Time and Landscape

Author(s): Barbara Bender
Reviewed work(s):
Source: Current Anthropology, Vol. 43, No. S4, Special Issue Repertoires of Timekeeping in
Anthropology (August/October 2002), pp. S103-S112
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological
Research
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C u r r e n t A n t h r o p o l o g y Volume 43, Supplement, August–October 2002
䉷 2002 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved 0011-3204/2002/43supp-0009$2.50

Every beginning and ending, every boundary drawn, is

arbitrary. “An horizon is nothing save the limit of our
Time and Landscape sight” (William Penn, Fruits of Solitude). Nancy Munn,
in her seminal paper “The Cultural Anthropology of
Time,” talks of “the space of time” and summons up
Borges’s infinite “Book of Sand”: “As one opens this
by Barbara Bender book, pages keep growing from it—it has no beginning
or end. Borges’s book could be taken as the space of time:
A page once seen is never seen again, and the book’s
harried possessors keep trying to escape its ‘monstrous’
Landscapes are created out of people’s understanding and engage- self-production by surreptitiously selling or losing it”
ment with the world around them. They are always in process of (Munn 1992: 93).
being shaped and reshaped. Being of the moment and in process, This introduction attempts a cautious path-finding
they are always temporal. They are not a record but a recording, through the proliferating notions of time and landscape,
and this recording is much more than a reflection of human
after which I discuss some of my recent work, which
agency and action; it is creative of them. Landscapes provoke
memory, facilitate (or impede) action. Nor are they a recording, attempts to negotiate parts of this labyrinth.
for they are always polyvalent and multivocal. There is a histo- I start with two proposals. The first: Landscape is time
ricity and spatiality to people’s engagement with the world materialized. Or, better, Landscape is time materializ-
around them. This paper begins with the untidiness of spatial ing: landscapes, like time, never stand still. The second:
temporalities, with structural inequalities that emphasize—or
marginalize—people’s sense of place and belonging, and with the Landscapes and time can never be “out there”: they are
subjective positioning of the commentator. A phenomenological always subjective.
position is adopted, but it is one that moves beyond the local to The first: In contemporary Western discourse (a loaded
encompass a nested series of sociopolitical landscapes. Three re- and problematic concept to which I shall return), land-
cent projects are then described. The agendas that inform the
scape may be defined in many different ways, but all
projects are different, but each attempts to understand how peo-
ple, differently placed, engage with the world around them and incorporate the notion of “time passing.” Thus land-
with the past embedded in the landscape. scape as solid geology (as in “a granitic landscape,” “a
karst landscape”) speaks to evolutionary time, aeons of
b a r b a r a b e n d e r has a Ph.D. from the Institute of Archae- time: “all history in a grain of sand” (Samuel 1975: xix).
ology, London. She is Professor of Heritage Anthropology in the Landscape as land form or topography (“a desert land-
Anthropology Department at University College, London (Lon-
scape,” “a riverine landscape”), again, has great time-
don WC1E 6BT, England [[email protected]]).
depth but may involve human interventions, human his-
tories. With landscape as mantled (as in “a landscape of
peat and moor,” “a tropical landscape”) the processes
quicken, sometimes invoking seasonal transience. Land-
scape as land-use (“an arable landscape,” “a country
house landscape,” “a plantation landscape”) speaks of
things done to the land—action and movement, the ef-
fects of historically specific social/political/cultural re-
lationships. And there are many other sorts of peopled
definitions of landscape: historical landscapes, land-
scapes as representation, landscapes of settlement, land-
scapes of migration and exile, and, most recently per-
haps, phenomenological landscapes, where the time
duration is measured in terms of human embodied ex-
perience of place and movement, of memory and expec-
tation. The list could surely be extended, but whatever
the focus, time passes.
The time that passes in these ’scapes is not uniform.
Sometimes a linear notion is implied: units of time
“clipped together,” uniformly ticking over as the years,
centuries, millennia, and much more, go by.
There is seasonal time, which is sometimes thought
of as cyclical (or repetitive)—“the simple scansion of
passing time” (Bourdieu 1977:103). Or there may be a
recognition that though the seasons come round and the
same places are revisited, they are never the same; time
moves on: “While people often move in cyclical patterns
in the course of routine activities, returning to the same
location again and again . . . the places . . . are themselves
continuously being physically altered and decaying, as
S103

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S104 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 43, Supplement, August–October 2002

well as continuously being re-evaluated and re-inter- tions and fields of power that improve1 some people’s
preted” (Thomas 1996:90). positions and diminish others’.
In other accounts time is event-driven or inflected Nor does the recognition that landscape is subjective
through the lens of mythical or historical accounts, or mean that it is passive. This context-dependency of peo-
it is elided, denied, or exaggerated in action and memory: ple’s being-in-the-world is a physical context: the con-
“Incommensurable islands of duration, each with its tours of the interacted-with landscape—the materiality
own rhythm, the time that flies by or drags, depending of social relationships—are dynamic. Human interven-
on what one is doing” (Bourdieu 1977:103). tions are done not so much to the landscape as with the
There is ceremonial time, time punctuated by church landscape, and what is done affects what can be done. A
bells or factory sirens, and there is compressed global place inflected with memory serves to draw people to-
time that often, confusingly, serves to accentuate the wards it or to keep them away, permits the assertion or
particularity of local time. denial of knowledge claims, becomes a nexus of con-
But time is not one thing or another: it is both one tested meaning. Equally, more abstractly, our attempts
thing and another. Different times nest within each to interpret time or place are created out of (and creative
other and draw meaning from each other. Thus Gell of) an experience of “things in place.” As Hodder (1997:
(1992) takes Bourdieu to task for privileging practice over 193) puts it, the past “is constructed by the interpreter
more abstract cultural knowledge—for maintaining that and that interpretation is informed by an experience of
the Kabyle have no “abstract” calendar, “only incom- data from the past.”
mensurable islands of duration.” Gell points out (p. 299)
that though the Kabyle calendar may be agrarian rather
than celestial, “it is only in relation to the calendrical The Historical Particularity of Western
scheme as a whole that the contingent passage of [time] Discourses
has any meaning.” And more, the codified calendric
knowledge “evoked and exchanged in the flow of ev- When I listed landscapes “in time” I limited myself to
eryday interaction” (p. 308) is an important source of a particular bunch of understandings and experiences
power. that can be loosely bundled together under the umbrella
The second proposal follows from the first. Landscapes of “Western discourse(s).” Calling them discourses
and time are not objective, not “a given,” not neutral. rather than social theories serves to emphasize that the
(Nor, for that matter, is “nature” or any of the other theories come out of something and somewhere (Gregory
categories that we might care to consider.) This is not 1993:274):
to say that the world does not exist outside of human
understanding—of course it does. When we have bombed The term underlines the embeddedness of social the-
ourselves out of existence or made the world unlivable ory in social life—those traces of its historical geog-
for human beings, the world will (probably) still exist raphy that conventional social theory seeks to sup-
and will go on changing. The point is simply that it is press but which are, none the less, indelibly present
we, through our embodied understanding, our being-in- in the very questions it asks and the answers it
the-world, who create the categories and the interpre- gives. . . . Contexts and easements which shape our
tations: “Human beings cope with the phenomena they local knowledges, however imperiously global their
encounter by slotting them in to the understanding of claims to know . . . . To speak of social theory as
the world which they have already developed: nothing discourse is to emphasize the politics of social the-
is perceived without being perceived ‘as’ something. . . . ory which are put in place . . . through the multiple
If there was no . . . person, there would still be rocks, ligatures between “knowledge” and “power.”
trees, mountains . . . but no one to recognize them as To call them “Western” discourses not only locates
such or to call them by those names” (Thomas 1996: them geographically but also locates the historical
65–66). source of their power. These discourses are located in
To say that landscape and time are subjective does not post-Enlightenment, expansionist, capitalist worlds. The
require a descent into a miasma of cultural relativity. It three adjectives interlock (Bender 1999: 32):2
simply means that the engagement with landscape and
time is historically particular, imbricated in social re- The inventions and refinement of the cartographic
lations and deeply political. equipment . . . was not just an adjunct to explora-
More, the cultural meanings we give to time and place tion and colonisation, it helped create the conditions
are not just reflections of these relationships; they carry for such enterprises (Cosgrove 1984: 140). Equally, it
their own political and social charge. When farmworkers
become “farm hands” or a “fine prospect” elides a view 1. Another ambiguous word: to “improve” the land and/or to “im-
over the land (preferably your land) and a view to en- prove” one’s chances.
hanced social status (Williams 1973: 121), or when Ben- 2. Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” is a wonderful example
jamin Franklin coins the phrase “Time is money” (Frank- of the seductive power of the “New World”: “Had we but world
enough, and time, / This coyness, lady, were no crime. . . . / Thou
lin 1785?) or we unthinkingly talk about “wasting time” by the Indian Ganges’ side / Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide / Of
or “spending time,” this linguistic sleight-of-hand both Humber would complain. . . . / . . . / My vegetable love should grow
justifies and obfuscates transformations in social rela- / Vaster than empires and more slow.”

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 b e n d e r Time and Landscape F S105

was not just an aid to the establishment and moni- chor human evolution and a vast amount of cultural
toring of different sorts of property and of national material once and forever in objective, natural, i.e.,
and regional boundaries, but a force in the creating noncultural Time. . . . They conveyed an aura of sci-
of changing social configurations (Helgerson 1986). entific rigour and trustworthiness. . . .
Evolutionary sequences and their concomitant
As Harley (1992: 528) explains, 16th- and 17th-century political practice of colonialism and imperialism
cartography was “simultaneously a practical instrument may look incorporative: after all, they create a uni-
for colonial policy, a visual rhetoric for fashioning Eu- versal frame of reference able to accommodate all
ropean attitudes towards the Americas and its people, societies. But being based on the episteme of natural
and an analogue for the acquisition, management and history, they are founded on distancing and separa-
reinforcement of colonial power.” Turnbull (1989) has tion. There would be no raison d’être for the com-
shown that the notion of a non-indexical representation parative method if it was not the classification of
of space in Western cartography—that is, a representa- entities or traits which first have to be separate and
tion that is supposedly neutral and scientific and floats distinct before their similarities can be used to es-
free of any historical particularity—is an illusion that tablish taxonomies and developmental sequences. To
serves to obscure the political and social indexicality of put this more concretely: What makes the savage
the undertaking. significant to the evolutionist’s Time is that he lives
Equally, Western notions of landscape are politically in another Time.
laden. They encapsulate ideas about perspective, about
distance between observer and observed, which make the Not just evolutionary (time) discourses but anthro-
observer active, the observed passive. In the late 16th pological discourses that stress the boundedness of cul-
century the word denoted a particular type of painting, tures and countries (place) work to “other” the Other
then went on to encompass a particular way of viewing, (Appadurai 1988:37). Gupta and Ferguson (1992:14) prob-
and eventually involved the physical landscaping of the lematize both the unity of the “Us” and the otherness
view—a class-based imposition that appeared visual but of the “Other.” We should, they suggest, work “with the
in reality marked the reorganization of social and eco- premise that spaces have always been hierarchically
nomic relations. Labour was both aesthetically and phys- interconnected. . . . Then cultural and social change be-
ically removed from view and the connection between comes not a matter of cultural contact and articulation
landscaped estate and factory and colonial plantation sat- but one of thinking difference through connection. . . .
isfactorily obscured (Bender 1993). We turn from a project of juxtaposing pre-existing dif-
As with landscape or cartography, so with time. Munn ferences to one of exploring the construction of differ-
emphasizes that seemingly neutral “timekeeping” is not ences in historical process.”
just a strategy for interaction but “a medium of hierar-
chic power and governance” (Munn 1992:109). Again,
“clock time” not only works for and with the control of The “Self” in This Narrative
labour but spills out and infiltrates a far wider network
of social relationships: “Individual participation in the Up to this point the stress has been on the way in which
tightly synchronized and ’synchorized’ production proj- Western discourses take shape from and work to shape
ects of factories and large-scale shops of necessity im- particularities of time and place. This deconstruction be-
posed time discipline and coupling constraints upon es- comes possible because time has moved on and condi-
sential family projects, thereby contributing to a modi- tions, including the production of knowledge and self,
fication of the family itself” (Thrift and Pred 1981:279). have changed. The deconstruction “makes sense” in a
Not just clock time but evolutionary time has to be postmodern context in which, though “the West” con-
recognized as socially and politically freighted (Fabian tinues to entrench and extend its economic hold, many
1983:13): people, as individuals, feel a loss of “place” (in the widest
sense of word), fear the change of pace, and mistrust the
The true reason why biblical chronology had to be mission to control.
abandoned was that it did not contain the right kind The reader might point out a logical flaw in the de-
of Time. . . . It was Time relaying significant events, construction: on one hand, I say everything is subjective
mythical and historical, and as such it was chronicle and relative, and on the other, struggling to contextualize
as well as chronology. . . . It did not allow for Time the discourse, I retain elements of “grand narrative.” I
to be a variable independent of the events it marks. find this a necessary contradiction. On one hand, our
Hence it could not become part of a Cartesian sys- understandings are both “placed” and changing; on the
tem of time-space coordinates allowing the scientist other, we marshal them to work for us, to answer to our
to plot a multitude of uneventful data over neutral current preoccupations. While we accept that we are not
time until it was first naturalized, i.e., separated in the business of producing “the truth,” we have the
from events meaningful to mankind. right to position ourselves within the postmodern flux
in order to produce something that feels true to us and
Fabian continues (pp. 22, 26–27):
effective at a given moment in time. In my case, given
These methods of [absolute] dating appeared to an- the particularity of my own background—which, among

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S106 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 43, Supplement, August–October 2002

other things, involves an espousal of, first, structural

Marxism (Bender 1978) and then, in keeping with the
changing times and preoccupations, cultural Marxism
(Bender 1998:30–31)—I welcome the postmodern em-
phasis on an untidy multivocality but maintain a strong
desire to work with narratives (grand or otherwise) that
acknowledge the political, economic, and social forces
that inform that diversity (Bender 1998:13–23).

Embodiment of Place and Time

Deconstruction serves to destabilize and question, but
how are we to move towards a more constructive en-
gagement? This is not the time or place for a long the-
oretical exegesis; I would simply make a plea for more
open-ended theorizing that questions disciplinary
boundaries and recognizes the untidiness and contradic-
Fig. 1. The Leskernick quoit stone at the midsummer
toriness of human encounters with time and landscape.
solstice. The capstone was hefted into place by the
A small example taken from our work at Leskernick
Bronze Age villagers, but there are many similar
Hill on Bodmin Moor in southwestern England (Tilley
structures on the moor that are “natural.”
et al. 2000) (fig. 1) illustrates the constraints imposed by
historically constituted disciplinary boundaries:
Leskernick is a small hill, covered in rivers of moor- of landscape. A person may, more or less in the same
stone or clitter. These were once great tabular strata that, breath, understand a landscape in a dozen different ways
through peri-glacial action, shattered into smaller and (field notes, 1999):
larger pieces and slid down the hillside. In among the
I’m in Devon, walking with F., who owns the small
stones are the remains of Bronze Age settlements, field-
dairy farm, up a steep, muddy pathway between
systems, cairns and field-shrines.
high hedgerows. She points to a small, triangular
It became clear to the anthropologists surveying the
field: “That used to be an orchard—cider apples. Dad
hill that these Bronze Age people were, in some sense,
used to pay the farm workers with cider. A gallon a
communicating with the stones. Perhaps the stones were
day. They had to stop when mechanisation came
the ancestors, or the ancestral spirits? The anthropolo-
in—you couldn’t be pissed on a tractor.” She grum-
gists then began to notice that in among the moor-stones
bles about the steepness of the slope and the north-
there were some that had been slightly shifted—a
facing aspect of the farm; worries about whether the
propped stone here, a line or semi-circle there, a circlet
new organically grown meadow will be too rich;
of stones around a boulder. The changes were so subtle
and, looking over at the cattle, voices her bitterness
that it was hard to know where “culture” began and
at government lack of interest in the falling price of
“nature” ended.
livestock following the BSE [Mad-Cow Disease]
Specialist geologists arrived. They had studied peri-
scare. She glances down towards the farm and is re-
glacial action. It had never occurred to them that some
minded that the National Trust is going to repair
of the patterning might be caused by human action. Now
the old waterwheel—“That should bring the punters
they looked again, and confirmed that, yes, there were
in!” Then she laughs, remembering how her kids
stones that had been moved.
used to toboggan down this hill on their tin trays.
Oddly enough, in the end, it seemed almost irrelevant
Towards the top of the hill, she turns round, ges-
whether a stone had been moved by peri-glacial action
tures expansively towards the boundaries of her
or by human agency. The distinctions were ours not
land, and says—slightly mockingly—“Isn’t it
theirs. A “naturally” upright stone, a “naturally”
picturesque?”
strangely weathered shape, an overhang or fissure may
have been as culturally significant as the stones that had I leave it to the reader to deconstruct this interlude
been moved. Indeed, the moved stones may have repli- —there is almost every sort of place and time contained
cated or responded to ones that were in place. within it.
Geologist and anthropologist moved towards each Different people, differently placed, engage with the
other, and moved away from the categorisations that world in different ways. Looking at a small portion of a
each had imposed upon the landscape. London map (fig. 2)—streets, domestic houses, public
Landscapes refuse to be disciplined; they make a places (a church), an alleyway—you might think about
mockery of the oppositions that we create between time it as a palimpsest, a historically constituted ’scape. Or
(history) and space (geography) or between nature (sci- you might want to think about how and why, by whom
ence) and culture (anthropology). Academics have been and for whom, the map was drawn. And then you might
slow to accept this and slow, too, to notice the volatility try and people it: Why are some people hurrying, some

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 b e n d e r Time and Landscape F S107

extends forward and backward in time and place. And

while I have chosen to focus on place, the same is true
of time (Munn 1992:111):
[The idea of clock time] as “lifeless time,” “a chron-
ological series of points on a string” is misleading.
Considered in the context of daily activity, clock
time is quite alive, embodied in purposeful activity
and experience. Coordinately, people are ongoingly
articulated through this temporalization into a wider
politico-cosmic order, a world time of particular val-
ues and times. This articulation may include con-
flicts over clock time, as well as daily operations
carried on in its terms. . . . The clock may be
“hated, endured . . . and manipulated.”
What I have attempted to sketch is ways of talking
about time and landscape that no longer privilege the
visual over other senses or the mind over the body but
instead work with an embodied phenomenological ap-
proach to time and landscape married to a larger political
understanding—one that attends not only to how people
Fig. 2. Detail of a map of London. are socialized through their daily (timed) encounters but
to how they negotiate, question, and create those en-
loitering? Who has a place to go to, who is barred from counters (Bourdieu 1977; Giddens 1985; Pred 1990; Rose
going? Who goes with whom? What dictates the different 1993:chap. 2; Tilley 1994), that recognizes not just ex-
patterns, the different timings of their comings and go- periences of time and place rooted in familiar landscapes
ings, their partings and assembling? The past is not only (Ingold 1993, Edmonds 1999, Gow 1995, Basso 1983) but
etched on the present in the form of architecture and the dislocated but nonetheless always physically
layout but also drawn into the present, invested with grounded experiences of people on the move (Bender and
meaning, used and reused in any number of different Winer 2001). People relate to place and time through
ways. The alleyway (“Angler’s Lane”: the River Fleet memory, but the memories may be of other places and
once ran through here) is for some (often women) a fear- other times. Hoffman (1989:106), in Lost in Translation,
ful place, a place to be avoided; for others it’s a shortcut, discusses the thinness of a landscape translated into new
or an escape route. Perhaps it’s a secret place, a place of and unfamiliar words: “‘River’ in Polish was a vital
assignation? Or a place to mark with graffiti? Or a place sound, energized with the essence of riverhood, of my
to dump unwanted things or scavenge for wanted things? rivers, of my being immersed in rivers. ‘River’ in English
A place to be viewed with an eye to setting up a cardboard is cold—a word without aura. It has no accumulated as-
box for a night’s uneasy rest, or a place ripe for devel- sociations for me. . . . It does not evoke.”
opment?3
This plurality of place is always in the making, and
how it is used and perceived depends on the contours of Three Case Studies
gender, age, status, ethnicity, and so on, and upon the
moment. Being Jewish or coloured, being a woman, being
young or old, rich or poor, may assume significance in The three projects I am currently engaged in all revolve
one context but not another. Or perhaps one’s political around the complex and often contradictory ways in
orientation will be relevant. And the moment or context which people engage with landscape, how they move
will be both particular—dependent upon the time of day, towards a sense of place and belonging (or, sometimes,
the company one is in, the memories evoked—and gen- not-belonging), and how, as part of this, they creatively
erally dependent upon things happening off-scene. What rework the past in a volatile present. The projects—one
people feel about that alleyway, what they can do or what in southern England, another in southwestern England,
might be done to them, may depend upon something and the third in Northern Ireland—were not set up to be
happening on the stock market in a distant city or some comparative: I had different agendas and questions for
broad flow of events that washes people up in strange each one. There are no great differences between these
places. The lived particularity of encounter works at areas in the way that people go about their lives or in
many different scales. their understanding of the world around them. None-
The action that takes place—habitual, accidental, sub- theless, there are not just historical but also economic
versive—is both “of the moment” and something that differences; for example, the Southwest (Cornwall)
is—now—more marginalized and underprivileged than
3. This reconstruction owes something to Benjamin (1985), Pred Northern Ireland, and the people there express increasing
(1990), and Edholm (1993). resentment of central government policies and concom-

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S108 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 43, Supplement, August–October 2002

itantly strong nationalist sentiments. Again, whilst I

may be lulled into a sense of working “at home,” there
are not infrequent circumstances and contexts—not least
when working in the village in which I live—in which
the seemingly familiar suddenly becomes unfamiliar and
even threatening.

leskernick, bodmin moor, southwestern

england
Anthropologists and archaeologists have been working
together for five seasons on a rather isolated part of Bod-
min Moor where, on a low stone-covered hill, there are
two small Bronze Age settlements, field systems, burial
cairns, a stone row, and stone circles, all of which are
about 4,000 years old. What we have is the well-pre-
served remains of a small-scale, very modest Bronze Age
world, one that encompasses everyday and feast-day. We Fig. 3. A small stone circle within the spread of moor
have combined excavation with a great deal of experi- stone, almost invisible but brought into play by stone
ential surveying. We move around between houses, out wrapping.
through doorways, down drove-ways, along stone rows,
and up to the high tors, trying to understand how people
might have engaged with the land as they built their der, social position, and variable context all play into our
homes and enclosed their fields, moved around with experience, our changing, dynamic experience of place.
their herds, headed down to the spring or the ford over And just as we have attempted a more phenomenological
the river, stopped at a field shrine, or walked the length approach to a prehistoric engagement with place, so we
of the ceremonial stones. What places were privileged? are concerned with a contemporary embodied negotia-
What links were made between places? Between past and tion of landscape. How do we move around? How do
present? We found, for example, that house doors were places get invested with memories? How do we appro-
oriented towards the tors on the high places; that as you priate ancient footpaths and house spaces or make the
entered the house you were often faced by a particularly journey to and from the hill, and how, back at our
fine stone in the back wall; that as you walked down the base—the caravan park—do we move between caravans
stone row, at a particular point where the row crossed (our “homes”) and the communal spaces of pub and
the water, a very important hilltop and tor came into washhouse? Who moves where? With whom? When?
view. What we think we can begin to delineate is the How? And how do these intimate spaces of temporary
world of a small community in which all of life circles habitation interdigitate with our wider landscapes and
around the stones. The stones—we suggest—are the an- networks of social relations?
cestors or ancestral spirits, and the communication be- We have created art installations (Tilley, Hamilton,
tween Bronze Age villagers and these powerful and em- and Bender 2001) (fig. 4), a website, and a travelling ex-
powering stones is reiterated at every level, from the hibition. Our work—like any ethnographic or archaeo-
intimately domestic to the field shrine to the subtle logical undertaking—is an intrusion on local or regional
transformations of stone flows to the great cairns on the sensibilities, and in this instance there was an added
tops of the encircling hills and the human claims to the urgency in making contact because among the many lo-
high tors made by way of walls and cairns (fig. 3). There cal or regional groups were Cornish nationalists who un-
is no divide to be made, as archaeologists have so often doubtedly resented our (English) appropriation of their
done, between a ritual landscape and an everyday one, history. We needed not only to explain what we were
just as—as I mentioned earlier—there is no divide be- doing but to make clear that our interpretations were
tween the “natural” and the “cultural.” This is a world just some among many. We wanted to create spaces for
in which time—the time of the ancestors—and place are other people to consider and to express their involvement
fused, where the ancestral past is renewed through the with the moor and with the past. Sitting in on the ex-
activities of the living—a place where much of the ritual hibition, talking to people about what the moor and the
is communal, though there are some more secret places prehistoric settlements meant to them and about their
and places that are set apart (Bender, Hamilton, and Til- reactions to our work and to the exhibition, we came to
ley 1997). understand better the heterogeneity—and fluidity and
We are all too aware that our attempts to understand context-dependency—of an engagement with place and
the prehistoric embodied landscape, the engagement of past. We saw, for example, how peculiar our myopic con-
prehistoric people with the world around them, is filtered centration on the Bronze Age landscape appeared to most
through our sense of place and landscape, and so we have local people, who saw stone row, medieval field systems,
been concerned to understand how, over the past five 17th-century granite working, and 19th-century peat-
years, we have interacted with the moor—how age, gen- cutting either as layered palimpsest or, more simply, as

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 b e n d e r Time and Landscape F S109

inquiry. They then had to marshal support against the

quarry, and the support had to come from across the
spectrum: church dignitaries, politicos, Paras, Unionists/
Loyalists, Nationalists/Republicans, local people and
people from across the border. The archaeologists pro-
posed that this was a site, a landscape, that everyone
could and should fight for, for its significance, its history,
preceded all the Troubles. It was, they said (somewhat
muddying the argument), a place that belonged to all the
people of Ulster.
They got support from all across the spectrum, but
what became clear, in talking to people and reading the
numerous newspaper and agitprop accounts, was that the
different groups did not buy into the idea of a past un-
tainted by contemporary political fault lines. The dif-
ferent constituencies marshalled different histories.
Thus: “Here was a kingdom . . . that was the last to
surrender to such invaders as the Gaels, Scythians and
Fig. 4. The ceremonial stone row close to the foot of Normands, and kept itself to itself, separate from the
the hill. The stones are tiny. The flags perhaps provide rest of Ireland. The time has come for us to say thus far
a small sense of movement within the landscape. and no further, or to use an old Ulster saying “Not an
inch” (South Belfast Post, January 10, 1985). “Not an
inch” is, of course, a Loyalist war cry. Or again: “For
“history.” We saw how ignorance of “official” history hundreds of years the Gael has stolen our heritage. . . .
could go hand-in-hand with a great depth of local knowl- These men stole Navan from us by force in the past, now
edge and how the same person who helped create parts they are attempting to steal it with words, they cannot
of the exhibition could, in a slightly different context, be given the chance to claim for themselves something
vent his anger at our “invasion.” that is ours by right” (Young Unionist 1 [1985]). Or the
Republican counterpart: “The preservation and care of
Navan fort is . . . not a matter which can be left in the
navan or emain macha, northern ireland
hands of eleven bigoted councillors . . . . [We] have little
Emain Macha, or Navan (what you call it already says a faith in Chris Patten’s Inquiry—given the destruction
great deal about where you are politically located), is in wrought on our Irish culture and heritage by his coun-
County Armagh, one of the counties most heavily af- trymen down the years” (The Ulster Gazette, February
fected by the Troubles. Emain Macha/Navan is an Iron 1985). Or, in the nonsectarian Peace by Peace (April
Age site. People built, on the top of a glacial drumlin, a 1985): “There have always been divisions . . . population
huge structure of concentric timber circles, filled it with shifts and shifts of allegiance. . . . there is no single ‘Irish’
stones brought from many places, and torched it. They tradition or community or tribe. . . . No group has any
then mounded it with earth, again brought from many right to claim they are the true people of Ireland or people
places. This transfer of stone and earth must surely sug- of Ulster. . . . We all have a right to be here.” They signed
gest the bringing together of varied histories/mytholo- up to different histories but nevertheless signed the same
gies/memories. But Emain Macha is not just a prehistoric petitions and stood shoulder to shoulder as witnesses at
site—it is the location of the Ulster Cycle, the epic tales the inquiry.
of CuChulainn, Conchobar, and Deirdre of the Sorrows, As it happens, the inquiry was not exactly evenhanded,
probably Iron Age in origin but written down by medi- and the quarryman won, but the outcry was so great that
eval monks. Unlike, for example, the English Arthurian the minister for Northern Ireland had to intervene and
tales, these stories are precisely located in and around put a stop to his plans. My first concern was to under-
the hill. Emain Macha was a site of such significance stand the way in which the present-past was used in the
and power that, it is said, St. Patrick built his church at construction of group identities, how it wound its way
Armagh in sight of, and in opposition to, the hill. around the materiality of place and landscape, and the
So far, this project has been less concerned with the complex relationship between an intimate sense of place
prehistory or even the epic stories than with contem- and history and the larger political landscape.
porary perceptions of and contestations over the site and I then became interested in the presentation of place/
the surrounding landscape (Bender 2001). landscape that followed on from the dispute. The min-
There is a quarry alongside the site, and the owner, a ister said that if this place was so important it ought to
man with powerful Unionist connections, was about to have an interpretive centre. The archaeologists claimed
get permission, more or less on the nod, from the local that such a centre would be a “Flagship of Peace.” The
council to quarry two-thirds of the way around the site, Americans put up £4 million. A fine and sensitive build-
leaving it as an island in the middle. The archaeologists ing was erected, and an English firm was brought in to
from Belfast created sufficient fuss for there to be an mount the exhibition. It was an exhibition that avoided

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S110 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 43, Supplement, August–October 2002

tion that this place might be a “Flagship of Peace” seems

laughable, and yet, while this pap is served up for adults
or families, something quite different is created in work-
ing with children at the museum’s interpretive centre.
The education programme is run on a shoestring, but
most days a class of Protestant primary-school children
and a class of Catholic children are brought on site to-
gether. They go to the top of the hill, stand on the pre-
historic mound, and look down over the city of Armagh.
They take on board—often for the first time—that there
are two cathedral spires (one Catholic, one Protestant),
discuss why St. Patrick might have placed his church
there, look down on the old quarry and discuss the events
surrounding it, and talk about where they themselves
come from and the places that are important to them.
The idea is to get them to feel that they all have a stake
in the landscape and a responsibility towards it.
Fig. 5. A Republican rendition of CuChulainn.

branscombe, devon, southern england

all politics. Labelled “The Archaeologist as Detective,”
it could have been anywhere, any time. Quite separate In the village where I live in East Devon, I am working
from and with no attempt to create connections with the with people on something called “Where Memory Meets
archaeology, there was a blood-and-guts video of the Ul- History.” We use oral history and archival material, go
ster Tales. walking with people and plot memory maps (fig. 7), and
So much could have been attempted. The exhibition talk around photos and objects that trigger more mem-
could, for example, have shown that the Ulster Tales are ories. Each year we mount an exhibition in which peo-
a reworking of an earlier history—that they were set ple’s different ways of understanding this place and land-
down by monks who often wavered in their allegiance scape and their relationship to it work off each other.
between pagan and Christian ways of referencing and We witness how, unselfconsciously, a person can express
reworking the past. It could have shown that Cu- nostalgia for the past and a hard-headed recognition of
Chulainn, the Hound of Ulster, has gone on being used rural poverty, class and gender inequality, and—some-
and reused until, today, his image graces not just the times—covert (sometimes overt) hostility:
Dublin General Post Office—his statue proudly com-
Wynne Clarke: Father used to cry for nights—didn’t
memorating the 1916 Easter Uprising—but also the
know where he was supposed to get the money to
paramilitary murals on the gable-ends in the Bogside area
pay for it . . .
of Republican Derry (fig. 5) and those of Loyalist build-
ings in Belfast (fig. 6).
Nobby Clarke: Work, you can’t credit it. . . . He
One could despair at the conservative rendition of a
linear past that is boxed up and frozen—the assumption
that the delineation and interpretation of the past is un-
problematic and has no bearing on the present. The no-

Fig. 7. A memory map of the cliff plots at

Fig. 6. A Loyalist one. Branscombe.

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 b e n d e r Time and Landscape F S111

It is quite a complicated business, trying to re-create

a multivocal sense of place, a past that is both “golden”
and “hard,” one that is not over and done with but in
process. It is also complex because I live in the place,
am implicated in the project and imbricated in the com-
munity, and—if I am honest—use the project in part as
a way of creating my own sense of place and belonging.
I have to negotiate in a way that is different from other
times and places when I arrive from somewhere else
—and leave. It is no bad thing to have to face some of
the fallout from asking people to open up and talk about
their worlds. It is too easily assumed that remembering
makes people “feel good.” But what of the woman who
screams abuse in the middle of the supermarket not be-
cause of anything that has been shown in the exhibition
but because she fears that this raking up of the past might
expose her own painful and secret history? Or the woman
who takes umbrage because the transcription of her story
has marked her with a Devon accent? She went to gram-
mar school and worked in the bank; she has two voices,
one formal, and one—when she forgets her-
self—Devonian. But she refuses to accept this, and sud-
denly I become the Outsider—I am “putting her down.”
And here is a minor irony—that I wanted to show how
subjective people’s feelings about past and place are and
yet I thought that I could objectively record their voices.
Surely, I thought, it was my job to be accurate, to pin
down every nuance, to record, before it disappeared, the
sound of Devonian voices? And yet what I transcribed
was not what she heard, and indeed to some extent it
was not what I heard. Even though it was “accurately”
transcribed, it did not look the way it sounded.4 It looked
harsh. I should not have been surprised. It is not just
what you say or write or feel that is subjective but also
Fig. 8. Nobby Clarke photographing the exhibition at
how you say it. Form and content play off each other.
Branscombe.
In the end, we recorded the Branscombe voices in three
different ways: the first, for the archives, one that tried
for academic fidelity; the second, a transcript that was
used to go away at half past four in the morning.
on public view and with which the person talking felt
He’d dig out all the brambles, clean the cliff out dur-
happy; and the third, a shortened, more dramatic version
ing the winter like, ready for planting, and then
that made sense to an exhibition viewer. This is an ac-
they’d be out collecting seaweed off the beach . . .
knowledgement that the transcripts, like maps or any
and they would dig in the seaweed and you’d never
other recordings, are indexical—context-specific—and
taste potatoes like it, I’m not kidding. They’d got
that the record is powerful and can be used or abused.
the sea breeze, salt spray, seaweed . . .
Leskernick, Emain Macha, Branscombe: different
questions are being asked, but there is always the im-
Wynne Clarke: . . . We were only talking about it
possibility of disentangling time from place and land-
yesterday. I said, “We was poor, but we did well.”
scape, always the need to recognize that in “the unending
performance of social life” our stories can never be com-
Lilly Gush: When they brought piped water through
pleted—“the pages [will] keep growing.”
the village in the ’30s, they digged up our garden,
but they wouldn’t bring we a tap. . . . We used to
look sideways at all these people, they had so much,
we knew they cheated somewhere along the line.
. . . If they gets what [they] deserves they’ll have a
bad time in another world, they will.
The exhibition is put on in the late autumn at a time
4. The Devonian accent has no h’s, but dropping all the h’s makes
when, after the summer visitors, the village turns in on it look very like Cockney, and Devonian is soft whereas Cockney
itself. It is mainly for people who live locally, and it is is glottal. I am sure there are codes that could be used, but these
a celebration of a complex sense of local identity (fig. 8). would not help create something “readable” in an exhibition.

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S112 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 43, Supplement, August–October 2002

cial relations and spatial structures. Edited by D. Gregory and

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