How Landscapes Remember

Abstract

This paper considers the possibility that as subject or agent, the landscape might have the potential to contain, store or transmit memories of their past, which are engaged experientially as uncanny. In a simple sense it asks why there are some landscapes – or landscape features – that are regarded as spiritually animated by different social groups, at different times. The paper focuses on the Neolithic temple site of Borġ-in-Nadur, in Southern Malta, which as well as having been a site of prehistoric ritual activity has more recently been the site of a significant devotion to the Virgin Mary, who graced the site with regular apparitions, and a focus for national and transnational Goddess pilgrimage. The paper suggests that sites such as Borġ-in-Nadur can be seen as palimpsest landscapes, in which memory is layered such that experiential engagements with them draw the past in to the present, and forwards into the future. The paper examines the intertwining of prehistoric, Catholic and Neo-pagan engagements with Borġ-in-Nadur, extending Pierre Nora’s concept of lieux de memoire (sites of memory) to encompass the milieux de memoire, or memorial environments, which are themselves also context of, and for, the uncanny.

Keywords: :

• landscape
• palimpsest
• memory
• religion
• uncanny

Acknowledgements

The research upon which this paper is based was made possible by funding from British Academy Small Grant Scheme, and research leave from the Department of Anthropology, University of Sussex. I am grateful to them, and to audiences at the Mediterranean Institute, University of Malta, and the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Vienna. I am also particularly grateful to Karis Petty, James Fairhead and Hildi Mitchell for their comments on earlier drafts.

notes and references

Notes

1 Much of the material on Angelik and the messages he received from Our Lady is taken from diverse internet sources, where they were broadcast by his followers.

2 In January 2016 the Diocese issued a statement that the meetings were to cease, and that the visions and messages were not of a supernatural nature.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jon P. Mitchell

Jon P. Mitchell is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Sussex, UK. He has conducted ethnographic research since the early 1990s in the Mediterranean island state of Malta. Here, he has worked on issues of politics and Europeanisation, popular ritual, saints’ feasts, Catholic visionaries, the materiality of statues, and forms of embodied and sensory religious experience. His most recent book is Ritual, Performance and the Senses (edited with Michael Bull), Routledge, 2015. [email protected]