LANGUAGE, CULTURE, PLACE + IDENTITY
Christianna Bennett 12 | 18 | 2011
Despite the idea that the places people inhabit on a daily basis may seem like a constant, the true theme of contemporary life unravels a story about the ephemerality of place. Especially due to the increasing temper of climate change, places indigenous and developed, economically laden or not, are facing disappearance or destruction. With an anthropologist’s concern for people and the way they construct their worlds, as well as a designer’s concern for how the physical world is understood and documented, this essay will explore the importance of understanding place in contemporary research and across many fields.
‚Knowledge of places is closely linked to knowledge of the self, to grasping one’s position in the greater scheme of things, including one’s own community, and to securing a confident sense of who one is as a person.‛ – Keith Basso The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina left some of the most densely-settled cities and towns in the southern United States in a state of complete environmental and infrastructural disrepair. When the U.S. government went to document the extent of the crisis, they began to realize the number of places in the National Register of Historic Places was actually lacking a number of buildings, spaces, and objects being described by previous residents as important, even integral to their identity in the town [or city] where they were from [Morgan,
6]. Hurricane Katrina forced the governmental and public eye to be drawn upon the importance of markers in the landscape ‚that anchor people to what they call home and to what they identify with as their heritage‛ [Morgan, 1]. In the article, Finding a Place for the
Commonplace: Hurricane Katrina, Communities, and Preservation Law, David and Nancy Morgan define place as ‚the connection between people and the places they repetitively use, in which they dwell, in which their memories are made, and to which they ascribe a unique feeling… called sense of place.‛ Philosopher, architect, and writer Christian Norberg-Schulz says similarly, ‚without reducing the importance of orientation, we have to stress that dwelling above all presupposes identification with the environment… that man dwells when he is able to concretize the world in buildings and things.‛ Why then, in many instances and across many cultures
is
the
documentation
and
understanding
of
place
so
underdeveloped
and
misunderstood? In the work of anthropologist, Keith Basso, he begins to unravel how language can determine the level of understanding within an environment. Basso lived and worked with the Western Apache for many years, returning time after time to gather knowledge about a group of people with a deeply-rooted sense of place. During his visits, he began learning about the Apache way for describing place. Place-names amongst the Apache are highly descriptive markers of natural phenomena in the landscape. Examples of these are: White Rocks Lie Above In A Compact Cluster, Water Flows Inward Under A Cottonwood Tree, and Trail Goes Down Between Two Hills [Basso, 87 & 115]. By creating these names, the Apache establish a unique sense of closeness and understanding in the landscape. Whereas names put in
place by foreign conquerors and even contemporary place-naming in America is typically based off of the name of a single important person [such as Jamestown or Hudson]. Place names to the Apache are much more applicable across many decades and important to many people, because they are descriptors of the actual environment. Today, the Apache’s land is generally protected from intrusive forces and destruction by the U.S. government, but soon they will be facing new challenges dealing with climate change and the variability of plant and animal life that comes with this alteration. There have been many natural phenomena observed that are increasingly changing at a faster rate than has been recorded in hundreds of years. The boreal forest range is quickly traversing northward as temperatures increase and the climate becomes more favorable. Barrier island chains, as well as millions of miles of coastline are changing shape, structure, and as a result function as sea levels rise and ocean-related storm surges become more powerful [Roberts ed., 13]. Deserts are also increasingly spreading drought and sand at farther distances, uprooting thin lines of vegetation that protect communities just beyond the border of the resource-less desert landscape. These changing landscapes are just the beginning of the alterations climate change is making to the surface of the earth, and many more places will be impacted as a result. It has been said that due to climate change, the human hand now touches every environment and location on the planet, as the results of human manufacturing, industry, travel, and pollution. As a result, changes to landscapes may force indigenous people, like the Apache, to either rename or establish new connections with their environment. thousands
of
years
of
indigenous
knowledge
may
be
altered
by
Hundreds, even
extreme
changes
in
temperatures and flora and fauna patterns. The advent of large catastrophes has started to become a marker for governments and communities to begin paying more attention to the places people identify with.
‚If we are not together anymore, I think we would become weak and kind of, like, lost.‛ – Ardith Weyiouanna, member of the indigenous Shishmaref community in northwest Alaska The impacts of climate change and the dematerialization of numerous societies will result in shifts both within communities and between communities once-adjacent to one another. There is any number of futures that can occur for cultures dissipating from the places they have always called home, many more stories then could ever be predetermined. Some such futures have already been explored by the Shishmaref community, facing the loss of their entire island due to erosion and the threat of storm-surge flooding. The Shishmaref is a small community of just about seven hundred indigenous Inuit who have lived with and on an island called Sarichef for thousands of years [Lixenberg, 43]. Here, community members believe there are three main options for maintaining their cultural identity. The first is that they move to a near-by Alaskan city, such as Kotzebue and maintain cultural veracity there. Another option is to dissipate according to family and or individual desires, maybe some people seeking refuge in California and other in New York or beyond, which might entirely crumble the cultural relationship the group shares. And another, entirely unfavorable option to
the Shishmaref [according to the Shishmaref Erosion & Relocation Coalition] would be to stay on the island, rebuilding the rip rap seawall each time they are hit by a storm. The final option is so ill-favored by the community, because they are completely reliant upon the U.S. government for food and freshwater [Lixenberg, 164]. The island is currently not sustainable in any way and relies upon three shipments of USAid a day, for sustaining their livelihood. This creates a situation that does not give the U.S. government desire to put money into the island, and thus would leave the Shishmaref to rebuild their protection from the ways from their own funds. The community sees this as impossible because the majority of the islanders live below the U.S. poverty line, buying the USAid shipments with food stamps, and so there would not be enough money to rebuild infrastructural protection. Looking back to the Apache way of describing place, one can begin to think about if the Shishmaref were to index their environment and categorize the landscape in ways that their forefathers possibly did, that maybe sustainability and living with the land could generate new, and positive growth for the community. Many Shishmaref explain a fear about moving away from the land that their familes have lived on for so long, much like other indigenous cultures across the globe, there is a deep-rooted fear about leaving a certain place. Sarichef Island does not only serve as a place for the construction of identity, but for the stage upon which the Shishmaref create relationships and dialogue amongst each other – the patterns that truly distinguish themselves as a culture and members participating in a common identity. Maintaining a common language, and a common set of knowledge about things and amongst one another in a community are the strongholds for establishing cultural identity.
Place, is an integral part of the framework for this, as it is like a binding agent for keeping people in close contact with one another. Place is a defining part of the human experience for also providing the means by which humans can make a living. Landscapes and ecosystems support humans ways of life, and cannot be undermined despite the blindness situations such as cities may provide for understanding the resources humanity relies upon. Furthermore, the intersection of humans and places must be better understood as a mutuallyreliant phenomenon. New understandings about the ways in which indigenous communities have a deep knowledge about the land they live upon may begin to provide governments with better information about how to manage specific ecoregions and ecosystems that support not only small, indigenous people but also landscapes that serve to support cities, or other communities abroad. There is currently a wave of research going on in the United States concerned with ‚ethnographic landscapes,‛ which aims at associating people of a certain place as being key players in maintaining the resources of the cultural heritage and ecosystems of those places [Morgan, 4]. This is not to say that cultures and places will remain static over time, rather contemporary patterns of climate change and migration to urban centers appear to prove the extremely ephemeral relationship between people and landscapes. Although it is still an integral part of the human experience to have a knowledge and certain connection to the places one is tied to, the association with a place, its names, and the people therein serve to provide a person with many important facets of an identity and cannot be undermined.
‚When asked why she lived abroad instead of in the United States, Gertude Stein, used her hometown of Oakland, California, as an example, she said ‘There is no there there.’ Preservationists have used this as a rallying cry against the homogenization and urban sprawl characteristic of much development of the United States that began in the first half of the 20th century. When places where we spend our daily lives become indistinguishable from any other place in the country, we come to value especially those communities that are, in Stein’s words, still there.‛ – David and Nancy Morgan, Finding a Place for the Commonplace:
Hurricane Katrina, Communities, and Preservation Law
WORKS CITED
Basso, Keith. Wisdom Sits in Places. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. 1996. Lixenberg, Dana. The Last Days of Shishmaref. Netherlands: Paradox Publishers. 2008. Norberg-Shulz, Christian. Existence, Space & Architecture. London: Studio Vista London. 1971. Norberg-Shulz, Christian. Genius Loci. New York: Rizzoli International Publications, Inc. 1979. Morgan, David & Nancy. ‚Finding a Place for the Commonplace: Hurricane Katrina, Communities, and Preservation Law.‛ 2006. Found on Anthrosource. Roberts, Rebecca ed. Rising Currents: Projects for New York’s Waterfront. New York: MoMA. 2011.
WEBSITES
The Last Days of Shishmaref. Found at http://www.thelastdaysofshishmaref.com/. Shishmaref Erosion & Relocation Coalition. Found at http://www.shishmarefrelocation.com/.