ARCO13 Alex Wood by Plymouth University School of Architecture

ESCAPING TO MY ZIMBABWE Alexander Wood

ARCO13

Passport Stamp to Zimbabwe: by author

ESCAPING TO MY ZIMBABWE Alexander Wood A consideration of identity, place & loss in a paradoxical world. Technological advancements and media portrayal in the Western world today is leading to an ever increasing detachment from place due to conscious and unconscious exposure to damaging material, which, in turn, forms negative, one sided perceptions of places we are otherwise detached from. “The evolution of media has decreased the significance of physical presence in the experience of people and events.”1 In particular this essay will look into the notion of the internalised object of comfort, a memory, or a physical object held as a touchstone to form the backbone of our identity. As a means to enquire into the above issue, I will conduct a study on Zimbabwe, Africa. Within this setting, I will categorize the forms of our relation to place under three character types; the resident, based upon the experiences and thoughts of travel writer Douglas Rogers, specifically in his book ‘The Last Resort’, the tourist, the foundation of which will be footed by my personal connection with Zimbabwe and a current position seen in the third character, the outsider, the person detached from experiencing the place first hand, reliant on media portrayal and other agencies for their views and understanding. In undertaking this quest, the essay utilises the argument put forward by Alex Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre in their title ‘Critical Regionalism: Architecture and Identity in a Globalized World’, and later Kenneth Frampton in his essay, ‘Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points of an Architecture of Resistance’, in a search for a critical regionalism as a means for the creating and maintaining the identities of place. As a result of this exploration, the essay suggests that the need for a ‘critical regionalism’ is apparent now more than ever as a means of championing the individual in an ever more globalized and consumer dependent world. This can only be achieved through a responsibility of us as individuals to see and question our experiences in a bid to rekindle our inner world.

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Aerial Photo of Lake Kariba, Zimbabwe: by author

Introduction “All distances in time and space are shrinking. Man now reaches over night, by plane, places which formerly took weeks and months of travel... Yet the frantic abolition of distances brings no nearness; for nearness does not consist in shortness of distance.”2

The world of today bears witness to a battle for identity, trying to create, discover and hold onto it. Advances in technology and the evolution of the digital world mean that a rapidly increasing reliance on online identities and codified consumerism in the form of bank accounts, shopping sites, social media and online virtual worlds, has created a platform on which detached human identities are increasingly stolen or hijacked, and the contact with the physical world is rapidly diminishing. “Among all the things in this world, information is the hardest to guard, since it can be stolen without removing it.”3 The contact of our finger tips to the letters of the keyboard becomes the extent of our experience of a desired place as we are digitally transported from one side of the globe to another. “He has instruments that place him in constant contact with the remotest parts of the outside.”4 Kimberly Dovey describes authenticity as “a way of being-in-the-world, a connectedness born of our acts of appropriation. It is a spatio-temporal rootedness which enriches our world with experiential depth.”5 This definition shows that today’s culture of technological dependency needs to take an additional step, coming full circle and stepping back onto the ground of the physical world to regain this experiential depth. “The observer becomes detached from an incarnate relation with the environment through the suppression of the other senses, in particular by means of technological extensions of the eye, and the proliferation of images.”6 In this essay I shall investigate the notion of the internalised object of comfort, a memory, held as a touchstone to form the backbone of our identity. In danger of being lost, due to the duration of time and memory, or what we perceive through media and other iconographic material, a journey must be undertaken to reassert this memory. In undertaking this quest, the essay utilises the argument put forward by Alex Tzonis with Liane Lefaivre and later Kenneth Frampton in a search for a critical regionalism as a means for the creating and maintaining the identities of place. I endeavour to use this theory as a criterion from which to broaden my enquiry to other theorists and writers in a bid to investigate a range of scales from the global to the local, ending up with an investigation into the individual’s role of 2 3 4 5 6

Heidegger, M. Being and Time, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 1962. p95-107. Goffman, E. quoted in, Meyrowitz, J. No Sense of Place, pV. Auge, M. Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity, London: Verso, 1995. pVIII. Seamon, D & Mugerauer, R. Dwelling, Place & Environment, New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. p47. Pallasmaa, J. The Eyes of The Skin, Chichester: John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 2005. p27. 5

identity and his relationship with place in the world. “Today, in the technological society, the tendency is to homogenize the globe with one artificial culture, the place becoming immaterial and the assumption being that the job defines a man’s identity.”7 With the aim of investigating the role of identity in a modernising world, I will conduct a study on Zimbabwe, Africa. The location of the essay and subsequent choice of characters to provide the framework for my investigation, is formed from a personal motive in an effort to re-establish and secure a connection with a place with family history and an experience with which I rely on as a touchstone to my identity today. The first of the three character titles I have adopted to guide my enquiry is the resident, the basis of which revolves around the thoughts and personal experiences of Zimbabwean travel writer Douglas Rogers, and more specifically, the topics raised in his book ‘The Last Resort’, which documents his parents’ lives within the paradox that is Zimbabwe. To aide my investigation, I shall explore a selection of theories and literature within the section which will include an analysis of place and our bodily connection with it, globalisation and the effects of electronic media, the role of the built environment and a call for a critical regionalism, and concluding with the creation of community and an attachment to home. The tourist is the second character title used in the text, and will relate to my personal relationship with Zimbabwe. The chapter will analyse the idea of the photo memory as one of the influences of past events on future perceptions, and the control of material we are exposed to via the media and our subsequent socially shared cognition. The outsider is the last of the three sections and is structured around the character who has no firsthand physical experience with place. The chapter will investigate the influencing authority of the mass media, expanding on social construction – introduced in the tourist, and exploring the concepts of ‘reification’ and ‘alienation’ developed by Karl Marx. The topic will then stem into a conversation of the ‘media world’ and its relationship to the ‘real world’, and the effect of culture shock in society. To conclude the section, the discussion will be returned to the topic of ‘personal construct theory’ and the role of the individual. The explorations carried out in this text will allow me to explore the influences and effects of perception in relation to our physical presence in the world.

Ley, D & Samuels, M. Humanistic Geography, Chicago: Maaroufa Press Inc, 1978. p224.

ESCAPING TO MY ZIMBABWE: Alex Wood

The Resident “Concern for familiar topography, for the places one knows, is not about the loss of a commodity, but about the loss of identity. People belong in the world: it gives them a home. The attachment to place - not just natural places, but urban places too is one of the most fundamental of human needs.”8 The resident finds home in the place that the tourist seeks a destination and which the outsider is devoid of bodily experience with, and relies upon his social field, societal environment and the influencing force of the media for his perception of place. The character title is based on a travel writer who has ventured outside of his country of birth and found residency in others. The location of the essay and subsequent choice of character to take the role of the resident was formed from a personal motive, in an effort to re-establish and secure a connection with a place within my family’s history and an experience with which I use as a touchstone to my identity today. The character will allow me to explore and draw connections between an attachment to place, home, loss and identity with which the other characters will be compared to. Douglas Rogers, author of ‘The Last Resort’, is a white Zimbabwean travel writer living in New York, whilst his parents remain in Zimbabwe struggling to hold onto their family farm/ backpacker lodge in the aftermath of a violent land war. Although not his childhood home, his parents’ home he returns to visit, is grounded deep within the family’s homeland and is the current, ever adapting, physical manifestation of their lives as Zimbabweans. The Rogers’ grasp of the land is not only derived from holding onto the place in which their home lay, but branches to another ‘place’ meaning which Edward Relph terms generosity. “Generosity is doing something for its own sake, without an ulterior motive, and is an indication that someone cares for a place simply because it is his or hers.”9 In contrast, however, it is apparent that a modern tradition of resorting to the, economically viable option of the mass produced object, has seen the demise of the imperfections of the individually crafted object, “imperfection is in some sort essential to all that we know of life. It is the sign of life in a mortal body, that is to say, of a state of progression and change.”10 This mass production generates an ease of procurement from one side of the globe to another, only ever strengthening universality in commoditisation, subjected to trends and styles projected by influential multinational companies to its privileged worldwide arena. It is the privileging of an audience that creates both “homogenization and exclusion”11, 8 Warburton, D. Community & Sustainable Development, UK: Earthscan Publications Limited, 1998. p15. 9 Seamon, D. Dwelling, Seeing, and Designing: Toward a Phenomenological Ecology, New York: State University of New York Press, 1993. p37. 10 Ruskin, J. The Stones of Venice, London: The Folio Society Ltd, 1851. p138. 11 Auge, M. Non-Places, pIX. 7

Granite Outcrop: by author

Building on the Rogers farm: by author

which guides the discussion onto globalisation, a term described by Marc Auge as “the existence of a free, or allegedly free, market and of a technological network that covers the entire earth, to which a large number of individuals do not yet have access.”12 It is the lack of access that perpetuates exclusion and the gap between “the richest of the rich and the poorest of the poor”.13 In reference to those with access to this technological network, Meyrowitz states “In many ways electronic media have homogenized places and experiences and have become common denominators that link all of us regardless of status and “position”.”14 But this has become a link through a kind of digital abstraction of time, as previously stated by Heidegger, ‘for nearness does not consist in shortness of distance’. This effort to hold onto their home and identities as Zimbabweans is at the strategical forefront of Critical Regionalism, a term coined by Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre, described as “an approach to design giving priority to the identity of the particular rather than to universal dogmas.”15 This identity is what allows the region to maintain its reference point, as opposed to losing itself within its country, its nation or even its continent. Questioning a world without place, Joseph Grange explains how place “mingles with our being, so much so that place and human being are enmeshed, forming a fabric that is particular, concrete and dense.”16 The role of the built environment as a fundamental need that humans require for shelter and protection goes beyond the physical presence of the built realm and into the vital production of place. Place, as discussed in Michael Godkin’s essay: Identity and Place, is defined as “a discrete, temporally and perceptually bounded unit of psychologically meaningful material space.”17 If the generation of place is the objective which the region relies upon for its individualism and to deny the intrusion of “supermodernity”18 and to maintain “local particularisms”19, the design of the built environment becomes the backdrop to the stage on which lives are acted out. It is the eradication of these ‘local particularisms’ by the onslaught of globalisation that leads Auge to voice his concern for: “the same hotel chains, the same television networks are cinched tightly round the globe, so that we feel constrained by uniformity, by universal sameness... The world is like a single immense conurbation.”20 Expressed by Frampton, “the fundamental strategy of Critical Regionalism is to mediate the impact of universal civilization with elements derived indirectly from the peculiarities of 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

Ibid. pXI. Ibid.pX. Meyrowitz, J. No Sense of Place, pVIII. Lefaivre, L & Tzonis, A. Critical Regionalism, Berlin: Prestel, 2003. p10. Seamon, D & Mugerauer, R. Dwelling, Place & Environment, New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. p71. Buttimer, A & Seamon, D. The Human Experience of Space and Place, London: Croom Helm Ltd, 1980. p73. Auge, M. Non-Places, pXII. Ibid.pXVI. Ibid.pXII. 9

a particular place.”21 Douglas Rogers describes to the reader how “rolling blonde savanna gave way to tumbling hills of granite and grassy woodland”22, which interpreted suggests a solidity in the landscape, a density and stability associated with the characteristics of stone. He continues, “If Zimbabwe was the breadbasket of Africa, then this valley was a bakery, a fruit bowl, a dairy and a butchery.”23 Described as a microcosm, the area suggests a structure of distribution. A solidity that the distribution of produce revolves around, which, harvested to full effect, could become a hub to provide the citizens of Zimbabwe and possibly to the many other countries in Africa that aren’t as blessed with fertile soil. It is a structure that could economically profit the country, but also provide an identity as a nation. Instead, Mugabe’s government have reallocated farm land from the possession of farmers into the hands of alleged war veterans, in a bid to keep the land within the hold of his supporters, who “had been dispossessed by whites in colonial times.”24 This corrupt and somewhat blinkered view of trying to maintain his country’s identity has meant that the country’s breadbasket has now dried up, due to the lack of knowledge and experience of the relocated war veterans as many of them are too young to have fought or even been alive during the war. A popular view of the situation in Zimbabwe we hold in the West, as Rogers recounts whilst living in the “rootlessness of London”25, is that he found it easy to believe that a violent race war had ensued, but from his time within the country it actually revolved around a serious political threat to Mugabe’s ZANU-PF, in the form of a popular opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change.26 It was this rapidly deteriorating political situation that pushed so many into the arms of the Rogers’ hospitality at Drifters, forced from their homes and livelihoods, many fled the country but some of those who chose not to, sought refuge in the lodges on their farm. “How to become modern and return to sources”27, a paradox put forward by Paul Ricoeur, “seems to be circumvented by the apocalyptic thrust of modernisation, while the ground in which the mytho-ethical nucleus of a society might take root has become eroded by the rapacity of development.”28 In reference to Zimbabwe, this ‘rapacity of development’ doesn’t evolve from what we might interpret as a Western definition, possibly understood as a generally positive notion, an evolution or progression over time, or in terms of the built environment, to develop land for the siting of shops, homes, offices etc., it comes more in the form of a lateral development. I introduce the term lateral here to describe the development of corruption within the governmental institute which sees the illegal creation 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

Frampton, K. Labour, Work and Architecture, London: Phaidon Press, 2002. p82. Rogers, D. The Last Resort, Jeppestown: Jonathan Ball Publishers, 2009. p7. Ibid. p8. Ibid. p6. Ibid. p1. Ibid. p6. Ricoeur, P. ‘Universal Civilization and National Cultures’ in, Labour, Work and Architecture, p77-78. Frampton, K. Labour, Work and Architecture, p78.

ESCAPING TO MY ZIMBABWE: Alex Wood

and passing of laws, inflation and human rights violation. The development has a time value allocated to it which sees its direction of travel ever increasing with no foreseeable end. Although personal thought advises me that the country and its government is in a state of developmental decline, I acknowledge the fact that the decisions implemented are being made for reasons that they see as improving the country. The government has force that successfully dictated this lateral development, which, as a consequence, has eroded the ground in which ‘the mytho-ethical nucleus of a society might take root’. The land invasions have expelled farmers, the majority of which, up until that point had been firmly rooted in the country as Zimbabweans, as in the case of Douglas’ father Lyn, whose ancestors had arrived in the Cape in the mid 1600’s. “He had roots here, blood in this soil.”29 Rogers writes of his realisation that his parents’ farm “had become a stage set, a metaphor for the state of the nation”.30 In addition to the presence of their settler neighbours, those that sought refuge on the farm came together, and if left to dwell, they could aid in the identity giving qualities required for a critical regionalism, as the view of David Seamon suggests, “one sees human place-making for people left to their own human devices.”31 The residents upon creating their day to day lives would interpret Frampton’s ‘peculiarities of a particular place’ and generate personal responses to them as a method of adapting and subsequent authentic place making. This then forms the basis of the perception that residents of a specific place “provide an authentic representation, as in grounded in everyday life experiences, rather than a mythologized or manufactured representation.”32 They have formed a community, ““Community” is that web of personal relationships, group networks, traditions and patterns of behaviour that develops against the backdrop of the physical neighbourhood and its socio-economic situation.”33 This collective of people generate a power. Hannah Arendt writes, “only where men live so close together that the potentialities of action are always present can power remain with them.”34 Their passion to stay rooted in their homeland is what keeps the residents at the farm once they’ve lost their homes. A resident interviewed by Rogers expressed her feelings for her country despite the action its rulers had taken against her, “I am returning to my place of birth, but my first love is Zimbabwe. This is where my heart is, this is where my blood is, this is where my roots are, this is where my 29 30 31 32 33 34

Rogers, D. The Last Resort, p12. Ibid. p116. Seamon, D & Mugerauer, R. Dwelling, Place & Environment, p241. Jennings, G & Nickerson, N P. Quality Tourism Experiences, Oxford: Elsevier, 2006. p12. Warburton, D. Community & Sustainable Development, p15. Arendt, H. The Human Condition, Chicago: Chicago Press, 1958. p201. 11

children were born. My Zimbabwe. My Zimbabwe...”35 “It appears that people’s sense of both personal and cultural identity is intimately bound up with place identity. Loss of home or ‘losing ones place’ may often trigger an identity crisis.”36 The metaphor formed by the occupants of the farm and its surrounding area create the nucleus which has grasped onto the unsteady ground beneath it in its attempt to reestablish itself from its microcosmic state to a societal one. It has developed an existence autonomous from external agencies that one would hope could exist for long enough to see out their current conditions and reinvigorate the cultures and the love for their land that has held them to Zimbabwe until now.

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Rogers, D. The Last Resort, p97. Buttimer, A & Seamon, D. The Human Experience of Space and Place, p167.

ESCAPING TO MY ZIMBABWE: Alex Wood

Lake Kariba Visit: Pre-flight: by author

Family Photo at Odzi Dam: by author

The Tourist

“The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page”37 St. Augustine

The tourist is the character title allocated to the role of my personal experiences in the essay. It is the mediating character between, and has links to both the resident and the outsider. A trip to Zimbabwe at the age of five introduced me to my first travel experience outside my country of birth, England. Although blissfully unaware, I was in a process of learning, “To experience is to learn; it means acting on the given and creating out of the given.”38 I imagine I was not overly concerned at the time, but the trip was rooted in family origins on my mother’s side and provided me with my first memories of meeting my grandparents, who, at the time, were still living in Zimbabwe. Coincidentally, in their retirement they had built one of the cottages on the Rogers’ farm. Experiencing a somewhat tailored trip to suit my interest in the animals and wildlife I had seen animated in The Lion King, I captured photo upon photo from my four-foot view of the world, photos which in recent years have been re-discovered time after time. Looking back through these photos rekindles my first childhood memories, a time of exploration and adventure within a kind of second homeland, memories which have become, with time, a foundation to my identity today. Rudolph Arnheim describes the process “the experiences of the present, stored and amalgamated with the yield of the past, precondition the percepts of the future.”39 In contrast to the outsider, my experience as a tourist gave me a sense of place I would otherwise not experience. “A mind shaped through travel and cultural change will embody in its idea of meaningful places a far greater area of the earth than a mind in the myopia of one locale and a single ideology.”40 It provided me with an outlook developed to question what is being presented to me when I see an advertisement or poster based on an issue in Africa. This has enabled me to develop an objective view of a land so many take pity on. It is a place made of many cultures, religions, climates and natural wonders, much more than starving children and poverty, so often the stance taken and portrayed in the media we see. “I have seen with my own eyes many elements of life that are beautiful beyond explanation, and I beg someone to explain to me why these elements aren’t projected.”41 37 Akerstrom, L. ‘The 50 most inspiring travel quotes of all time’ Matodor Network, http:// matadornetwork.com/bnt/50-most-inspiring-travel-quotes-of-all-time/ [Assessed 25th February 2013]. 38 Tuan, Y. Space and Place, London: Edward Arnold Publishers, 1977. p9. 39 Arnheim, R. Visual Thinking, London: Faber and Faber, 1970. p80. 40 Ley, D & Samuels, M. Humanistic Geography, Chicago: Maaroufa Press Inc, 1978. p138. 41 Araya, S. ‘Mis-Representation at its Best’ African Holocaust, www.africanholocaust.net/news_ah/eye sofafrica.html. [Accessed 9th October 2012]. ESCAPING TO MY ZIMBABWE: Alex Wood

However, beautiful elements found within the continent can be discovered in the form of documentaries from studies through Africa like those of Sir David Attenborough and his latest series, Africa. His status as a figurehead of extraordinary documentaries saw the first episode of his new series draw 6.5 million viewers to their screens.42 However informative and insightful his works may be, both in their fundamental purpose of documenting the natural world, and the sheer amount of invested hours dedicated to constructing and capturing an event in its purest form of unscripted natural life, the viewer is put into an unfamiliar position, not only suspended from contact with its situational context, but its place as would be understood in time. Many of the clips of species or natural events further privilege the viewer by transcending his visual experience from an unseen perspective of life, and transmuted into a kind of God’s eye view of an unnatural, altered time frame for his own interpretational convenience. Such precedents have become what were previously mentioned in reference to the resident as ‘common denominators that link all of us regardless of status and “position”.’ The first of these denominators is access to the technological network, an aspect taken for granted by my generation and much of the developing world. Now of an age to appreciate and have a better understanding of the socio-political, environmental and cultural problems regularly displayed on the world news, the desire to revisit the land I had previously experienced as a rich playground of adventure is fast diminishing. Currently living two worlds away in first world Great Britain, the only news I hear of Zimbabwe comes from the occasional daring reporter, risking the imposed broadcasting ban to distribute the latest updates from within the corrupt third world dictatorship. Described by Arnheim, I have composed a term to describe the amalgamated yield of the past, a photo memory. It is the photo memory that is developed from looking back over the photographs from my experience in Zimbabwe in an attempt to hold onto the feelings and thoughts I have developed in the years since my trip. In the novel, ‘Last Letter Home’, Vilhelm Moberg describes the emigrant character Karl Oscar as using memory as an escape from the new world he has travelled to, “a dubious retreat to a past which appears more secure than the present”.43 With portrayals in the media of what Zimbabwe has become, I find my ability to question the origin of authenticity of the reports increasingly difficult. The photos provide me with an idealized view of the world, something to be positive about for my wish of one day returning. I could see myself in many of the photos, with family, and of exotic locations completely alien to the environment I call home today, so surely this is an honest depiction? My dependency on this must be reliable, after all, the camera doesn’t lie. I found myself in a similar situation to the character Karl Oscar, questioning the photo bound memories I relied upon, and their place as being more secure 42 Reynolds, E. ‘Producer of Attenborough’s BBC Africa series defends emotional scenes which have left viewers in tears’ Mail Online, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2261216/BBC-producers-insist-DavidAttenboroughs-Africa-series-did-manipulate-viewers-emotive-narrative.html [Accessed 4th February 2013]. 43 Seamon, D & Mugerauer, R. Dwelling, Place & Environment, p238. 15

than what I was hearing and seeing in the present, doubting my inner world, my sanctum, which felt I could go to and rely upon and which is so important to my sense of belonging in the world. “My body is truly the navel of my world, not in the sense of the viewing point of the central perspective, but as the very locus of reference, memory, imagination and integration.”44 My bodily experience with Zimbabwe generated my embodied memories as a young adventurer, kept safe in my being to be reignited by the stimulus to reveal essential knowledge “stored in the muscular and tactile senses... The body knows and remembers.”45 This situation of geographical and communicative detachment, or, “loss of nearness”46, finds me being drawn towards the character traits of, referred to in the essay, the outsider. The debris begins to build over these memories, tainting and pushing them further out of reach whilst developing a new cognition, a socially shared one. “Cognition is a social process, so that what one sees is often influenced by what others wish one to see or what they think one wishes to see.”47 My role as an individual in an “omni-present media society”48, sees a blanket of manipulated, carefully constructed information draped over society, derived from a stance believed or calculated to be what the audience desires. “The media help construct and maintain social reality because the audience receives the information unquestioningly and files it away as reality.”49 Although this point being acknowledged, the media provides the base information, the almost unconscious foundations on which its audience builds trust, to which “individual social interactions that influence a culture more than the mass media”50 take root. The day-to-day conversations both face-to-face and virtual merely concretize the prescription of society’s “norms, behaviours and boundaries.”51 The destination seeking tourist finds himself drawn to the other end of the spectrum to the videos of starvation and poverty, he absorbs the ideals portrayed by the tourism industry. “The tourist gaze has become more and more intertwined with the consumption of media images.”52 His plan of escape from everyday life becomes an event designed for his utmost convenience, but the idea of departure from routine is unsettling for he is removed from his culture and peer group in which he shares a datum of views and information. Consequently, he returns to the things in which he seeks comfort in, and takes his culture with him on his travels, as an imposition to his destination. The real test comes from the destination’s ability to host any number of varying requirements for which its guests require routine and security. The residency becomes a travel adaptor to service human and gadgetry requirements in 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52

Pallasmaa, J. The Eyes of The Skin, p11. Ibid. p60. Heidegger, M. In, Frampton, K. Labour, Work and Architecture, p89. Ley, D & Samuels, M. Humanistic Geography, p272. Jennings, G & Nickerson, N P. Quality Tourism Experiences, p2. Ibid. p28 . Ibid. p25. Ibid. p29. Jansson, A. ‘Spatial phantasmagoria: The mediatisation of tourism experience’ in, European Journal of Communication, 2002. p431.

ESCAPING TO MY ZIMBABWE: Alex Wood

order to maintain his trip in continual enjoyment. “The tourist furthermore may return from his travels with his previous reified, stereotyped images of the people and places visited. This may be due in part to the tourist business, which profits from providing the tourist with that which he wishes to see.”53 The direction taken by the tourist generates views such as, “[tourists] are reproached for being satisfied with superficial experiences of other peoples and other places.”54 As a search for a deeper authenticity, a traveller would suggest less of venturing to foreign lands as an escape from his day to day world, but more as a departure from his culture in an exploration for a deeper understanding of other world cultures.

The Outsider “We only see what we look at. To look is an act of choice. As a result of this act what we see is brought within our reach – though not necessarily within arms reach. To touch something is to situate oneself in relation to it.” 55 A popular perception of those with no exposure or knowledge of Africa is that it is some form of homogeneous land of famine and disease contained within a banner of appeals for food and monetary donations, generated by campaigns that perpetuate the concept that Africa is in need of saving. “Western media coverage tends to focus on pessimistic, crisisoriented stories that equate Africa with misery – a place filled with unimaginable horrors.”56 The owner of this view, is, in this essay, referred to as the outsider, a name that aims to reflect the ever increasing detachment from place created by these representations and lack of education so often found to be portrayed by the media in the Western world. The mass media, a term described as “all forms of media that can reach a mass audience”57, comes into contact with its audience through our technology dependant Westernised culture. This culture sees us glued to screen projected stories and images, in a bid to broaden our knowledge of global affairs in countries we have more than likely never stepped foot in. “New advanced telecommunications act as conduits for flows of images, knowledge, information and symbols which integrate places and people into the 53 54 55 56 57

Ley, D & Samuels, M. Humanistic Geography, p275. MacCannell, D. The Tourist, California: University of California Press, 1999. p10. Berger, J. Ways of Seeing, London: Penguin Books Ltd, 1972. p8-9. Halhoul, K. ‘Using African Cinema to Shift Cultural Perceptions’ UTNE Reader, http://www.utne.com/ african-cinema-shift-cultural-perceptions.aspx [accessed 9th October 2012]. Jennings, G & Nickerson, N P. Quality Tourism Experiences, p29. 17

global cultural system in ‘real time’.”58 Although obvious benefits of such advancements in technology can be seen in many different industries, from health care and education, to communication and transportation systems, there is a danger in the form of our taken for granted ‘omnipresent-media society’. This threat is derived from the notion of social construction, built within social frameworks which provide “background understanding for events that incorporate the will, aim, and controlling effort of an intelligence, a live agency, the chief one being the human being.”59 Alfred Schutz extensively explored this notion of social construction to which he refers to people having a “stock of knowledge”60 which is drawn upon in social situations for one’s understanding of the world. It is not, in effect, the notion of stock of knowledge derived from social construction that is the danger to us in society but the degree to which we are bound unquestioningly to this information which as previously noted, ‘we file away as reality’. The idea of the taken-for-granted world of today is found at the heart of the concepts of reification and alienation, two concepts developed by Karl Marx. As defined in Humanistic Geography : “reification refers to the process by which man produces a world both of abstractions - that is, ideas, values, norms of conduct - and of real concrete objects, which, although they are his own product, he nevertheless permits them to dominate him as objective unchanging facticities.”61 These abstractions can be seen in society where the subject finds standardizations through the aforementioned socialisation process. This is then embedded further by day-to-day social interactions and then taken to be accurate and true without questioning its level of authenticity, and eventually turns into another one of many “socially shared notions of reality”62 or “recipes for interpreting the world”.63 Alienation then becomes the consequence of reification as man becomes alienated through the failure of seeing his own products as once created by himself.64 His inability to question these standardizations or recipes in search of a different possibility to something he has seen leaves him alienated and detached in a societal sea of disoriented people. This could suggest that in an effort to break from his state of divorce with the world, man must begin to question the origins and authenticity of things prescribed to him within his society in a bid to form his own identity and rekindle his individuality and existential being in the world. 58 Graham, S & Marvin, S. Telecommunications and the City: electronic spaces, urban places, London: Routledge, 1996. p38. 59 Goffman, E. Frame Analysis, New York: Harper & Row, 1974. P22. 60 Schutz, A. Collected Papers II - Studies in Social Theory, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964. See Appendix. 61 Ley, D & Samuels, M. Humanistic Geography, p271. 62 Jennings, G & Nickerson, N P. Quality Tourism Experiences, p52. 63 Ley, D & Samuels, M. Humanistic Geography, p271. 64 Ibid. ESCAPING TO MY ZIMBABWE: Alex Wood

In accordance with the growth in technology, specifically the internet, over the last 20 years, the next development from reification is the broadening of horizons into what has been referred to as the ‘media world’. This could be seen as the more regulated and controlled segment to what could also be extended to being labelled more broadly as the cyber world. “The real world is where we come in direct contact with other people, locations and events.”65 But as a technological society we feel that this ‘world is too limited’, too bound by physical and financial situations, environmental and political conditions and an investment in time. The ‘media world’ provides us with experiences and information we could not so readily encounter in our real lives,66 from situations on other planets in our solar system, to a definition of a word held perhaps just a little too far out of reach within the dictionary up on the shelf in the neighbouring room. This dependency has problems beyond its initially helpful and convenient outlook, it leaves us in a state of confusion, reliant upon other people’s constructs to determine our own identities. “In part, this frequent confusion of self is characterized by uprootedness – a sense of non-belonging to place.”67 Following on from the concept of reification, Berger and Pullberg discuss culture shock as a means of ‘de-reification’, a notion perhaps less impacting today due to the diversity of the culture we’re surrounded by.68 Unconsciously we purchase foods which have travelled thousands of miles to stack our supermarket shelves, we find people originating from foreign countries in our work places and educational institutes without really knowing where they have ventured from. It is these situations to which we apply “typifications”69 that allow us a reference point with which we can orientate ourselves to the world.70 But as I confront my fellow-man, I bring into each concrete situation a stock of preconstituted knowledge which includes a network of typifications of human individuals in general, of typical human motivations, goals, and action patterns.”71 In our situation of unknowing, we might not necessarily experience culture shock, instead our reference point directs us to our close at hand ‘typifications’ which aid us in our judgement, but push us from engaging and inquisitive contact to develop founded relationships with people and an understanding of their identities as individuals. “Unfortunately, such media standardizations or social realities may create barriers, which obfuscate rather than facilitate communication among societal groups.”72 Culture shock is becoming less effective as a means of de-reification, as our detachment 65 Jennings, G & Nickerson, N P. Quality Tourism Experiences, p40. 66 Ibid. 67 Buttimer, A & Seamon, D. The Human Experience of Space and Place, p75. 68 Ley, D & Samuels, M. Humanistic Geography, p271. 69 Schutz, A. Collected Papers II - Studies in Social Theory, See Appendix. 70 Jennings, G & Nickerson, N P. Quality Tourism Experiences, p28. 71 Schutz, A. Collected Papers II - Studies in Social Theory, p29. 72 Jennings, G & Nickerson, N P. Quality Tourism Experiences, p29. 19

from the real world and divulgence in the media world keeps us in a constant state of distraction, focused on a screen - a portal into a world of abstracted information. “Focused vision confronts us with the world whereas peripheral vision envelopes us in the flesh of the world.”73 The lack of de-reification merely enforces alienation felt by man and creates the continued consumption of commodities, or as Marx describes, “Commodities, in short, appear as the purchasers of persons.”74 It is as though man, in his state of alienation has no choice, his dependency renounces his body as redundant to be claimed by commodity. It is “The dominance of the eye and the suppression of the other senses tends to push us into detachment, isolation and exteriority.”75 Exteriority maintains our being at merely skin surface. “The current mass production of visual imagery tends to alienate vision from emotional involvement and identification, and to turn imagery into a mesmerising flow without focus or participation.”76 It is evident that something needs to interrupt or disrupt this reification of the world to reestablish our existence in the physical world. At the societal scale, socially shared cognition as referred to earlier in the text, conceives the start to an unquestioned social reality, further set by individual interactions which combine to provide the stimulus to develop often contaminated personal constructs in the small amount of head space allowed of us to develop as individuals. Personal construct theory “evolves based on how the individual sees reality and constructs his or her social world.”77 Just as “physically bounded spaces are less significant as information is able to flow through walls and rush across great distances”78, it seems to have permeated our skin and initiated disorder in our bodily composition. It is evident that in addition to our detachment with the physical world, we have become detached from ourselves; our interior nexus that makes us fundamentally human is left hanging by a thread, pushed aside by commodity and weakened by society, which only enforces Heidegger’s loss of nearness. It is this nearness which “joins people with a larger world... In part because of nearness, people know their place, and this knowledge is unselfconscious because it is founded on blood ties and physical proximity.”79

73 74 75 76 77 78 79

Pallasmaa, J. The Eyes of The Skin, p10. Marx, K. Capital - volume 1, London: Penguin Books, 1990. p1003 Pallasmaa, J. The Eyes of The Skin, p19. Ibid. p22. Jennings, G & Nickerson, N P. Quality Tourism Experiences, p83. Meyrowitz, J. No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behaviour, pVIII. Seamon, D. Dwelling, Seeing, and Designing: Toward a Phenomenological Ecology, p237.

ESCAPING TO MY ZIMBABWE: Alex Wood

Where does our food come from? : by author

Conclusion “I was a sojourner, a global traveller... Where did I belong?”80 Identity, place and loss, as explored through the characters of this essay, has highlighted a number of different ways in which we look to, or are led to create and secure our identity as human beings. The text has endeavoured to undertake an exploration at a breadth of scales from the global to the individual, and their surprisingly close liaison, whilst considering multiple factors which can be associated with our development as humans and our connection with the places that surround us. The text began with the resident, with which, under the character Douglas Rogers, I could divulge into the topic of home and holding onto ground which one can call their own. This highlighted the term ‘generosity’ and identified a place in which we may apply ‘imperfections of the hand’ in an ever consuming global age. From this, critical regionalism was explored as a method of championing the individual in opposition to ‘universal dogmas’ and as a means to re-produce a place in which the Rogers family could reside. I took this as an opportunity to speculate with the situation of Zimbabwe to return its name and its identity as a great nation to its global audience. The notion of a lateral development was introduced to investigate the erosion of the ground on which the developing microcosmic community might grow as part of ‘human place-making’. The second section, the tourist, began with a personal recollection of Zimbabwe and the documented moments in the form of photographs which I rely on today and have preconditioned my outlook, to question what I see and hear as represented in the media. As a precedent to investigate the other side of the spectrum to negative media portrayal, the documentary series Africa was used as a tool to illustrate the privileging of the viewer into a seat aligned to his personal convenience. From here, the conversation returned to personal accounts of my current detachment with Zimbabwe, as similar to that of Moberg’s character, Karl Oscar, doubting my inner world through experiencing a ‘loss of nearness’ and developing a new socially shared cognition. The role of the tourist was explored as an entity, a travel adaptor, with an ability to migrate his culture from place to place, whilst the traveller was suggested as a character to discover a deeper authenticity of place. The final character, the outsider, introduced the influence of the mass media within our technology dependent culture as a mediator to return to, and develop further, the topic of social construction and one’s ‘stock of knowledge’. As an overarching link, the Marxian concepts of ‘reification’ and ‘alienation’ provided an overview to every day interactions, concretising our ‘recipes for interpreting the world’. The investigation highlighted the need for man to detach himself from his state alienation through questioning and challenging the medicine he is prescribed, in an effort to rekindle his existential being in the world. This is continued further through a dialogue between the ‘real world’ and our dependency 80

Rogers, D. The Last Resort, p19.

ESCAPING TO MY ZIMBABWE: Alex Wood

in the ‘media world’. As an attempt to de-reify ourselves, the notion of ‘culture shock’ was introduced and put against a counter point of ‘typifications’ that we use in an attempt to secure ourselves when found in new or unusual situations, and then focussed into an analysis of personal construct theory and our absence of touch with the world. This text doesn’t set out to suggest that to be anything other than a global traveller is to be narrow minded and bound by the influence of one’s social environment, as that would be insensitive to people’s economic situations and the spiralling issues of global warming and the depletion of the planet’s resources. It aims instead to provide a reference with which we can begin to understand our place in the world and begin to acknowledge a direction in which we might take should we feel so moved as to do so. “Some speak disparagingly of the “generalization” of the modern city where due to sameness of commercial chains, transportation and airports, etc., it is difficult to distinguish places. Could this also be a question of looking and seeing?”81 It is easy to suggest that a call for a critical regionalism is needed as we regress into a fashion of consuming universalised elements, just as it is easy to become a critic of the mass media and of globalisation. But, it appears the actualities of change are harder to suggest. As brought up in the resident, the option of resorting to the more economical option seems to be the popular route of purchase nowadays, which puts the call for a critical regionalism one step further from our grasp. Although not the solution proposed, I would suggest that to homogenize the world to become a global workshop where every industry has unanimous working conditions and allow the price and acquisition of objects to become local again would not only be impossible due to the nature of skills and materials and their locality, but would lead to a completely universalised world and prove to be even more of a contradiction to the stipulations of critical regionalism than is evident now. I feel it comes down to an acceptance of the competition provided on a global scale as many of the global operators are simply too powerful to be affected by the individual and to suggest something such as a consumer strike would be merely naive. It is a question of our individual morality and an ongoing evaluation of our ethics as to whether we break from the global and return to the local. I can propose through the investigation that we do indeed have a difficulty between looking and seeing. As a culture we rely on the stimulation of imagery for our day to day to which we look but don’t see. We struggle to acknowledge ourselves as bound up in notions of social constructions, unconsciously implanted within our minds with which we look at the world, but it is the experiences we encounter in the real world, in life itself, that gives birth to our true identity condition, our contact with the ground that enables us to see again. Our inner world is delicate but so crucial to our sense of belonging, and yet it is bombarded by the intensity 81

Holl, S. Pallasmaa, J. & Péréz Gómez, A. Questions of Perception: Phenomenology of Architecture, San Francisco: William Stout Publishers, 1994. p48. 23

of modern life, to the point at which it is merely desensitised to notions like culture shock. We are deceived by the computer and have succumbed to its power, it has taken hold of us and is, in return, attempting to inflict its own machine attributes into our being. “Although we cannot see the inside of our body, we do develop memories of an inside world that include a panorama of experiences taken from the environment and etched into the “feelings” of our identity over a lifetime of personal encounters with the world. We populate our inside world with the people, places, and events that we “felt” at one time in the outside world, and we associate these events with the feelings themselves.”82 In my present world, I have realised, I’m losing grip of the photographs of my time in Zimbabwe, but as a consequence of the text, I can acknowledge that these are mere fragments of my life, that, with the assistance of technology, can be drawn upon to be duplicated as times require. These surrogates may lack the charm of the original but they remain rich as a stimulation of memory. They are each unique scenarios that can never be re-enacted or recreated, not for lack of want or effort, but due to the perpetual motion of time. Neither I nor the world will ever be as young as the time we conspired to create these memories, so for that I should be thankful, for my Zimbabwe shall always have a place in my heart.

Bloomer, K & Moore, C. Body Memory and Architecture, USA: Yale University Press, 1977. p49.

ESCAPING TO MY ZIMBABWE: Alex Wood

Bibliography

Books: Anderson, L. Betsky, A & Hays, K Michael. Scanning : The Aberrant Architectures of Diller and Scofidio, New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2003. Arendt, H. The Human Condition, Chicago: Chicago Press, 1958. Arnheim, R. Visual Thinking, London: Faber and Faber, 1970. Auge, M. Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity, London: Verso, 1995. Bachelard, G. The Poetics of Space, Boston: Beacon Press, 1969. Berger, J. Ways of Seeing, London: Penguin Books Ltd, 1972. Billington, R. Hockey, J. & Strawbridge S. Exploring Self and Society, Hampshire: Macmillan Press Ltd, 1998. Bloomer, K & Moore, C. Body Memory and Architecture, USA: Yale University Press, 1977. Buttimer, A & Seamon, D. The Human Experience of Space and Place, London: Croom Helm Ltd, 1980. Canter, D. Psychology of Place, London: Architectural Press, 1977. De Botton, A. The Architecture of Happiness, London: Penguin Books Ltd, 2007. Dovey, K. Framing Places: Mediating Power in Built Form, London: Routledge, 1999. Frampton, K. Labour, Work and Architecture, London: Phaidon Press, 2002. Goffman, E. Frame Analysis, New York: Harper & Row, 1974. Graham, S & Marvin, S. Telecommunications and the City: electronic spaces, urban places, London: Routledge, 1996. Heidegger, M. Basic Writings, Oxon: Routledge, 1978. Heidegger, M. Being and Time, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 1962. ESCAPING TO MY ZIMBABWE: Alex Wood

Holl, S. Pallasmaa, J. & Péréz Gómez, A. Questions of Perception: Phenomenology of Architecture, San Francisco: William Stout Publishers, 1994. Jennings, G & Nickerson, N P. Quality Tourism Experiences, Oxford: Elsevier, 2006. Lefaivre, L & Tzonis, A. Critical Regionalism, Berlin: Prestel, 2003. Levine, J. Resnick, L & Teasley, S. Perspectives on Socially Shared Cognition, Washington: American Psychological Association, 1993. Ley, D & Samuels, M. Humanistic Geography, Chicago: Maaroufa Press Inc, 1978. MacCannell, D. The Tourist, California: University of California Press, 1999. Marx, K. Capital - Volume 1, London: Penguin Books, 1990. Meyrowitz, J. No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behaviour, New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Miller, D. The Comfort of Things, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008. Pallasmaa, J. The Eyes of the Skin, Chichester: John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 2005. Pallasmaa, J. The Thinking Hand, Chichester: John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 2009. Rasmussen, S.E. Experiencing Architecture, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1964. Rogers, D. The Last Resort, Jeppestown: Jonathan Ball Publishers, 2009. Ruskin, J. The Stones of Venice, London: The Folio Society Ltd, 1851. Schutz, A. Collected Papers II - Studies in Social Theory, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964. Seamon, D. Dwelling, Seeing, and Designing: Toward a Phenomenological Ecology, New York: State University of New York Press, 1993. Seamon, D & Mugerauer, R. Dwelling, Place & Environment, New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. Tuan, Y. Space and Place, London: Edward Arnold Publishers, 1977. Warburton, D. Community & Sustainable Development, UK: Earthscan Publications Limited, 1998.

Zumthor, P. Atmospheres, Basel: Birkhauser, 2006. Zumthor, P. Thinking Architecture, Basel: Birkhauser, 2006. Journals: Jansson, A. ‘Spatial phantasmagoria: The mediatisation of tourism experience’ in, European Journal of Communication, 2002. Internet: Borowski, R. ‘Young People’s Perceptions of Africa’ www.geography.org.uk/download/ GA_Conf11Borowski.ppt. [Assessed 9th October 2012]. Araya, S. ‘Mis-Representation at its Best’ African Holocaust, www.africanholocaust.net/ news_ah/eyesofafrica.html. [Assessed 9th October 2012]. Halhoul, K. ‘Using African Cinema to Shift Cultural Perceptions’ UTNE Reader, http://www. utne.com/african-cinema-shift-cultural-perceptions.aspx [Assessed 9th October 2012]. Reynolds, E. ‘Producer of Attenborough’s BBC Africa series defends emotional scenes which have left viewers in tears’ Mail Online, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2261216/BBC-producers-insist-David-Attenboroughs-Africa-series-did-manipulateviewers-emotive-narrative.html [Assessed 4th February 2013].

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ESCAPING TO MY ZIMBABWE: Alex Wood

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