Environmental Semiotics: Differing Spaces

Eric Kramer 3143 S. 273'd Street

Auburn, Washington 253-520~3467

emkstar@yahoo.com

Environmental Semiotics: Engaging Architecture

THE ENVIRONMENT Spatial difference can be an important dimension of cultUIal variance and can

have profound influences on individual sojourners. For instance, when China invaded Tibet in the late 1950's, Tibetan refugees were forced southward down out of the mountains into India .. The Indian government attempted to relocate many of the Tibetans to refugee camps in the southwestern interior of India, which is heavily forested and made up of largely flat plains .. The reaction of the Tibetans to this new environment was sUIprising but also understandable. Many refused to leave their tents and complained about the fact that they could not see very far because the trees were in the way and also that they did not have the alpine vistas they had lived with all their lives in the Himalayar., Mountains .. Some became so upset that they stopped eating 11ntil t-hav V'701"0 T'r'\l"\"'UDrI ha~k -I-n. -J."ho nn",'-I-ha"l''Y''I ..... a .... +- .... -1= T ...... A.;a ........ .J. ....... -I-e"am" 'ha-l- -U.ja~ m~'·e la .... e .............................. , ............. ........ '-' v ......... ..., .... .1: L'-' .... n ..... tV.!." ... L ....... .LL 1-" .I." V.L .1..1., ...... .1. .L.LL\.V ... .LJ.. L W LV o=J.L LV ... .L.l.l.'\,.

their homelands .. In some cultures strict spatial segregation between the sexes and also according

to caste and age is followed.. An example of this is the Muslim requirement that women not be permitted into certain parts of mosques. This is also the case for some Hindu sects that permit women to worship in temples with men but require them to remain in the back of the sanctuary and not to enter the temple at all dming menstruation. There is also a kind of caste system inherent to many religious organizations that is spatially expressed and enforced .. For instance, among Mormons, only certain "ranks" can enter the inner sanctum of their temples.. Indeed, for nearly all religions, this is the case with their respective versions of heaven and helL

Space is a very important part of the life-world .. The creation of space by the arrangement of artifacts and practices like rituals is often taken for granted until one travels into a different spatial arrangement. Other instances when one may become conscious of space include when one is suddenly permitted to enter a place where you were not previously allowed, or you are suddenly prohibited from entering a space you used to visit. For instance, a very strong example of the power of space and mobility is prison. Another is the unisex dormitory. And yet another is the private club. THREE KINDS OF SPACE

Generally speaking, there ar'e three distinct forms of consciousness/ world; the magical, the mythical, and the perspectival (Gebser, 1949 Ger /1989 Eng). The magical world is characterized by being one-dimensionaL The mythic is two-dimensional And

the perspectival is essentially tluee-dimensional .. According to Kramer's (1997) theory of dimensional accrual and dissociation, as dimensions increase so too dissociation, such as abshaction and alienation, also increases This correlational process between dimensional and dissociative qualities is very evident with regards to space

Magic "Space": Movement Shictly speaking, in a one-dimensional world there is no space as such There is

no such thing as one-dimensional space.. Magical languages have no word for "spaceu

Instead magic is "everywhere" at once. A magical person may indicate that "the bird is over there," but they do not perceive the ar'ea between themselves and the bird as being anything in itself. To discuss shictly magical peoples one must think of nomads, Space, as h'l.e concept comes down to us generally occurs only with the presence of enclosures .. The magic world is a world not of differentiation and boundaries but of identity.

Magic is prior to temporal and spatial units .. Of what little is known of our purely nomadic ancestors in the Paleolithic epoch, two things ar'e clear, the tools of the time manifest an extension of specifically masculine movements Paleolithic tools amplified acts of chipping, cleaving, digging, exerting force in a masculine style of aggressive behavior, By conhast, the later Neolithic Epoch is characterized by the first settlements and a shift in attitude toward a more feminine purpose of containment in general manifested by the creation of the bowl, bin, basket, granary, pot, oven, and even the enclosed village itself. All such phenomena are in the form of a circle reminiscent of the feminine form to which we shall retum later when we tum our attention to the mythic world And second, Paleolithic Human expresses our first awareness of ritual and death

The world for magical peoples is a not yet fragmented unity. The magic world is "one and the same U And yet it is also not an "it," not a "one" as compar'ed with a "many," The world simply is the case beyond question or comparative limitations from some other "worlds.u There is no reflective" distance" to enable the recognition of "prejudice," as such. The world cannot be objectified for there is no subject/ object dichotomy and therefore" private" ownership does not yet exist. It is a point-like unity and the point does not indicate direction, The circle of life and death is unified as one process, There is no past or future only a permanent now. Prophecy and "telling the future" is more a mythological imaginative wish than a magical act. For magical people the future is not something separate to be guessed at or predicted but rather it is made. The fragmentation of (spatialization of) time into the so-called past and future does not exist for purely magical people.. They do not dwell on the past or on the future. Everything is identical on some level with everything else and can be exchanged without logical conhadiction.

Thus, a shaman can intonate a spell and its effect occurs" across time and space" instantaneously because time and space do not exist as such., For instance, a voodoo practitioner in the Caribbean can create a voodoo effigy of me, a "doll" if you wilL For the doll to "work" its magic the maker must not simply make it a realistic re­presentation of me, but must include in its conshuction actual bits of my real hair and clothes and whatever other parts of me he or she can obtain Thus, the doll becomes

identical with me so that when a pin is stuck into the doll, no matter where 01 when I am, I get pricked.

The localization of the sacred as in the identification of a glade in a wood as somehow special, or a mountain peak 01 a spring where water originates from the ground is a late-magical, early-mythological invention. It often takes the fmm of the cave: the subterranean enclosure While Paleolithic Human wandered about, it was the dead that had the first permanent dwelling The Necropolis, that is the place of the dead (the "cemetery") foreshadowed what would eventually develop into early settlements .. For magic Human then and now, the magnet that draws people back again and again to a specific place until it finally forms the core of a permanent settlement is the ceremonial spot of sacred ritual that has a magic of its own. In Paleolithic times it was often also a gravesite which indicates magic Human's fascination with and anxiety about death. Such is the case with the periodic visitation to graves and caves around thewmld.

Here, in the Paleolithic cave, magic Human did not dwell for the sake of survival but rather she punctuated her existence with visits for spiritual stimulation and exaltation. For instance the limestone caves at Dmdogne France evince successive occupations and visitations .. Most caves such as Lascaux, Altarnira, and Caverne des Trois Freres at Ariege were not occupied Instead they constitute the original motivation fm the shrine and temple that will not appear for another 13,000 years. The Paleolithic cave is the inspiration for the Pre-Columbian and Egyptian pyrarrdd, the Ziggurat, the Christian crypt, the Mithraic grotto, the Stupa, the pagoda, and vru:ious mound building effmts around the globe which are iwitatimls of the mountain tomb. Paleolithic cave paintings will later be repeated in the fmm of chamber" art" in pyramids, crypts, and tombs around the world continuing on into the yet current practice of stained glass pictography, mosaics and murals ..

Other points of magical import include large rocks, sacred groves, monumental trees and enchanted springs. The ceremonial center drew Paleolithic Human to it again and again such as at Nippur and Abydos.. The wander er enters a slowly spiraling 01 bit downward around such places and eventually settles there or nearby once domestication of plants and animals insures a predictable food source. This constitutes the appearance of "home," as a specifically spatial, geographical entity, which is synonymous with woman who makes settlement possible through her dedication to domestication and nurturing. The impmtance of the cave continues to fire the imagination of our ancestors well beyond the emergence of settled life as expressed as late as the fourth century B .. C at the Cave of Nymphs on Mount Petelicon where a representation of a cave dedicated to the Nymphs and showing the mythological characters Hermes and Pan was carved into the cave wall It is a cave within a cave; a cave dedicated to the arcahic sacrality of mystery itself. It is interesting that the god who traverses space to carry divine revelation is pair'ed with Pan, an adumbration of the enchanted and enclosed forest Music, the most fundamentally magical of all fmms of communication is thus acknowledged,

Following the psychic eruption of magical vigm, mythological two-

dimensionality manifests the polruization of unified mystery into a realization of the sacred and the profane Early magic on the other hand occurs "everywhere," and is not spatially bounded nor dichotomized .. Magic permeates everything and everywhere and it is prior to mythical polruities and perspectival dualisms The coalescence of magic into specific places like grottos and caves heralds a specifying awareness on its way to mythological thought. But what continues and is often presupposed in mythic and perspectival worlds is the magical process of ananging objects whereby space is created .. In this way, magic is a necessruy precursor and permanent component of mythic and perspectival worlds .. It is never outgrown or abandoned but only reinterpreted. Magic is purely emotional, totally "prejudiced." And emotion cannot be located but instead when one is in a "bad" mood, for instance, the whole world is colored ..

The magic dimension of life is very powerful and all pervasive .. It is the field from which opposites emerge so that it is prior to speech, which creates semantic meanings through binruy processes. Magic is prior to meaning. It is a sense-making process without meaning as such. Rather, incantation is late magic which is already well on its way to becoming mythological story telling and linear narrative .. Early magic is expressed as a silent identity of the human mind with what it perceives .. There is no thinking involved; no elaborate systems of symbols and signs or sacred objects Rather magic is an at-onement with everything .. It is an a-tonality prior to incantation and chanting. It is both atonal and an act of atonement for the very first glirmnerings of magic appe;.'lf in the human awareness that one must 1<:-i11 to live, one must hunt other apimals and Ll,en atone for being a hunter (Campbell, 1983; Eliade, 1972).. It is utterly collectivistic so that ritual demands group participation including the animaL Totemic identity manifests such at-one-ness.

Chanting initiates both the death of magic and the birth of myth but at the SaIne time the one and only way magic can be expressed in its very demise The first images ever made ru·e not of stars or hees but of the animals humans hunted and ate and the hands which are and make the hunt and the cave art. The hand that makes the art is part of the art. This identity is evinced in the outlines of the hands of the rutists painted on cave walls.. These images that are before the sacred and the profane, were made in the perpetual drukness of caves where there is neither two-dimensional up and down, left or right, nor three-dimensional depth. The druk is thick with emotion and mood that has neither edges nor center.. It is a spaceless "place" where magical atonement takes place .. Mystery has no direction.

Magic human is largely an intelligent animal still deeply and unconsciously engaged with all of so-called "nature" (in quotes for "nature" as such does not emerge in consciousness until the perspectival dualism that posits" culture" as that which is not "natural").. The magical field of experience is nonlinear and is purely vital even prior to the dualistic confrontation between humans and natural forces .. Magic is a vital field of prelinguistic emotion, sympathetic communion and compassion (to suffer with).. There are no dissociative distances between intention and expression, between objects and subjects, between here and there. The earliest magic is in fact not an act but rather the

first glimroerings of human volition itself, the realization of a want as opposed to wanting

Mythic Village Space: Settlement As we tIace the shift from the dawn of magical behaviOI to the development of

the first villages what is clear is that myth as an explanatOIY and legitimating narrative gains force, What occurs is a slow (in historical terms) shift from incantation and rhythmic chant to cosmological and cosmogenic stOIY., This shift accompanies the slow process of domestication known as the agricultural revolution during the Mesolithic Period, beginning about 15,000 years ago., The great revolution that marks the boundary between the Paleolithic, and later Mesolithic and Neolithic, epochs is a profound shift in time and space, Space and time are integrated into the qualities of both movement and permanence, Paleolithic humans were nomadic hunter-gatherers, It is estimated that this mode of existence can sustain no more than ten people per square mile (Mumford, 1961: 10)., Paleolithic humans required a vast range and of necessity were limited to small bands with few physical possessions, Then around 15,000 years ago permanent settlements begin to appear between the Indus Valley and the Baltic Sea,

With the emergence of the Mesolithic hamlet comes a profound change in spatio­temporal perception (Giedion, 1952)., This is the time of the first effOIts to domesticate wild plants and animals" Breeding of fruit-bearing tIees, grains and animals takes time and continuous occupation, The Mesolithic Era is the gr'and time of the invention of civilizing conservatism and persistent care ... both p!edoIPinantly maternal qualities"

Mythical two-dimensional space is quite different from magical pre-spatiality and modern three-dimensional space, However, it must be understood that neither the magic, mythic, nOI perspectival attitudes exist in any fOIm of pure modality" Instead, even in the modern city, dimensions of magic and mythic realities persist as vital yet presupposed necessary conditions for the existence of the modern world, as we know it With regards to the predominantly mythical world a residual aspect of magical

consciousness is evident by the arrangement of objects and the attendant creation of space as such, Recall that magical" space" is not empty but" filled" with spirit, manna, chi, ether, or some other mystical substance, Modern science teaches that the universe is largely dead and empty, that the space between electIons and atomic nuclei is a complete vacuum and that the distance between electIons and nuclei is just as gr'eat as that between the planets and the sun, propOItionally speaking given the size of the objects involved This is not the case fOI the vast majority of humans including Western Europeans (up until the twentieth century), Instead, the universe is seen by most humans tluoughout histOIY and across cultures to be alive and whole ("full")., And because the universe is full of vitality, each thing in the universe is connected with each other thing, The idea of fragmented, absolutely independent objects is a twentieth century Western idea, which has many profound consequences including some for space to be discussed further below (Kramer, 1998)

The mythological world is expressed by an eruption in the use of language and the psychic mutation OI punctuated shift from sympathetic to associative

understanding and sense-making. Myth manifests a dissociative abandonment from being" one with all" to being" about" everything. With language and conceptual thought emerges the semantic distinction between intention and expression, the literal and the figural. Humans have a fateful choice: to borrow from Biblical metaphor, the choice is one of "taste," to eat of the tree of knowledge or of life .. Knowledge is disembodied concept. Life is embodied precept. The mythic world is a world of symbols and ambiguity. Mythic ambiguity emerges with the dissociation of figural concept from literal thing symbolized. This becomes a central problem of knowledge and it demands greater and greater degrees of reflection until the breaking point over the breech into perspectival dissociation occurs. Here is the liminal break through to the visually oriented perspectival modality that anogantly proclaims itself "Enlightened," and by implication, magic and myth" dim."

And yet, as the mythic and perspectival presuppose the magic dimension of prelinguistic sense-making, so too the perspectival also presupposes and requires the mythic problematic of ambiguity to call forth the need for greater semantic precision and its attendant longing for methodical thinking. Logic, in the form of absolute authority of definitive meanings, emerges in the perspectival world ..

Because magic space is vital through and through, magical peoples are not very concerned about communication as such. It is not until the emergence of the mythic world that power shifts from making to interpreting the signs and dreams, and truth­saying .. Oracles and prophets proliferate in the mythic world. They live more by words than by deeds .. Late! in the perspectival world pbilosophers and lavvyers "'Tho use words for purely arbitrary purposes and elocutionaxy force displace the prophets.

Moving from the magic emphasis on sightless trance and wisdom, expressed by ancient Taoist masters and Homer, the mythic soothsayer becomes a "seer" of future states .. Finally, we arrive at a form of knowledge that truncates all sensual perception (empiricism) to the eyes. Minerva's (goddess of knowledge) lance is straight and true and her totem is the owl that can see even in the dark. Forever after, accept during the "dark ages," the owl would signify truth and the ability to see invisible relationships by means of pure logic. Owls, along with other nocturnal animals like cats, would be seen as heretical beasts to be exterminated along with the Manicansxx and Gnostics In some statues of the modem pagan god Minerva, she has owl eyes. Logicians, unlike prophets, pride themselves on the ability to argue either side of a dispute without personal attachment or consequence .. For the perspectival person, language is merely a tool, not a magical force for creation (Popper, 1968) ..

For magical people, communication exists as a sympathetic connection to everything that exists and not only empirically but also, and more importantly, emotionally, spiritually, directly. We might think of the magical life-world as being a world filled with a thick gelatin so that if one moves, vibrations "travel out" in all "dir'ections," instantaneously through spiritual and physical" space," and" effect" all other entities. The use of quotation marks is to signify the metaphorical nature of this description because there is no cause/ effect in the magic world but instead spontaneous action. The world just is the case without the reductionism of "prior cause" elsewhere

as from before, behind, eaIlie1, or below.. Hence, magical people" communicate" quite liteIally with the dead and the not yet born. EveIything is alive such as the wind, liveI, sky, mountain, and so forth. Magic people commune with eveIything in the universe .. And long before Watzlavik, Beavin, and Jackson's (19xx) pIagmatism, magical people understood that one could unintentionally and unwittingly send the WIong message to the spiIits .. Consequently, magical people tend to be veIY superstitious or, to put it more accurately, veIY crueful about what they are doing and how they rue doing it. Much of late-magical and mythical life is a sacred activity preoccupied by Iituals and ceremonies

Mythic life is essentially a life concemed with moral judgement. The mythic world is preoccupied with the polality, sacIed and profane It is two-dimensional One cannot understand mythical space without understanding that spatial rurangements and orientation often have much more than utilitarian and aesthetic motives.. The mythic arrangement of objects is often a matteI of serious concern. There ru'e certain identifiable spiritual criteria that govem the ordination of traditional villages almost eveIywhere on Eruth .. Cosmological/religious relationships, rather than geometric order or material efficiencies, are the major determinants in the placement of buildings This is the case for such radically different cultures as the Bushmen of Africa, the Cheyenne of North America, and the Nias Islanders of Indonesia .. Each independently identify the east with the renewal of life This is also the case for the cattle-herding Herem of southweste1n Africa whose sac1ed file is always located in the easternmost hut of the circle that fOIITtS their Kraal. (Vedder, 1928; Fraser, 1968).. The same orientation is favored by the Swazi of South Africa (Kupe1, 1946)

The circle and its center ru'e essential and widespread spatial arrangements that chruacteIize late-magical and mythical space .. This is an important aspect of the mythological universe for the relationship between a center and its circumference is essential and mutually necessruy. You cannot have a circumference without a center and vise versa .. Each is very different from the other but each depends on the ot.~er for its being. This notion extends to the relationship between the individual gIOUp member and the group, This is a fundrunentally polar relationship. For magic people there is only a vague realization of this polruity .. For one-dimensional people the1e is no distinction, no dissociation between a so-called "individual" and the "gIOUpu The circle of the world and the tribe, which is fundamentally two-dimensional, is mythic in nature. For tluee-dimensional perspectival people only discrete points-of-view exist with no inherent or necessruy connection between them, The individual may actually be at odds with the gIOUp and personal liberties rue held in high esteem for perspectival persons. For mythic peoples, personal liberties are equated with selfishness, and simply do not exist at all for magical people,

The circle is not merely a geometric shape for mythic peoples.. It has cosmological import, As noted above, the mythic world is the world of the village, Historically it appears as the Mesolithic hrunlet, Unlike magical Paleolithic life, the mythic world is a world of lengthy narratives, which presuppose a sedentruy being .. The settlement replaces Paleolithic wandering, and mythic nanatives act to legitimize

the emergence of social order that accompanies settlement, domesticity The Mesolithic village is the site of domestication of all sorts of wild plants and animals and not least of all humanity itself. According to Mumford (1961: 11) the Mesolithic hamlet manifests two revolutions in human interaction with the world, the sexual revolution and the agricultural revolution. The Mesolithic world of village life is feminine Woman begins the systematic process of domesticating plants, and with the new surplus of food nomadic forced fasting is abolished. Paleolithic famine, which dimished sexual appetite, is replaced with a new potency The settlement is all about reproduction and domestication. The hamlet affords gr·eater security for childbirth and nurturing. The human population begins to grow like never before. Paleolithic predation yields to Mesolithic symbiosis .. Fertility is at the center of the mythic village. The very term "fertilization" has the double sense of the use of manure, which is abundant to the permanent settlement and which yields abundance in the field, and the role of woman According to Mumford:

The village, in the midst of its garden plots and fields, formed a new kind of settlement: a permanent association of families and neighbors, of birds and animals, of houses and storage pits and barns, all rooted in the ancestral soil, in which each generation formed the compost for the next. The daily round was centered in food and sex, the sustenance and the reproduction of life .. Right into historic times, the phallus and the vulva loom large in village ritual .. In monumental form they make their way l:::1oh:'1"' into +hCl ("'l·t-V nr~+ 1'Y\£H"ohT rl;SlT1"1;saA as ~J..el;st.-€' ..... r.1-.-."YV'Io~.., .......... "1"."'-1'" .............. ~~ ...... ~ ... ~ ...... ...... a.'- ...... " .LL....," ...... u ........... .LJ ~.L 5U..L.......... VLJ.L..I. ~o;:), I...V..tu..L.lUL::t, LVYV~.L.::t1

domed enclosures, but in such naked forms as the huge penis, broken off but erect, still on view at Delos (Mumford, 1961: 13)

The Mesolithic world appears as a massive shift to woman writ large. The very physical structures and technologies of the Mesolithic village were woman Structures such as huts, bins, and storage pits appear as protective enclosures many formed from manure mixed with mud. Manure as AM .. Hocart (19xx) has established, was not orly an integral aspect of settlement and agriculture but it was probably first used in fertility lites and magic sacrifices and also as body decoration .. This is significant in that mythic humans regard excretions of the body with interest and even awe.. The periodic discharge of menses arouses profound concern and anticipation. The meaning of such new inventions as the byre, cistern, graIlaIY, and bin evince a feminine tone which, unlike Paleolithic tools such as spears and an ows, act as extensions of woman with her arms and legs serving to hold and enfold children and lovers, and orifices such as the mouth, vulva, vagina, breast, and womb. Houses, rooms and tombs ar·e usually round in the mythic world, which coincides with the ancient Greek myth that the first bowl was modeled on Aphrodite's breast.

The Neolithic emphasis on domestication and containment, cir·cumscribe the sense of security, receptivity, and nurturing The Mesolithic world is a feminine world marlifested as permanence, continuity, and ordination for the sake of nurturing. The Mesolithic hamlet is a collective nest for the care and nurture of all forrns of life. The concepts "home" and "mother" ar·e fundamentally intertwined .. In ancient Egyptian

hieroglyphics "house" and "town" can stand as symbols for "mother" Already, dming the Neolithic peIiod, woman's intense concenhation on organic life, its selection, propagation, breeding, cross-fertilization, and systematic cultivation yielded neady all the plant and animal varieties still used today. Almost no new species have been added to agriculture in the past 10,000 years .. Only recently, with the advent of perspectival technology, which is materialized magic, a new revolution of will-power-drive is unfolding with the making of entirely new species via genetic engineering.

Woman and home are the center of the mythic world and the mythic village is a model of the larger cosmos, which was born of woman. Woman, universe, and village are synonymous. Right up until today, the mythic concept of center is found among neady all tribes of the Pacific l'-Joltnwest of l'+1orth America irlcluding the Haida, the Kwakiutl, the Tsimshian, TIingit and others .. This is also the case for the Mailu of New Guinea, the Nias Islanders of Indonesia, the Trobriand Islanders of New Guinea, and the Yoruba of Nigeria, as well as many others It must be noted however that many Oceanic peoples of Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia organize their villages in two parallel rows of houses facing each other with a system of two halves (moieties) with men's" clubhouses" either in the center or at the ends of the cenhal thoroughfare Thus they form elongated ovals.. The space in between the rows of houses in Oceania is used mainly for dancing and the ceremonial preparation of food .. Similarly, important ceremonies and feasts were held in the center of Native American villages in North Carolina, on the Great Plains, a.nd in South AmeIica including Bororo villages of South cenhal Brazil, Shavante villages on the Matto Grosso of cenhal Brazil, and Timuquanan fortified villages in Florida. Pueblo natives of North America kept their sacred ceremonial shuctme, the Kiva, in the center of their villages .. Sirnilady, ancient Viking communities formed cirdes, which may say as much about the eady sense of equality and cooperation as it does about cosm'Ological criteria.

A comm'On aspect 'Of mythol'Ogical s'Ocial 'Organizati'On is nat 'Only t'O be farmed in a cir'cular orientati'On but als'O t'O have two halves of the cirde .. For instance twa sub­groups always 'Occupied opp'Osite halves 'Of teepee circles thr'Ough'Out the Plains 'Of North America am'Ong several hibes including the Cheyenne, Omaha, P'Onka, Osage, Kansas, I'Owa, Ot'O, and Miss'Omi For instance, am'Ong the Osage, dming inactive times the circle 'Of teepees faced the sumise, but dming a hunt or raid, which implied the taking 'Of life, the opening 'Of the cirde faced West, toward the sunset and the land 'Of the dead.. In Ki'Owa camps, Ree Indians 'Occupied places of h'Onor irmnediately s'Outh 'Of the enhance while the Ki'Owa themselves, wh'O were resp'Onsible for the Sun Dance teepee, camped 'On the western side 'Of the circle ..

It should be n'Oted als'O that the placement 'Of 'Objects and residences is c'Onholled by c'Osm'Ological criteria despite the fact that same 'Of these Native Americans were largely n'Omadic hunting hibes .. All 'Of this is interesting because it dem'Onshates that even n'Omadic pe'Oples organized their dwellings 'On a cirde of" c'Olossal scale by means 'Of a c'Ombinati'On 'Of axial and cenhalized aligmnent" (Fraser, 1968: 22). This is als'O hue 'Of Pygmies and Bushmen despite the fact that they retain a very high level of m'Obility and flexibility in design.

Thus, even nomads can have a sort of fixed-feature sense of organization within the teepee and village cirde even while they are temporary conshucts.. This points up the importance of Joseph Campbell's (1983) claim that mythological peoples count as most real and hue a sacred world of relationships that ar'e presumed to be necessary and "behind" the visible world, which is regarded as contingent. The mythological cosmos has two halves well described in Plato as the hidden or forgotten yet most important and eternal formal" side," and the visible actual world of time Mythological and religious principles maintain in a timeless field informing the world of temporal change while being in polarity with it,

For mythological peoples, matter and spirit are distinctly different with the emphasis of impmtance going decidedly to the spiritual side of the cosmos, With the advent of the three-dimensional perspectival world however, this polarity is shetched to the breaking point of duality as the spiritual and material sides of the cosmos (or a single person or entity), become fragmented into the uncommunicative subject and object dichotomy, Indeed, in modernity, the subject and object dichotomy fractures into an antagonistic, mutually excluding opposition. In modernity the subject, spirit, or consciousness is pushed into an existential oblivion of nonexistence, All that is left is material objects separated by empty space which then raises to critical importance of the problem of how they then communicate which is why the discipline of communication came into being when and where it did.. Communication as such becomes an important problem ody in the modern West The connection to ancestral and divine entities is also centralized Lll the mytPic 1vodd" In Dongson­influenced eastern Flores, Indonesia, families that have houses in the center of the village are called" mast" and "sail" and ar'e said to be direct descendents from the original ancestors who arrived long ago by ship.. The identity of ship with ancestor and center is common to many Indonesian groups. Even practical affairs such as village defense almost always involves a religious/mythical dimension, which is to say, a narrative explanation and justification for why things are arranged the way they are For example, the mountain villages in Sumba, Indonesia, are placed on sites hallowed by hadition despite the fact that they are miles from water (Fraser, 1968). Similarly, the Onondaga of New York developed a system of ponds and ditches as a water source inside the thirty-foot-high walls of their villages.

The essence of mythological space is that it expresses mythological beliefs about the universe, A good example of this can be found in Douglas Fraser's (1968) realization that G. J Ojo's (1966) description of the typical Y oruba coronation ceremony and Frank Willett's history of African culture had explanatory value for understanding the physical planning of Y oruba towns in Nigeria

One of the least explored yet potentially most interesting aspects of the Y oruba town plan is its relation to cosmology and geomancy. The axial north-south orientation of the Ketu town brings to mind the installation ritual of the Ketu king who, at the time of his coronation, visited four special houses situated respectively north, west, east, and south of the village, This custom of cir'cumambulation, whereby the king takes

symbolic possession of his dominions, is found in many parts of the world and is particularly characteristic of kingship in the ancient Near East, Many other Nigerian traits, including the custom of linking the cardinal directions with different colors and deities, the system of divination, fish­legged figures, the" animal master" theme, bird-serpent combats as royal symbols, the snake that bites its own tail, and so on, have been ascribed to influences stemming ultimately from the pre-Islamic Near East, although possibly not reaching Nigeria until the middle of the first millenium AD, (Fraser, 1968: 46)

The Yuroba town plan is based on orientation centered upon the palace of the divine king The divine king, or aba, of each town embodies the wellbeing of the community and is the custodian of the rituals, shrines, and wealth thereof. The king, like most royal rulers the world over, traces his descent from a god, The Oba claims to be a direct descendant of Oduduwa who was ordered by the Supreme Being, Olodumare, to desecend to Earth at LLe-Lfe and inaugurate the first kingship"

Other examples of mythological space are the towns of Bali Aga, in the highlands of Bali, Although there are marked differences between Indianized Balinese villages and other non-Hinduized Southeast Asian villages, both adhere to the macrocosmic­microcosmic principle of crossing cardinal axes The macrocosmic-microcosmic principle is embodied in town planning as the spatial imperative to imitate the presumed structure of ~'te universe ii' village and town planning, The practice of crossing cardiP..a! axes as a funda..'t}1ental structural fo:rm in village arrangement, vvhich is found allover the world, is also evident in Bali Aga villages" While it has been arg-ued by Robert Heine-Geldern (1956) that this principle probably originated in the ancient Near East as an astrological or cosmological system of town planning which then spread to India, China, Southeast Asia, and Europe, it has also, and inexplicably, occurred in village and city planning in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica" Gebser (1949) would attribute this form of spatial orientation to a deeper mythological world-view rather than conventional notions of the migration of ideas"

In either case, the point is that mythological space is an expression of my tho­religious world-view, For instance, in some Indonesian villages that have been influenced by Indian thought, the central palace is synonymous with the sacred world­mountain, Mount Meru in Buddhism and Hindu Brahmanism, In fact the word for "temple" among Indianized Balinese is "Meru" But in non-Indianized Bali Aga villages this concept does not exist, This suggests that the planning system employed in old Balinese villages was pre-Indic in origin, Indeed, Bali Aga villages resemble much more the spatial organization of Bronze-Iron Age Dongson culture found in Nias, South Borneo, and other parts of Indonesia (Tan, 1952),

The founding of Nias villages clearly follows a cosmological model, First a "priest" selects a suitable site then he must perform many rites, which accompany the clearing of the land, Then he marks the limits of the village with pieces of the "world tr'ee" Anyone who moves these markers is seen as a criminaL The center of the oval is called the "Fuso Newali," the "navel of the village" from which the cir'cumference

OIiginates (Thomsen, 1928) .. In OIder to get a clear understanding of mythic village space the Nias village

Gou) is a good example For instance, stone stairways leading to the village are carved with various animals and symbols such as crocodiles, lizards, and other animals of the "lower world" One end of the elongated village is regarded as being" downstream" which means the end of commoners, death, aquatic animals, "west" and "nOIthU The other end (Sibaloi) is regarded as the "river source," and "upstream" which means life, chieftanship, aerial creatures, sun, "east," and" southU The axis of the Nias village is also seen as the sky-river OI world axis, which separates the upper world from the underworld. The sky-river/village axis is synonymous with both the cosmos and the wOIld snake, which is the Milky Way that rings the world and! OI village The world tree grows at the center of the wOIld and the navel of the village .. The Fuso Newali is the spot where opposing forces fuse.. Conjoinings are seen as both reconciliations of polar forces and as climactic episodes in the universe.. In other non-Indianized parts of Indonesia, such as in Ngadju villages of Borneo, we also find cOOIdinates consisting of upriver (Ngadu), downriver (Ngawa), sunrise (Kabaloman Andau), and sunset (Kabelapanandau).. Where they intersect in the village are focal points of cosmic impOItance. PERSPECTIVAL SPACE

Somewhat ironically, the most rudimentary glimmerings of perspectivism and the awareness of three-dimensional depth space can be traced to the end of the nomadic HT:::H.T of lHp. lATi+h tho +11"'0+ no1'TY'I~1"'Ic),1,",+ cof+lcn"'I"H30n+c hlTTY'IanC hoO"i-n +1"'\ '3 .... rruT1"'O ':l c:o:t"'llCO At-....... , ~ ....................... .......... ~ ..... ~ .... .L.a..L ...... y""..L.L.LU"L..LL'-........ "' ................ .L.LL ........ LLUO .I.L ..... .L.LL .Lu..> "-' .... OLLL ................. "'1 .u. ....................... I..U'- ...... .L

fixed position that grounds a personalj private vantage point and which equals one's identity and "belongs" to no one else .. The permanent hut and hearth is were early human makes his stand and from which he projects his interests and desires, and from where he surveys the wOIld Settlers come to have something to defend and ultimately something to expand upon. "Home" constitutes the first point-of-view in all senses of this phrase. Home is from where perspectival identity emerges <'-TId the first Se!1Be of self as a redundant emphasis, "self-identity.u One acquires the self in all its dimensions induding language, economic status, ethnicity, religion, and so fOIth. Home implies permanence, which underscores the sense of position. From this follows various allegiances and group loyalties such as nationalism, ethnocentrism, racism, and other forms of tribalism. With settlement comes a sense of permanence and identity induding personal property and ethics, which justify defense The advent of perspective and its defense in all its modalities heralds the consolidation of a fixed habitus .. Once humans stopped moving they had a fixed point-of-view that took possession of them, absolute fixed interests, values, beliefs, and material possessions worthy of defense, even to death.

Perspectival space presupposes magical and mythical tenitOIiality. However, perspectival space goes beyond instinctual and mythological feelings of ownership and belonging to more systematic, arbitrary, and goal oriented attitudes towards land .. The ownership of land changes from the mythic sense of being one with the land and it having the sense of hereditary, inherent birthright, to transferable and ultimately

arbiharyownership No longer is the land identical with personal identity. No longer does it own you as much as you own it. But instead, it becomes a commodity with the impermanent quality of manipulation by exchange Perspective becomes mobile.. In the mythic sense, land has an inherent identity Land is like the color of one's skin. The land is a birthright and it cannot be changed in the sense that it can be stolen but it cannot be given away, sold or otherwise become anything other than what its identity "really," and always has been and will be .. The intertwined nature of identity can be simply stated in this form, this is Japan I arnJapanese. The land speaks Japanese. The land literally (in mythological terms) gave birth to a particular group of people and no others .. And no matter who should ever occupy it, it remains Japan, the home of the Japanese.

By conhast, in the perspectival world, the possession of land is not a polar relationship whereby I own it and it owns me .. Rather, in the perspectival attitude, land is dead resource base, which has no magical or mythical imperatives about it.. It holds no obligation for us, no emotional attachment. It can be bought and sold innumerable times to whoever has the desir'e and wealth to exchange for it. Possession is not a birthright but a legal and economic status .. Perspectival land is conceived of rationally in the form of legal deeds, geomehy, cartography, ownership, and resource .. Land has no inherent value in and of itself. It has value only as something exchangeable and in so far as it has utility as defined by personal interest. Only in so far as it is "productive" is it valuable .. Because according to the per'Spectivel person, land has no inherent value, it must be value-added, II developed ," Thus, the nattual composition of land must be made into a ma.'1ageable artifact li..\e a park or preserve with definite boundaries and use-values,. That which cannot be made to exist within the criteria of economic expedience, has no value, does not exist except perhaps in some sentimental sense, which is to say in some nonsensically illogical modality.. This is essentially hue of the flora and fauna on the land too.. Animals, if they are to be worthy of interest and protections, must be proven to have at least the potential for human utiJity like perhaps becoming a pharmaceutical resource base .. Pragmatism and utilitarianism, which is to say the physical exploitability of a phenomenon comes to be synonymous with reason itself. Opportunism is the modus operandi of the egocenhic perspectival world .. The perspectival query put to all things is "what is your reason for being," "of what use are you tome?"

Perspectival land, as compared with mythical or magical land, is all essentially the same., Its value or meaning, in so far as it has any, is the consequence of exploitation based on personal interest, which guides the so-called disinterested measurement of the surveyor and assessor. Of course, the value of the land is the focus of interest. Under such conditions, land is made into a commodity, an artifice., It becomes ideologized and enculturated., It becomes perspectival, which is to say that it no longer is seen as a purely natural thing. Land is thus "tamed," "developed," measured subdivided and assessed .. Real-estate is not a naturally occurring phenomenon .. Land is made into a valuable commodity according to the dictates of the perspectival worldview, values, interests, beliefs, and expectations.

As noted above, the perspectival sense of space finds its first nascent possibility in the permanence of fixed settlement, But what is implied in fixed settlement, which is the most important aspect of perspectival space, is the division of space into yours and mine, the in-group and the out-g!'Oup, us and them, and also the fragmentation of life into the public and the private domains" But it does not come into full-blown realization until the advent of the city, which ushers in a mode of being characterized by uniformity, specialization, unitization, division and sub-division, and sectorization, Uniformism as the ideology of creating and reifying units as identical ideal types like units of money or lengths like feet and meters, is a necessary condition for measurement. In the process of measuring the land, actual geographical inconsistencies like trees, landmarks, hills, and such are treated as inelevant contingencies, Land is transformed into a base and uniform resource available for measurement and subdivision, The emotional distinctions of sacred and profane are disregarded as irrelevant and supplanted with economic evaluation, which is deemed in ethnocentric tenns to be a more standardized and thus rational way of assessing value" The magical and mythical unity of the surface of the earth is broken by walls, fences, boarders, and boundaries" In accordance with the egocentric quality of perspectivism, the world is privatized,

The subdivision of the virtualized or idealized surface of the land that has been reduced to a uniform resource pmifying it of superstitious contingencies like sacred tenitoriality, is then value-added by being "reclaimed," as when interested parties drain a swamp or clear-cut a portion of it This process involves reducing the u]1iform surface to an idealized and rationalized pattern like a grid of plots or sectors which are then arbitrarily (or to put it another way, with little care) assigned specialized functions as in the legal process of zoning in modern cities" In this way, economic interest is etched into the land via the segregation of residential areas from industrial and commercial areas, This begins with the segregation of the nec!'Opolis or cemetery and slaughterhouses f!'Om the city of the living, but this segregation is based less on human interest than supernatural requir'ements that impose themselves upon the collective, and as such ar'e not seen as arbitrary at alL Even the sacred, that in the magical world exists everywhere, and is localized in the mythical world to mountain tops, sacred wells, springs, caves and the like, becomes vastly abstracted and removed to unreachable domains like heaven and the astral plane In the perspectival world, space becomes a kind of containment that leads to goal-oriented organization and arrangement,

The perspectivial attitude permeates all modes of life including the division of specialized labors and the uniform standardization of professional criteria such as certifying doctors, teachers, plumbers, soldiers, financiers, and so forth" With the predomination of rationalizing philosophical and psychological explanations, modernization occurred in Eu!'Ope during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, One consequence has been that even the unity of the mind has been spatialized leading to its subdivision into various "faculties," like memory and sensation, which were reflected in the subdivision of knowledge itself into the various faculties of the

university so that knowledge has been fragmented, a pIOcess called regional ontologization by Edmund Hussed (19xx)

Thus, knowledge itself came to be seen as achievable not be passively observing the world, that is by sheer experience or wisdom, but by the utilization of method as tooL Knowledge itself became a pIOduct The scientific method yields knowledge by subdividing big problems into smaller sub-elements for solution, dissecting organic bodies, splitting economic barter into debts and credits, and the material universe into periodic elements, molecules, atoms, and so forth .. Perspectival space is characterized by fragmentation in the interest of control and goal-orientation, especially the goal of ordination itself, which enables manageability. The universe, and everything in it, takes on a linear quality presupposed by goal-orientation and achievement, The perspectival attitude is one of positivistic optimism known as pIOgressivism, The perspectival person struggles to tame or manage time itself in the interest of expediting goal accomplishment, Thus we have what Jacques Ellul (19xx) has called the modern" cult of efficiency," and Gebser (1949/1985) has called modern humanities "tragic addiction to time.," This condition is deemed "tragic" by Gebser because the more the perspectival human attempts to control time by spatializing and subdividing it into schedules and deadlines, the more she is restricting her own freedom,

Shedding the ascription oriented fatalism of the magic and mythic worlds, the perspectival world manifests a release of directional will that launches various drives for expansion and acquisition in space; exploration, mapping, development, and power, Perspectivism is a sense of spatial thinking such that one starts somewhere and

" " embarks on journeys of investigation, exploration and acquisition into and of depth-space, This perspectival obsession can be named in a word: empir'e This is not magical nomadic wandering, Instead empire has a fixed center fIOm which progress commences, PIOgress is measured in terms of conquest, Progress and conquest become synonymous, Conquest means to get things under the ego's control, to "tame" the wilderness of space/ time thus making it malleable, valuable, The expansion of imperial power is spatiaL It presupposes three-dimensional depth To the perspectival mentality, uncertainty is an anxiety, and as is typical of modern Western scholasticism, this particular attitude is projected onto all peoples as a universal property of human nature (Berger & Calabresee)., Thus, it is assumed in ethnocentric fashion by Western experts, that happiness is a product of manageable ordination, This becomes the taming rationale behind benevolent, Modern, imperialism, otherwise known as the "white Man's burden," in all its manifestations., This is the moral "duty" of development efforts" As the missionary would say, "We must destroy you and your gods, in order to save you and bring true happiness,u As is typical of all ethnocentrisms (truly blind prejudices), it never even occurs to the missionary that a person could be happy without being" saved" from him or her ignor ant self This is quite different from malevolent imperialism which has little guilt about conquest in need of being asuaged by means of such rationale" This requirement of making one feel good about being a conquorer has been identified by Friedrich Nietzsche and Max Weber as a specifically Christian cultural characteristic Otherwise, conquest has been what might be called

"bmtally honest" in its motives The modernization of Japan can thus be seen in its attempt to accomplish and legitimize colonization of East and Southeast Asia in the I wentieth CentUIY by naming the pIOcess the creation of a "sphere of co-pIOsperity ," Such euphemisms constitute a rhetoric that hansparently reveals what Nietzsche calls the hypocrisy of "bad conscience," Modem, ideological, conquest presents itself not as exclusively pursuing its own interests, but as saving the world fIOm itself For instance, the "White Man's bUIden" is expressed as a duty, as even a sacrifice, rather than the pursuit of "influence," riches and power" Minimally modem imperialism is stated as a II· • n .

WIn, WIn scenarIO,

The first manifestation of wide scale ordination in the pursuit of exaggerated power-interests OCCllI'S with the development of the city.. Ihe city emerges first in Sumer some 8,000 years ago and it is marked by the consolidation, psychologically, politically, and physically of the village containment into a walled fortress, which forms the hard core of empire.. Ihe capital city is the center of empire in all the ways this is meant today. The capital is the seat of central government to which taxes and tribute flow and from where reallocation of resources occurs. Often the imperial city is the very seat of god herself as in ancient Egypt, China, Japan, Mexico, or god's designated authority and representative on Earth as in the divine right of kings and Papal authority. The city has at its center the fortr'ess and the temple. The centr'al power is the priestly king, Until the advent of perspectivism, with its fragmenting mentality, secular and spiritual power is combined into an absolute authority, to be later further "modernized," which is to say subdivided

Here, in the capital city, we fh,cl space a central concern .. Population density makes it a cltt onie issue" Perspectival space is expressed in all aspects of city plar.ning, Vlith tIle advent of the city comes the goal-oriented lh,ear obsession vvith efficiency The layout of cities changes from being guided by magical and mythical imperatives to issues of efficiencies in crowd control, housing, enhanced military movement and defensive deployment, trade and the like .. Monumental architecture and sculpture emerges in the imperial city to impress its inhabitants and visitors with the might of centr" lized power With centralization comes hierarchy and specialization (Mumford, 1953; Monis, 1978) As Desmond Monis puts it, with the ordination of human life into artificial hierar'chies, status becomes increasingly dissociated from natural capacities like sheer physical strength or mental cleverness and instead dependent upon organizational, which is to say ideological justifications .. It is in the city, that the" status struggle" and the frustration of natural talents, commences on a mass scale,

With population density comes the new state of affairs whereby people live and move among hoards of strangers in their everyday lives., Walking down the street of a city, one is caught up in the flow of masses of people utterly unknown to you. Unlike the village milieu where everyone practically knows everyone else from the time of their birth until their death, the city acts as a magnet, drawing people from various cultures and backgrounds into a multiethnic stew. Several consequences follow from the city and its density,

First of all there is widespread alienation. With cultural and religious diversity coming together in the polyglot of the city, people no longer share a common set of beliefs, values, customs, or language. Consequently, their actions are not held in check

by the social bond immanent in the village milieu. Thus, law must be invented which subjects all those within the city to its dominion. This is the birth of secular cenhalized authority. For no matter what religion or culture a city dweller might claim, all are equal under the new "high" law. Also the law must be enforced which calls into being the invention of an entire class and profession of law enforcers, police. The city cannot function without order and so it is that the city is preoccupied with ordination. Standardization of fragmented units is shictly a dissociated, mban abshaction Money and the clock ar'e the first mass media that synchronize the entire community as a mass movement They ar'e products of the urban environment, not rural agrarian tools.

Shucture is the most essential quality of m ban life. Shucture is a fundamentally spatial concept, The city is a highly cenhalized and dense congregation of people And as alienation results from the weakening of community bonds on the individual, hierarchical niches and sub-groupings emerge for the individual to have a sense of place, order, intelligibility, pUIpose, and identity. For example, an urban individual may come to identify with his or her profession more than with a clan. So their names shift from the clan surname to being called whatever it is that they do, like being a blacksmith, a porter, a cobbler and so forth. So we have Mr .. Smith, MI'.. Porter, and the like,

Being the most shuctured environment yet concocted by humanity, the city is the first machine whose parts ar'e living people fulfilling specified roles and functions (Mumford, 1953), The structure, primarily a bureaucracy necessary for the administration of centra! po\ver, cop..stitutes the changeless skeleton "bepJnd," "over arching," and/or "underneath," "grounding" the overall running of the machine/ city, System and shucture, flow chart and scheme, come to be seen as the real processes that guide daily contingencies toward hanscending goals Like some divine force, system gives the impression of being located" somewhere" else, such as a plan or logic "behind" the scenes, conholling everything .. Individuals, in their specialized capacities, are easily interchangeable within the unchanging shuctme of adroinishation The shucture is more "real," more endUIing than its inhabitants ..