Visualising Place, Memory and the Imagined

Sarah De Nardi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138052277
• eBook ISBN: 9781351684286
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

This book probes into how communities and social groups construct their understanding of the world through real and imagined experiences of place. The book seeks to connect the dots of the factual and the imaginary that form

affective networks of identities, which help shape local memory and sense of self and community, as well as a sense of the past. It exploits the concept of make-believe spaces – in the environment, storytelling and mnemonic narratives – as a social framework that aligns and informs the everyday memory worlds of communities. Drawing upon fieldwork in cultural heritage, community archaeology, social history and conflict history and anthropology, this text offers a methodological framework within which social groups may position and enact the multiple senses of place and senses of the past inhabited and performed in different cultural contexts.

This book serves to illustrate a useful visualisation methodology which can be used in participatory fieldwork and thus will be of interest to heritage specialists, ethnographers and cultural geographers and oral history practitioners who will particularly find the methodology cheap, easy to replicate and enjoyable for community-based projects.

1 Defining terms

What is place?

This chapter articulates some of the core themes in this book, starting with the metaconcept of place. “In memory, time becomes ‘place’ ”, contends Alessandro Portelli (1997: 32). Place can be built up, revisited or discovered anew; the very idea of place is imbricated in a constant process of becoming (Belcher et al., 2008: 501). The many constituents of place could be disassembled and analysed, but, if one were to attempt to piece them together again, they would not achieve the same configuration as before – least of all would they find themselves in the same place.

Place is certainly one way that remembrance is attached to the visible, tangible world. But this is not always the case. Michel de Certeau has asked, “Of all the things everyone does, how much gets written down?” (1984: 42). Emplacement, or the situating of memory in a meaningful space, does not necessary lead to an objective or streamlined way of remembering. My main concern in this book is the ephemeral and unstable nature of stories that generate, shape and transform place. From place, to the body. For Curti, when we explore “bodies and how they affect and are affected by one another, the material conflicts bound to politics of memory and place may also be understood as political strategies to relationally re-shape and re-constitute (Other(s’)) emotional geographies” (2008: 116). The performative element of ‘heritage’ negotiations and experience is notoriously difficult to translate and represent in traditional scholarship and (paper-based) academic outputs (Candida-Smith, 2003), yet it lends a whole new dimension to place and memory of place, in place.

I suggest that perhaps communities, in their imaginary bond or through shared ingroup logic, construct and experience place as so many real and imagined facets to make sense of the world and the stories told therein. They do not simply transmit these knowledges to each other as much as construct them, enact them and share them together. Community as a way of learning. Sometimes these constructions affect the tangible, the material, and sometimes they do not. The broadness and slipperiness of definitions of place single it out as one of scholarship’s foundations so much so that “if two different authors use the words ‘red’, ‘hard’, or ‘disappointed’, no one doubts that they mean approximately the same thing. […] But in the case of words such as ‘place’ or ‘space’, whose relationship with psychological experience is less direct, there exists a far-reaching uncertainty of interpretation” (Malpas, 1999: 19).

Place is hard to define as it is forever caught in a process of becoming (Cresswell, 2004); it is embroiled in an unfolding dynamic that the material feminists designate as ‘agential realism’ (see Barad, 2007). Place is articulated through multiple intersecting processes enacted by human and more-than-human agencies and affects; these entangled agencies are what make the spatial experience unique, ineffable and complex (Tuana, 2008; DeSilvey, 2006, 2012). Affects may attach themselves to objects as well as places and human and non-human animals (Ahmed, 2010). Beyond socialisation, place is enmeshed in a network of affects, energies and agencies that exceeds the verbal and the discursive (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004; Anderson, 2009). The situated nature of affect (Ahmed, 2004; Richard and Rudnyckyj, 2009) is connected to the shifting significance of place, to which affects are typically tethered (Watson and Waterton, 2015).

First to highlight the impossibility of place remaining unaltered for more than a few instants, rendering it impossible for someone to step into the same stream twice, was Herodotus of Samos: the Greek philosopher unkindly dubbed “The Obscure” was anything but that, for he astutely pinned down the changeable and subjective nature of place in one brief yet effective metaphor. Later in the classical world, the Greek and subsequently the Roman imagination anthropomorphised place by assigning it personhood and identity as a Genius, a spirit dwelling and dictating site-specific terms and modes of interaction between a site, humans and their lives (de Certeau, 1984; Vernant, 2001).

The ways in which space and place are conceptualised rely on several factors and agencies. Places are what they are because “people and things occupy them, give them shared meanings and situate them in collective memory” (Beauregard, 2013: 16). Place is, above all, intensely embroiled in the politics of identity (Seremetakis, 1994), and community is always (or almost always) tethered to a real or imaginary place. “With few exceptions, community always denotes a there” (Keller, 2003: 7).

Whenever we think about the power or knowledge gained by ‘interpreting’ a place, it is helpful to identify practices and behaviours deemed appropriate or unsuitable for those places (Tolia-Kelly, 2004a; Drozdzewski, 2015). Allowances and affordances (de Certeau, 1984) and acts of resistance to established rules offer insight into the perception of place and to the make-up of its socialised nature. Performativity and the body politics work in synergy as emplaced practices: one is the channel of the other, and they act as emergent agencies understood through the lens of relational attachments. Judith Butler (1997) has advocated the primacy of the emplaced body and of an interpersonal stance in the performance of identity and social and cultural norms under the rubric of ‘performativity’. Performativity in place does not cohere into “a singular ‘act’, being instead the reiteration of a norm or set of norms” (1997: xxi). The ideas of resistance to the norms and conventions of a social norm find purchase in this context: the enacted memory-stories in the following chapters resonate with the concepts of resistance and performance, which help frame the ethnographic experience of ‘working with’ community memory.

And yet material feminists (Hekman, 2008) have questioned the peculiar bodilessness and lack of ‘matter’ in Butler’s articulation of her pervasive theory of performativity (Butler, 1993). The idea of a cultural or political separation from nature in the affectual make-up and experience of place has also been extensively dismantled in scholarship (Barad, 2007; Tuana, 2008; Ingold, 2000, 2011; Ahmed, 2004; DeSilvey, 2012; Bradley, 2000; Witmore, 2007). Affect permeates the ‘cultural’ – whatever that means – and that which is not in the traditional sense. As in Tim Ingold’s still deeply persuasive essay on the practice of dwelling (2000), the place-experience process does not imply any effective inertness on the part of nature. Above and beyond environmental determinism, the natural milieu effectively teaches and shapes human agency, and ‘nature’ communicates something of herself to human animals in a mutual relationship. An action, a memory, takes place somewhere or is tethered to a specific location. Thus, place is as much of a subject and character in any story, geographically situated or otherwise.

In contrast to the porous and fluid process of mutual learning expressed in the dwelling perspective, place-making is a process of appropriation: it means making one’s mark on the landscape. Place-making is all about imposing an interpretation or meaning onto place as opposed to revealing and exploring existing themes, as opposed – in essence – to establishing a dialogue with nature (Ingold, 2000: 42, 55 ff.). In place-making, new meanings are negotiated. Place experience is always more than visual and definitely never abstract; place engulfs us through the senses (Cresswell, 2004). The encounter of person and ‘environment’ ultimately takes place through sensory engagement (Ingold, 2000: 56). The maps and strategies the reader finds in this book seem to suggest that sensory and political interpretations of place are possible at the same time, through a process of learning and making together.

Place is capable of haunting, lingering and resonating long after we have moved away from it or erased it (de Certeau, 1984; Tolia-Kelly, 2004b). Any process “harnessing these placed-practices has the effect of developing social understandings into socio-spatial understandings of knowledge” (Anderson, 2004: 257) – social knowledge, always situated somewhere. The maps I use in this book might just represent one such process, and these maps are certainly ‘placed practices’. Placed or emplaced practices do not just underline and nurture presences, however: they can also mourn absences and expose wounds (DeLyser, 1999; Navaro-Yashin, 2009). Communities that once defined themselves spatially do not necessarily need to be located in a place to nurture a strong sense of belonging. Imagination and fantasy notions of place, long-distance longings and nostalgia for a homeland, a town, a street, can all fulfil the need for closeness to a thing, a place, an ‘idea’ of a place which may or may not correspond to an objective truth (see also Miller and Parrot, 2009). But the hauntings, the experiences, they remain, they linger, they are potent and exhilarating and they are contagious. The sites and memories in this book demanded to be confronted, explored, and they asked us to get to know them for better or for worse.

In Chapter 3, the communal imaginary of a township draws inventive, more-than-spatial maps of a longue durée landscape through the senses and citizen science. The resulting map is a palimpsest of ideas, impressions, memories and expectations. In Chapter 4, a town in northern Italy is held captive by the invisible traces of fratricidal violence during the Second World War. In an intangible yet haunting mesh of places and non-places, memory and postmemory intersect to conjure up a network of affects.

In Chapter 5, the dead once contained in a sinkhole deep in a forest inhabit a double identity as invisible yet haunting ghosts of Italy’s fratricidal Fascist past. To visualise a place like this is an experiment in ghost photography: the attempt to capture an ephemeral, melancholy moment in time that defines a local culture and shapes a community’s sense of place in relation to the outside world. In Chapter 6, an open-air social history museum sets the (staged) scene for a collective postmemory and longing for the golden age of coal mining in the deindustrialised northeast of England. The affectual engagement of many storytellers crafts new stories, striving against forgetfulness. Chapter 7 takes a dialogic form in tracing a double journey of experiments with mapping, narrated and led by an academic and a museum Engagement and Participation officer. The double vision/double journey we create in that chapter contains many overlapping layers of meaning, affects and projects.

Meeting the imagined

The lure of the imagined has long fascinated thinkers and artists alike. The notion of ‘imagined communities’, also critiqued by Harris (2014), was initially espoused as part of Benedict Anderson’s (2006) critique of nationalism. Anderson conceptualised imagined communities as social networks reliant on the idea of an identity constructed and enacted by individuals – but those individuals need not ever meet in person. Their imagination provides the stuff to fill the social blanks, leading a certain ‘imagined community’ to feel united by a common ‘way of belonging’, or bound by shared ingroup logics. Geography and history, or rather the concepts of place and time, “play out in the psychic words of individuals” (Lieberman, 2015: 2); they are encased in the notions of selfhood and community, and they shape experience in all its many facets. In our imagination, we can be at one place and in many places at once. Exploring Giorgio Agamben’s idea of the ‘exception’, Belcher et al. define it as “situated on the edge of materiality, the state of exception has the potential to materialize or not to materialize actual spaces of exception” (2008: 501). The idea of exception can contribute a nuanced layer of interpretation to the idea of the potentially disruptive, almost-but-not-quite present notion of the collective imagination. Barbara Misztal has written extensively on the configurations and grammars of social remembrance, but imagination does not appear as central to her conceptions. She does explore the idea of invented traditions, but the two ‘ideas’, while they intersect and mutually inform each other, are not that closely aligned or mutually unpacked.

In cultural geography, imaginaries of place loom large as subjects with an agency of their own. Bachelard’s poetic phenomenology leads to framing the imagination as a “perpetual interaction between the human subject which imagines and the image itself. Imagination is thus recognized to be conscious of something other than itself which motivates, induces and transforms it” (Kearney, 1998: 97). In the introduction to their edited volume, Jane Kenway and Johannah Fahey (2009) argue that allowing the imagination to become an important and active part of the research process and project allows us to get closer to communities and to better enable the sharing of knowledge. They muse about the way that “certain people take us to such untravelled words” (2009: 1). I love this definition of the imagination: not an unreal world, but more like an unexplored territory. Being mindful of the power implications and the ever-present danger of colonising the other’s imagination, framing the imagined as a potential place to discover, enjoy and explore is a good starting point to shape the ‘reality’ and ‘verisimilitude’ of memories and perceptions that seem to eschew factual events, objects and spaces. The realm of the imagination bridges the inner and outer nuances of place-making and place understanding and influences knowledge-building in myriad ways (Orange and Laviolette, 2010).

Imagination is central to this book, and, I argue, to any holistic and grassroots notion of heritage and memory, cultural or otherwise. Imagination colours pasts and presents and paints futures, shaping experience and shaped by experience and potential things-to-be. Here, I build on the idea of imagined communities and Harris’s idea of community as assemblage (2014) to think about the ways communities and social groups navigate, give meaning to and remember place.

The communities I worked with told spatial stories in ways that suggest the past as an ‘insistent’ force in the shaping of place and in the framing of their presents and futures. This insight aligns with current thinking on identity-making linked to ‘sense of place’ and to multiple senses and appreciations of the past. Edward Said’s conception of the ‘invented’ is crucial in framing place-identity configurations and national narratives (2000), as is the idea of the manufacture of heritage (sensuAlsayyad, 2001) as a transforming society’s desire to shape place narratives and communicate selected place understandings. A drive to self-represent, making use of imaginative and creative processes to foreground one specific image of a country or regional identity, is innate to humans (Hobsbawm and Ranger, 1993; Babadzan, 2000; Bell, 2006). We often encounter this imaginative self-shaping process among and within social groups (and individuals) who have undergone dramatic change, slow decline or dispossession or who have been the victims of intense trauma such as genocide, the annihilation of the Shoah or the ongoing ferocity of the Palestinian Nakba.

To an extent, however, a self-image shaping grounded in the collective imaginary is common to most societies. On a small scale, as in a town or a neighbourhood, imagination and invention pervade local understandings of place even when there is no need or desire to purge traumatic memory. When talking to people about what place means to them, listeners are inevitably going to be surprised by the range of responses received (Pink, 2009; Dicks, 2010). Researchers (or simply sympathetic listeners) will be presented with things or interpretations they may have been quite unaware of prior to their questioning. We may not always be able to fathom the full extent of the intersections of the imagined and the real in the way we experience or even understand space and time. This will take us by surprise not because our research has not been sufficiently thorough, but because in this way fieldworkers learn about things that do not necessarily qualify as ‘truths’ outside of a given co-researcher’s imagination. Researchers are successful when they not only gather data and information grounded on fact and observable realities but also learn about the ‘what ifs’ and make-believes their co-researching communities live by.

“In community, self and terrain are intertwined”, writes Suzanne Keller (2003: 11). Often, these ties are imperceptible to the naked eye. Sometimes, perceptions or understandings of the self/terrain dynamics and the world one makes therein are intimate, sacred and not to be shared with strangers (Cappelletto, 2003). This diversity is what, to my mind, makes qualitative research such a precious, intriguing process even when the imaginary edge of some of the tales and interpretations held by our co-researchers veers towards the stuff of legend (see Henare et al., 2007; Black, 2003). The imagination ought to be foregrounded in scholarly research as community-made, community-dreamed and community-performed agency (Henare at al., 2007) across self and terrain.

The logics of co-production enable the building of stories from the ground up, stories that then take on a life of their own as they unfold and reach multiple, ever wider publics. Co-produced fieldwork insights and shared knowledges rework and reframe recent events in unique ways, even if they may appear unorthodox or unwarranted. This ‘sharing’ approach is especially critical in fields such as cultural heritage, where people’s perceptions of the past (and place) are key to their present positioning (Dicks, 2010). How may we convey a version of a group’s sense of place which also involves them directly as co-researchers and curators, not simply as participants or subjects? In this book, I attempt to show how we might implement this strategy through collaborative fieldwork and mapping; I also explore the way in which an institution, Beamish Museum in England, is already carrying out work of this kind.

Experiential learning is central to many of the experiments described in this book and is a core theme in my wider research (De Nardi, 2014a, 2016). Rudy Koshar’s idea of memory-landscape, for instance, encompasses the material and immaterial elements of memory and landscape as intertwined in experience and encounter (2000). The memory-landscape is said to include objects and markers that we can see, touch and hear, such as monuments, parades, performances and street names, but also wider ‘sense of place’ (Agnew, 1987), which is arguably closer to a feeling or a sensorial exposition of memory than to a tangible thing. The imagined, then, becomes a quality of affects, atmospheres and things that are tied together by stories and bound together by human and more-than-human experience. “Bodies, things, social formations, ideas, beliefs and memories can all possess capacities to materially affect and be affected” (Fox and Alldred, 2018: 1). It follows that not only are memories materially produced, but that place understandings are created and given meaning through affectual palimpsests of perception and memory. This intersection occupies a meaningful space in social and individual sense of place and identity, and heritage experience is but one of such interlinked affects dynamically negotiated through real and imagined assemblages.

A memory more than most

This book looks at the pervasiveness and endurance of certain memories and attends to the deliberate erasure of others; yet in most examples, presence and absences often coalesce around the same places. The two fight for primacy in the ways that successive generations of people who live somewhere make their world and understand their place therein. Heritage practice is one of many facets of this process of dwelling. But is memory a form of heritage-making, or is heritage a process of memory-making? Both stances may be true. In this volume, I explore their relevance to each other via multiple brecciations of affect, emotion, and place experience. Both heritage and memory depend on the private and public mechanisms of remembrance and deliberate or accidental forgetting. To be sure, memory has become ‘big business’, especially in the post-war period (Berliner, 2005); this surge in scholarship has generated various strands of research and artistic production attempting to make sense of, and heal, the black hole left in memory by war, conflict (Portelli, 1997; Cappelletto, 2005; Till, 2005) and, in particular, the Holocaust (White, 1990; Young, 1997; Pickering and Keightley, 2012; Kidron, 2012).

The omnipresence of memory is inevitable, as I already alluded to in the introduction; people have been thinking and writing about the process of recollection and remembrance for decades, and this preoccupation has percolated into most studies that concern themselves with the analysis of perceptions of the past in the present. Whether offering meditations on collective memory (sensu Halbwachs, 1997; Ricoeur, 2004) or on social memory, or more recently, on activist and marginal group memory, scholars have extensively engaged with the process of remembering and the construction of the past since the beginnings of human history. Others have made a convincing case for the ‘gap’ in memory (after Bessel, 1996) to be investigated; we have come to appreciate the forceful impact and role of the media in bridging this gap between “the official memory of the state’ and memories that are ‘current in t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Defining terms
• 2 Deep mapping as memory work: theoretical and methodological implications of heritage mapping
• 3 Imaginative engagement: the sleeping giant and the cursed hill
• 4 A town, divided: mapping the tense imaginaries of the 1943–1945 Italian civil war
• 5 Unlearning the body: liminal spaces, abject corpses and the historical imagination
• 6 Stories from Beamish Museum’s ‘1950s town’
• 7 Experiencing the mapping method in the field: a dialogic interlude
• 8 Moving forward: not a conclusion chapter
• List of figures
• References
• Appendix
• Index