1 Connecting semiotics and cultural geography: A new approach to the study of monuments and memorials
To my wife Daria, for continuous encouragement in life and research
To my mother Laura, my father Claudio and my brother Francesco
This book aims to advance the understanding of the connections between semiotics and cultural geography on the basis of which to explore the meaning-making of monuments and memorials.
Cultural geography has provided different perspectives to analyse concepts such as space, place, landscape, built environment and power. Cosgrove (1994: 111) defined cultural geography as a subfield of human geography that focuses āupon the patterns and interactions of human culture, both material and non-material, in relation to the natural environment and the human organization of spaceā. Since the āinterpretive turnā (Geertz 1973), several cultural geographers have used semiotic concepts to decipher the meanings of space, place, landscape and built environment. For example, Duncan and Ley mapped out a series of alternative ways of seeing and interpreting within the field of cultural geography and concluded that cultural geographers aim to investigate how culture as a signification system affect the social order:
What then does it mean to say that we practise cultural geography? First, it means that we prioritise culture within our scholarship, that is, we focus upon how the cultural as a signification system interpenetrates the economic and political systems within a social order. Second, we prioritize the geographic within our interpretations, that is, we focus upon the cultural dimensions of landscape, place or space.
(Duncan and Ley 1993: 332)
Since the 1980s, the so-called New Cultural Geography has called for an approach to explore the cultural dimension of the human world including āvirtually all aspects of the human world ā from national culture and landscape painting to masculine cultures of global finance ā encompassing high culture, popular culture, subcultures, and the impress of globalization on indigenous culturesā (Clarke 2017: 4769). In particular, this approach has aimed to investigate the struggles over cultural meanings produced in social and political life (Cosgrove 1990: 561). Following this view, the urban space is the product of struggle among conflicting interest groups (Whelan 2002: 509).
Despite using semiotic concepts, cultural geographers have not explicitly associated themselves with semiotics, using it only as a methodological approach to identify meanings in apparently neutral physical forms (Lindstrƶm et al. 2014: 114ā115). Actually, semiotics can provide a broader theoretical framework for understanding cultural meanings, interpretation and culture (Lagopoulos 1993: 255; Lotman 1990; 2005; Uspenskij et al. 1998; Posner 2005; Lorusso 2015; Tamm 2019). Between the 1970s and the 1980s, semiotics went beyond its traditional research objects, i.e. literary and written texts, including other cultural products: everyday objects, advertisement, newspapers, television broadcasts, architecture, design and music became suitable of being analysed through semiotic analysis. In this context, branches in the field of semiotics such as semiotics of space, semiotics of architecture and urban semiotics have begun to include topics such as space, place, landscape, the city and its built environment (e.g. Gottdiener and Lagopoulos 1986; Lagopoulos and Boklund-Lagopoulou 2014; Pellegrino 2010, 2020; Pellegrino and Jeanneret 2009). These approaches have focused on the interpretation and the meaning-making of space, place, landscape and the built environment, beyond their historical, architectural and socio-economical aspects alone.
A holistic approach to the built environment should consider the cultural geographical world in which built forms are located and interpreted, addressing how the built environment shapes cultural meanings, relations, paradigms and practices. It regards meanings as always interacting with space and culture. The main contribution of this research is to connect semiotics and cultural geography in order to sketch out this holistic approach and explore the interpretative aspects of the built environment and of monuments and memorials specifically.
Monuments and memorials are common features of the urban space. Throughout the world, they take a variety of different forms: war memorials, public statues, monumental buildings and architectures, squares, temples, memorial gardens, stone circles, pyramids, civic precincts, cenotaphs, obelisks and even entire areas of the city. At first glance, their main function is celebration and commemoration of important identities and events. Young (1993) uses āmemorialā as a general term for commemorative texts, as distinguished from āmonumentsā, i.e. particular types of memorials fixed in material forms and normally associated with public art. Ben-Rafael (2016: 207) defines a memorial as āa structure that commemorates in the public space, persons or events that are deemed to require remembranceā. In this book, āmonumentsā refer to built forms publicly erected by the state to celebrate significant events or individuals. The term āmemorialā is used more specifically, when referring to built forms commemorating individuals who died due to war, mass violence or other disasters.
Historical epistemology and the construction of the past
Along with commemorative purposes, monuments and memorials can wittingly or unwittingly present political meanings and legitimate the power of those who had them installed. They can convey selective historical narratives, focusing on events and individuals that are preferred by elites and obliterating what is uncomfortable for them. While articulating specific historical narratives, they can inculcate particular conceptions of the present and encourage future possibilities. Cultural memory is a text and, as such, it can be shaped to suit someoneās intentions.
Cultural memory refers to the processes through which a community actively constructs and maintains historical narratives to define what is to be remembered of the past (Assmann and Czaplicka 1995: 129). Historical narratives are inevitably selective and subjective. History is not a repository of past facts, events and identities. It does not have an ontological status. RicÅur (2000) argued that history is not a neutral and faithful report of past events. For him, historical epistemology develops in some phases, from documentation to interpretations, explanations and finally to the representation through writing and reading. Representations of history are outcomes of narrative construction in which past facts, events and identities are selected and combined. Therefore, historical narratives are not a passive delivery, but powerful media able to establish specific discourses on the past, present and future.
The power of historiography has become a philosophical problem especially thanks to the works of Michel Foucault and Michel de Certeau. Foucault explained that discourse and power are inevitably linked:
In any society, there are manifold relations of power which permeate, characterize and constitute the social body, and these relations of power cannot themselves be established, consolidated nor implemented without the production, accumulation, circulation and functioning of a discourse.
(Foucault 1980: 93)
Undoubtedly, shaping historical narratives facilitates the contemporary exercise of power by promoting dominant worldviews and determining social dynamics of inclusion and exclusion. This is particularly evident in transitional societies when new elites come into play and receive the mandate to write what has happened before and during their rise to power. Selection, editing and omission comes into play in this (re)writing of history.
While exploring the relationship between history and religion, de Certeau (1988) described the practice of writing history as a tool to legitimate political power. He claimed that Western historiography has been produced within a colonial context, omitting and repressing the traditions and voices of native people. According to de Certeau, modern Western history began with a rupture between the past and the present. The task of historians was thus filling the gap created by this rupture through discourse. Only through discourse the past became apparent and describable. Historians were entrusted to differentiate between what is dead ā i.e. the past ā and what is not: for de Certeau, modern age had a peculiar relation with death and discourses on the past was essentially a discourse on death. As he argued:
Historiography tends to prove that the site of its production can encompass the past: it is an odd procedure that posits death, a breakage everywhere reiterated in discourse, and that yet denies loss by appropriating to the present the privilege of recapitulating the past as a form of knowledge. A labor of death and a labor against death.
(de Certeau 1988: 5)
Therefore, the writing of history is a paradoxical practice performed through a continuous movement between absence and presence constituted by a rupture between the past and the present. De Certeau frames this practice in spatial terms: writing history is always situated in a location from where the past is recreated in the present: historical writing thus facilitates the understanding of the past from a position in the present and offers meaningful ways to anticipate future expectations. This research is based on a āconstructivistā approach to historical knowledge: history is necessarily a discourse, designed by someone (an author) for a specific purpose. However, it is always open to a myriad of interpretations depending on the point of views that the readers take toward it (Eco 1979; Violi 2014). This research considers historical narratives as producing multiple interpretations of the past, present and future and their representations in space. As such, they are inevitably linked with semiotic and geographical processes.
Monuments and the construction of the past in Estonia
Monuments are important tools to write history in the urban space. National elites design monuments and memorials aiming to present the kinds of ideals they want citizenship to strive towards. However, the original intentions embodied in monuments and memorials are not always achieved: while national elites attempt to convey dominant meanings, individuals differently interpret and use them in ways elites might have never envisioned. As such, the interpretations of monuments are never fixed once and for all. This is particularly evident in transitional societies associated with regime change, where multiple historical narratives and identities coexist at the societal level. For this reason, this research concentrates on the multiple meanings of monuments in post-Soviet countries, with a focus on Estonia.
Post-Soviet countries are independent states that emerged from the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1990ā1991. The prefix āpostā indicates a situation where the Soviet regime belongs to the past, but āits shadow is still clearly visible in the present, in memories and habits, and in the environment and political lifeā (Lindpere 2011: 40). In post-Soviet countries, monuments have been an issue that has taken on a particular significance. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the tearing down of monuments erected by Soviet authorities was a noticeable sign of regime change. Subsequently, the recently formed national elites used monuments to educate citizens towards the current historical narratives and to establish concepts of nation in accordance with current political conditions. Specifically, they took various initiatives to remove and relocate Soviet monuments, while establishing new monuments reflecting the post-Soviet historical narratives. In this book, the terms ācultural reinventionā is used to refer to this set of practices aiming to fill the built environment with specific cultural meanings through redesign, renewal, reconstruction, relocation and removal. Contrarily to the elitesā expectations, the cultural reinvention of monuments has not been widely accepted in post-Soviet countries, where multiple historical narratives and identities coexist at the societal level. Here, the marginalisation, relocation, removal of Soviet monuments and the erection of new ones have often sparked broad debates and resulted in civil disorder. Estonia, the northernmost of three Baltic countries (Figs. 1.1 and 1.2), presents particularly evident...
