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Time and Landscape Author(s): Barbara Bender Source: Current Anthropology, Vol. 43, No. S4, Special Issue Repertoires of Timekeeping in

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C u r r e n t A n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 43, Supplement, August–October 2002� 2002 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved 0011-3204/2002/43supp-0009$2.50

Time and Landscape

by Barbara Bender

Landscapes are created out of people’s understanding and engage-ment with the world around them. They are always in process ofbeing shaped and reshaped. Being of the moment and in process,they are always temporal. They are not a record but a recording,and this recording is much more than a reflection of humanagency and action; it is creative of them. Landscapes provokememory, facilitate (or impede) action. Nor are they a recording,for they are always polyvalent and multivocal. There is a histo-ricity and spatiality to people’s engagement with the worldaround them. This paper begins with the untidiness of spatialtemporalities, with structural inequalities that emphasize—ormarginalize—people’s sense of place and belonging, and with thesubjective positioning of the commentator. A phenomenologicalposition is adopted, but it is one that moves beyond the local toencompass a nested series of sociopolitical landscapes. Three re-cent projects are then described. The agendas that inform theprojects are different, but each attempts to understand how peo-ple, differently placed, engage with the world around them andwith the past embedded in the landscape.

b a r b a r a b e n d e r has a Ph.D. from the Institute of Archae-ology, London. She is Professor of Heritage Anthropology in theAnthropology Department at University College, London (Lon-don WC1E 6BT, England [[email protected]]).

Every beginning and ending, every boundary drawn, isarbitrary. “An horizon is nothing save the limit of oursight” (William Penn, Fruits of Solitude). Nancy Munn,in her seminal paper “The Cultural Anthropology ofTime,” talks of “the space of time” and summons upBorges’s infinite “Book of Sand”: “As one opens thisbook, pages keep growing from it—it has no beginningor end. Borges’s book could be taken as the space of time:A page once seen is never seen again, and the book’sharried possessors keep trying to escape its ‘monstrous’self-production by surreptitiously selling or losing it”(Munn 1992: 93).

This introduction attempts a cautious path-findingthrough the proliferating notions of time and landscape,after which I discuss some of my recent work, whichattempts to negotiate parts of this labyrinth.

I start with two proposals. The first: Landscape is timematerialized. Or, better, Landscape is time materializ-ing: landscapes, like time, never stand still. The second:Landscapes and time can never be “out there”: they arealways subjective.

The first: In contemporary Western discourse (a loadedand problematic concept to which I shall return), land-scape may be defined in many different ways, but allincorporate the notion of “time passing.” Thus land-scape as solid geology (as in “a granitic landscape,” “akarst landscape”) speaks to evolutionary time, aeons oftime: “all history in a grain of sand” (Samuel 1975: xix).Landscape as land form or topography (“a desert land-scape,” “a riverine landscape”), again, has great time-depth but may involve human interventions, human his-tories. With landscape as mantled (as in “a landscape ofpeat and moor,” “a tropical landscape”) the processesquicken, sometimes invoking seasonal transience. Land-scape as land-use (“an arable landscape,” “a countryhouse landscape,” “a plantation landscape”) speaks ofthings done to the land—action and movement, the ef-fects of historically specific social/political/cultural re-lationships. And there are many other sorts of peopleddefinitions of landscape: historical landscapes, land-scapes as representation, landscapes of settlement, land-scapes of migration and exile, and, most recently per-haps, phenomenological landscapes, where the timeduration is measured in terms of human embodied ex-perience of place and movement, of memory and expec-tation. The list could surely be extended, but whateverthe focus, time passes.

The time that passes in these ’scapes is not uniform.Sometimes a linear notion is implied: units of time“clipped together,” uniformly ticking over as the years,centuries, millennia, and much more, go by.

There is seasonal time, which is sometimes thoughtof as cyclical (or repetitive)—“the simple scansion ofpassing time” (Bourdieu 1977:103). Or there may be arecognition that though the seasons come round and thesame places are revisited, they are never the same; timemoves on: “While people often move in cyclical patternsin the course of routine activities, returning to the samelocation again and again . . . the places . . . are themselvescontinuously being physically altered and decaying, as


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S104 F current anthropology Volume 43, Supplement, August–October 2002

well as continuously being re-evaluated and re-inter-preted” (Thomas 1996:90).

In other accounts time is event-driven or inflectedthrough the lens of mythical or historical accounts, orit is elided, denied, or exaggerated in action and memory:“Incommensurable islands of duration, each with itsown rhythm, the time that flies by or drags, dependingon what one is doing” (Bourdieu 1977:103).

There is ceremonial time, time punctuated by churchbells or factory sirens, and there is compressed globaltime that often, confusingly, serves to accentuate theparticularity of local time.

But time is not one thing or another: it is both onething and another. Different times nest within eachother and draw meaning from each other. Thus Gell(1992) takes Bourdieu to task for privileging practice overmore abstract cultural knowledge—for maintaining thatthe Kabyle have no “abstract” calendar, “only incom-mensurable islands of duration.” Gell points out (p. 299)that though the Kabyle calendar may be agrarian ratherthan celestial, “it is only in relation to the calendricalscheme as a whole that the contingent passage of [time]has any meaning.” And more, the codified calendricknowledge “evoked and exchanged in the flow of ev-eryday interaction” (p. 308) is an important source ofpower.

The second proposal follows from the first. Landscapesand time are not objective, not “a given,” not neutral.(Nor, for that matter, is “nature” or any of the othercategories that we might care to consider.) This is notto say that the world does not exist outside of humanunderstanding—of course it does. When we have bombedourselves out of existence or made the world unlivablefor human beings, the world will (probably) still existand will go on changing. The point is simply that it iswe, through our embodied understanding, our being-in-the-world, who create the categories and the interpre-tations: “Human beings cope with the phenomena theyencounter by slotting them in to the understanding ofthe world which they have already developed: nothingis perceived without being perceived ‘as’ something. . . .If there was no . . . person, there would still be rocks,trees, mountains . . . but no one to recognize them assuch or to call them by those names” (Thomas 1996:65–66).

To say that landscape and time are subjective does notrequire a descent into a miasma of cultural relativity. Itsimply means that the engagement with landscape andtime is historically particular, imbricated in social re-lations and deeply political.

More, the cultural meanings we give to time and placeare not just reflections of these relationships; they carrytheir own political and social charge. When farmworkersbecome “farm hands” or a “fine prospect” elides a viewover the land (preferably your land) and a view to en-hanced social status (Williams 1973: 121), or when Ben-jamin Franklin coins the phrase “Time is money” (Frank-lin 1785?) or we unthinkingly talk about “wasting time”or “spending time,” this linguistic sleight-of-hand bothjustifies and obfuscates transformations in social rela-

tions and fields of power that improve1 some people’spositions and diminish others’.

Nor does the recognition that landscape is subjectivemean that it is passive. This context-dependency of peo-ple’s being-in-the-world is a physical context: the con-tours of the interacted-with landscape—the materialityof social relationships—are dynamic. Human interven-tions are done not so much to the landscape as with thelandscape, and what is done affects what can be done. Aplace inflected with memory serves to draw people to-wards it or to keep them away, permits the assertion ordenial of knowledge claims, becomes a nexus of con-tested meaning. Equally, more abstractly, our attemptsto interpret time or place are created out of (and creativeof) an experience of “things in place.” As Hodder (1997:193) puts it, the past “is constructed by the interpreterand that interpretation is informed by an experience ofdata from the past.”

The Historical Particularity of WesternDiscourses

When I listed landscapes “in time” I limited myself toa particular bunch of understandings and experiencesthat can be loosely bundled together under the umbrellaof “Western discourse(s).” Calling them discoursesrather than social theories serves to emphasize that thetheories come out of something and somewhere (Gregory1993:274):

The term underlines the embeddedness of social the-ory in social life—those traces of its historical geog-raphy that conventional social theory seeks to sup-press but which are, none the less, indelibly presentin the very questions it asks and the answers itgives. . . . Contexts and easements which shape ourlocal knowledges, however imperiously global theirclaims to know . . . . To speak of social theory asdiscourse is to emphasize the politics of social the-ory which are put in place . . . through the multipleligatures between “knowledge” and “power.”

To call them “Western” discourses not only locatesthem geographically but also locates the historicalsource of their power. These discourses are located inpost-Enlightenment, expansionist, capitalist worlds. Thethree adjectives interlock (Bender 1999: 32):2

The inventions and refinement of the cartographicequipment . . . was not just an adjunct to explora-tion and colonisation, it helped create the conditionsfor such enterprises (Cosgrove 1984: 140). Equally, it

1. Another ambiguous word: to “improve” the land and/or to “im-prove” one’s chances.2. Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” is a wonderful exampleof the seductive power of the “New World”: “Had we but worldenough, and time, / This coyness, lady, were no crime. . . . / Thouby the Indian Ganges’ side / Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide / OfHumber would complain. . . . / . . . / My vegetable love should grow/ Vaster than empires and more slow.”



bender Time and Landscape F S105

was not just an aid to the establishment and moni-toring of different sorts of property and of nationaland regional boundaries, but a force in the creatingof changing social configurations (Helgerson 1986).

As Harley (1992: 528) explains, 16th- and 17th-centurycartography was “simultaneously a practical instrumentfor colonial policy, a visual rhetoric for fashioning Eu-ropean attitudes towards the Americas and its people,and an analogue for the acquisition, management andreinforcement of colonial power.” Turnbull (1989) hasshown that the notion of a non-indexical representationof space in Western cartography—that is, a representa-tion that is supposedly neutral and scientific and floatsfree of any historical particularity—is an illusion thatserves to obscure the political and social indexicality ofthe undertaking.

Equally, Western notions of landscape are politicallyladen. They encapsulate ideas about perspective, aboutdistance between observer and observed, which make theobserver active, the observed passive. In the late 16thcentury the word denoted a particular type of painting,then went on to encompass a particular way of viewing,and eventually involved the physical landscaping of theview—a class-based imposition that appeared visual butin reality marked the reorganization of social and eco-nomic relations. Labour was both aesthetically and phys-ically removed from view and the connection betweenlandscaped estate and factory and colonial plantation sat-isfactorily obscured (Bender 1993).

As with landscape or cartography, so with time. Munnemphasizes that seemingly neutral “timekeeping” is notjust a strategy for interaction but “a medium of hierar-chic power and governance” (Munn 1992:109). Again,“clock time” not only works for and with the control oflabour but spills out and infiltrates a far wider networkof social relationships: “Individual participation in thetightly synchronized and ’synchorized’ production proj-ects of factories and large-scale shops of necessity im-posed time discipline and coupling constraints upon es-sential family projects, thereby contributing to a modi-fication of the family itself” (Thrift and Pred 1981:279).

Not just clock time but evolutionary time has to berecognized as socially and politically freighted (Fabian1983:13):

The true reason why biblical chronology had to beabandoned was that it did not contain the right kindof Time. . . . It was Time relaying significant events,mythical and historical, and as such it was chronicleas well as chronology. . . . It did not allow for Timeto be a variable independent of the events it marks.Hence it could not become part of a Cartesian sys-tem of time-space coordinates allowing the scientistto plot a multitude of uneventful data over neutraltime until it was first naturalized, i.e., separatedfrom events meaningful to mankind.

Fabian continues (pp. 22, 26–27):

These methods of [absolute] dating appeared to an-

chor human evolution and a vast amount of culturalmaterial once and forever in objective, natural, i.e.,noncultural Time. . . . They conveyed an aura of sci-entific rigour and trustworthiness. . . .

Evolutionary sequences and their concomitantpolitical practice of colonialism and imperialismmay look incorporative: after all, they create a uni-versal frame of reference able to accommodate allsocieties. But being based on the episteme of naturalhistory, they are founded on distancing and separa-tion. There would be no raison d’être for the com-parative method if it was not the classification ofentities or traits which first have to be separate anddistinct before their similarities can be used to es-tablish taxonomies and developmental sequences. Toput this more concretely: What makes the savagesignificant to the evolutionist’s Time is that he livesin another Time.

Not just evolutionary (time) discourses but anthro-pological discourses that stress the boundedness of cul-tures and countries (place) work to “other” the Other(Appadurai 1988:37). Gupta and Ferguson (1992:14) prob-lematize both the unity of the “Us” and the othernessof the “Other.” We should, they suggest, work “with thepremise that spaces have always been hierarchicallyinterconnected. . . . Then cultural and social change be-comes not a matter of cultural contact and articulationbut one of thinking difference through connection. . . .We turn from a project of juxtaposing pre-existing dif-ferences to one of exploring the construction of differ-ences in historical process.”

The “Self” in This Narrative

Up to this point the stress has been on the way in whichWestern discourses take shape from and work to shapeparticularities of time and place. This deconstruction be-comes possible because time has moved on and condi-tions, including the production of knowledge and self,have changed. The deconstruction “makes sense” in apostmodern context in which, though “the West” con-tinues to entrench and extend its economic hold, manypeople, as individuals, feel a loss of “place” (in the widestsense of word), fear the change of pace, and mistrust themission to control.

The reader might point out a logical flaw in the de-construction: on one hand, I say everything is subjectiveand relative, and on the other, struggling to contextualizethe discourse, I retain elements of “grand narrative.” Ifind this a necessary contradiction. On one hand, ourunderstandings are both “placed” and changing; on theother, we marshal them to work for us, to answer to ourcurrent preoccupations. While we accept that we are notin the business of producing “the truth,” we have theright to position ourselves within the postmodern fluxin order to produce something that feels true to us andeffective at a given moment in time. In my case, giventhe particularity of my own background—which, among




Fig. 1. The Leskernick quoit stone at the midsummersolstice. The capstone was hefted into place by theBronze Age villagers, but there are many similarstructures on the moor that are “natural.”

other things, involves an espousal of, first, structuralMarxism (Bender 1978) and then, in keeping with thechanging times and preoccupations, cultural Marxism(Bender 1998:30–31)—I welcome the postmodern em-phasis on an untidy multivocality but maintain a strongdesire to work with narratives (grand or otherwise) thatacknowledge the political, economic, and social forcesthat inform that diversity (Bender 1998:13–23).

Embodiment of Place and Time

Deconstruction serves to destabilize and question, buthow are we to move towards a more constructive en-gagement? This is not the time or place for a long the-oretical exegesis; I would simply make a plea for moreopen-ended theorizing that questions disciplinaryboundaries and recognizes the untidiness and contradic-toriness of human encounters with time and landscape.

A small example taken from our work at LeskernickHill on Bodmin Moor in southwestern England (Tilleyet al. 2000) (fig. 1) illustrates the constraints imposed byhistorically constituted disciplinary boundaries:

Leskernick is a small hill, covered in rivers of moor-stone or clitter. These were once great tabular strata that,through peri-glacial action, shattered into smaller andlarger pieces and slid down the hillside. In among thestones are the remains of Bronze Age settlements, field-systems, cairns and field-shrines.

It became clear to the anthropologists surveying thehill that these Bronze Age people were, in some sense,communicating with the stones. Perhaps the stones werethe ancestors, or the ancestral spirits? The anthropolo-gists then began to notice that in among the moor-stonesthere were some that had been slightly shifted—apropped stone here, a line or semi-circle there, a circletof stones around a boulder. The changes were so subtlethat it was hard to know where “culture” began and“nature” ended.

Specialist geologists arrived. They had studied peri-glacial action. It had never occurred to them that someof the patterning might be caused by human action. Nowthey looked again, and confirmed that, yes, there werestones that had been moved.

Oddly enough, in the end, it seemed almost irrelevantwhether a stone had been moved by peri-glacial actionor by human agency. The distinctions were ours nottheirs. A “naturally” upright stone, a “naturally”strangely weathered shape, an overhang or fissure mayhave been as culturally significant as the stones that hadbeen moved. Indeed, the moved stones may have repli-cated or responded to ones that were in place.

Geologist and anthropologist moved towards eachother, and moved away from the categorisations thateach had imposed upon the landscape.

Landscapes refuse to be disciplined; they make amockery of the oppositions that we create between time(history) and space (geography) or between nature (sci-ence) and culture (anthropology). Academics have beenslow to accept this and slow, too, to notice the volatility

of landscape. A person may, more or less in the samebreath, understand a landscape in a dozen different ways(field notes, 1999):

I’m in Devon, walking with F., who owns the smalldairy farm, up a steep, muddy pathway betweenhigh hedgerows. She points to a small, triangularfield: “That used to be an orchard—cider apples. Dadused to pay the farm workers with cider. A gallon aday. They had to stop when mechanisation camein—you couldn’t be pissed on a tractor.” She grum-bles about the steepness of the slope and the north-facing aspect of the farm; worries about whether thenew organically grown meadow will be too rich;and, looking over at the cattle, voices her bitternessat government lack of interest in the falling price oflivestock following the BSE [Mad-Cow Disease]scare. She glances down towards the farm and is re-minded that the National Trust is going to repairthe old waterwheel—“That should bring the puntersin!” Then she laughs, remembering how her kidsused to toboggan down this hill on their tin trays.Towards the top of the hill, she turns round, ges-tures expansively towards the boundaries of herland, and says—slightly mockingly—“Isn’t itpicturesque?”

I leave it to the reader to deconstruct this interlude—there is almost every sort of place and time containedwithin it.

Different people, differently placed, engage with theworld in different ways. Looking at a small portion of aLondon map (fig. 2)—streets, domestic houses, publicplaces (a church), an alleyway—you might think aboutit as a palimpsest, a historically constituted ’scape. Oryou might want to think about how and why, by whomand for whom, the map was drawn. And then you mighttry and people it: Why are some people hurrying, some




Fig. 2. Detail of a map of London.

loitering? Who has a place to go to, who is barred fromgoing? Who goes with whom? What dictates the differentpatterns, the different timings of their comings and go-ings, their partings and assembling? The past is not onlyetched on the present in the form of architecture andlayout but also drawn into the present, invested withmeaning, used and reused in any number of differentways. The alleyway (“Angler’s Lane”: the River Fleetonce ran through here) is for some (often women) a fear-ful place, a place to be avoided; for others it’s a shortcut,or an escape route. Perhaps it’s a secret place, a place ofassignation? Or a place to mark with graffiti? Or a placeto dump unwanted things or scavenge for wanted things?A place to be viewed with an eye to setting up a cardboardbox for a night’s uneasy rest, or a place ripe for devel-opment?3

This plurality of place is always in the making, andhow it is used and perceived depends on the contours ofgender, age, status, ethnicity, and so on, and upon themoment. Being Jewish or coloured, being a woman, beingyoung or old, rich or poor, may assume significance inone context but not another. Or perhaps one’s politicalorientation will be relevant. And the moment or contextwill be both particular—dependent upon the time of day,the company one is in, the memories evoked—and gen-erally dependent upon things happening off-scene. Whatpeople feel about that alleyway, what they can do or whatmight be done to them, may depend upon somethinghappening on the stock market in a distant city or somebroad flow of events that washes people up in strangeplaces. The lived particularity of encounter works atmany different scales.

The action that takes place—habitual, accidental, sub-versive—is both “of the moment” and something that

3. This reconstruction owes something to Benjamin (1985), Pred(1990), and Edholm (1993).

extends forward and backward in time and place. Andwhile I have chosen to focus on place, the same is trueof time (Munn 1992:111):

[The idea of clock time] as “lifeless time,” “a chron-ological series of points on a string” is misleading.Considered in the context of daily activity, clocktime is quite alive, embodied in purposeful activityand experience. Coordinately, people are ongoinglyarticulated through this temporalization into a widerpolitico-cosmic order, a world time of particular val-ues and times. This articulation may include con-flicts over clock time, as well as daily operationscarried on in its terms. . . . The clock may be“hated, endured . . . and manipulated.”

What I have attempted to sketch is ways of talkingabout time and landscape that no longer privilege thevisual over other senses or the mind over the body butinstead work with an embodied phenomenological ap-proach to time and landscape married to a larger politicalunderstanding—one that attends not only to how peopleare socialized through their daily (timed) encounters butto how they negotiate, question, and create those en-counters (Bourdieu 1977; Giddens 1985; Pred 1990; Rose1993:chap. 2; Tilley 1994), that recognizes not just ex-periences of time and place rooted in familiar landscapes(Ingold 1993, Edmonds 1999, Gow 1995, Basso 1983) butthe dislocated but nonetheless always physicallygrounded experiences of people on the move (Bender andWiner 2001). People relate to place and time throughmemory, but the memories may be of other places andother times. Hoffman (1989:106), in Lost in Translation,discusses the thinness of a landscape translated into newand unfamiliar words: “‘River’ in Polish was a vitalsound, energized with the essence of riverhood, of myrivers, of my being immersed in rivers. ‘River’ in Englishis cold—a word without aura. It has no accumulated as-sociations for me. . . . It does not evoke.”

Three Case Studies

The three projects I am currently engaged in all revolvearound the complex and often contradictory ways inwhich people engage with landscape, how they movetowards a sense of place and belonging (or, sometimes,not-belonging), and how, as part of this, they creativelyrework the past in a volatile present. The projects—onein southern England, another in southwestern England,and the third in Northern Ireland—were not set up to becomparative: I had different agendas and questions foreach one. There are no great differences between theseareas in the way that people go about their lives or intheir understanding of the world around them. None-theless, there are not just historical but also economicdifferences; for example, the Southwest (Cornwall)is—now—more marginalized and underprivileged thanNorthern Ireland, and the people there express increasingresentment of central government policies and concom-




Fig. 3. A small stone circle within the spread of moorstone, almost invisible but brought into play by stonewrapping.

itantly strong nationalist sentiments. Again, whilst Imay be lulled into a sense of working “at home,” thereare not infrequent circumstances and contexts—not leastwhen working in the village in which I live—in whichthe seemingly familiar suddenly becomes unfamiliar andeven threatening.

leskernick, bodmin moor, southwesternengland

Anthropologists and archaeologists have been workingtogether for five seasons on a rather isolated part of Bod-min Moor where, on a low stone-covered hill, there aretwo small Bronze Age settlements, field systems, burialcairns, a stone row, and stone circles, all of which areabout 4,000 years old. What we have is the well-pre-served remains of a small-scale, very modest Bronze Ageworld, one that encompasses everyday and feast-day. Wehave combined excavation with a great deal of experi-ential surveying. We move around between houses, outthrough doorways, down drove-ways, along stone rows,and up to the high tors, trying to understand how peoplemight have engaged with the land as they built theirhomes and enclosed their fields, moved around withtheir herds, headed down to the spring or the ford overthe river, stopped at a field shrine, or walked the lengthof the ceremonial stones. What places were privileged?What links were made between places? Between past andpresent? We found, for example, that house doors wereoriented towards the tors on the high places; that as youentered the house you were often faced by a particularlyfine stone in the back wall; that as you walked down thestone row, at a particular point where the row crossedthe water, a very important hilltop and tor came intoview. What we think we can begin to delineate is theworld of a small community in which all of life circlesaround the stones. The stones—we suggest—are the an-cestors or ancestral spirits, and the communication be-tween Bronze Age villagers and these powerful and em-powering stones is reiterated at every level, from theintimately domestic to the field shrine to the subtletransformations of stone flows to the great cairns on thetops of the encircling hills and the human claims to thehigh tors made by way of walls and cairns (fig. 3). Thereis no divide to be made, as archaeologists have so oftendone, between a ritual landscape and an everyday one,just as—as I mentioned earlier—there is no divide be-tween the “natural” and the “cultural.” This is a worldin which time—the time of the ancestors—and place arefused, where the ancestral past is renewed through theactivities of the living—a place where much of the ritualis communal, though there are some more secret placesand places that are set apart (Bender, Hamilton, and Til-ley 1997).

We are all too aware that our attempts to understandthe prehistoric embodied landscape, the engagement ofprehistoric people with the world around them, is filteredthrough our sense of place and landscape, and so we havebeen concerned to understand how, over the past fiveyears, we have interacted with the moor—how age, gen-

der, social position, and variable context all play into ourexperience, our changing, dynamic experience of place.And just as we have attempted a more phenomenologicalapproach to a prehistoric engagement with place, so weare concerned with a contemporary embodied negotia-tion of landscape. How do we move around? How doplaces get invested with memories? How do we appro-priate ancient footpaths and house spaces or make thejourney to and from the hill, and how, back at ourbase—the caravan park—do we move between caravans(our “homes”) and the communal spaces of pub andwashhouse? Who moves where? With whom? When?How? And how do these intimate spaces of temporaryhabitation interdigitate with our wider landscapes andnetworks of social relations?

We have created art installations (Tilley, Hamilton,and Bender 2001) (fig. 4), a website, and a travelling ex-hibition. Our work—like any ethnographic or archaeo-logical undertaking—is an intrusion on local or regionalsensibilities, and in this instance there was an addedurgency in making contact because among the many lo-cal or regional groups were Cornish nationalists who un-doubtedly resented our (English) appropriation of theirhistory. We needed not only to explain what we weredoing but to make clear that our interpretations werejust some among many. We wanted to create spaces forother people to consider and to express their involvementwith the moor and with the past. Sitting in on the ex-hibition, talking to people about what the moor and theprehistoric settlements meant to them and about theirreactions to our work and to the exhibition, we came tounderstand better the heterogeneity—and fluidity andcontext-dependency—of an engagement with place andpast. We saw, for example, how peculiar our myopic con-centration on the Bronze Age landscape appeared to mostlocal people, who saw stone row, medieval field systems,17th-century granite working, and 19th-century peat-cutting either as layered palimpsest or, more simply, as




Fig. 4. The ceremonial stone row close to the foot ofthe hill. The stones are tiny. The flags perhaps providea small sense of movement within the landscape.

“history.” We saw how ignorance of “official” historycould go hand-in-hand with a great depth of local knowl-edge and how the same person who helped create partsof the exhibition could, in a slightly different context,vent his anger at our “invasion.”

navan or emain macha, northern ireland

Emain Macha, or Navan (what you call it already says agreat deal about where you are politically located), is inCounty Armagh, one of the counties most heavily af-fected by the Troubles. Emain Macha/Navan is an IronAge site. People built, on the top of a glacial drumlin, ahuge structure of concentric timber circles, filled it withstones brought from many places, and torched it. Theythen mounded it with earth, again brought from manyplaces. This transfer of stone and earth must surely sug-gest the bringing together of varied histories/mytholo-gies/memories. But Emain Macha is not just a prehistoricsite—it is the location of the Ulster Cycle, the epic talesof CuChulainn, Conchobar, and Deirdre of the Sorrows,probably Iron Age in origin but written down by medi-eval monks. Unlike, for example, the English Arthuriantales, these stories are precisely located in and aroundthe hill. Emain Macha was a site of such significanceand power that, it is said, St. Patrick built his church atArmagh in sight of, and in opposition to, the hill.

So far, this project has been less concerned with theprehistory or even the epic stories than with contem-porary perceptions of and contestations over the site andthe surrounding landscape (Bender 2001).

There is a quarry alongside the site, and the owner, aman with powerful Unionist connections, was about toget permission, more or less on the nod, from the localcouncil to quarry two-thirds of the way around the site,leaving it as an island in the middle. The archaeologistsfrom Belfast created sufficient fuss for there to be an

inquiry. They then had to marshal support against thequarry, and the support had to come from across thespectrum: church dignitaries, politicos, Paras, Unionists/Loyalists, Nationalists/Republicans, local people andpeople from across the border. The archaeologists pro-posed that this was a site, a landscape, that everyonecould and should fight for, for its significance, its history,preceded all the Troubles. It was, they said (somewhatmuddying the argument), a place that belonged to all thepeople of Ulster.

They got support from all across the spectrum, butwhat became clear, in talking to people and reading thenumerous newspaper and agitprop accounts, was that thedifferent groups did not buy into the idea of a past un-tainted by contemporary political fault lines. The dif-ferent constituencies marshalled different histories.Thus: “Here was a kingdom . . . that was the last tosurrender to such invaders as the Gaels, Scythians andNormands, and kept itself to itself, separate from therest of Ireland. The time has come for us to say thus farand no further, or to use an old Ulster saying “Not aninch” (South Belfast Post, January 10, 1985). “Not aninch” is, of course, a Loyalist war cry. Or again: “Forhundreds of years the Gael has stolen our heritage. . . .These men stole Navan from us by force in the past, nowthey are attempting to steal it with words, they cannotbe given the chance to claim for themselves somethingthat is ours by right” (Young Unionist 1 [1985]). Or theRepublican counterpart: “The preservation and care ofNavan fort is . . . not a matter which can be left in thehands of eleven bigoted councillors . . . . [We] have littlefaith in Chris Patten’s Inquiry—given the destructionwrought on our Irish culture and heritage by his coun-trymen down the years” (The Ulster Gazette, February1985). Or, in the nonsectarian Peace by Peace (April1985): “There have always been divisions . . . populationshifts and shifts of allegiance. . . . there is no single ‘Irish’tradition or community or tribe. . . . No group has anyright to claim they are the true people of Ireland or peopleof Ulster. . . . We all have a right to be here.” They signedup to different histories but nevertheless signed the samepetitions and stood shoulder to shoulder as witnesses atthe inquiry.

As it happens, the inquiry was not exactly evenhanded,and the quarryman won, but the outcry was so great thatthe minister for Northern Ireland had to intervene andput a stop to his plans. My first concern was to under-stand the way in which the present-past was used in theconstruction of group identities, how it wound its wayaround the materiality of place and landscape, and thecomplex relationship between an intimate sense of placeand history and the larger political landscape.

I then became interested in the presentation of place/landscape that followed on from the dispute. The min-ister said that if this place was so important it ought tohave an interpretive centre. The archaeologists claimedthat such a centre would be a “Flagship of Peace.” TheAmericans put up £4 million. A fine and sensitive build-ing was erected, and an English firm was brought in tomount the exhibition. It was an exhibition that avoided




Fig. 5. A Republican rendition of CuChulainn.

Fig. 6. A Loyalist one.Fig. 7. A memory map of the cliff plots atBranscombe.

all politics. Labelled “The Archaeologist as Detective,”it could have been anywhere, any time. Quite separatefrom and with no attempt to create connections with thearchaeology, there was a blood-and-guts video of the Ul-ster Tales.

So much could have been attempted. The exhibitioncould, for example, have shown that the Ulster Tales area reworking of an earlier history—that they were setdown by monks who often wavered in their allegiancebetween pagan and Christian ways of referencing andreworking the past. It could have shown that Cu-Chulainn, the Hound of Ulster, has gone on being usedand reused until, today, his image graces not just theDublin General Post Office—his statue proudly com-memorating the 1916 Easter Uprising—but also theparamilitary murals on the gable-ends in the Bogside areaof Republican Derry (fig. 5) and those of Loyalist build-ings in Belfast (fig. 6).

One could despair at the conservative rendition of alinear past that is boxed up and frozen—the assumptionthat the delineation and interpretation of the past is un-problematic and has no bearing on the present. The no-

tion that this place might be a “Flagship of Peace” seemslaughable, and yet, while this pap is served up for adultsor families, something quite different is created in work-ing with children at the museum’s interpretive centre.The education programme is run on a shoestring, butmost days a class of Protestant primary-school childrenand a class of Catholic children are brought on site to-gether. They go to the top of the hill, stand on the pre-historic mound, and look down over the city of Armagh.They take on board—often for the first time—that thereare two cathedral spires (one Catholic, one Protestant),discuss why St. Patrick might have placed his churchthere, look down on the old quarry and discuss the eventssurrounding it, and talk about where they themselvescome from and the places that are important to them.The idea is to get them to feel that they all have a stakein the landscape and a responsibility towards it.

branscombe, devon, southern england

In the village where I live in East Devon, I am workingwith people on something called “Where Memory MeetsHistory.” We use oral history and archival material, gowalking with people and plot memory maps (fig. 7), andtalk around photos and objects that trigger more mem-ories. Each year we mount an exhibition in which peo-ple’s different ways of understanding this place and land-scape and their relationship to it work off each other.We witness how, unselfconsciously, a person can expressnostalgia for the past and a hard-headed recognition ofrural poverty, class and gender inequality, and—some-times—covert (sometimes overt) hostility:

Wynne Clarke: Father used to cry for nights—didn’tknow where he was supposed to get the money topay for it . . .

Nobby Clarke: Work, you can’t credit it. . . . He




Fig. 8. Nobby Clarke photographing the exhibition atBranscombe.

used to go away at half past four in the morning.He’d dig out all the brambles, clean the cliff out dur-ing the winter like, ready for planting, and thenthey’d be out collecting seaweed off the beach . . .and they would dig in the seaweed and you’d nevertaste potatoes like it, I’m not kidding. They’d gotthe sea breeze, salt spray, seaweed . . .

Wynne Clarke: . . . We were only talking about ityesterday. I said, “We was poor, but we did well.”

Lilly Gush: When they brought piped water throughthe village in the ’30s, they digged up our garden,but they wouldn’t bring we a tap. . . . We used tolook sideways at all these people, they had so much,we knew they cheated somewhere along the line.. . . If they gets what [they] deserves they’ll have abad time in another world, they will.

The exhibition is put on in the late autumn at a timewhen, after the summer visitors, the village turns in onitself. It is mainly for people who live locally, and it isa celebration of a complex sense of local identity (fig. 8).

It is quite a complicated business, trying to re-createa multivocal sense of place, a past that is both “golden”and “hard,” one that is not over and done with but inprocess. It is also complex because I live in the place,am implicated in the project and imbricated in the com-munity, and—if I am honest—use the project in part asa way of creating my own sense of place and belonging.I have to negotiate in a way that is different from othertimes and places when I arrive from somewhere else—and leave. It is no bad thing to have to face some ofthe fallout from asking people to open up and talk abouttheir worlds. It is too easily assumed that rememberingmakes people “feel good.” But what of the woman whoscreams abuse in the middle of the supermarket not be-cause of anything that has been shown in the exhibitionbut because she fears that this raking up of the past mightexpose her own painful and secret history? Or the womanwho takes umbrage because the transcription of her storyhas marked her with a Devon accent? She went to gram-mar school and worked in the bank; she has two voices,one formal, and one—when she forgets her-self—Devonian. But she refuses to accept this, and sud-denly I become the Outsider—I am “putting her down.”And here is a minor irony—that I wanted to show howsubjective people’s feelings about past and place are andyet I thought that I could objectively record their voices.Surely, I thought, it was my job to be accurate, to pindown every nuance, to record, before it disappeared, thesound of Devonian voices? And yet what I transcribedwas not what she heard, and indeed to some extent itwas not what I heard. Even though it was “accurately”transcribed, it did not look the way it sounded.4 It lookedharsh. I should not have been surprised. It is not justwhat you say or write or feel that is subjective but alsohow you say it. Form and content play off each other.

In the end, we recorded the Branscombe voices in threedifferent ways: the first, for the archives, one that triedfor academic fidelity; the second, a transcript that wason public view and with which the person talking felthappy; and the third, a shortened, more dramatic versionthat made sense to an exhibition viewer. This is an ac-knowledgement that the transcripts, like maps or anyother recordings, are indexical—context-specific—andthat the record is powerful and can be used or abused.

Leskernick, Emain Macha, Branscombe: differentquestions are being asked, but there is always the im-possibility of disentangling time from place and land-scape, always the need to recognize that in “the unendingperformance of social life” our stories can never be com-pleted—“the pages [will] keep growing.”

4. The Devonian accent has no h’s, but dropping all the h’s makesit look very like Cockney, and Devonian is soft whereas Cockneyis glottal. I am sure there are codes that could be used, but thesewould not help create something “readable” in an exhibition.




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