135: Simon Schama's Landscape and Memory

In Landscape and Memory, Simon Schama argues that "even the landscapes that we suppose to be most free of our culture may turn out, on closer inspection, to be its product," and that this mutually constitutive relationship between nature and culture is "a cause not for guilt and sorrow but celebration."  Accordingly, while Landscape and Memory digs deep into the histories of a wide variety of landscapes, Schama's is an "archaeological" method rather than a critical one.  His goal is not to expose capitalist exploitation in the landscape but to dig deep "below our conventional sight-level to recover the veins of myth and memory that lie beneath the surface."  By situating landscape myths in their historical-cultural moments, Schama shows how socially-constructed meaning and memory become embedded in a landscape.

Schama applies his archaeological approach to a variety of landscapes: the primordial Bialowiez forest in Poland, which the Germans wanted to raze and replace with "a great, living laboratory of purely Teutonic species: eagles, elk, and wolves" (and bison) during WWII, because it was the symbolic and heart of Poland;   Gianlorenzo Bernini's Fountain of the Four Rivers in Rome as an embodiment and co=optation of the ancient obsession with circulation and flow; Mount Rushmore and sculptor Gutzon Borglum's obsession with dominating nature by carving human heads into stone; and "both kinds of arcadia, the idyllic as well as the wild," as escapist "landscapes of the urban imagination," responding to cities by providing pandemonium when cities are too ordered and bucolic countryside when cities are too chaotic.

Throughout, Schama relies on a narrative form to weave many disparate threads into each chapter's coherent whole.  This book is neither a call to action nor a complete history of particular places nor even a landscape study; it's more of a literary exploration into the layers of myth and memory that make up a landscape, arranged by a subjective narrator into layers of his own choosing.  While it's a lovely read, it does make me wonder whether Schama thinks the physical landscape needs to be there at all.

119: Yi-Fu Tuan's Space & Place

From my notes from Spring 2012: 

In Space and Place, Yi-Fu Tuan develops three themes: the relationship between space and the human body; the relationship between place and space; and the range of human experience or knowledge of space and place.  He argues that human experience of the world (in all its fullness) both shapes and is shaped by space and place.  Tuan develops this humanist argument against more abstract geographical conceptions of space; this book is generally considered to be the first “human geography” book.  For Tuan, experience is both feeling and thought.  Experience consists of all the myriad ways in which humans interact with their environment: via the body (the five senses, along with “sensorimotor,” moving through a space, and “skin”), via the imagination (including myths, fantasy, narration, memory), and conceptually or rationally (a big-picture, god’s-eye view).  Space is more abstract, something that you move through and dominate; think openness, spaciousness.  Places “stay put;” they acquire value when humans pause in their movements through space and stop to experience them, to create memories there, or to otherwise create links between themselves and a physical location.  While a single human experience cannot possibly encompass the complexity of the real world, full experience of space and place, is integral to the development of human consciousness and culture and to the reintegration of body and mind (discourse).

35: Patricia Limerick's Legacy of Conquest

A Westerner studying at Harvard, Patricia Limerick wrote The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West with three main goals: to knit together the Old West of frontiers, cowboys, and conquest and the complex, 20th century west into a coherent history; to warn against the dangers of the narrative of Progress for the West, environmentally and culturally; and to finally overturn the Turner thesis and shift the focus of Western history from the frontier-as-process to the West-as-place.  She achieves these goals by synthesizing existing scholarship in a variety of historical subdisciplines, including urban, social, business, labor, Chicano/a, Indian, and environmental, and by taking the West's many regions and perspectives into account.

Much of the book, then, involves dispelling myths of the Old West by retelling the history of the West from a variety of perspectives.  Limerick investigates the ideology of Western independence, which can only exist in a national and international context; real estate and property as the emotional center of Western history; and writing mining as labor history.  Most importantly - she spends the second half of the book writing a history of the West from Native Americans' perspective.  While she pulls from Native sources somewhat, her main strategy is to read Anglo sources from a Native American perspective; the result is a portrayal of resentful  people reduced to dependency on a single centralized agency, choosing rationally from among a dwindling number of opportunities.

With this new, synthetic history of the West as a place instead of a mobile frontier or a cowboys-and-indians fantasyland, Limerick argues that the West is a "place undergoing conquest and never fully escaping its consequences," and that "Western history has been an ongoing competition for legitimacy - for the right to claim for oneself and sometimes for one's group the status of legitimate beneficiary of Western  resources."  In other words, the West has long been shaped by a competition between different ethnic groups for property rights, even as the Western frontier functions as a kind of creation myth for white America.  This book thus complicates American narratives of Progress and manifest destiny even as it reclaims the West for historical study.