Place contra space in a morally just landscape

Abstract

Michel de Certeau's work provides a provocative means of distinguishing the concepts of space and place in relation to that of the just landscape, while at the same time challenging the common tendency to identify landscape with the rural rather than the urban. de Certeau's landscape analysis takes its point of departure in the contrast between the map-like view of Manhattan from the World Trade Center and the place-creating practices of the pedestrians below. Since that time, the World Trade Center has become ‘Ground Zero’ and it is theoretically challenging to look at what this transformation of a monumental mark in the landscape to an equally monumental zero means for de Certeau's analysis, particularly in relation to the epistemology of nothingness. The larger significance of de Certeau's decidedly urban approach to landscape emerges in the work of the anthropologist John Gray who has made novel use of de Certeau's theory to interpret the place identity of borderland Scottish sheepherders. Gray's analysis can be applied to other rural landscapes, such as the sæter landscapes of Norway. The depth of de Certeau's argument, however, can easily be missed due to terminological confusion in translating his French into English.

Keywords:

• custom
• landscape
• place
• space
• zero

Acknowledgments

This is a revised version of the conference paper ‘Ground Zero – the Space and Place of a Just Landscape and the Epistemology of Nothingness’ published in Peil & Jones (2005, 18–29). I would like to thank Nick Blomley, Tom Mels, Kerstin Potthoff, Sebastian Eiter, and an anonymous reviewer for their comments on this article.

Notes

1. The history of the idea of the celestial eye has been charted by Cosgrove (2001).

2. Originally published by Thomas Hobbes in 1651 under the full title of Leviathan, or The Matter, Forme, & Power of a Commonwealth ECCLESIASTICALL AND CIVILL.

3. The word ‘theoretical’ derives from the ‘Late Latin theoreticus, from Greek theoretikos, from theoretos (verbal of theorein to look at, behold, contemplate, consider)’ (Merriam-Webster 1968, theory). de Certeau compares Manhattan to a ‘stage’ (de Certeau 1984, 91), and it should be noted that the word ‘theater’ has a similar etymology: ‘Middle English theatre, from Middle French, from Latin theatrum, from Greek theatron, from theasthai to see, view (from thea action of seeing, sight) + -tron, suffix denoting means, instrument, or place; akin to Greek thauma wonder, miracle’ (Merriam-Webster 1968, theater).

4. On these differing forms of movement in relation to the political landscape of the state, see Olwig (2002c).

5. In the influential eschatological Fourth Eclogue, which was seen in the Middle Ages to predict the birth of Christ and a new pastoral golden age (thereby giving Virgil the role of a minor profit), Virgil refers to the return of the virgin goddess of Justice. In Georgics II (1946 [u.d.], 564–565) Virgil writes: ‘When Justice fled this world of wickedness, 'Twas in their midst [amongst rural agriculturalists and shepherds] that her last steps were seen’ (Virgil 1946 [u.d.], 24, 114).

6. de Certeau deliberately plays upon the etymological ties between the words text and textile.

7. Milieu, in French, means ‘surroundings’, ‘medium’ (as in chemistry) and ‘middle’ (Deleuze & Guattari 1988, xvii).

8. Paysage translates as ‘landscape’ and carries the same variety of meanings as landscape, but it should be noted that the prefix pays means the same as land in the territorial sense of country (i.e. Jutland is the land/country of the Jutes) and does not mean land in the sense of soil. The French meaning paysage retains the connotations of landscape as a place of dwelling that is characteristic of the etymologically primary territorial sense of landscape as the place of a people. Age means the same as -scape or -ship, meaning state, condition or quality (Olwig 2002b, 232, footnote 6).

9. On chora, choros, place, and landscape, see Olwig (2001).

10. For example, outbye, inbye.

11. According to the much debated theory of the Dutch forest historian, F.W.M. Vera, the original pre-human state of the land was that of open parkland, not dense forest (Vera 2000), and his thesis suggests that the process of hefting may have been one that the first humans to domesticate large grazing animals learned from the behavior of the animals and later applied to their own settlement of the land.

12. The research project on ‘Customary Rights, Cultural Practice, and Biological Diversity in Mountain Agricultural Landscapes’ was financed by the Research Council of Norway. Within this project, the students documented the ecological and social role of the sæter as discussed here (Brokhaug 2001, Endresen 2001, Floten 2001, Sæther 2001, Størseth 2002, Potthoff 2005).