Narrative Identity and Trauma: Sebald’s Memory Landscape

Narrative identity is said to consist of a few key reference points—places, events, peoples, ceremonies, rites, ideas, and values—that translate into sites of memory that are representative of a person’s or a community’s past. In this essay I explore the role of traumatic memories in the formation of collective identity, the national or transnational sites of memory that are officialized by the state. I argue that collective traumas need to be counterbalanced by personal memories that can diminish their pain and thus enable people to regain their lost sense of being at home. To demonstrate this claim I discuss the twentieth-century traumas that have affected European identity by and through the life stories of W. G. Sebald’s characters in The Emigrants (1992) and Austerlitz (2001), which combines the collective and the personal narrative identity. I conclude that the performative aspect of the past needs to be translated into personal forms of commemoration that surpass the official memory archive, which task requires a comprehensive and sensitive understanding of those traumas at both the individual and collective levels.     

Maritime Durées: Long-Term Structures in a Coastal Landscape

The interaction between humans and the maritime coastal landscape must be one of the central theoretical questions for maritime archaeology. How should an academic discipline, which is defined by its studies in a certain physical milieu, avoid the trap of environmental determinism and still be able to argue for the special influence of the maritime factor? And how should this long-term relation to the sea be interpreted and described? In this article, based mainly on material from the central Swedish Baltic Sea coast, three examples of long-term structures regarding the relationship between people and the sea are discussed. The structures, here called “maritime durees”, which almost all coastal habitants in the analyzed area seem to have had in common are linked to: exploitation of marine resources, communication over water and the mental presence of the sea. In conclusion the actual meaning of these long-term structures for everyday life and for cultural and social change are discussed in comparison to more short term structures: the changing historical circumstances and possibilities for people to choose different strategies.     

The Digital Landscape: New space for women? {1}

The expression 'Information is power' is widely used, particularly with reference to the imminent 'Information Age'. Yet women must ask, 'Whose information?' and 'Whose power?' if, as a large body of scholarly literature has suggested, women's relationship to information technologies is somehow problematic. In this article, I argue that electronic networks, bulletin boards, online conferences and other computer-mediated communications emphasizing women's issues can recast traditional notions of the computer and its relationship with women. While historically, the dominant groups in many societies have used their command of communications technologies as a means to consolidate their power, new communications technologies escaping centralised political or legal control can diversify information and offer alternative courses of action. Computer-mediated communications on the Internet currently offer these options, yet their future is uncertain. Women who engage with information technologies as the technology and the regulatory framework develop have the opportunity to influence the deployment of this medium, which in turn may have consequences for their sociopolitical status.     

Losing—and Salvaging?—the Rural Landscape of Graeco-Roman Philadelphia

Between Biblical ‘Ammon’ and Early Umayyad ‘Amman’ lie a thousand years of Graeco-Roman Philadelphia. During this period the population of the classical city and its hinterland reached a peak not seen again until the 20^th century. During the Middle Ages, however, the population shrank dramatically, the city was abandoned, an island of crumbling grandeur, surrounded by an equally depopulated landscape—the skeleton of a once thriving network of roads, villages, farms, monasteries, and field-systems. Even after re-settlement began at Amman in the 1870s, population in city and hinterland was thin and scattered, the abundant ruins often well-preserved. Development throughout the Belqa—the extensive fertile hinterland of Amman, was evident but relatively slow for some 70 years. After 1948, the impact of successive waves of refugees on top of a region-wide population explosion, began to transform the landscape and devastate the archaeological record. The process is accelerating and spreading. Even in the city, many substantial buildings captured on 19^th century photographs have been lost to development; in the hinterland, the vital rural context of a great Classical city has been extensively overwhelmed. Nevertheless, much can yet be salvaged. Beginning with Seetzen in 1806, westerners began to explore ‘east of Jordan’. Many recorded their observations and some mapped, painted, drew, and increasingly photographed—including from the air. Collectively, the corpus of evidence is considerable, ranging from the observations of scores of early western visitors to the more recent archaeological surveys of the 1970s. Appropriately for present purposes, outstanding amongst such visitors and explicitly scientific and systematic were the PEF surveys of Warren in 1867 and Conder in 1881.     

Nostalgia as Affective Landscape: Negotiating Displacement in the “World City”

Bangalore, an aspiring “world city”, is rapidly transforming as factories and mills are sold to private developers. As their neighbourhoods now accommodate multi-million-dollar gated communities and post-industrial labour markets, residents experience an in situ displacement, staying in place while landscapes around them dramatically reconfigure. This paper makes sense of how old-time residents locate themselves within such urban growth through nostalgic invocations of the past. Emplaced within histories and geographies of neighbourhood change, nostalgia creates “affective landscapes” through which residents invoke their closeness to past landscapes of abundance and involvement in community-making. Such affective landscapes bring together embodied, sensorial, and more-than-human fields of action to shape an everyday politics in which residents narrate their marginalization within the world city and articulate their own value here.     

Landscape and Social Relations at Charleston Townhouse Sites (1770–1850)

Restoration projects at Charleston townhouse properties, both public and private, have provided opportunities for archaeological exploration on a variety of scales. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, these properties were the homes of wealthy planters and merchants and enslaved African Americans, who lived and worked in the service buildings and work yard. The inter-dependence of these diverse occupants, their daily affairs, and the landscape elements under their purview has been revealed in the research of scholars from a host of disciplines, including archaeology. Townhouse compounds included support structures and activity areas required to meet the range of daily life affairs, from the necessary to the luxurious. While the front of the house, and the formal garden, presented a well-ordered façade, the work yard housed the facilities for the necessities of daily life, in an often dirty, noisy, and unordered space. The deliberate separation of space and placement of specialized service buildings and their occupants created an urban landscape suitable to the social values, as well as physical needs, of the townhouse owners. Thus, owner and slave lived in a compound that was physically close, but socially distinct. Archaeological case studies are used here to explore the racial power dynamics embodied in the urban townhouse landscape. The archaeological mixing of material from master and slave is, however, a material reflection of the racial power dynamics played out in constricted urban spaces.     

Is the Aboriginal Landscape Sentient? Animism,the New Animism and the Warlpiri

ABSTRACT It is now commonplace for some anthropologists, and others, to say that for Aboriginal Australians in the remote regions, the landscape is ‘sentient’, however, what that means is not always clear. Are the anthropologists using this term metaphorically or do they understand Aboriginal people to be animists? The ‘new animists' have no doubt that the anthropologists are describing what they call the ‘new animism’. Much of this literature refers to the Warlpiri or their near neighbours. Here I examine the evidence for whether Warlpiri speakers are animists.     

Regimes of Ethical Value? Landscape,Race and Representation in the Canadian Diamond Industry

Abstract: Canadian diamonds are marketed as “ethical” alternatives to notorious “blood diamonds”. This paper analyzes the specific matrices through which ethical consumption as a discourse is being mobilized to sell diamonds. I argue that consumption operates as a system of social signification in which consuming subjects are positioned as moral subjects. Moreover, I argue that historically accumulated symbolic power, in the form of imagined geographies of benevolent colonialism in the Canadian North versus the exploitation of “dark” Africa, pristine, “white” northern landscapes, modernization via commodity production, and national identity, creates the very field of meaning within which the consuming subject is positioned. The ethicalization of Canadian diamonds also has important normative implications both in terms of the cultural politics of ethical consumption and social and environmental justice in the Canadian North.     

A Comparative Analysis of the Late Woodland–early Mississippian Settlement Landscape in Northern Georgia

To understand the development of complex socio-political phenomena, we need to study not just the origins of central places, but also their emergence. This can be accomplished by taking an historical perspective where we position ourselves before the occurrence we wish to study. Data from the Georgia Archaeological Site File are presented to explore the Late Woodland and Early Mississippian (ca. A.D. 600–1,100) settlement landscape which contextualized the emergence of two prominent Mississippian mound centers: Macon Plateau (also known as Ocmulgee) and Etowah. Our results suggest that the Etowah River valley supported a denser population who had formed attachments to particular points in the landscape compared to the region surrounding Macon Plateau during the Late Woodland to Early Mississippian transition. These social landscapes provided different contexts for the origins of each Mississippian center and influenced later trajectories of cultural development and settlement in each region.     

Landscape and Settlement in Late Bronze Age Cyprus: Investigations at Pyla-Kokkinokremos, 2007–2009

Pyla-Kokkinokremos is a fortified hilltop settlement in Cyprus founded towards the end of the Late Bronze Age. It has played a prominent role in discussions concerning the c. 1200 BC ‘collapse’ in the wider eastern Mediterranean. Results from survey and soundings (2007–09) provide significant new information about the site and its relationship to the surrounding landscape. This includes the discovery of a large intramural feature in the form of a shallow bedrock terrace with associated architecture running through the centre of the settlement. Consideration is also given to broader regional patterns of settlement in the surrounding Pyla littoral and south-east Cyprus.     

On the Subject of the “Unified” Geography (Landscape and Ethnos,VI)

A theory of ethnogenesis is advanced, associating stability of ethnic communities with homogeneous landscapes and ethnic change leading to the formation of new communities with heterogeneous landscapes. The ethnic aspect of population, unlike the social and political aspects, is found to be a function of geographical factors. The study of the interplay between ethnic man and the environment does not require an integration of the geographic disciplines but can be investigated within the framework of a special discipline, say, ethnology within geography.     

Qualitative Landscape Theories and Archaeological Predictive Modelling—A Journey Through No Man’s Land?

An approach to test and interpret geographic information system-based, quantitative archaeological predictive models using techniques from qualitative (experiential) landscape theory is described and demonstrated via a case study. The result is the transformation of statistical output from quantitative predictive models into more archaeologically meaningful interpretations of spatial data.     

Landscape bioarchaeology at Pacatnamu,Peru: inferring mobility from δC and δN values of hair

Stable carbon- and nitrogen-isotope ratios were measured for segments along the shafts of hair from eight individuals from the site of Pacatnamu, located in the Jequetepeque Valley on the north coast of Peru. All are from known grave contexts dating from Moche (ca. 450–750 A.D.) to Lambayeque periods (ca. 900–1100 A.D.). The mean δ¹³C and δ¹⁵N values of hair segments from individuals are comparable to those of bone, and demonstrate increased consumption of marine resources in the Lambayeque times relative to the Moche period.