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CONTESTED GEOGRAPHIES / TERRAINS DISPUTÉS 27-2, 2005
Johanne DEVLIN TREW, Diane TYE Peter LATTA Johanne DEVILIN TREW Sabina STAN Adrian IVAKHIV Jade ALBURO Francine SAILLANT, Mary RICHARDSON and Marie PAUMIER Ian BRODIE Diane TYE OPEN TOPIC ARTICLE Kristin HARRIS WALSH |
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CONTESTED GEOGRAPHIES
The articles that follow challenge the very concept of geography in explorations of sites as diverse as The Rooms heritage facility: Romanian agricultural policies; a Nova Scotian Celtic festival; Filipino Balikbayan boxes; competing discourses of humanitarianism in Québec; an Ontario hospice room; and contemporary legends of women alone in the urban landscape. They show that, as feminist geographer Linda McDowell has written,
The focus moves from urban to rural settings with the next two articles. Sabina Stan examines agricultural policy frameworks in Romania and competing visions of socialism. Stan reminds us that one's position determines one's memories and that in remembering we also look forward. Our version of the past informs our present and future and, as Stan argues in the case of Romanian farming collectives, visions of the past are not simply reconstructions but also commentaries on the types of societies in which we wish to live. Adrian Ivakhiv identifies Cape Breton's Celtic Colours International Festival as another site where historical and geographical claims are contested. Here, cultural identities and natural landscapes come together in a construction of both Celticity and ecology. Ivakhiv argues that views of nature and culture intertwine as products of social, economic and ecological practice. The gaze widens further to the transnational with Jade Alburo's consideration of Filipinos living in the United States. The gifts they bring to relatives and friends in the Philippines, known as Balikbayan boxes, become symbolic of the ties these immigrants have to their families and their homeland. The gifts, as well as souvenirs that the immigrants bring back to their new homes in the United States, reflect their sometimes competing identities as native Filipino and new American. Francine Saillant, Mary Richardson and Marie Paumier continue to explore questions of the global and the local in their discussion of discourses of humanitarianism. The authors present two competing approaches to humanitarian organisation, demonstrating, as McDowell notes above, how globalism can often reconstruct rather than destroy the local. This special issue of Ethnologies closes with two papers that problematize notions of public and private space. Ian Brodie's autoethnographic reflection explores the decoration of a hospice room in the context of his dying father.s declining health and shifting family relationships. Finally, in turning her attention to contemporary legends that feature lone female protagonists, Diane Tye raises the issue of nonplaces, those spaces of supermodernity, like shopping malls and parking lots, where people increasingly spend their time. She argues that the legends reveal female challenges to the male domination of public space at the same time they expose powerful male defences. In these varied contested spaces, as Adrian Ivakhiv writes, "cultural identities and natural landscapes intermesh at every possible level, from the local to the global. They do this through the medium of technology, discourses, representations and material practices." The sites of contestation take a variety of forms: festivals, objects, legends, or state policies, but from cultural institution to cultural discourse, the geographies speak loudly of who we are and how we see ourselves. From family to local community to nation state, we constitute ourselves through "the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves," to cite the familiar words of Clifford Geertz (1973). By contesting these geographies, individuals and groups challenge the hegemonic control of dominant, publicly sanctioned narratives that tell us who we are, what constitutes our past, our gender, our ethnicity, our nationality, and significantly, what will be our future. Together these articles raise fundamental questions about what localities count as family, community and home and, through their analyses of spatial contestations and negotiations, the authors explore the nature of belonging. In examining constructions of family, ethnicity, region and gender, they reveal complexities that illustrate how both feelings of belonging and of entitlement alter as geographical boundaries shift. Perhaps above all, the studies in this issue underscore the notion of multiple realities. They argue forcefully that it is not simply one story we tell ourselves about ourselves, but many stories. Building on the premise that one cultural text may have many meanings (Geertz 1973; Miller 1998), and that an examination of traditional culture may provide opportunities for debate as well as consensus building (Dégh 2001; Firestone 1967), the articles in this volume highlight how people.s experiences of places and the narratives they construct of those places underline power dynamics. As McDowell argues,
While many of the articles in this collection document the construction of master narratives
(Latta, Devlin Trew, Ivakhiv, Saillant, Richardson and Paumier, and Tye), they also document resistances to dominant
discourses. Folklore has long been recognized as an expression of contestation or resistance (Scott 1985; Radner
1993), and the articles in this volume clearly show how places are interpreted and reinterpreted fluidly in ways
that link not only to people's pasts but to their present and their future. Importantly, all the accounts of contested
geographies here hold implications for the future. They envision change on both individual and societal levels
for the ways things are done and how those processes are understood. From reflection on changing family dynamics
through death (Brodie) or migration (Alburo), to explorations of alternate political visions (Devlin Trew, Saillant,
Richardson and Paumier, Stan) and examination of women in public spaces (Tye), these articles examine aspects of
traditional culture as expressions of contestation, and sometimes negotiation. In so doing, they offer hopeful
glimpses of fairer ways of organizing our lives and our world. Dégh, Linda. 2001. Legend and Belief: Dialectics of a Folklore
Genre. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. |
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