Colonized Landscapes

How does landscape as a form of memory represent conflicts of the past?

In this week's article, I explored the question as to how people perceive the land around them, and how that perception changes over time. I highlighted that with time, the space we inhabit becomes permeated with cultural and historical meaning. In other words, the space we inhabit starts symbolizing the very way in which we do this. This symbolic meaning, the land being charged with the cultural and historical meaning given to it by its inhabitants, makes space become landscape.

So indeed, the ways in which we look at the landscape changes with time. As time goes by, we entrench cultural meanings in our living spaces, which, as a consequence, become symbolic for the ways in which we live.

These cultural representations help us define and control our sense of who we are. Andrew Strathern and Pamela Steward (2003) point out in their Epilogue (pp. 229-236) that missionaries and other colonizers leave a notable mark on the environment. In their effort to control the new space, they often invade the landscape with large settlements and roads. Yet over time, we might turn these very representations of oppression into proud artifacts of our own heritage.

The landscape of my youth is a good example of this process. The city of Nijmegen was founded by the Romans. A little over 2000 years ago, Emperor Trajan built a settlement here as a camp to protect the border of the Roman Empire. The name of the settlement was "Novio Magus," meaning "new market". To this day, remnants of the Roman colonization of Nijmegen can be found, and are carefully preserved at the Nijmegen Museum. The very fact that the marks of the colonizer are carefully preserved illustrates that aforementioned process- over time, artifacts of an oppressive past become deposits of a personal and collective history.

Indeed, landscape is more than a visual representation on a piece of canvas. In the words of Jim Hodges, "Landscape is a piece that is emotional and psychological."

References

Pamela J. Steward and Andrew Strathern (2003). Landscape, Memory and History. Anthropological Perspectives. London: Pluto Press