Violence in Place, Cultural and Environmental Wounding

Cultural and Environmental Wounding

Amanda Kearney

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138921078
• eBook ISBN: 9781317415756
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Human life is intimately woven into place. Through nations and homelands, monuments and sacred sites it becomes the anchorage point for ethnic, cultural and national identities. Yet it is also place that becomes the battlefield, war zone, mass grave, desecrated site and destroyed landscape in the midst or aftermath of cultural wounding.

Much attention has been given to the impact of trauma and violence on human lives across generations, but what of the spaces in which it occurs? How does culturally prescribed violence impact upon place? And how do the non- human species with whom we coexist also suffer through episodes of conflict and violence? By identifying violence in place as a crisis of our times, and by encouraging both the witnessing and the diagnosing of harm, this book reveals the greater effects of cultural wounding. It problematises the habit of separating human life out from the ecologies in which it is held. If people and place are bound through kinship, whether through necessity and survival, or choice and abiding love, then wounding is co- terminus. The harms done to one will impact upon the other. Case studies from Australia, North and South America, Europe and the Pacific, illustrate the impact of violence in place, while supporting a campaign for methodologies that reveal the fullness of the relational bond between people and place.

The book will appeal to students and practitioners alike, with interests in cultural and human geography, anthropology, environmental humanities and moral ecology.

Part I

Meeting place in the epistemological gap

This book cautions against any tendency to imagine place as the backdrop to human life, or as a stage on which conflict and ethnic violence act out their ugly drama. Place is not an inert field into which human aggressions and the violence of ethnic conflict are projected, rather it is a fully absorbing and responsive co-presence that witnesses and experiences these acts as part of its own biography and existence. To fully realise this statement, Part I of this book is tasked with finding a methodology capable of presenting place as an agent, sentient co-presence and kin to human life. It is one part of a substantive relationship that justifies and delimits human existence and experience. It is not enough to simply state that place feels and lives through human conflict, for such arguments lie vulnerable to scepticism or charges of romanticism. What is needed is a fully operational methodology that epistemologically grasps at place-meaning from a new direction, drawing together ontological and axiological principles from across cultures to render an understanding of place as fully sentient and capable of response and action.

To begin, Chapter 1 introduces place as one part of the relational sphere of life. It works to distinguish place as an agent capable of being harmed but also as capable of becoming an instrument of harm when reinscribed with strange and often violent meaning by those who co-opt it into a wounding agenda. The methodologies that progress this vision of place are Indigenous epistemologies of place and phenomenological geography, the former engaged most thoughtfully and with decolonising principles in mind. Together these allow for a fuller witnessing of place and place harm, and when combined with the principles of nesting, emotional geography and kincentric ecology, the relational sphere of life in place and place in life is brought to light.

1Context and cultural wounding

The relational sphere of life in place

Accounts of human conflict, violence and the quest for survival are never far away in the era of the 24-hour news cycle. At any moment we are drawn in to witness these struggles. As one part of the motive for violence, ethnic difference and subsequent hatred fuel a vast number of conflict situations. Conflicts, many historically motivated, erupt over disputed territories; land, sea and resource rights; political and ideological discord. Seen operating in public are tensions that seep into the private realms of personal lives, making their presence felt within familial environments, homes and villages, townships and local communities. We see ethnic conflict and violence occurring in the context of the state, across international borders, at the regional and local level and most intimately in the hearts of those who suffer abuses.

Violence, trauma and the cultural wounding that results have considerable spatial presence; so far-reaching that as they appear on our television screens, we are jettisoned for a moment into the places of conflict and into the often extreme everyday lives of those who experience ethnic prejudice and the aggressions that lead to cultural wounding. Although we may turn away, a witnessing has occurred. As we watch journalists scramble over rubble, or ethnic minorities march the streets in defiance of the state, and as asylum-seekers board unseaworthy vessels fleeing one place in search of another, cultural wounding threatens and takes hold. Once it takes hold, it is etched onto occupied territories and the bodies of displaced peoples, expressed as the loss of home and the destruction of environments once capable of sustaining human life. Dispossession of Indigenous homelands for state-sponsored developments and the commemoration of past violence through the construction of gleaming memorials also mark this scattered landscape of wounded places through which we often tentatively move.

Shown to us in the hope of eliciting an empathic response, the reality is that for many, accounts of conflict and suffering are abstract and by virtue of birth or good fortune are removed from the experience of everyday life. Yet we are called upon to witness these events and therefore participate in what is an ‘ecology of cultural wounding and healing’, which positions some as witness, some as the wounded and others as the perpetrators of violence. This book, written from the perspective of a witness, seeks to understand trauma and violence ‘in place’, in the hope of generating a deeper understanding of interethnic violence, cultural wounding and the impact these have not only on human life but also place, and non-human life as part of a network of co-presences. As an ethnographer, I have listened for over a decade and a half to accounts of violence that led to cultural wounding, as told by Indigenous Australians and African descendants in Brazil. Many times I’ve struggled to understand the magnitude of these experiences, yet when told to me ‘in place’, at the site of the experience, or when left to walk amid the remains of place, I believe I have inched closer to appreciating the extent of violence or at least its emotional toll. By visiting Indigenous homelands and seeing what has been taken, lost or destroyed and by standing in the ruins of slave ports in Brazil, I have tried to feel ‘in place’ the violence that has occurred by way of colonisation and slavery. Augmenting accounts of violence, trauma and cultural wounding with the sensory and emotional geographies of place has raised many questions for me, about the ways in which place bears the scars of conflict and intentional harm, and also how place itself might actually experience violence and the cultural wounding of its human counterpart. Exploring these concerns requires that I examine people and place relations, emphasising kinship and mutual constitution as the substance that joins the two.

Based on the principle of relatedness, the concepts and ethnographic case studies developed throughout this book aim to articulate an ecology of wounding that, once recognised, might elicit greater empathy for the effects of violence and wounding not only on human life, but also on place and on the non-human life with which we coexist – and that in some contexts are vividly cast as our kin. I do this by adopting a methodology that combines decolonising principles and Indigenous epistemologies of place and place agency. These are what allow me to more fully construct a sense of nested and kincentric ecology. A methodology of this kind renders possible a sense of kinship between people and place. Place is defined in such a way as to recognise its agency and responsiveness to human presences. It is hoped that by examining the relational sphere of life in place, an appreciation for place agency and experiential capacity can be reached; one that matches the human capacity to be harmed and to suffer. By locating people and place along an equal register of vulnerability in moments of cultural wounding and violence, these experiences are described as shared and mutually lived through.

Meeting violence and wounding in place

Rose (2004: 34) describes wounded space as that which “has been torn and fractured by violence and exile … pitted with sites where life has been irretrievably killed”. Wounding is mapped in place by the “legacy of genocide and ecocide, savagery that has ripped at the earth and at the lives of many who inhabit it, a conquest over lands that has supported an agenda of devastation so sudden and massive that we might never fully grasp the consequences” (Rose 2004: 35). Practitioners in place studies, human and cultural geography and anthropology have sought ways to convey the magnitude of violence in place, expressed through dark places, urbicide, topocide and domocide, place annihilation and erasure (Abujidi 2014; Falah 1996; Porteous and Smith 2001; Sather-Wagstaff 2011; Trigg 2009; Tumarkin 2005). Research into cultural trauma and cultural wounding, as well as place designification and resignification has also honed a reflexive awareness for what happens in place when human conflict occurs, predicated on ethnic difference, perceived marginality and the alleged undesirability of some bodies over others (Alexander et al. 2004; Alexander 2004a, 2004b, 2011; Bracken 2002; Eyerman et al. 2011; Fassin and Rechtman 2009).

The loss or destruction of place resonates powerfully in the accounts of those affected by forms of forced removal and constitutive cultural shift brought on by ethnic conflict. Decisive and violent action befalls certain ethnic and cultural groups often on the grounds of place contest and the desirability of the land, sea and its resources. Livelihoods and ways of being are deemed ‘out of place’ or impediments to the forceful taking of territories. Subsequently they are positioned in the way of harm. Place, often a highly desired commodity in interethnic contact zones, is overwhelmingly pressed upon to provide refuge for some ethnic groups, while becoming a site for the banishment and erasure of others. The years are marked by and remembered for these events, or the denial of their having occurred. People who live through such experiences and the places that come to harbour these events are imprinted with the legacy of violence. The overwhelming shock for witnesses to this violence, whether immediately experienced or witnessed from afar, comes from the loss of human life, and the depravity of what humans will do to one another under the guise of conflict, and even ambivalence. On this human compulsion to wound and harm I have written, utilising the themes of cultural trauma, cultural wounding and motivated healing (Kearney 2014). These themes have emerged out of my work as an anthropologist and have been examined through collaborations with Indigenous families in Australia and African descendant and black rights groups in Brazil.

In both Australia and Brazil, people have experienced cultural wounding (Kearney 2014: 3).¹ For Indigenous ethnic groups in Australia and African descendants in Brazil, their histories and present realities are marked by loss and hardship on the basis of an alleged otherness and imposed marginality by powerful ethnic majorities. So too have both groups faced a profound and forced reconfiguration of the place relations that make them who they are. Whether through theft of place or removal from place, the relational world these ethnic groups occupy has been fundamentally rearranged. Theft, destruction and designification characterise just some of the deeply wounding strategies used against people and place in the context of Indigenous homelands. For African descendants, their wounding has also mapped onto place, leaving its signature in the very separation of people and place and construction of new, deeply disturbing places, such as those created for containment and captivity. The erasure of home or breaking of kinship with home through forced removal left African nations, tribal homelands and local communities without the men and women that constituted them. While place has come to bear the scars of cultural wounding, or has emerged out of the human suffering that slavery brought, it also figures as centrally important in healing projects across both ethnographic contexts. Place is often scripted as a refuge, offering security and the surety of ethnic belonging that is so longed for in the healing journey. Even those sites of great sadness and horrific memory can be reclaimed as essential to present healing and remembrance of hardship. It is as if lines of kinship offer the most secure pathway to healing and recuperation. Thus it is through a denial of kinship that wounding is made possible and may be sustained over generations. Instances of cultural wounding in both cases map heavily onto place. The most obvious incorporation of place into trauma narratives takes the form of recounting the injustice of place theft and destruction; the embodied suffering that comes with removal from place, and a deep longing to return. So too the paradox of return looms large in the narratives of those who have been wounded, often left asking, to what do I return? How do I reinstate kinship when my place kin is gone?

Returning home or seeking restitution of territories to which one belongs have become cornerstones of transitional justice efforts and reconciliation agendas in Australia and Brazil, and refuge has been found in places, whether home or not, that are capable of holding and nourishing ethnic constituents as a community of kin. For Indigenous Australians, place is often spoken of as longing for its people, yearning the very presence of its human kin. Rose (1996: 7) writes of Indigenous homelands, or country as a “nourishing terrain”, “a place that gives and receives life. Not just imagined or represented, it is lived in and lived with.” Among African Brazilian rights groups and African-Brazilian communities, place remains a nourishing terrain despite generations of loss and hardship. This has emerged through a powerful rhetoric of return and the portability of place. For quilombolas, there is the desire to legitimate land holdings that come down the generations from those who escaped enslavement and sought a ‘future in place’ for African Brazilians. For members of the African Diaspora, place lies both in the transatlantic voyage, as it does in African nations of origin, and present-day black communities throughout Brazil. Mama Africa is the largest and most looming of place concepts, both conceived of as myth, body, woman, kin and embodiment of journeying, and capable of taking in all across the Diaspora. Mama Africa becomes a site of meaning, a movable force of place for those who cannot return or find the pathways back or for whom their identity as African descendant is now powerfully enmeshed with black Brazilian identity. Mama Africa can also be found distributed across continents, a vast network of places thus ensuring her presence and survival. She is the most pervasive of places, both real and imagined. Reflecting on ethnographic insights drawn from my time in Australian and Brazilian contexts, what is striking is the extent to which the people and place relationship deserves a deeper reading in contexts of violence and wounding.

After 15 years of working with those who are structurally and historically oppressed through encounters with cultural wounding, I have become acutely aware of the greater effects of violence. My mind has turned to the places or contexts in which experiences of wounding ‘took place’ in the past and continue to ‘take place’ today. I note that with many of the trauma narratives I have recorded, events are traced to particular locations, places, homelands and even bodies of water. For Indigenous Australians, the very experience of cultural wounding cannot be disconnected from the colonial project’s desire to possess place and resignify it under the name of the British Crown. Place and possession of it stands often as the original motive for violence and wounding. For African Brazilians who recall ancestral narratives of enslavement and hardship, place echoes as the social and cultural universe from which ancestors were first taken, and the cruel world into which they were thrust remade as slaves. Via the transatlantic journey taken by the millions of African persons enslaved, places that had no prior connection became bridged and thus inextricably linked for generations. The deep ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Meeting place in the epistemological gap
• Part II Witnessing place violence and the intent to harm
• Part III Diagnosing place harm
• Part IV Reinstating kinship and healing place
• Index