities and types of data when only a minimal amount of time, labor, and funding was available. The procedure presented here was developed for a specific example of endangered, earthen-core Maya architecture in Belize; however, it is applicable to any archaeological project that faces similar obstacles in examining and documenting architecture before it is either eroded or intentionally destroyed.     

Amerigo Vespucci and His Alleged Awareness of America as a Separate Land Mass

ABSTRACT

The Florentine Amerigo Vespucci is widely believed to have been the first European to realize on his third voyage (May 1501 to September 1502) that America was a separate land mass, unconnected to Asia and completely surrounded by water, a communis opinio refuted in the present article. Close analysis of the geographical terms used in Vespucci’s letters, and their comparison with early sixteenth-century printed cosmographies, suggest that, on the contrary, Vespucci regarded the newly discovered land mass as a southern extension of the Asian continent. Also discussed are Matthias Ringmann’s 1507 Cosmographiae Introductio and Martin Waldseemüller’s 1507 world map, whose depiction of America as a separate land mass, allegedly based on Vespucci, paved the way for a concept that could not have been recognized as geographical truth in early sixteenth-century Europe.     

MEMORY,MEMORIALS, AND COMMEMORATION1

According to a popular view, the past is present here and now. This is presentism combined with endurantism: the past continuously persists through time to the present. By contrast, I argue that memories, memorials, and histories are of entities discontinuous with present experiences, and that the continuity between past and present in them is a construct. Memories, memorials, and histories are semantic means for dealing with the past. My presupposition that past and present are different is supported by grammar: as verbal tenses show, the past is not present here and now, for otherwise it would not be past. A failure to note this difference is a lack of chronesthesia, a sense of time specific to human beings. I argue that presentism fails to account for the temporal structures of memory and the changes in perspective as we switch from the present to a past situation. My account is perdurantist in the sense that it allows for temporal parts of things such as memorials or tombstones, as well as events such as wars or commemorations. But my main goal is to outline a semantic approach to the past: the tie between past and present actions and events is the semantic ground–consequence relation: a past event is the antecedent grounding a present situation, explaining why it is the case. In addition, I show how we refer to the past by means of two rhetorical figures of speech: synecdoche, using the (emblematic‐) part‐whole relation for relating the past to the present by transposing its sense; and anaphor, which has a deictic function—it points back toward the past. In references to the past, the deictic field is a scene visualized by the speaker and addressees: the deictic field is transposed from a perceptual to an imaginary space.     

Ruling by Record: The Meaning of Rights,Rules and Registration in an Andean Comunidad

This contribution looks at land property relations in a peasant community in the central highlands of Peru. Rather than using a rights‐based approach, the authors propose a ‘practice force field approach’ for their analysis of property relations under communal land tenure regimes. Their study combines qualitative ethnographic case studies with quantitative analysis of data on land distribution. In contrast to rights‐based approaches, this perspective understands the legal discourses that people draw upon to explain property relations as ‘justifying rule talk’ rather than the reflection of a system of property rights. It is shown how property relations are shaped in mediated interactive processes, where official rules, moral principles, shared histories and strategic games come together. The authors use this practice force field approach to study Usibamba, an Andean community that has developed a true disciplinary regime of communal governance based on control over land. The role of ‘rule talk’ and the function of elaborate local systems of land registration are examined in the context of the annual reallocation of communal land. Particular attention is paid to the performance of the president of the comunidad during this delicate process and his reflections on the course of events.     

Coral Roads and their Sorcery: Lost Authority and Spectral Commodification in Buka

Sorcery in Buka, Autonomous Region of Bougainville, is understood as reprehensible in most present contexts, but it is also believed to have once played a constructive role in maintaining social order. This mytheme is important both to the analysis of how traditional systems of sorcery come to be rearticulated in postcolonial contexts, and as a means of understanding how villagers conceptualise social order itself. Here, an analysis of the selective means by which vernacular forms of sorcery are assimilated to the Tok Pisin term poisen is presented together with an examination of the history of institutions of social control in which sorcery is remembered ‐ and forgotten ‐ to have played key roles. In the past, sorcery would have been gavman blong peles, a ‘village government’, a power over and from people, accumulated by the hierarchical integration of lineages within houses known as tsuhana. Sorcery has been privatized and commodified, slipping out of control of traditional authorities, who now pursue a strategy of achieving power over land. Power from people entails, in the Buka context, sorcery or other forms of internalised violence; power over land entails the assertion exclusivist genealogical claims. The pursuit of such claims is mediated by courts, and frequently creates rifts in communities. Sorcery, once freed from its role as government, returns to haunt traditional authorities as the spectre of their former power, and as the spectre of resistance to their current power: to the extent that they emphasize the historical role of poisen, the more they are suspected of it; imagined as the anarchy of jealousies, poisen multiplies in proportion to their success in parlaying forms of traditional authority into economic and political advantage.     

Property,Authority and Citizenship: Land Claims,Politics and the Dynamics of Social Division in West Africa

In the contemporary African context of rising competition and anxiety over access to land, neoliberal policy interventions designed to clarify property rights, broaden political participation and increase official accountability have frequently provoked rather than alleviated social and political conflict. Comparing case histories of local struggles over land and authority in selected rural areas in Ghana, Côte d'Ivoire and Bénin, this paper argues that in situations where access to land has been linked historically to claims on authority and social belonging, pressures to privatize or clarify ownership have intensified debates over citizenship and governance as well as over land claims per se. Ensuing struggles over land and entitlement have intersected with national as well as local economic and political dynamics, reinforcing ‘traditional’ hierarchies, contributing to the proliferation of formal and informal governing agents and institutions, and frequently disrupting or subverting open governance and sustainable resource use, rather than helping to create conditions for sustainable development and democratization.     

The Savage Science: Sigmund Freud,Psychoanalysis, and the History of Religion

This article analyzes how Freud takes issue with the prioritization of the present over and above the historical past. Significantly, Freud's understanding of history is closely related to his interest in Christianity's historical dependence on Jewish antiquity. He emphasizes the common sources of both religions: both are shaped by the experience of guilt. Christianity, however, relegates the historical past to the realm of the “old Adam.” According to Freud, Jewish culture, by contrast, revolves around the commemoration of a “savage” (i.e. pre‐modern) past. This article thus focuses on how Freud combines his analysis of onto‐genesis (in his psychoanalytical case studies) with a discussion of phylogeny. The manifestation of psychic illness gives body to the unconscious remembrance of phylogenetic history. Thanks to religious and literary documents an irrational past has been put down in writing. According to Freud, this characterizes their historical truth value.     

The Upper Paleolithic in Mediterranean Spain: A Review of Current Evidence

In spite of an active and sophisticated archaeological research program, the Paleolithic of the Iberian peninsula remains comparatively little known to English-speaking prehistorians, with the exception of Cantabrian Spain. The rich data set compiled by Spanish prehistorians and their colleagues over the past several decades stands to make a valuable and unique contribution to our understanding of the Pleistocene prehistory of Europe. We present a detailed overview of Upper Paleolithic chronology, sites, and assemblages for Mediterranean Spain, an area of over 1,600,000 km ² that extends from the French border to the Straits of Gibraltar. To interpret these data, we employ a regional perspective that emphasizes studies of paleoeconomy (especially zooarchaeology) and settlement. The Middle–Upper Paleolithic transition and Upper Paleolithic art also receive detailed treatment, and the Upper Paleolithic of Mediterranean Spain is discussed in the broader context of the late Upper Pleistocene of western Europe and the Mediterranean Basin.